Everything I needed to know, I learned from Loveline. Throughout the entirety of high school and even some of middle school, I listened on a near-religious nightly basis — Sunday through Thursday-nightly, anyway — to take in Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky’s words of complaint and wisdom, whether on sex and drugs, the show’s official mandate, or on cars, house remodeling, the geography of Los Angeles, smoke alarm battery replacement, or a host of other seemingly tangential but actually central subjects.
Has anything interesting appeared on commercial radio since Loveline? Unlikely, at least to the late Gen-Xers and early Millennials who grew up in the show’s Carolla-Pinsky “golden age” from 1995 to 2005. One such listener, unofficial-turned-official Loveline archivist Superfan Giovanni, has put forth a superhuman effort to collect recordings of all extant broadcasts.
In the podcast era, which began just Loveline‘s golden age ended, Giovanni first showcased his work in G.I.O. Get it On, in whose long-form episodes he curates and introduces his favorite tapes of the show. Now, we’ve also got the Classic Loveline podcast, which serves up the broadcasts of the once-in-a-generation unscripted comic duo of Adam and Dr. Drew just as we heard them in the late 90s and early 2000s, whether we listened on its home station of KROQ or elsewhere. (I myself tuned in to Seattle’s 107.7, “The End.”)
Classic Loveline also “airs” its episodes in chronological order. As of this writing, it has most recently made available a broadcast from July 21, 1997 featuring, yes, Young MC. Other celebrity appearances uploaded in the past few months include Suzanne Vega, Reel Big Fish, Victoria Jackson, and Toad the Wet Sprocket.
Some guests contribute a great deal the show. Some… contribute less. Carolla has described wide swaths of the Loveline roster in frank terms on his own newer podasts: “Drunken rockers, stupid actresses; a real who’s-who of retards.” And indeed, purists tend to prefer the show’s guestless episodes, when the hosts felt freer to ignore the calls and have conversations about what really matters.
Nor did Carolla have many kind words for most of Loveline‘s callers, a group whose level of intelligence he estimated at a stone’s throw from insensate. But as he and Dr. Drew often said, they didn’t do the show for the callers, in any case seemed generally unable to learn; they did it for the silent majority who never called, but just tuned in for nightly laughs and the occasional insight into the human condition. That’s what I did, and thanks to Classic Loveline (and The Adam and Dr. Drew Show, a kind of Loveline 2.0 in Carolla’s podcast stable), even those born after the show’s golden age can now do the same.