Not
surprisingly, Central Pennsylvania where I grew up was not among the first
areas in the country to get a progressive rock radio station in the latter half
of the 1960s. Around 1970, however, “Starview 92.7” made its debut, to my great
joy. Its name came from its frequency on the dial and its location. I had never
heard of Starview PA and had to look it up on a map – turns out it’s near York,
and is (or at least was) basically a trailer park. At any rate, it had a signal
strong enough to cover York, Harrisburg, and Lancaster, which was good enough
for me.
After high
school, I went to Lebanon Valley College in Annville, which is maybe 35-40
miles northeast of Starview as the crow (and the radio signals) fly. The only
window in my dorm room faced north with a nice view of a mountain range that
was accommodating enough to bounce the WRHY signal back to the T-antenna that I
taped to the window. Things worked great except for the times when a freight
train rumbled by on the tracks just across the parking lot outside my window;
the tunes were so great, however, that we tolerated these disruptions to our
reception. (Yes, kids, there was no Internet back then.)
Daryl Hall
and John Oates released “She’s Gone” as a single in early 1974. It wasn’t a
hit, but Starview played it. I fell in love with the song and bought the Abandoned Luncheonette LP, which
frequently found its way onto my (Technics SL-5) turntable for many years
thereafter.
Hall &
Oates followed up Abandoned Luncheonette
by collaborating with fellow Philadelphian Todd Rundgren on their next album,
which although interesting was so commercially unsuccessful that Atlantic
Records dropped the duo. Two years later, after they were signed by RCA and had
a big hit with “Sara Smile”, Atlantic re-released “She’s Gone”. Be warned,
however, that the 3:28 edited version that they sent to Top-40 radio stations
to induce them to play it* is an atrocity – the intro and the bridge are
shortened almost to nothing, and as an additional insult half of the first verse
is mashed together with half of the second. You need to hear/get the original
version, which is over 5 minutes long, to hear the song the way it was
intended.
* - It did
work. The song hit the Top 10 in 1976.
Ah, Starview. I remember it well. I still have this song on one of my running mixes.
ReplyDeleteHad I wanted to make the original post even longer, I would have also noted our efforts in getting an antenna splitter senior year and running wire from E6 to E8, since my junior-year roommate now had a window facing east and could no longer pick up the station. ;-)
ReplyDelete