August 1979 – KROQ – Dusty Street – Mike Raphone – Mike Devich Collection –
“You got the heavy sales-pitch; Summer School is great – Summer School means you graduate early – Summer School is a snap – Summer School is better than doing nothing. And besides, all your friends are going to Summer School, so it’ll be like one big party.
They lied. Summer School is a giant drag. They didn’t promise you’d graduate early; they just said you’d graduate with everybody else, since you did flunk those three classes last semester. You have more homework now than you ever had during the normal semester. Your social life is shot – none of your friends wound up doing Summer School – but they still want to party – you get three hours sleep a night, maybe. Your girlfriend hasn’t called you in over a month and every time you try to call her you get her dad, and he doesn’t like you. You have a bad feeling about all this. All you want to do is sleep. You miss doing nothing – you forgot what staring at a wall or the waves was like. Your only lifeline is your radio – it’s your buddy, your go-to happy place, the thing that takes you away for at least fifteen minutes. At least you got that. Everything else? Well . . .it sucks. But at least it’s Friday.”
As a reminder that Radio was still your trusty side-kick and go-to Pop Culture emporium, even in the 70s, here is a small (1/2 hour) snippet of the legendary KROQ during its heyday, in 1979 – when Music was still up in the air and MTV hadn’t quite gotten started yet. Dusty Street starts off and Mike Raphone finishes – just a half hour in the day of the life of Los Angeles, August 1979 – a Friday.
Editors note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
