"This is Paul Harvey - Good Night!"

When I was a kid, I used to hear the late Paul Harvey every so often on the only top-40 AM rock station in town (there was only one at the time, but that changed with the advent of FM album-rock). I didn't recall him harping on right-wing topics, but I didn’t pay too much attention to politics back in the day. “Smooth” was not the word for Mr. Harvey. His voice had a jarring, jagged quality which grabbed you the way a car alarm would. Not to say that it was irritating, far from it. What kept me glued to the radio was not merely his selection of unusual, nay, weird human interest stories but his delivery. The man could manufacture the kind of suspense normally reserved for final baseball scores or election returns even when he was talking about something fairly trivial. To me he was not so much a commentator as a storyteller. He worked his magic on everything from breaking news stories to humorous anecdotes. A lot of the things I heard him say would have been right at home around a campfire. Turn off the TV, Paul Harvey’s in the house!

Mr. Harvey was of the old school of radio journalism. Although he was every inch a conservative, and while he socked it to the loyal opposition every chance he got, I remember him taking the high road, or at least a higher one than most right-wing talk show hosts do today. I simply cannot picture Paul Harvey telling a progressive “Shut up, you punk!”, as I’ve heard one such modern-day AM-radio garbage-mouth do. On one of Kermit Schafer's "Bloopers" albums, there's a recording of him reading a particularly risible human-interest story, then totally cracking up on-mic, and never recovering. Can you even imagine Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter or Michael Savage doing that?

Everything I know I learned from record shopping,Part 2

Photo Creative Commons by Ivan Zuber

You cannot tell how a record will sound by looking at the cover art, reading the list of musicians, or checking out which studio it was recorded at or when. The only way to know is to put it onto a turntable, put the needle on it and listen to it, however briefly.

Just because "everyone likes it" doesn't mean that it's right for you.

If someone tells you that something sucks (or is fantastic) without offering a solid, rational explanation, that's proof that you need to check it out for yourself.

Oldies radio reminds us that a little nostalgia can be fun, but living in the distant past isn’t good for you.

You can hear something that everybody's raving about and wonder what the big deal is. You can hear something that everyone makes fun of and not think it's so bad.

The mainstream is like an 8-lane highway; big, straight, flat, efficient and predictable. And it seldom goes anyplace interesting. Cultural side roads can be much harder to navigate, but you'll probably find much more interesting and rewarding experiences on them.