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“3 o’clock in the morning/ It’s quiet and there’s no one around/Just the bang and the clatter/ As an angel runs to ground”

Beginning this week, Chapter Two is dedicated to bringing its readers more sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll than all other BOP columns combined! Actually, it’ll just be rock n’ roll for now.

I sleep more now than I did when I was 12, but all things considered, not that much more. The key difference is that once upon a pre-teen time it was the radio, movies on videocassette, and books that held my shuteye at bay. These days it’s some combination of television, the Internet, DVDs, ripping CDs I have borrowed from the library, and (yes, still) books that keep me up past my bedtime. To bastardize Wordsworth: the child is the media junkie forbear of the insomniac man.

It was the summer and fall of 1988 that I began tracking the dueling Top 40 countdowns that aired on Sundays on two of the stations for which the antenna jutting out from my General Electric boom box/ghetto blaster was able to pull in a signal. One of them came out of Portland, 150 miles to the north and the reception, incredibly, was as clear as the more local signal in Bend, 36 miles to the west. For a total of eight hours each Sunday, my dial was set to capture the hit parades of Shadoe Stevens (whose soothing yet sardonic tones brought Billboard’s Top 40 to life) and Rick Dees (whose self-monikered show with its squeaky clean ribaldry and groaningly juvenile double entendres took its data from Radio and Records Magazine).

Despite the fact that these two shows shared 95% of the same songs for any given week - and a good proportion of these songs in the same position - I reliably tuned in for both. But the true kicker is that I painstakingly transcribed the results from Position 40 to Position 1, for both shows, week in and week out. On lined 8 ½-by-11 sheets of paper, in dazzling block-letter penmanship that put my chicken scrawl cursive in the classroom to shame, I laid out the song title, the artist, how many places the song had soared or crashed since the previous week, and the number of weeks at said position.

Since I was most often working on Sundays during the mornings and afternoons (cleaning the cabins at the resort my parents operated), this meant either carting said boom box around and making short notes that would be fleshed out later, or using blank tapes to record the parts of the countdown I would miss. Given that most of those cassettes ran 45 minutes to a side, this option would include paying attention to the clock radios in the individual cabins and rushing back to my room to flip the tape over at the appropriate time.

On weeknights during that summer and several that followed, particularly those evenings when I knew I didn’t have to get up early the next day, I would jack my headphones into the boom box, fire up either the Portland or Bend station, throw a pillow down on the shag carpeting of my room, and play chicken with the Sandman. I would see how many songs in a row I knew, the goal being to get to 28, one side of a sheet of lined paper, or about three hours worth. At that time of night, of course, there were no deejays, only the occasional random station identification, so I relied on my own personal honor system and a familiarity with song titles and artists finely honed from reading the Columbia House supplements and yearly complete directory.

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