Category Archives: KOMA

My Music

Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly

I was growing up when Rock and Roll was born.  Prior to rock and roll, popular music pretty much defined banality.  Then, the blues and the beat.  Early rock and Roll was not always great either.  There was a lot of bad stuff out there.  The radio stations had to fill their space, and Buddy Holly, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers would not stretch far enough.  The music was born out of the blues, and there were black musicians who kept the tradition alive with some innovative infusions.  A lot of the trash came from Phil Spector, with his wall of sound.

Like most things In our culture, the real stuff got co-opted by white men in suits.  The real stuff stayed alive, but you didn’t hear it on top 40 radio very often.  There were some musicians far away who did listen to the real stuff, and they infused it with their own culture.  The British Invasion began, and music changed again.  A tremendous burst of creativity came forth, almost world wide.  Today, it’s called classic rock.  The suits, however, got to sell their schlock alongside the good stuff.

There was a parallel trend during all this change.  The folkies were alive and well, with the real stuff, Judy Collins (From Denver), Joan Baez, and others. We also got the Kingston Trio-like commercial music.  The king of the folkies was a Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota.  Not blessed with a great singing voice, he developed a huge following because his lyrics managed to define the mood of a restless generation.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Then, he went electric.  Bob Dylan and his legion of followers and contemporaries created music that inspired and motivated many of my generation.  There also was this war lots of people did not like.  The music led and we followed it into the streets.  It wasn’t just the music that created the cultural shift of the 60’s; the civil rights movement probably started it all.

There were some parallel trends in music during all this.  People still listened to big band standards, the Burt Bacharach’s were out there, commercial bubblegum polluted the airwaves, and Jazz stayed alive through it all.  The 50s and 60s were probably the golden age of jazz, taking its roots in the blues to entirely new places.  I left rock and roll for a while around 1959-1961 for jazz.  I guess I needed the blues.  Today’s jazz seems like Muzak with chords.

Classical music.  There was not much of a classical music scene when I was a kid in Fruita.  My introduction came from the Brumbaughs.  They had a piano, and used it.  Tedd, the older son, was my age, and two blocks away.  The Brumbaughs took me to a violin concert at Mesa College in Grand Junction.  Tossy Spivakoski was the violinist. (How can I remember his name?  It must have been around 1956.).  He was a well-known concert violinist, but I think he thought he was casting pearls before swine in the middle of nowhere. .  He hated any coughing or other noise while he was playing, and scowled at the culprits.  I liked the concert.

J. S. Bach

J. S. Bach

After my mother died, I listened to a lot of classical blues.  Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is the probably the best musical lament of all time.  Classical, especially Baroque, is now my favorite genre.  Baroque seems to appeal to people with ADD. I can’t connect with the new stuff, pop is as insipid as always, and country is pop with a steel guitar.  The scene is so fragmented I can’t track it.

I am sure there is good music, I just don’t know where.  One place of genuine creativity that channels 60s protest music is Hip-Hop.  I don’t connect with the sound too much, I guess I am too old and white, but if you want to know what is going on in Baltimore, listen to hip-hop.

Yo Yo Ma

Yo Yo Ma

I can’t listen to classic rock, I have heard every song several hundred times.  Pop and country suck, so it is classical for me.  Recently Carol and I went to a Yo-Yo Ma concert at DU.  He is the most famous cellist in the world, and most of his program was Bach.  I was transported.  I have some old R&R in my truck, Bonnie Raitt, Dylan, the Cranberries, but it is mostly classical, mostly Baroque.  I am content with listening to music that has been around for centuries.  I am still a bit of a folkie, so that music is OK as long as there is no John Denver.

Rock and Roll in the Sticks

1958 Chevy

1958 Chevy

Western Colorado in the late 1950s and 1960s was a cultural backwater of the first magnitude.  I-70 did not exist, making travel to Denver at least two hours longer than now.  In Grand Junction, there was one television station and two radio stations.  The Junction had the Daily Sentinel newspaper, and Fruita had the Fruita Times, a weekly with stories about the bridge club.

Things were on the move in the land.  Rock and Roll had appeared, but not in our neck of the desert.  The only contact we had was the Ed Sullivan Show, which introduced Elvis to the world.   The local radio stations weren’t interested.  They were making money playing Patti Page, the Andrews Sisters, and Doris Day.  The raciest they got was letting Johnny Ray cry.

At first, we found Lucky Lager Dance Time on KNBC in San Francisco, but you needed a good radio, and there better not be any lightning between the Junction and California.  Then, salvation!  KOMA!  As soon as the sun was down, KOMA boomed in from Oklahoma City.  Rock and Roll ruled the sticks.  And the sticks were extensive.  KOMA dominated Oklahoma, New Mexico, Rural Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and neighboring boondocks.

That radio station was our lifeline to the rock and roll youth culture developing in the country.  This was not the Beatles and the Stones.  It was Buddy Holly, Elvis, the Everly Brothers, all those Phil Spector bands, and some R&B, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.   KOMA was top 40, no obscure bands, just the big stuff.  Yes, there was country and western, and Grand Junction even got a station later, but country was mostly confined to the pool halls and beer joints around 1960.

There was the KOMA band circuit.  There were several rock and roll bands that traveled the region, playing in small town Grange Halls, Legion Halls; anywhere the band could rent a hall.  Sterling, Roswell, Scott’s Bluff, Colby, Torrington, Hot Springs, Alliance, Garden City, Trinidad, all those little towns starved for anything from the outside world.  The only band on the circuit I remember was Spider and the Crabs.  They advertised their gigs on KOMA and kids came to the dances from all over.  KOMA made money from the ads, and bad rock and roll ruled the boondocks.

Several of us would buy a case of Coors bottles, go to Grand Junction, listen to KOMA, cruise all evening drinking beer, and throw the empty bottles at highway signs on the way back to Fruita.

Was that youth misspent?  No, not at all.  I am writing about it now, aren’t I?  Rock and Roll survived, and all was well until the mid-1960s. Here’s to KOMA in Oklahoma!  The station is still in business, still playing rock and roll.