AM Boy
Personally, I love AM radio. I love the poor sound quality, uneven reception, bizarre unexpected squeals and other indescribable noises that pierce your ears right as you’re trying to navigate a careful driving maneuver…but most of all, I love how wacky it can be if you get it just right.
At first, the lover of the strange and abnormal may be a little disappointed by their local AM programming. After all, it seems like it could be so much more subversive and alternative than it actually is.
Hang in there, however, and you’ll see the rare and wonderful flowers of AM weirdness come to vivid bloom like a flower in the desert after unseasonable rainfall. Which reminds me of the single best reason to like AM radio if you’re weird: Coast to Coast AM.
Coast to Coast has featured so many fascinatingly loony things over the years that it seems a shame to simply call it a show about ‘the paranormal’. So is Ripley’s Believe it or Not, but you’d never hear Dean Cain taking 2am calls from a woman whose cat was possessed by alien terrorists who provided Tesla coil anti-gravity plans — which, of course, the government is now trying to steal from her. And that’s just one call!
Sure, the show was at its best when Art Bell was at the helm, but Noory is more than capable of maintaining the same level of calm encounters with the bizarre. At its worst, Coast to Coast is usually far more entertaining than nearly anything else on the radio.
However, there are plenty of completely surreal moments to be had from any number of other talk shows. The more mainstream right-wing shows are generally boring, so you can probably safely dial past anyone whose name is familiar. When you find a truly extreme conservative who does a call-in show, hang in there — you’re sure to hear something bizarre and unbelievable before too long.