FM vs. AM

FM vs. AM

When I was a teenager we weren’t allowed to listen to “our” music unless it was back in the bedroom on my sister’s old transistor, because my parents wanted FM, not AM, where the teenager music was. AM was the teenager music, like the Beatles and rock-n-roll. FM was what the parents listened to, stuff from the 40s and musicals and jazz and elevator music. My mother learned to like “One Toke Over the Line”—she didn’t know what it was about, but she liked the music. Now, my dad liked anything rock-n-roll if the Boston Pops played it. My parents played “New Girl in Town,” and it was about incest and all this stuff and it was banned from Broadway, but it had good music. I didn’t know it was about incest until I was in my 50s, and I used to belt out the songs at the Catholic school on the playground. I guess the nuns were really scandalized.

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