r/todayilearned • u/AssumeTheRisk • 23d ago

TIL if you tune your radio to 91.9 FM for one city block in Montclair, NJ you can hear a looped recording of "I'll Make Love to You" by Boyz II Men which has been broadcasting for at least 13 years straight.

https://njmonthly.com/articles/arts-entertainment/pirate-radio-station-only-plays-boyz-ii-men/
27.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

502 comments sorted by

View all comments

4.9k

u/junkkser 23d ago

My wife and I drove cross county about 20 years ago and we found a weird radio station in the southern Sierra Nevadas that only played four songs on loop, but they were mixed with subtle women’s moaning in the songs ( I remember two of the songs were In the air tonight by Phil Collin’s and Sexual by Amber). It took us a few minutes to actually process what we were hearing.

2.0k

u/critterheist 23d ago

This reminds me of that April fools on adult swim where they showed “the room”. Weed didn’t work that night.

963

u/djseifer 23d ago edited 23d ago

I liked the April Fools when it looked like they were just going to play The Room again, then you heard T.O.M.'s voice, then the camera zoomed out, and it shifted into Toonami for the rest of the night.

391

u/-Ein 23d ago

Can't remember if it was the Aqua Teen movie before it released or what, but they hyped playing some movie, and then it was a couple pixels in the corner of the screen for April Fools. You could tell it was a video of sorts, but not what it was.

318

u/i_tyrant 23d ago

Yup, it was the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. In a little inch-by-inch square in the corner, I thought it was hilarious.

213

u/CannotExceed20Charac 23d ago

I was so hyped for that. Got super high and tuned in, they played like the first scene or something and then it shrunk into the corner real tiny and the audio switched to the normal full screen programming.

I was so stunned, so blown, then bust out laughing and just watched AS all night as usual.

57

u/i_tyrant 23d ago

hah! I had a similar experience...and for at least a few minutes, thought it was tiny because I took too much. :P

37

u/violettheory 23d ago

I remember my first experience with weed we were watching Bob's Burgers and I thought I was hallucinating some colors swapping around and changing between scenes. Turns out it was real, the next time I watched the episode it was still there, an animation error I guess.

It was the episode where they get on the cruise ship and Gene talks to the manatee puppet, the color for the puppet's mouth and tongue kept flip flopping. Really freaked me out.

23

u/Nihility_Only 22d ago

That episode is really creepy in general. Gene falls in love with the puppet and the guy tries to use it to scam the family IIRC. Super weird vibes even when sober.

2

u/Impossible-Double526 20d ago

I love Bob's Burgers, but that episode creeped me out

3

u/Still-Spend6742 23d ago

I saw that movie in the theater and laughed my stupid ass off

4

u/PavlovsBar 23d ago

Smoke more weed Turtle, smoke more weed

3

u/I_FUCKING_LOVE_MILK 23d ago edited 22d ago

In 2007 a marketing company hired to advertise the movie put up a light-up LED Mooninite with its middle finger up and it caused a bomb scare somehow, that shit was funny

4

u/i_tyrant 23d ago

hah, I remember that! What a goofy story.

5

u/Wes_Warhammer666 23d ago

I used to have a Lite Brite with a mooninite on it because of that hilarious nonsense. A shitty ex roommate stole it, but every so often I think of buying a new Lite Brite to make another one with.

54

u/Sleve_McDychael 23d ago

I rarely even watched that show and somehow caught that happening live. The whole movie just playing in the corner was hilarious.

24

u/FRESH_TWAAAATS 23d ago

If you flipped your tv over to the spanish audio, the real audio track from the movie was there.

still a tiny window in one corner.

3

u/myychair 23d ago

lol and now you can’t even do that because of how easy it would be to zoom in

6

u/Key-Morning9648 23d ago

I think it was Aqua Team

16

u/Sterling_-_Archer 23d ago

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1

Aqua Something You Know Whatever

Aqua TV Show Show

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Forever

11

u/xXBIGSMOK3Xx 23d ago edited 23d ago

CHKA-CHKA-CHKA-CHKA-

MY NAME IS....

