It's been many years since I've listened to what used to be known as "Top 40 Radio." You know the type: radio stations that limit their play lists to 2 minutes 50 seconds or less per song, hours of noisy radio chock-full of commercials, and of course, announcers and music directors who know just how to hit the jugular of the 13 to 15 year old teenybopper demographic. In the 60's and 70's, these stations were largely confined to the AM dial.

For me growing up, it was always a rush tuning in to Chicago's WLS and WCFL, two AM stations dueling for my allowance or paper route money, and later, my teenage minimum wages of $1.30 per hour. That's right, Stone-age stuff, late 60's and early 70's. These Chicago clear-channel AM titans would sponsor after-school dances, hold local concerts at the Oak Park Arms or other long-defunct youth music venue and were very visible members of the community.

Back then, when department stores used to carry a full line of music, books and tapes (8-tracks, thank you, no cassettes please), I used to collect the weekly printed surveys of Top 40 songs at the local Goldblatt's or Sears stores. I used to buy 45's, and the plastic centers that were sold separately, and wish that I had kept some of my first forays into rock music, including "Journey to the Center of the Mind" by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes or Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild." I know that both of those musical references peg me right smack dab in the middle of the bunch of early 70's whiners who were too young to serve in Viet Nam, or too young either to raise our fists high in the air in support of or against the war, but they are some of the bricks in the foundation of my initial awareness of rock music as an adolescent.

I continued to collect 45 RPM discs every payday, whether the bucks came from my early experiments in capitalism (selling homegrown tomatoes door-to-door) or from my first real job. A job that paid $1.30 per hour, with taxes, as a bus boy at Sears, Roebuck and Company's store in the now-paved Clock Tower Mall in the southernmost reaches of Chicagoland. I played these records until the needle wore thin on my Radio Shack/Realistic Clarinette record player. The spindle played LPs or 45s in stacks of fours and fives at a time and if I were really adventurous, I could sneak a sixth 45 on there, but it sounded pretty warped and strange from all of 20 watts a side. You know the type: Martin Mull sang about these "lousy speakers" in his song "Normal" way back when. The refrain went "let's you and I get normal for a change." Right.

Since then, society tells me that I've grown up, got normal, two kids, a mortgage, etc. However, I tuned in to a local teenybopper station (sorry, no more weekly paper surveys, gotta surf the website) courtesy of my 11 year old daughter Jessica. Her station, Seattle's new KISS-FM at 106.1 plays the usual suspects aimed at the pre-teen and teen markets: The Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC, and the closest her suburban classmates will get to hip-hop, J-Lo and Ja Rule on 'I'm Real" or Eve and Gwen Stefani's "Let Me Blow Ya Mind."

One day doing the daycare pickup duty, KISS-FM played two back-to-back songs that jumped right out at me through the speakers: "Answer the Phone" from Sugar Ray, and "The Rock Show" from Blink 182.

From the opening, multilayered power chords of "Answer the Phone," Sugar Ray taps into a groove that's defined power pop, and rock and roll, for more than five decades. "Answer the Phone" is a four-minute tour-de-force that tells the story of many a pop song. A young man is seriously smitten with a young girl, and he hopes that his object of desire will pick up the phone just so that he can be with her to "do it again and do it again." It's one of my favorite pop songs in recent years, 'cause it harkens back to the full-throttle power pop of Rockpile (think "Teacher, Teacher" or "Oh What A Thrill"), or The Clash in their more accessible, pop moments (like "Lost in the Supermarket" or "Train in Vain").

Blink 182 owes more than a nod and a thank you to the legacy of The Ramones on "The Rock Show." The hyperkinetic guitars and lyrics that blast out of the gate on this four-minute gem don't let up until we hear the full story of the girl the singer's met at the side of the stage at the rock show. It's a wild sub-3 minute ride, and it's one of the high points of my musical 2001. It reminds me of that local San Diego band, The Monroes, whose shooting star, "What Do All the People Know," soared on the airwaves in the early 1980's.

Who says that Sugar Ray or Blink 182 don't rock in the traditions of the Ramones, Rockpile, The Clash, or other pop bands like The Monroes that us aging rock and roll fans recall as the halcyon days of power pop? To paraphrase Loundon Wainwright III from his 1978 LP, Final Exam, watch me rock, I'm over 40.

I might not be a Britney Spears or J-Lo fan, but when Sugar Ray or Blink 182 blast out of the speakers courtesy of KISS-FM, I'll listen. Sure, they don't have the political bent of The Clash's Sandanista or the social commentary of such power pop bands as Nick Lowe, The Go-Go's, Dave Edmunds, The Bangles, or Marshall Crenshaw, but they've shown me that the spirit of 70's pop and punk is very much still alive and well.

Although it may pain me to say it at times: rock on Sugar Ray and Blink 182!

(C) 2001 - Eric Steiner