For the longest time, I resisted getting Satellite Radio – primarily because I listen to radio mostly in the car, and I didn’t think the cost would be worth it. Meantime, Chicago rock radio continued to bore me with too much Classic Rock and Adult Contemporary formats but no major station with an Active Rock or even a Modern Rock format. I want to hear NEW Rock, dammit! I love listening to 95.1 WIIL Rock, but unfortunately, it’s Kenosha County transmitter signal doesn’t come in consistently clear enough to the Northwest side / Northwest suburbs of Chicago. I had some hope when “Rock 95.5” debuted in September 2020, but after a while, I could tell it was being programmed as Mainstream (aka Heritage) Rock, which is pretty much moving the Classic Rock playlist up a decade. Cutting…fucking…edge, I tells ya! That first weekend, I heard Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll” 3 random times I tuned into Rock 95.5 (!), proving to me that the station is bullshit – just another boring classic rock station with a small playlist. Since new Rock music wasn’t going to happen for me on Chicago radio, I started listening to WBEZ more. Then I wrecked my car in August 2021.
Our new car came with a free 3-month SiriusXM trial, which was cool (it doesn’t have an HD Radio receiver, which just shows how stupid the terrestrial radio broadcasting association is). My previous experiences with SiriusXM have been in rental cars when I would go on work trips. I usually only listened to Howard Stern’s Channel 100, though. Anyway, after three months, I decided to continue with the service, effectively turning my back on local Chicago terrestrial radio for Rock music.
SiriusXM has a lot of very cool channels (the coolest being Howard 100 & Howard 101), and it’s not perfect, and while I have 30+ Rock stations to choose from, there’s just one that gives me the new Rock (and it’s Hard Rock) I need. Octane ch 37 has Active Rock, Modern Hard Rock & Alt-Metal, and in the past year I’ve discovered some great new bands & music (Volbeat, Solence, Skillet, Pop Evil) thanks to the station. In another very cool twist, Octane (and several other great channels) is programmed by the legendary multi-talented Lou Brutus, who I came to love when he was on Rock 103.5 (active rock successor to the greatest radio station ever – 103.5 The Blaze!) in the mid-90’s. To be sure, there’s a lot of very hard metal on Octane that I don’t care for – songs with Cookie Monster vocals, incessant fast double-bass drumming and non-melodic rock – but there’s a lot of great stuff on the channel, including Octane’s Test Drive (new music) and Octane’s Big Uns weekly countdown.
Additionally, there’s a lot of other channels I surf around, another favorite being Turbo ch 41 (90’s and 00’s Hard Rock & Nu Metal) as well as 70’s on 7, 80’s on 8 (with MTV VJ’s!), 90’s on 9, PopRocks 12 (90’s to today Rock & Pop hits), Lithium 34 (90’s alt-rock, grunge & alt-metal), HairNation 39 (with Eddie Trunk!), and several classic rock stations including Classic Rewind 25, Classic Vinyl 26, Deep Tracks 27, Ozzy’s Boneyard 38 and RockBar 313. Sometimes I’ll even go a bit mellow and listen to Yacht Rock Radio 14 and The Bridge 17
So, yes, I am enjoying commercial-free satellite radio music (Stern’s channels have ads – boo!) that I can listen to in my car, on my phone and on my computer. It didn’t have to be this way, but since Chicago has not had an Active Rock station since Rock 103.5 went away in 1998, and the Chicago rock stations continue playing the same songs (no deep cuts!) they played 10 & 20 years ago…c’est la vie.
