DAVE IN THE CAVE AND HIS FAKE RADIO STATION!

"Radio Radio/Is The Sound Solution."

Back in the day, just to amuse myself and the kids, I made up a fake radio station, complete with segues and spots and everything a real radio station had to offer. we called it HFM, Howard Family radio. It was great fun and, what with moving songs in and out of the playlist according to the reaction from the kids, a bit of a experiment. Seeing which songs stuck to the kids and which faded quickly into apparent boredom.

And it was a lot more interesting than was actually on the radio dial at the time. It was a nice thing to have possession of,  your own little fake radio world.

You knew you had a "hit" in that world when the kids requested a copy of an HFM song for their own players. For me that was  a solid "win." Often times, a song would go into the fake station's rotation, and then, a few months later, we be at a movie and that song would appear. The family would look at me, wearing my golden song prognosticator hat, and I'd just shrug. This seem to happen a lot, for a while there.

It's long been a fascination for me, the fake radio station mix tape. When we were kids, and boomboxes came with twin microphones embedded into them, it wasn't much of leap from that to K.R.U.D. F.M. Some people back then just taped songs off the radio. I felt the need to do patter between them, even make fake commercials. It's like it was wired into my d.n.a. somehow, this radio bug.

Of course, I still have those tapes around, and yes, they're hideous.

However, amid my per-adolescent awfulness, I've trapped the local radio stations in time, and the music they were playing. And those long forgotten disc jockeys, who were completely unaware that their inane patter was ingraining itself into some little kid's soul, setting his direction in life, and ruining any chance he would ever have of being a success at something worthy-

-except being the creator of a fake radio station that had the kids jamming out in the back seat, some distant summers ago.

P.S: Wanna see a cool list of the top ten classic rock radio songs? Go HERE!