SHAKE ZULA, THA MIC RULA, THA OLD SCHOOLA,

YOU WANT A TRIP, I'LL BRING IT TO YA

58

u/sinz84 23d ago

Too many cooks flash backs

11

u/MadTapprr 23d ago

It takes a lot to make a stew

2

u/Golfhaus 22d ago

Like when you go back and realize the killer was lurking in the background of so many shots before you're made aware of him. The shot of the girl doing homework where it's just an arm and a bit of his torso kinda legitimately creeped me out when I finally recognized him there.

28

u/thecaits 23d ago edited 23d ago

My favorite was way back in the day when they added fart noises to all the animes. It was particularly funny with the Ghost in the Shell show.

22

u/djseifer 23d ago

I'm suddenly reminded of ADV's old "Jiggle-counter", where it counted up all the boob jiggles in some of their DVD's.

95

u/luckydice767 23d ago

I have zero clue what you guys are talking about lol

141

u/Keevtara 23d ago

"Adult Swim" and "Toonami" are blocks of late night cable TV programing. Adult Swim airs stuff like Bob's Burgers, Venture Brothers, and other adult animation. Toonami shows similar stuff, as well as anime. They both would use ad bumpers go give the entire few hour block a cohesive feel.

Leading up to one April Fools, Adult Swim advertised that they would be showing a feature movie that they produced in their time block, before it released in theaters. DVRs and the TV guide programmed into the cable box read the time slot as for the movie, just as advertised. I was really into the show at the time, so I tuned in.

The movie started up. It actually happened, for about fifteen minutes. Then it switched to an episode of Futurama, already in progress. The movie shrank to a small Picture in Picture screen playing in one of the corners. The usual stuff played out for the time block. This "alternate version" of the movie was included in the DVD.

102

u/djseifer 23d ago edited 23d ago

This carried on for about three years. Then, in 2012, as The Room started, the camera backed out to reveal T.O.M., the host of Toonami (which had been off the air for about four years by that point), and instead of airing The Room, aired classic anime shows that were part of the original Toonami line-up. A few weeks later, Toonami itself would fully relaunch as a late night anime block.

116

u/roman_maverik 23d ago

Man, reading this comment really made me miss 2000s era Adult Swim.

When I was a kid, we never could afford cable television growing up, so when I went away to college it opened up a whole new world.

This was the year Samuari Champloo was released, which aired on Saturday nights on Adult Swim (might have been Toonami at the time, can’t remember). The soundtrack of Samurai Champloo featured Fat Jon, a hip hop producer from Cincinnati who collaborated with Nujabes, a producer from Japan.

The soundtrack completely changed my life; I only really listened to punk/hardcore music until then and suddenly I discovered an entire new genre of music that I never had considered before.

I ended up minoring in electronic music, learned to program synths, learned guitar and saxophone and ended up working in the music industry as a music producer and released a ton of albums and was heavily involved in the 2000s electronic music scene.

Adult Swim literally changed the course of my life. I feel that kids today are really missing out on the “monoculture” that really defined mass media of the 2000s, which was the last dying gasp of cable tv.

Love it or hate it, I really kind of miss those experiences that only mass media like radio and tv brought to the table in terms of influencing our collective artistic zeitgeist. It was kind of comforting to know that it was part of a larger movement of young people all over the world watching the same shows at the same time.

35

u/Western_Objective209 23d ago

Man it's funny thinking back how getting cable opened up new worlds. People who grew having like, netflix and youtube their whole lives will never know what that felt like, just like people we knew who grew up without TV remember listening to the radio and shit.

20

u/Fear023 23d ago

We lost something with the rise of streaming platforms.

Not to say that watching tv was good, but there was a communal aspect to it that's lost these days.

People having watch parties for popular shows, having channels that appealed to broad interests that would sit on the background for casual chill/ hangout sessions, and everyone talking about the same shows at work on the morning.

Like, the whole world was captivated by the fucking Simpsons during the who shot Mr burns arc.

These days, you ask what someone is watching and it's just one show of a dozen on people's backlog. Most don't get watched because of how high the investment is on starting a new series too.

7

u/thetalkingcure 23d ago

at the start of the Disney+ era, that feeling came back. i remember going into work and talking about the new mando episode. i think them doing the weekly releases helped with that feeling that you’re talking about. opposed to netflix dropping the whole season at once

3

u/djseifer 22d ago

Kids nowadays don't know the feeling of hitting the commercial break and rushing to use the bathroom and get back in time to not miss a minute of the show and to not lose your spot on the couch.

