My greatest music memories come from the radio — and the Beatles.

I was 12 years old when I first discovered "progressive rock" radio. I was living in Quincy, Massachusetts and had started listening to the big "top 40" station in Boston, WKRO, when it had first moved from AM to FM. I was impressed with the high fidelity of the FM sound compared to the tinny, crackly AM version.

One night in late 1969, WRKO was playing a song I didn't particularly like (I think it was "Something Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra), so I started scanning the dial. I landed on a station called WBCN playing the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." I was dumbstruck! I'd heard the Beatles' hit singles, but never imagined they could be so edgy on their albums!

When the announcer came on, he wasn't screaming. He wasn't even "announcing." He was TALKING to me. I believe his name was was Mississippi Harold Wilson. He gave some facts about the "Abbey Road" album, then launched into "Oh! Darling." I was hooked on album radio and the Beatles!

Over the next few years, WBCN became very popular, and other "progressive rock" stations began to spring up. There was even one on AM, called WNTN in Newton, Massachusetts, which let me hear this great music on the AM-only radio in my '59 Ford. I remember hearing WNTN playing "Friends Of Mine" by the Guess Who, and it amazed me how the group was quoting the Beatles in that song. Then they played "We Love You" by the Rolling Stones and the announcer mentioned that John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang on that number with the Stones. I never would have imagined that the Beatles had such an influence on rock music from hearing them on "top 40" with their hits wedged between lame songs like "And I Love You So" by Perry Como and "San Francisco" by Scott MacKenzie!

Sadly,"progressive radio" began to die out in the mid-1970s. Suddenly, the great rock stations were either turning to "top 40" or reducing the number of songs they played drastically. In the later 1970s, so-called "classic rock" began to appear, but it was nothing more than the rock songs from "top 40," with a few album cuts thrown in. "Progressive" seemed to be dead in my native Massachusetts.

When I moved to Colorado in the early 1980s, there were a couple of radio stations keeping the "progressive" approach alive, but eventually they, too, were compromised. In the '90s some great new music came along with the singer-songwriter craze and the grunge scene, but, again, to hear this music on the radio, you had to put up with a lot of boring pop hits in between, and you seldom heard anything from the Beatles that hadn't been a hit single. Did these radio people not remember who put today's group-rock and singer-songwriters on the map in the first place?

Then, in the new century, along came [the radio station Archer was with for 6 years]. I was amazed to hear the best new and local music mixed in with the "progressive rock" cuts of the past. And then, one Sunday morning in August of 2002, I "ear-witnessed" the premiere of Archer's 3-hour Beatles show in Denver. Finally — a weekly examination of the band that started it all!

I connected my FM tuner to a hi-fi VCR and recorded all the shows since the second broadcast. I've transfered the shows to CD and take them with me on vacation. It always amazes me how week after week I learn and/or hear something new about the greatest group of songwriters to ever exist.

And when [the station did] its annual "Christmas with the Beatles" from 6 Christmas eve to 6 Christmas day, my wife, kids and I sang along with all the great music they produced.

What may amaze you is that I'm not a Beatles "freak." I don't have my family room adorned with posters and memorabilia. Other than the "1964" shows at Red Rocks, I don't go to Beatles-freak events and conventions. I just fully appreciate their music, their influence and their enduring, entertaining sound. And I thank ALL the artists who, through the Beatles' influence, have continued to make the world's best music in their wake.

[New England native George Tabor has lived in Broomfield, CO since 1982.]