No More Motown Mondays

You know you're getting older when your favorite music-radio station abandons its format of several decades. Although I like much of what WBIG 100.3 is now playing, some of my nostalgic favorites have just been assigned to my CD-player. Unfortunately, one of my vehicles has no tape- or CD-player, just the AM-FM radio. While some of the oldies on WBIG were of the type before "my day," others were among those hits I discovered when I got my first stereo system.

Excerpt from the April 4, 2006 Washington Post article Oldies a Thing Of the Past At WBIG-FM:

"Elvis has not only left the building — he's leaving the airwaves.

"So, too, are many of his fellow hitmakers from the 1960s and '70s, including the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Simon & Garfunkel and Wilson Pickett.

"In a generational as well as cultural shift, the area's only oldies station, WBIG (100.3 FM), yesterday dropped much of the music that has been a staple of local radio for more than 40 years and replaced it with 'classic' rock from the 1970s and early '80s.

"Out: the cheerful sound of Motown, which appeals to racially diverse audiences, and early Top 40 radio that harks to the civil rights and Vietnam eras.

"In: familiar cuts from rock giants such as Journey, Queen, Supertramp, Aerosmith, the Police and Cheap Trick.

"Still holding on: the Beatles and Rolling Stones, but not the epoch-changing British Invasion hits of the mid-'60s...."

"[I]n one swift move, WBIG consigned a whole swath of iconic pop — hits of the Temptations, the Monkees, James Brown and Mamas & Papas — to the same scrapheap on which radio programmers dumped their Frank Sinatra and Perry Como records more than a decade ago...."

One of the best features of WBIG had been Motown Mondays, when those of us sitting in gridlock could sing along to the hits we used to collect as 45 RPM's. I was partial to anything by The Supremes.

I'm going to miss Motown Mondays as well as the other programming offered by the now-defunct Oldies 100.3. My husband will have a difficult time making the switchover; he's terribly fond of the Beach Boys and doesn't much care for any music beyond 1975.

The change at WBIG is another adjustment to progress, close on the heels of having to do away with our backyard junk and the recent demolition of the oldest house in our neighborhood.