When I was in high school in the mid '60s, I didn't watch much television.

I listened to the radio nearly all the time, especially in the evening when I was trying to fall asleep. My clock radio only got AM, and with directional broadcasting at night, I wasn't able to get either of the two big rock 'n' roll stations in the Washington, D.C., area -- WEAM/1390 or WPGC/1580.

That forced me to pick up stations from hundreds of miles away, some of which came in pretty well all the time and others that I had to struggle to get. I listened to WKBW out of Buffalo, WCFL ("The voice of labor") out of Chicago and CKLW from Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit. On occasion I was able to get a good signal for WLS in Chicago or WABC in New York, which featured the legendary Cousin Brucie.

Those stations were all pretty much Top 40, but eventually I discovered WBZ in Boston. It had one of the most powerful signals of all the East Coast stations, and rumor had it that when the atmospherics were right, it could even be heard in England.

WBZ was much more eclectic, playing a lot more British Invasion stuff and also a lot of what would be called folk music now. I first heard Tom Rush on WBZ, and his performance of Joni Mitchell's "Urge for Going" puts me back into that time and place in a way few songs of that period do.

http://youtu.be/e0_RZZoREC4

Those were the days, when Rush didn't mean Limbaugh, and when I heard him do "Ladies Love Outlaws" in 1974, I knew it was another song I would never forget. It's on my iPod now, and on several of my playlists.

In Stephen King's wonderful "Hearts in Atlantis," the closest he ever came to writing about the '60s, he refers to the music we grew up with as "the fabled automatic," for the good feeling it always gives us to hear it. And while there are too many songs from the '50s, '60s and '70s that I have heard too many times to ever enjoy them again, there are dozens of others that put me directly into the place and time where I heard them.

And when you're coming up on your Social Security years, it's nice to be able to do that once in a while.

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