KROQ-FM – Larry Woodside – 11:30am-1:30pm – February 24, 1979 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Hits you like a ton of bricks – somewhere around 16 1/2 everything gets just a little dark and very uncool. You live in L.A., you have creeping cynicism. You don’t like your teachers, you don’t like the new kid in school – you hang out with your friends at lunch, other guys who are just as cynical as you and stare and make comments and you laugh at your own jokes – you don’t like the girls in your grade because, well . . .frankly, they think you’re a jerk and they avoid you anyway. Everybody is insane – people are assholes. You know it; you have proof. You see them at the 7-11 all the time, you see them walking down the street; bad dressers who drive creepy little cars and pretend they’re happy. You’re not happy. You’re never going to be happy ever again in your life.
You’re the only one who is sane on this maladroit clump of earth. The only one – but nobody notices. Your parents do sometimes. Your dad asks if you have a girlfriend yet – you roll your eyes to the back of your head. No – you don’t – you never got past a nanosecond peck on the cheek in 6th grade from a girl with a mouthful of braces. Girls don’t like you for the above reason. Everybody else has social skills, except you.
Deep-down, you’d really like to be in love – you would really like to get a car, since you live in L.A. and your bike seems silly – you would really like to sit in an open field and stare at the sky for hours on end. But no – that’s not cool, and your friends would think you sold out – became one of the fairly-normal-formal people who go out for Track and dress as a mime for school assemblies and meditate a lot.
You’re a cynic – you’re that guy. The future is bleak and you let everybody know you like it that way. And everybody is waiting for you to get over yourself.
Meanwhile, there’s your go-to solution to all your problems; KROQ and this 90 minute slice of February 24th 1979 featuring Larry Woodside and bunch of music you may have completely forgotten about.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
