ADULT BOOK STORES

A place outside of the home to privately indulge prurient interests that had nothing to do with reading.

AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIALS

Didactic television dramas aimed at youths, broadcast in the afternoons by ABC from the 1970s through the 90s; preached the dangers of teen pregnancy, drugs, hitchhiking, (see page 86) and bowl cuts. The term came to refer to any kind of televised morality play aimed at teens.

AGING

A biological process that occurred before the advent of plastic surgery. Signs of aging (or, speaking euphemistically, "maturing") often included graying hair, increased wrinkles, varicose veins, a lessening of shame, a desire to move to Arizona, and sometimes the proclivity to relieve oneself in public. Non-physical signs of aging may still be observed, such as (but not limited to) the desire to buy hot pants, drive a Ferrari, or play slot machines.

AIRPORT GOODBYES

The practice of accompanying someone (often a dewy-eyed lover) all the way to the gate at the airport, now thought to be as potentially dangerous as a handbag containing Scope; currently only possible with the purchase of an additional ticket.

AM RADIO

Radio channels that operated in the relatively low 500–to 1,600-kilohertz range; home of the Packers and Rush Limbaugh, I-95, and Jesus.

* * *

AM stations, if you can tune them in at all, are so often realms of pontificating jockeys, bummer health news, and scintillating traffic analysis that it's easy for many of us to just completely ignore that entire spectrum of the dial. Not long ago, however, AM — short for amplitude modulation — was the only option for radio users.

For the bulk of its ninety-plus-year lifetime, the AM dial played mostly music and had a kind of magic ability to span great distances. While its ground-wave signal only reached locally during the day, at night it would bounce off the atmosphere and the water, enabling it to travel thousands of miles. This meant that the strongest signals gave people glimpses of lives in parts of the country they might never see. Grand Ole Opry, which, as of this writing, is still broadcasting on 650 AM WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, started blasting country music into homes in Maine and California in 1925 — and was likely Woody Guthrie's first introduction to the genre when he was growing up in Oklahoma; New York's 77 AM WABC brought a taste of big city life to people living in shacks in Wyoming. Yes, there was often crackling during the day caused by the waves' wrestling matches with storms and sunspots, but this only added to the organic, ephemeral nature of the listening experience: The sound, delicate and prone to disturbance, was fighting its way across land and sea all so you could hear Casey Kasem's dulcet tones. If you had to play with your radio's knob or the antenna in order to get the least static-y sound, it only made the end listening experience feel all the more earned.

Frequency modulation radio, a.k.a. FM, was in development since before World War II, but it didn't amass a loyal following until the late 1970s; it was in the 60s, however, that it became a way for counterculture music lovers to get on the radio when the FCC had already handed out most of the frequencies in the AM band. FM, which operated at much higher frequencies that were less prone to natural interference, had about ten times AM's range. This extra space meant that the sound waves could carry more information. With all that additional room to play with, FM broadcasters put out their signals in stereo, so that people with FM receivers could get a sound much fuller than the tinny one that AM listeners were accustomed to — that thin, old-telephone sound today sometimes used as an effect in modern pop songs.

College radio DJs and the non-mainstream music aficionados broadcasting on the FM airwaves shirked the tight formulas that had become de rigueur on the AM band — the Top 40 countdowns and the same songs in rotation every hour, each one bookended by ten-minute commercials. Instead, they used the stations to play experimental music and embraced offbeat talk programs. The content could afford to be esoteric, if only because the people who owned FM receivers were few and far between. If you were listening to FM in the 60s, you were considered to be kind of weird. But you were probably proud of that fact.

In 1962, according to the FCC, there were only 983 commercially operated FM stations; by 1975, there were close to four thousand....