Nostalgia Questing: Finding an old recording from a radio station you grew up with.

My brother knew I’d get a kick out of this when he came across it on YouTube: 85 minutes of a KROQ broadcast recorded on a summer day in 2001. KROQ-FM, which has served a swath of the California southland with its fix of alternative rock for generations, was present in my life as far as my memory will stretch considering that I’m a Glendale boy by birth and 106.7 MHz was seemingly the only frequency my mom ever tuned a radio to. By mid-2001, I was eleven years old and a listener to the station by choice.

The hour-plus KROQ recording from August 2001 includes the music played and, much to my delight, the commercial breaks, station ID tags and DJ banter. It is this radio ephemera that I assume does the most in getting me to feel as though I’ve lapsed a quarter-century backward on the timeline. Depeche Mode touring on the back of Exciter and Radiohead about to play the Hollywood Bowl nearly a year after Kid A landed on shelves. System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” was, per DJ Rob “Chuck Roast” Cross, “for like weeks now […] the most requested song on one-oh-six-point-seven, KROQ, K-R-O-Q.” Chick’s Sporting Goods offering deals on Razor scooters (!), then retailing normally at $99, now half-off. KROQ had its own promotional errand to complete as the station’s inaugural “Inland Invasion” festival was a week away (call in to win passes). (On the bill: Incubus, The Offspring, Social Distortion, Weezer, Pennywise, etc.) For some reason, organizers decided that the last Saturday in August was the right time to pull an all-day concert experience at Glen Helen Amphitheater, an open-air venue positioned on the outskirts of San Bernardino. Note: Glen Helen was still Blockbuster Pavilion at the time...nothing quite says “25 years ago” like a reality in which the now vanquished video rental giant was raking it in well enough to secure naming rights to a 65k-capacity live performance space.

Anyways, if you can find one, I recommend listening to a recording from a beloved radio station dating to an earlier time in your life, even if it was just a few years ago. (Or maybe you have a Maxell C90 cassette in a shoebox somewhere with your own homespun mixtape sourced from said station.) It can seem that any random snippet of the past, no matter how routine or mundane it may have felt when it was the present, stands today to mean far more than it did then as it drifts further and further away from the current moment.