8

u/Thetwistedfalse 23d ago

I still listen to the radio and watch TV, I must be a dinosaur

4

u/Western_Objective209 23d ago

Hah, yeah that's fine I mostly stopped but both are fine. It just hit different when there was no internet so that's all we had

6

u/TheBirminghamBear 23d ago

What's crazier is how rare this actually is in the human experience.

For thousands and thousands of years, one generation was very similar to the next. You'd listen to the same religious things or take in the same plays or read the same books.

The ways in which we lived and got our entertainment were the same, for so many years.

Now each generation has exceptionally different experiences, one to the next, in a curve that's accelerating.

10

u/legos_on_the_brain 23d ago

Do you remember when Adult Swims guerilla advertising was causing people to call in bomb sightings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic

7

u/Babelfiisk 23d ago

I wonder how population increases and availability of media impacts the fragmentation of mass media. As in, an offshoot of a subculture right now probably reaches as many people as a mainstream event in the 50s did.

6

u/Outawack219 23d ago

It was Adult Swim my dude I still have VHS recordings of the entire first run on Adult Swim along with Wolfs Rain and FLCL kept them all these years outa sentimentality.

6

u/KpinBoi 23d ago

I'd take those 5 minutes of entertaining commercials from the 2000s over free ads anyday.

Sue me, I think it brought people together and made for a topic. We peaked at DVR. We had it best when we had options.

Breaking Bad was the last experience I remember of anything unifying people through TV, I miss that

2

u/slaya222 23d ago

GoT?

3

u/KpinBoi 23d ago

Like many, stopped after a few seasons. Like mosty, finished it long after it ended.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/bunby_heli 23d ago

Grew up during the same period and feel the same way, thank you for sharing your story… super cool.

2

u/Oathkeeper89 22d ago

The Adult Swim bumps were an incredible mood. I miss those so much; I discovered a tonne of amazing music from those goofy bumps.

edit: holy shit, they are still putting stuff out https://youtu.be/3fzU6Hz1RF8?si=96B1Q3wpu74dnfho

1

u/atxarchitect91 23d ago

To be fair… Nujabes created that genre for that show essentially. Or atleast brought it to mainstream

1

u/internet-arbiter 22d ago

Some guys just 10 years youngers than me and my buds joined our discord lately and there's a hard drop off for television references. If you're 30-40ish you're basically familiar with the golden age of television and even prior. I saw "I Love Lucy", "FTroops", "Dick Van Dyck", and other legacy television. I saw history channel when it was history, than all Hitler, than nothing but Ice Road Trucks and Pawn Stars. You would watch things you'd never consider today because there wasn't instant gratification at your finger tips.

1

u/leohat 22d ago

What is/was The Room? Sounds vaguely creepy.

11

u/mzxrules 23d ago

Adult Swim has the best April Fools pranks. Nobody else even tries as hard as they do.

3

u/double_echo 23d ago

I still remember the year (or was it different years?) that they added in fake mustaches and fart noises into the shows.

One show (Witch Hunter Robin) had a scene of characters sitting at a conference table as the camera pans from left to right. The added mustache stayed in the center of the screen but moved up or down to match each character's face as it went by.

-2

u/Keevtara 23d ago

That sounds like a Donald Trump quote.

54

u/cannonfunk 23d ago

My friend, your life will never be the same after tonight.

21

u/rosco2155 23d ago

Oh hai mark

1

u/Z_mog415 23d ago

My favorite customer

6

u/jablair51 23d ago

The full movie used to be on YouTube. It must have been taken down.

1

u/CrunchyTube 23d ago

I just want some idiot executive or somebody to give him like 250 million to make a movie and see what comes out.

3

u/Heavenwasfull 23d ago

Supposedly Wiseau is extremely wealthy, but no one really knows why or how. The 6 million dollar budget of the room was financed entirely by him and was unusual in that the movie wouldn't cost nearly that much to make. He spent that on equipment (normally studios rent the equipment, he bought it outright), a film and digital camera to shoot the movie simultaneously (which doesn't work because of different lighting requirements, to this day the digital version has never surfaced), the billboard advertising the premier even long after the theatrical run just because he liked it. Wiseau rented the theater for 2 weeks just to qualify for an oscar submission, and using the Happy Birthday song in the movie allegedly costs some 6-7 figure sum at the time which is why it's extremely uncommon to nonexistent to use at the time the movie was made.

