Radio Gaga

EMC Editorial - What's your favourite local radio station? These days, there are certainly enough of them to choose from.

I've done a lot of moving to and from Kingston over the last decade, and have witnessed many changes in my hometown over those years. To my mind, though, few things have transformed so dramatically as the greatly diversified musical selection that can now be found on local airwaves.

For a while, it seemed like every time I'd come home from university for a weekend a new radio station had emerged. While some of them seemed to fold just as quickly, I think it's interesting how we in the Limestone City have gone from having perhaps three or four radio stations 20 years ago, to nearly a dozen quality choices today.

I distinctly recall two main stations from my childhood - 1380 CKLC and Oldies 960 - that we seemed to listen to all the time in my family's car. The former was basically a pop station with a substantial dose of early '90s cheese - lots of "been around the world and I-I-I....I can't find my baby" and "walking on, walking on broken gla-ass" - that sort of thing.

The latter featured the sort of '50s and '60s bubblegum music that is simply delightful to the ears of an eight-year-old girl, and I would have a ball singing along to The Archies, Roy Orbison and Manfred Mann. Often they would play some of the earlier tunes by my dad's and my favourite band, The Beatles, and we would get all excited and crank up the volume.

I think there was a country station in those days too, but my parents would have none of that.

As I approached my teenage years, it seemed more and more stations began popping up from all the different cities around Kingston. There was one from Watertown that my friends and I used to listen to called Z-Rock. It played a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, Cake, Pearl Jam, etc., but rarely came in without a good deal of static. It was always such a treat when we actually got to listen to it without straining our ears.

Another favourite was the top 40 station The Border, which used to come in on both 102.7 and 106.7 FM. Today, of course, it can only be found on the latter frequency. In fact, The Border may well be the region's only surviving radio station from those days, although I can't remember exactly when 98.3 Fly FM came into the picture - it could have been around that time as well.

Then there was the Brockville-based station called The River that played some great classic rock like Queen and CCR. Unfortunately, it also played a boatload of Rush and '80s hair metal, which meant that it was usually not the station of choice for my crowd.

Notably, however, none of these stations were actually based out of Kingston. Compare that to today, where we can find everything from Frank Sinatra to Rage Against the Machine broadcast right here in our own backyard.

More often than not, my own dial can be found on either The Drive, Fly FM or - I'm not ashamed to say it - The Lake. Even though I was born in the mid-'80s, that station never fails to make me nostalgic for the '70s, if that doesn't demonstrate the power of the music they play, I don't know what does. I'm also not ashamed to say that I absolutely adore the standards, and was over the moon when I realized we have a station that will play them.

As for my other two favourites, perhaps they indicate that my tastes have not evolved quite as much over the years as I sometimes claim they have. After all, I still crank up the volume whenever a Beatles song comes on.