Wednesday, April 05, 2006

the bullet in the back

Over at Nashville is Talking, they're reminiscing about the good old days when WKDF was rock station. The best rock. They shoulda stripped them of their call letters when they changed to country format. (And by the way, I love country music, too.)

My parents weren't so much into popular beat combos by the time I was in Junior High, and our car radio was usually tuned into Nashville public radio. Sure, I did occasionally play my parents LPs from the 60s when my dad would let me near the stereo, but I favoured the softer sounds of Maria Muldaur and Helen Reddy.

So I was amazed when classmates introduced me to KDF. Wow. It rocked my world - the first in the holy trio of drugs, sex and...

Once we moved to Lawrenceburg, I used to struggle to get the KDF signal on my crappy little Sears stero. Whenever we went to Nashville, I used to beg my mom to let me tune into KDF, but it was back to Nashville public radio. So KDF represented to me both new cultural horizons and the constant struggle of reaching that forbidden fruit.

I never had one of those KDF stickers, the bullet in the back, but I sure wanted one.

I can however, recount seeing one in one of the strangest places. I was in the Venezuelan Angel Falls national park riding in a jeep across what must be savannah terrain and I look up and what do I see? A KDF bullet in the upper right hand side of the windshield.

Holy crap. The KDF bullet. I started gesturing and pointing at the thing, asking the driver in poor Spanish how he got it, where he got it. Did he even know what it was? He simply could not understand my excitement.

I eventually discovered that a Nashville girl ran the gift shop.

2 comments:

genderist said...

How random. Just a couple of weeks ago I was treating one of my patients who is a radio personality and used to MC one of the radio stations in Nashville -- after which we figured that out I asked him if it was when KDF was still rock and roll ... to which he said, Yeah, changing that station was TRAGIC...
so you're not the only one mourning KDF!!

Meanwhile, OKC has an oldies station called KOMA --

melusina said...

I spent much of my early teenage years listening to KDF, although I had stopped listening before it became country. I was all into the Vandy station and 100 (was it 100?) when it was all alternative.

I didn't even know it had gone country until one day I was flipping through the radio and thought I'd listen to some good old fashioned rock and rool, and tuned to KDF. Oops.