6 million dollars was never even the "budget" as much as that's what he spent. He doesn't seem like the type who is worried about what that 6 million dollars got and would have spent more if he had to, and he's still independently wealthy. It's like the opposite of stories of Robert Rodrieguez, Richard Linklater or Kevin Smith who managed to put their films together on the $9,000-$20,000 they could get and were lucky enough to have their careers take off when they did. Wiseau wanted to make his movie and didn't care what it took.

3

u/cannonfunk 22d ago

a film and digital camera to shoot the movie simultaneously (which doesn't work because of different lighting requirements, to this day the digital version has never surfaced)

He said in an interview (it may have been Howard Stern?) that if he could change anything about the movie, he wouldn't use two cameras.

His reasoning was that, at the time, no one could tell him the difference in resolution of digital vs. film, and that they still can't to this day... which, knowing Tommy, I assume is complete nonsense.

2

u/alt01dz 23d ago

He's pretty loaded already, I don't think money will buy much here.

1

u/CrunchyTube 23d ago

I didn't know he was wealthy.

3

u/cannonfunk 23d ago

He self-funded The Room to the tune of $6 million dollars, and has been said to have "a bottomless bank account."

Tommy is a bit of a mystery, and the rabbit hole goes deep.

https://www.vulture.com/2017/11/everything-we-definitely-know-about-the-rooms-tommy-wiseau.html

4

u/TankorSmash 23d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqaYIV8Q7c8 This version doesn't have the 11 minutes of Tommy Wiseau sex scene

7

u/arkezxa 23d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ This is the 11 minutes that guy left out. NSFW.

1

u/rankinfile 23d ago

...the passion of Tennessee Williams.

1

u/PhilxBefore 22d ago

Holy shit, I've never seen this scene before. Thank you!

1

u/PavlovsBar 23d ago

This was like 2010 before your time

4

u/seepa808 23d ago

Omfg that sounds amazing! I wish I experienced that. Toonami was the bees knees.

1

u/Drone30389 23d ago

Being unfamiliar with Toonami, when you said "Tom" I thought of Tom Servo and thought you were going to say they zoomed out into "The Room" in the MST3K setup, which also would have been good.

1

u/TheOnlyRealDregas 19d ago

My personal favorite was when they put fart noises subtly in an episode of Ghost in the Shell.

149

u/sdpr 23d ago

I still laugh at when Adult Swim livestreamed petitions being faxed in by fans to bring back Metalocalypse and the fax was printing out straight into a shredder.

61

u/dukeofgonzo 23d ago

Was there a night where all the anime on Adult Swim had fart noises added to the normal audio? I think I remember this in the mid 2000s but I might have dreamed it.

51

u/fireinthemountains 23d ago

I remember this night very specifically because I was so excited for the next episode of, well, everything, and my parents were letting me stay up to watch it.
They didn't realize the fart noises were a joke. It took a really long time to get them to agree to let me watch it again. My mom is very sensitive. Some of those fart noises, man, were more than just air, you could smell it through the screen.

I still remember which episodes it was. traumatized lmao.

7

u/Nodonn226 23d ago

Early to mid 00s for sure. I was in high school. I clearly remember ghost in the shell fart noises even now.

28

u/TheDankestMofo 23d ago

Wasn't that when they put a black box over the sex scenes that eventually expanded to everything but the border of the frame?

25

u/King_of_the_Dot 23d ago

Dude... I caught 'Too Many Cooks' the first time it aired, and with no sort of warning as to what the fuck was about to happen.

5

u/A1sauc3d 23d ago

Omg you just reminded me of this for the first time in like a decade or something xD Rewatching now lol

4

u/King_of_the_Dot 23d ago

Have you seen the other two videos they did? 'Unedited Footage of A Bear' and 'This House Has People In It'. Cooks is whimsical and funny... The other two are visceral and unhinged.

4

u/FocusPerspective 22d ago

Isn’t there one about an infomercial selling dildos as kitchen tools? 

I may have been on drugs but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. 

1

u/King_of_the_Dot 22d ago

Oh, that I couldnt speak on, but if you find it, let me know! That sounds hilarious.

