Tune In for Crisis on Your AM Dial

If you bought a car in the 1950’s, 60’s, or 70’s, this is what your radio would look like.

It’s the point of departure for understanding the rise of conservative talk radio, and I’m realizing with horror that if I were to give a lecture on the subject to my undergraduates, I’d have to spend five minutes explaining how this thing worked.

But the key thing is that you’re looking at an AM radio, and AM radio basically sucks, at least if you want to listen to music. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Elton John—90 percent of the time we got our first introduction to their music via the monaural speaker of an AM car radio. It was cool but only because we didn’t know any better: you’d put up with the static and the mediocre sound quality and save the quality listening experience for your record player at home.

If you were at home you could also listen on FM, whose sound quality was a lot better, had very little static, and could broadcast in stereo. But for reasons I don’t really understand FM didn’t work well in automobiles. In most makes and models they weren’t a standard accessory even if you could get one.

But eventually—the early 1980s or thereabouts—FM radio became common in automobiles. Given a choice between listening to music in AM or FM there was no contest. It was FM, hands down. No static at all, as the Steely Dan song put it.

That left a lot of AM radio stations high and dry. They had to figure out a way to stay alive. Some of them didn’t. Others limped along, often in an Easy Listening format. It was sad. But AM could still do one thing as competently as FM: it could broadcast a human voice. And that’s how talk radio became a staple on the AM dial. Not conservative talk radio—that’s not yet part of the story. But without the eclipse of AM by FM in American automobiles the story doesn’t begin.