No matter what happens in the future, I will always love AM radio

It’s been a tough couple of years for anyone who loves AM radio.

Things began to wobble before the pandemic as new, younger media buyers — people who did not grow up with radio — started shuffling advertising dollars towards digital platforms away from traditional media. That hurt all terrestrial radio, but AM in particular because it tends to attract an older demo.

Things got worse when it became apparent that big foreign tech companies — Google, Facebook, and so on — sucked more ad dollars out of the Canadian ecosystem.

Next, manufacturers of electric vehicles claimed that they couldn’t offer AM radio in their dashboards because of the electromagnetic interference caused by EV motors. Depending on who you talk to, this claim may or may not be bogus.

This issue reached the U.S. Congress, resulting in the introduction AM Radio for All Vehicles Act of 2023. But time is running out. It still needs to pass the Senate, House, and the president before it can become law. With a presidential election just a few months away, it may die on the agenda.

Further pressure came from abroad with stories of medium wave (Europe’s term for AM) stations either going silent or moving to other bands, notably DAB (digital audio broadcasting), something that we don’t have — and never will have — here in North America.

The financial situation, compounded by an aging and decreasing audience, has become so dire that broadcasting companies have been letting some of their AM stations go dark, including CHML/Hamilton, which began broadcasting in 1927, one of half a dozen Canadian transmitters that have been turned off so far this year.

It joined an AM graveyard that also contains CKMX/Calgary (b.1922, d. 2013), CFRN/Edmonton (b.1926, d.2023), CFTE/Vancouver (best known as CFUN, b. 1922, d. 2023), and my go-to Top 40 station growing up, CFRW/Winnipeg (b. 1963, d. 2023)

These closures are not confined to Canada, either. There’s a long list of now-dark AM stations south of the border, too, the most recent being the legendary WCBS/New York which signed off for good last weekend after 99 years. And more are coming.

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Every time I hear that an AM station disappears, a little piece of my heart goes with it. For many of my generation, AM was our introduction to radio. When my grandmother gifted me a little Lloyds transistor unbidden for my sixth birthday, the world changed. Up until then, the only radio I knew was what Mom and Dad played from the kitchen counter or in the car. Now that I had my own radio, I discovered that there was a whole universe of news, entertainment, and, above all, music out there. It’s because of that radio so many years ago that I’m here to tell this story.

I (and eventually my friends) discovered that there were three Top 40 stations in Winnipeg, each offering a slightly different twist on the format: 58 CKY, 630 CKRC, and CFRW (first at 1470 and then at 1290). Tribes formed at school based on which of those three stations was your favourite.

Meanwhile, I drove my father crazy because I was forever re-programming the push buttons of the Delco radio of his ’68 Impala and then his ’73 Oldsmobile Delta 88. My mom was concerned about my schoolwork because I was forever staying up late at night trying to tune in to distant radio stations (a practice I’d later learn was called “DXing”) on cold Manitoba winter nights when the ionosphere acted as a giant mirror for AM signals from far-off stations in Denver, Cincinnati, Chicago, and occasionally, even Mexico.

For a kid growing up in a cable TV-less household — all we had was CTV, CBC English, and CBC French — my radio was everything to me.

In the living room was a giant Eaton Viking console stereo that my Dad picked up for a hundred bucks. Its AM tuner must have been the size of a small fission reactor because that sucker could reach out for thousands of miles. WLS/Chicago all night? You bet. A 500,000-watt “border blaster” station down in Mexico or maybe in Cuba? No problem.

Road trips were great, too. I was always in charge of the radio. The further we got from home, the more new stations — all AM, of course — we got to hear. One glorious Christmas, we followed the interstate highway all the way down to Dallas, sampling stations along the way.

Later, when I was in the business, my friend Pat, who worked at CFRW, would drive out into the countryside after our shifts (I worked down the hall on ‘RW’s FM sister) Sunday nights, a time when some stations shut down for transmitter maintenance, areas on the dial were temporarily opened up for other, more distant stations on the same frequency. One guy would be at the wheel while the other would manipulate the tuning knob like a surgeon — we still had a slide rule-type tuner on those days — trying to find a station we’d never otherwise hear. I used to call these excursions “radio astronomy.”

Of course, this is all before the internet, before we could stream any virtually any radio station from anywhere on the planet with zero effort. But somehow, streaming isn’t as fun as DXing.

By the end of the 1980s, AM radio was having problems. Unable to compete with the signal quality of FM, music-based AM stations began switching to all-news, all-talk, all-sports, all-business, and even all-traffic. This repurposing of the band revitalized the AM band for another quarter-century. (It also marked the rise of right-wing talk radio and its effects on society, but that’s another discussion entirely.)

Now, though, AM is in trouble again. What will become of it here in North America?

Where dial space allows it, some stations are moving over to FM. But in a city like Toronto with the U.S. just across the lake, the dial is full. There’s just no room on FM to relocate anything. Regulatory barriers and ownership rules make it difficult, too.

Earlier this summer, I visited my folks back at the ancestral home outside of Winnipeg. As I sat in my rental car, I hit “audio” and “source” and hit “scan” on the AM band. The radio first stopped on the powerful and ever-reliable CJOB/Winnipeg. After that, though, it just scanned and scanned and scanned until it came back to CJOB. CKY? Gone. CKRC? Gone. CFRW? Gone. That hurt.

I’ll leave you with this paraphrasing of what Tom Waits (I think) once said: “One of the most beautiful sounds in the world is a baseball game coming out of an AM radio on a warm summer night.” You got that right, Jack.

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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.

Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play