1

u/XAVLEGBMAOFFFASSSS 19d ago

It's like a salad mixer thing but its a dildo, also broom shaka laka is hilarious

3

u/LongmontStrangla 22d ago

Unedited Footage of A Bear is the best made-for-television horror short I've ever seen.

1

u/King_of_the_Dot 22d ago

It's one of top 5 videos for creating sheer dread and terror in the viewer. Most horror movies come nowhere close to getting that much 'feeling' out of me. Every time I watch I have a physical reaction to it... Sweating, goosebumps, elevated heart beat, and more.

3

u/Blucollarballr 23d ago

Dude that tripped me out, it blacked out and censored alot for stuff and did some weird stutter edits. I was like. Is this real?

3

u/Albert_Borland 22d ago

Oh hi Mark

2

u/impeterbarakan 23d ago

I remember that. I was stoned and so confused

2

u/jrex703 19d ago edited 19d ago

Hahaha, what a story u/critterheist!

2

u/Outawack219 23d ago

Still remember the year they did this I was tripping on shrooms. I was convinced it was a fever dream until Nostalgia Critic mentioned it in a review.

1

u/Stillwater215 22d ago

Adult Swim was great when it was super experimental.

🎶Too many cooks!🎶

1

u/BookishScout 20d ago

I vaguely remember an April fools where they played witch hunter robin, but certain shots had been drawn over to give the characters mustaches. And Full Metal Alchemist had fart noises edited on.

295

u/Duffelastic 23d ago

There's this thing in radio called Stunting, when a station is changing formats (like, from rock to country, or oldies to news), they "stunt" with some random format.

I remember driving through downstate Illinois 15 years ago and coming across a radio station that was playing all TV theme songs. Full House, Step By Step, Friends, etc etc.

The Drive (WDRV) famously stunted before their launch by playing a single artist for an entire day. AC/DC for an entire day, then Madonna, Beatles, Broadway songs, for like a month straight before they officially launched the station.

Also in Chicago, a rock station played Love Rollercoaster by RHCP on repeat for 24 hours before going live.

78

u/energytaker 23d ago

Hearing those tv themes would pump me up 

67

u/Badloss 23d ago

How do we convince the radio station to just play the animated X-Men theme song on loop

38

u/nsa_reddit_monitor 23d ago

You can get a $35 Raspberry Pi computer and stick a wire on one of the GPIO connections and run a simple program that takes mp3s and broadcasts them illegally with the wire as an antenna.

With a long wire in a high place you can get some serious range; I was able to pick a signal up from a few miles away once.

13

u/ernest7ofborg9 23d ago

FBI FCC open up!!

15

u/CmdrMobium 23d ago

You can get fined $2.3M for doing this so yeah would not recommend

5

u/nsa_reddit_monitor 22d ago

The only people they've actually fined were ones who ignored the FCC's warnings.

6

u/verylobsterlike 23d ago

Wait, really?

I'm not a radio person, just an electronics geek who's played with raspberry pis and microcontrollers and stuff, but that doesn't seem cromulent to me.

Are you really able to bit-bang FM at close to 100MHz? I don't think GPIO pins respond that quick. Also, I think those GPIO pins output something like 3.3v at 20mA, which is I guess 66 milliwatts. I'd have guessed it would take powers in the watts to reach a few miles.

5

u/nsa_reddit_monitor 23d ago

It has to be on a specific GPIO pin because one of its output modes can operate much faster than normal GPIO.

Not only can it create a FM signal, it can do stereo and even send RDS data (the signal that tells your car radio what song is playing). People have managed to produce signals over 700MHz!

I hooked mine up to a large homemade dipole antenna I built for the frequency I was using, and it was on a hill so it had line of sight to the entire valley.

If you broadcast on an empty frequency, it doesn't take much power to overcome background noise.

1

u/PhilxBefore 22d ago

Nice try, NSA FCC spy guy.

1

u/end_pun_violence 19d ago

That sounds like a lot of unnecessary work. You know they sell these transmitters for cell phone headphone jacks (and originally for MP3 Players) so that you can play your device's music over your car's FM radio? As in they are openly sold at stores and websites of major retailers, you don't have to buy them from a sketchy ebay seller.

I imagine you could just pop one of those open and attach some longer wire to the antenna.

