Radios
Gateways to Music

My childhood is filled with radios.

At the head of the pack: Mom’s big brown Luxor in the kitchen (they didn’t make small radios in the 1950s). Sometimes you’d find it on the kitchen table itself, sometimes on a smaller table by the kitchen table, sometimes perched atop the porcelain cabinet, eventually on a small shelf my father installed by the kitchen window for the very purpose of housing this always turned-on gateway to music.

Mom loved music and would listen to just about anything (not that there was much to choose from—Swedish radio, at that time, sported two channels: P1 and P2 (Program 1 and Program 2). P1 was the highbrow channel: news, discussions about obscure artifacts, radio theater, book readings, classical music and such; P2 the lowbrow one, sported mostly music, both light classical and popular though no pop or rock’n’roll as yet—that was not to arrive until the early 1960s.

Each morning, when I came down from what we called the children’s chamber to (literally) see what was cooking, for Mom was an amazing and very diligent cook, she would already be up and busy.

“Good morning,” I’d say, still rubbing the last of sleep out of my eyes. And she’d stock-respond with the expected, “That should have been this morning.” Straight face. I’d smile, of course. Yes, Mom, I know you’ve been up since four or something like that.

If she was baking, which happened about once a week, the kitchen would be filled with the amazing aroma of fresh bread—rising loafs waiting their oven-turn scattered about the kitchen.

If she was frying our thick Swedish version of bacon along with finely cubed potatoes and an egg or two, my mouth always watered. If this was one of those boring mornings (too many of them, but I think that had to do with our family budget), there’d be porridge puttering away, which didn’t smell like much of anything.

But always, always, there would be music wafting out of that big, brown radio—like an aroma, part of every morning, regardless of breakfast, regardless of season.

Winter, pitch black outside, windows more like mirrors than windows.

Summer, the kitchen window opened to let bird song in along with the sweet countryside air that said all was well with the world.

I’d sit down, and she’d serve up what was on the menu that morning, say that dreaded oatmeal porridge. Still, it was palatable if you poured enough sugar on top of it and if the milk didn’t have too many flakes of cream floating about like ice floes around the snow-covered porridge iceberg. I hated cream floating about on top of the milk, but there was no getting around it: this milk came straight from the farmer, no homogenizing here. Let it sit overnight, and the top inch or so will be thick, slightly off-white cream—wonderful as whipped, poison as floes. My mom would harvest the cream every morning, but she never got all of it, hence cream-floes.

She’d often hum along with the Luxor, especially to those songs he liked, and she liked a lot of them. I loved her humming (or sometimes singing), for it told me in so many hums that, as far as Mom was concerned, radio and music and singing along with it was not a sin.

This was important for me to hear since her Mom, Grandma Olga, my fanatically Christian Grandma Olga, had impressed upon me more than once that radios and the music that spewed out them were all the Devil’s work, and I would do well to stay away from such terrible, such dangerous fare, such evil.

Mom disagreed (though not to Olga’s face), and perhaps the permanent kitchen music fixture was, at least in some measure, a revolt—my children will not consider music a sin. Yes, this was a good thing to know and to be reminded of every morning.

Dad liked music, too. Not a sin for him either. Away from Olga, radios were fine. However, during the month or so each summer that we spent with her, radios were banned along with the Devil and whatever else he was up to that would catch and ensnare little boys like me.

Another radio: The much smaller, black portable Centrum with FM (yes, I forgot to mention that the Luxor only had AM bands) and its built-in jack for your car antenna—clever, if you ask me. It was on this radio, lying in a summer field one Saturday afternoon (listening to the Swedish top-ten program), that I, for the very first time, heard the Beatles. The song was “Please Please Me.” I don’t remember where it placed on the list that week, first or second, but I do remember that I liked Brian Hyland’s “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (the Beatles’ competition) just as much then and would often, over the next few months, confuse the two songs in my mind—I’d picture night stars as a thousand eyes when I heard “Please Please Me.”

This radio followed us around a lot. On short drives, on long drives, on boat rides, always singing, and when taking a break, it would sit somewhere in the kitchen as well, perhaps by the old Luxor, proudly showing off its FM band.

Another radio: This was a crystal radio, a kit that I believe I put together myself or (perhaps) with a little (or a lot of) help from Dad. It wasn’t much larger than a big (kitchen-size) matchbox, and it was blue. Only AM here, but late at night, if atmospheric conditions agreed, I’d manage to tune in Radio Luxemburg from down on the continent (whose signal, I later found out, would actually bounce off the atmosphere and down into my little blue radio and form there into my ear through an earpiece) and through star-like static hear that far-away, wondrous world of Pop music.

Another radio: This was a monster. A Radio/Gramophone that must have weighed in at eighty pounds. I had been pestering Dad for a while for a gramophone of some kind. Small, battery-powered, perhaps. Bigger, off the mains, perhaps. Larger still, perhaps even a stereo gramophone—though those were still rare and cost a lot of money.

Before Dad drove into town, he told me to wait there. He was going in to get me a gramophone, he said.

I waited.

And waited.

And then he arrived in his Volvo Duett (Volvo’s version of a station wagon at the time) and parked by the front steps. He had brought a friend along, and I soon discovered why: it took two grown men to carry this monstrosity up the stairs to the children’s chamber, where they plunked it down.

“Here you go,” said Dad.

Delighted and disappointed in equal measure, I wasn’t sure what to say, but I did manage a “Thank you.”

I did, however, grow to like this beast for it worked (only AM though) and worked well, especially the gramophone part, which played 33s, 45s, and 78s no problem. Mom and Dad had a stack of 78s which they let me play and which, today, I wish I still had.

My first real album (a 33 RPM LP) was a United Nations benefits record called “All Star Festival” which, among other tracks, included Ella Fitzgerald’s “All of Me,” which I truly fell in love with.

Next album: West Side Story, original soundtrack. I loved it even more.

Next Christmas: My first Beatles LP, “With the Beatles.” I just about wore that one out, along with a host of 45s: “Just One Look” (The Hollies), “Here I Go Again) (also The Hollies), “I Believe” (The Bachelors), and “From Me To You” (The Beatles) spring readily to mind.

Another radio: This one in a friend’s house. Parents away, so we never went to bed; instead, through the never dark summer night we nestled around this old AM-only thing enjoying Radio Luxemburg fading in and out through the static and catching “Da Do Ron Ron” (The Crystals) three times between midnight and four in the morning.

Life like that cannot be improved.

Another radio: Luxor’s successor. Not as large by far, and with both FM and AM. This radio played me “Mr. Tambourine Man” (The Byrds) for the first time. I’ve been a Byrds fan ever since.

Another radio: My dad finally bought me a proper radio/stereo sporting both AM and FM, along with a very nice turntable and two excellent separate speakers. I had moved to Stockholm by then, and this slick and good-sounding wonder grew to be the center of my life, a position it maintained for the next four years, which four years also saw my record collection (LPs) grow from a few to well over thirty (riches at that time).

Today, it’s all mp3s of course, in the thousands. But what brought me here, what nursed me through a life with music, all these childhood radios.

Tolkien’s Lothlórien Elves, as I recall, considered music more important than food. I do not beg to differ.

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