My Best Ever Summertime Playlist

a.k.a. A Love Letter To "Good Times Great Oldies" Radio

If you follow me on Twitter, you are familiar with something I like to call The Patio Hall Of Fame. It works like this: I’m sitting outside with a drink in one hand and my phone in the other, and I am listening to an album that I love via either the compact disc or cassette format. I then take a photo of said album and post it on the internet.

People have often asked me, “What is the criteria for a Patio Hall Of Fame Album?” I am asked this because I am a rock critic, and rock critics are expected to have criteria for their publicly stated opinions. I probably will write a Patio Hall Of Fame manifesto at some point. But the truth is that the main qualifications are 1) I like the album and 2) I happen to be listening to the album outside and 3) I have an unhealthy impulse to post something at the moment. That’s it. Anything else is just intellectual gymnastics.

(Pedantic folks have repeatedly pointed out that I am technically sitting on a deck, not a patio. Here’s the thing: There’s no poetry in the word “deck.” Whereas “patio” is actually quite beautiful, linguistically speaking. If my wife and I had decided to have a third child, I would have pushed to them Patio. Anyway: I’m asserting my poetic license here.)

Patio music for me is inherently summertime music, because I live in the Upper Midwest and can only sit outside comfortably from late April to late October. (Give or take a few weeks, I’m being generous here.) But if we are talking about the time of the year we’re in right now — middle-of-the-summertime — there’s really only one kind of music I want to hear. And it’s all compiled on the best playlist of summertime music that I (or anybody??) has ever made.

I give you WOLD, Your Good Times Great Oldies Station.

I made this playlist about three or four years ago, and I always re-share it at some point during the lazy stretch from the Fourth of July to Labor Day. The playlist consists of 122 songs spread across five and a half hours, and they’re all tunes I remember hearing on my local “Good Time Great Oldies” station when I was growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s. It’s music I associate with road trips and cookouts and beach trips and that one house in the neighborhood where old guys hung out in the garage and chugged beers at dusk. (This mental image being stuck in my brain probably explains a lot of my own summertime behavior.)

The “Good Times Great Oldies” concept will be instantly familiar to people around my age — the very old Millennials-slash-very young Gen Xers aka “xennials” — and not at all recognizable to anyone who’s younger. I wrote about the radio format in my second book, Twilight Of The Gods, in a chapter in which I differentiate “oldies” radio from “classic rock” radio. At the peak of these formats, “oldies” covered music from the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s, whereas “classic rock” started in the late-’60s and stretched to the early-’80s. Some bands — The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, etc. — straddled both formats, but “oldies” and “classic rock” each had custody of certain songs. “She Loves You,” “The Last Time,” and “My Generation” were oldies, and “Hey Jude,” “Miss You,” and “Baba O’Riley” were classic rock. (Weirdly, CCR is strictly an oldies act, despite being a defining Woodstock era band, likely due to their contemporary status as AM radio hitmakers.) Beyond that, oldies stations were more diverse than the classic rock ones — they played rock and soul, which meant white and black artists, as well as loads of girl groups, whereas classic rock was mostly just white guys with guitars.

Oldies stations still exist, of course, but the goal posts have shifted. Wherever you go, it’s mostly songs from the ’80s and ’90s, with some well-known disco tracks from the ’70s (“Stayin’ Alive,” “I Will Survive,” et. al) sprinkled in. Also, the “Good Times Great Oldies” slogan attached to the format like fast-food chain branding has been replaced by “Cool.” Trust me, you definitely have a “Cool 105.1 FM” (or some other such call number) in your town, and they’re probably playing “Africa” by Toto as we speak.

(Fortunately, there are exceptions. In the Twin Cities area, there’s a wonderful station called WDGY 740 AM that plays oldies as they were meant to be, with load of deep cuts I often don’t know at all. I have Shazam’ed more songs than I can count listening to 740 AM. You can see what I mean by streaming the station online.)

Making the WOLD playlist was a reminder of just how formative oldies radio was for me as a young music listener. It’s weird to consider that, say, “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and The Playboys was as much a part of my personal “’90s music” experience as Nirvana or Snoop Dogg. But it truly was. My goal with the WOLD playlist was to recreate the world that I remembered from that time. And I found it shockingly easy to recall dozens of songs that I hadn’t heard in years. No matter how obscure many of them are now to contemporary audiences, they remain deeply embedded in my soul.

I’m not just talking about obvious hits like “The Tears Of A Clown” by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles or “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas or “Get Together” by The Youngbloods. I’m talking about “1,2,3” by Len Barry and “Vehicle” by The Ides Of March and “Nobody But Me” by The Human Beinz and “Walk Away Renee” by The Left Banke and “Come On Down To My Boat” by Every Mother’s Son and “Green Tambourine” by The Lemon Pipers and “Little Bit O’ Soul” by The Music Explosion and “Gimme Little Sign” by Benton Wood and “Five O’Clock World” by The Vogues and “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight” by Boyce and Hart and “Take A Letter Maria” by RB Greaves and “Little Girl” by Syndicate Of Sound and many more.

Garage rock, bubblegum R&B, fake psychedelia, unabashed pop junk — I heard all of these songs at least once every few weeks for years. And now they are mostly forgotten. The most poignant part of getting older for me is seeing the pillars of your past slowly evaporate. Nobody is posting memes about Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. Nobody is starting a podcast to investigate the music of The Left Banke. (Though they should! Deep band!) You probably won’t see a TikTok craze connected to “1,2,3.” It’s all … just vanished.

(There are, again, exceptions that prove the rule: Part of my attraction to Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is how it emulated the feel of a long-lost oldies station.)

Streaming has, in many ways, altered our collective sense of time when it comes to music, to the point where the biggest songs of the ’80s and ’90s remains omnipresent as an influence on modern hits. The gap between 2024 and 1994 (or 1984) seems much smaller than the span from the early ’90s to the mid ’50s was when I was a kid. (I understand that my perception as an adult is different from my perspective as a child, but I think it’s demonstrably true that music has changed much more slowly in the 21st century than it did in the previous one.) But the dividing line for music that younger generations rediscover is basically the same one that split oldies and classic rock, with oldies being left in the cold. Anything that derives from earlier than the late ’60s — aside from seminal works by icons like The Beatles and Dylan, of course — simply does not exist.

Anyway: The upside of time’s endless march forward is that I can now hear these songs whenever I want. Back then, I didn’t even know who sang most of these tunes. It was all just the output of the “Good Times Great Oldies” house band that existed in our car stereo. But that’s not true with WOLD. On this playlist, oldies are alive once more.

Self-Promotion Time

That’s right — your boy swung by CNN on July 3 to solve our current electoral crisis. You’re welcome.

I kid! Actually, I was just doing book promo. It was fun — I felt low-grade anxiety for about 12 hours and then went on camera for five minutes. Sales spiked on Amazon so it was all worth it.

Speaking of book promo: I will be at The Hideout in Chicago on July 9 with my pal Rob Mitchum. Come through if you live in the Windy City!

Over at Uproxx, I wrote about the latest album by Zach Bryan, The Great American Bar Scene. Bryan is possibly the closest equivalent to Bruce Springsteen in the sphere of modern music superstars, and this record has loads of Boss references (along with a cameo by Bruce himself). I consider myself a Zach Bryan fan with reservations, and in the column I parse his strengths (lyrics) and weaknesses (music).