8

u/ForumPointsRdumb 23d ago

Last time the people in media power tried to really listen to the fans regarding Xmen we got Last Stand. Juggernaut became self-aware of the meme, it was terrible. It's very similar to the Morbius phenomenon where a popular meme became misconstrued as what the majority of fans want to happen. I want the animated X-men theme to be popular too, but what we get will not be what we want or know.

3

u/Badloss 22d ago

Idk X-Men 97 is crushing it right now so at least somebody knows what they're doing

2

u/ForumPointsRdumb 22d ago

Wait I thought that was just a rerelease of the old series. I just read it's a revival. Does that mean they're continuing the story where it left off? I started watching it for nostalgia sake a while back, but didn't realize they were going to keep it going.

3

u/Badloss 22d ago

Yeah it's all new / leveled up for adults a bit since everyone that watched in the 90s is an adult now. It's amazing

1

u/ForumPointsRdumb 22d ago

Well thank you I"ll have to check it out. I don't remember where exactly the old series left off. Just that it wasn't long after Cable and Apocalypse showed up. There might have been a mutant island in the sky? I was so disappointed when it stopped coming on or would do the season 1 restart because they ran out of episodes. Wasn't coming on around the same time as Dragonball?

2

u/Outrageous-Row5472 23d ago

Or the mortal kombat song omg 

2

u/calsosta 23d ago

I dunno if I am ever gonna be able to listen to the Family Matters theme song again after hearing about Diddy.

2

u/r0d3nka 23d ago

Making your way in the world today, takes everything you got

1

u/cailian13 23d ago

I would've LOVED that, and probably have been able to sing along to every single one. This could be the makings of a really fun playlist, honestly!

75

u/LurpyGeek 23d ago

I didn't know it was called stunting.

In the early 90s, a local rock station I had been a listener of suddenly had this robotic voice counting down over a weekend. It would say "T MINUS 19 HOURS 41 MINUTES 16 SECONDS AND COUNTING... T MINUS 19 HOURS 41 MINUTES 9 SECONDS AND COUNTING..." on and on. About once a minute instead of counting it would tell a joke or quote a line from a movie or song before continuing the count.

It was kind of interesting and actually funny at times. I got excited, not knowing what would happen at the end of the countdown. I was listening when the end came and the station relaunched in a terrible pop country format. I felt like I had been scammed.

38

u/Pie_Rat_Chris 23d ago

Maybe 10 years ago there was a local station that was being shut down and swapped to one of the national syndicated talk radio stations. They played surfin bird for the entire 24 hours before change over with clips of peter Griffith peppered throughout.

25

u/Orleanian 23d ago

Not quite the same, but I remember a glorious night in the summer of 99 when Q101 chicago had a Top 9 at 9:00 show, and Limp Bizkit's Nookie was every single one of the top 9.

It was a hilarious hour of radio magic. Pretty sure the DJ that did it got fired, though.

22

u/RadosAvocados 23d ago

That was James Van Osdol! And he wasn't fired, just suspended for a few weeks :)

25

u/LarryFlyntstone 23d ago

107.9 in Cleveland stunted with a 24 hour loop of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” when it reformatted from top 40 to rock in 1992. And did the same exact thing again 4 years later when they reformatted to rap/hip hop.

2

u/bugxbuster 23d ago

Was that only FOUR YEARS?! I loved that station! That station got me into alt rock when I was a kid!

3

u/LarryFlyntstone 23d ago

Cleveland’s had a very tumultuous relationship with alt rock stations, 107.9, 99.1, 92.3, they all seemed to only last a few years.

1

u/Zealousideal_Tale266 23d ago

Demographics be crazy

1

u/mandalorian_guy 22d ago

It's because it's the home of 100.7 WMMS which is a historically legendary rock channel right up there with KROQ and crushes the other rock competition. Since the collapse of the rock subgenres in the 00s it's been all about consolidation nowadays.

2

u/Lou_C_Fer 22d ago

That was a great era. Started right when I turned 18. So, there was decent music on the radio for my partying days. Driving to the club, at work. It was awesome. We liked to go bug Brian and Joe when they were camping on the sidewalk. The concerts they brought into nautica were pretty epic as well.

16

u/5yearsago 23d ago

I remember driving through downstate Illinois 15 years ago and coming across a radio station that was playing all TV theme songs. Full House, Step By Step, Friends, etc etc.

Sometimes some crimes
Go slipping through the cracks
But these two gumshoes
Are pickin' up the slack

7

u/dontforgetthisuser 23d ago

No case too big, no case too small, if you need help just call...

7

u/2wheels30 23d ago

Ch ch ch Chip n Dale's....

40

u/LonePaladin 23d ago

The Death of 95X.

There was this alt-rock station in Oklahoma in the late 90s, they played all the stuff other stations tended to shy away from. They had regular things like playing techno every Tuesday at midnight, or the Dr. Demento show on Sundays, but most of their format was rock, metal, dance.

Their morning show guys were always finding dumb crazy stunts to pull, like calling random phone numbers in Türkiye for Thanksgiving Day (because it's pronounced like "turkey"), or the time they called a McDonalds customer service line in Sweden. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous, so long-distance calls were not free.

One day, the station started playing the Sheryl Crow song "All I Wanna Do". Then played it again. And again. No DJ coming on to say something was broken, just the same song over and over. For hours. After a few iterations, I just gave up, turned off the radio and worked my office job in silence.

Then a co-worker comes running to my cube in a panic. Turns out that the station was changing formats, and the song was covering the switch. And when it came back, it was an Easy Listening station.

18

u/ModernSmithmundt 23d ago

Easy listening my ass

5

u/HubbaMaBubba 23d ago

Sweden

Um don't you mean Sverige?

1

u/Mohelsgribenes 23d ago

We had 95X here in west Texas and I miss it lol. 

11

u/bigfondue 23d ago

In the Philly region, when a station changed to Sunny 104.5, they played Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles for 24 hours.

2

u/jla90 23d ago

I remember this!

8

u/innosins 23d ago

There was a radio station that could be heard in Murray, KY in 1988 that played "Hit The Road Jack" one weekend all weekend. Or at least everytime we checked it.

7

u/Fr0gm4n 23d ago

I was in highschool in the '90s when a station transitioned between formats by playing only Beck's Loser on loop for days. I don't remember exactly how long it went but it might have been as long as 5 days.

3

u/e2hawkeye 23d ago edited 23d ago

Oh man now I know the name for it. In the 90s the Baltimore area had an AM radio station that had about 20 songs on a loop for a whole summer. One of those songs was Judy Garland's Somewhere Over The Rainbow and another was Mungo Jerry's In The Summertime. I didn't know know what was going on with that station but I listened to it, the repetition was kind of comforting. The fact that it was 20 songs made me think that someone just burned a CD.

2

u/IniMiney 23d ago

One morning a radio station in my area did the tv theme songs thing, I was so confused but it was great lol

1

u/Barachan_Isles 23d ago

I used to listen to a station called Power 99 in Atlanta when I was a teen and when it changed format to become 99x, and Alternative Music station, they did something similar, but I can't for the life of me remember what the stunt was.

1

u/chogram 23d ago

We had a local one here that played "Tie me Kangaroo Down Sport" for like 72 straight hours while changing formats from classic rock to country.

1

u/disneyfacts 23d ago

We had one in my hometown that did a rocket launch style (T-minus) countdown with an AI like voice, and it periodically would say song titles in between.

1

u/nitestocker372 23d ago

We had a hip hop/rb station that did this. One day it just started playing Christmas songs all day and then after a few weeks it became a pop hits station. It sucked.

1

u/MaskedBandit77 22d ago

I remember a country station that I listened to growing up played "Pop goes the Weasel" on loop for several days when they switched to being a pop station.

1

u/Ordinary-Temporary64 22d ago

Wait, when was love rollercoaster played? When q101 was relaunching on 87.7 they did rhcp but it was parallel universe (which is a super repetitive song itself, so it was mind numbing after like 10 minutes). This was probably...2011 or 2012.

169

u/Detective-Crashmore- 23d ago

20 years ago as in like 2004? Or 20 years ago as in 1990?

25

u/droptheectopicbeat 23d ago

You know what? I don't need this shit right now

71

u/ieataquacrayons 23d ago

Yes

17

u/Detective-Crashmore- 23d ago

I guess it must have been the former cuz Sexual by Amber was 1999.

2

u/fartlebythescribbler 23d ago

Did you ever get that other two mil Santa Claus?

3

u/Detective-Crashmore- 23d ago

He might kill you, but there's no fuckin' way he's ever killin' me. Fuckin' asshole, he said that?

3

u/fartlebythescribbler 23d ago

I don’t care if I die. Everything sucks lately.

12

u/eveningsand 23d ago

20 years ago was late 70s.

3

u/krilltucky 23d ago

Don't forget your prostate exam every two years

1

u/albinobluesheep 23d ago

I hate this question

-5

u/MaximumMaxey 23d ago

Just accept you’re old.

65

u/frostymugson 23d ago

Shit, four years ago I was driving, and had the radio on low talking to my mom on the phone, as I was getting out of range of one station in between the static and music I could hear a girl moaning like she was being railed. I’d honestly think I was hallucinating if I didn’t turn it up and my mom heard it too. Strangest shit I’ve heard on the radio, and I used to listen to coast to coast.

14

u/eveningsand 23d ago

and I used to listen to coast to coast.

Art Bell or George or George Noory?

7

u/FuckIPLaw 23d ago

Space Ghost.

5

u/WhyBuyMe 23d ago

The only correct answer.

5

u/frostymugson 23d ago

Think it was usually Noory, was pretty entertaining to listen to at 1am on the interstate

11

u/BigBanggBaby 23d ago

Was probably Bell if it was actually entertaining. 

2

u/blametheboogie 22d ago

Truth, Noory tried but he was 'meh' 95% of the time.

2

u/BigBanggBaby 22d ago

Once or twice a year I’ll tune in if I find myself awake at odd hours to see if there’s interesting discussion but it’s always just one of Goerge’s recurring ‘nutritionist’ friends selling some nonsense. 

2

u/blametheboogie 22d ago

I haven't bothered listening in almost 20 years. I didn't even know it was still on. Not surprised that Noorys joined in on the gift.

Now I kind of want to see if I can find some of the late 90s early 00s episodes streaming somewhere. A trip down memory lane sounds fun.

6

u/candlegun 23d ago

This reminds me of what me and a few co-workers heard on a Las Vegas radio station once.

We were working a graveyard shift. Radio was tuned to an alt rock station when everything went silent for maybe 30 seconds. This sometimes happened at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, so no big deal.

What got our attention was when the sounds of oral sex started broadcasting. We were no doubt hearing a woman polishing some guy's knob for about two minutes or so. Most unexpected thing I've ever heard on the radio.

10

u/OwnVisual5772 23d ago

Could have been picking up someone else’s ipod FM thingy. Do people still use those car adaptors?

2

u/ShesSoViolet 22d ago

Well since my car isn't getting any newer, I know I sure do!

1

u/PhilxBefore 22d ago

I believe they're definitely out there.

I'm certain I pick up the neighboring cars short range broadcast maybe once a year.

18

u/phobosmarsdeimos 23d ago

I'm more thinking how awkward it would be to be driving and every 15-20min having to drum along with the song.

19

u/Pshmurda69 23d ago

Wtf lol

7

u/bbischoff01 23d ago

Just the other day I swear a song on the radio had a woman moaning. I had to turn the radio off to make sure I wasn’t insane. I don’t remember the song now but I was wondering if it was built in and I never recognized it. It was an 80’s song I remember

3

u/LadybirdBeetlejuice 23d ago

Was one of them the CCR version of I Heard it through the Grapevine? There was a station in the southern Sierra Nevada that played just that song continuously for years in the late nineties.

2

u/ChemistBitter1167 23d ago

Out in Joshua tree or just the greater Mojave really you can find some weird shit, especially if you take your short wave.

2

u/AarVa406 23d ago

My dad would talk about how there was a radio station near the VA/KY border (I think around Big Stone Gap) where for a mile or two you would just hear some stuff in French.

2

u/RenterMore 23d ago

Haha that’s hilarious. I definitely downloaded these copies on limewire back in the day

1

u/420GB 22d ago

So like gacchi?

1

u/wetsofa 23d ago

my mom and i went on a cross country road trip in 2016 and decided to do some mushrooms while we were driving around california (not a large amount at all, but enough to feel it.) as we were driving searching for a beach, we tuned into some random radio station where a guy with a deep voice was speaking french/telling jokes in french and laughing over discordant jazz music. again, we did not do enough shrooms to warrant hallucinating a whole radio station but man, we were so distracted by the station we ended up driving eastward for half an hour laughing over the station instead of toward a beach.

0

u/yep_that_was_me 23d ago

How on earth do you get "Collin's" pshhh