Pre-1970 Music on Seattle FM dial

[DMK]

Too bad KZOK doesn't play Weird Al's version. On a tangent how much say do PD's have in programming local artists who've mad it big. In other words would a similarly programmed IHEART classic rock station outside of Washington play Nirvana on a constant loop.

 

[TexasTom]

Then, what about those younger listeners who actually want to hear older music? Shawn Ross wrote just yesterday that country PDs are hearing excitement from younger listeners when they add older titles. Of course we can't forget a couple summers ago when Running Up That Hill, a 35 year old record, suddenly was everywhere thanks to a Netflix series. Outside of this, I know several people my age and a bit older who love music older than they are.

That can come from exposure like the example you give ("Running Up The Hill" becoming a hit again because it was featured on "Stranger Things"), but to some extent it is also a matter of what was getting played on the radio when we were teenagers.

Right now there are Top 40 stations that are playing quite a few older songs, sometimes going back more than twenty years. To the extent that young people still listen to the radio, that means those older songs are part of what teenagers are hearing today. They may still like those songs twenty or thirty years from now.

That's my own personal experience. When I was in high school and starting college, there was a lot of older music being played on the FM Top 40 stations that I listened to. Since I recently digitized a whole bunch of old radio recordings, I've been reminded of that. As an example, I have recordings from July of 1981 from 'The New 93' (the station that later became KUBE) right after they went to their live format that include "I Saw Her Standing There" from the Beatles -- a song that 17 years old. A recording from KNWR (TM Stereo Rock automated Top 40) a month later includes the 16 year old "Tell Her No" from the Zombies. "Stairway to Heaven" and "Nights in White Satin" were regularly heard on multiple Top 40 stations in the area in the late seventies and early eighties. My classmates who preferred AOR-formatted KISW could expect to hear quite a bit of sixties rock in that same time frame.

Some of that music stuck, and those of my generation still like those songs -- even though radio programmers never quite seemed to believe that those of us who grew up with Top 40 radio liked those songs. Even when those songs tested well, they were dismissed as "not fitting the format".

If radio is still around in 25 years, programmers who see good test results for something like "Running Up The Hill" will dismiss those results the same way.

 

[bobdavcav]

You hit the nail on the head as to one of the biggest things wrong with radio today in my opinion. Having not been born until 1993, I didn't know that top40 had a significant gold component even well before then. Am I just biased because I'm younger, or is there really more opportunity for today's young people to be exposed to older music? That's really what it seems like to me, as my favorite station was KBSG, and as I've said before, I know at least one other person who loves older music that's hard to find on radio today, and several more who love classic rock, all of whom are within a couple years of me in age.

 

[DMK]

Texas Tom is correct. I lived through the 80s (best decade of music in my opinion) and many Top 40 stations leaned into the 1970s from time to time. The extent varied depending on the station. Magic 108 played music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The irony of Running Up the Hill is that's happened in other decades as well. Think Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Twist and Shout or Ghost with Unchained Melody. Movies and television certainly have a way of reinvigorating an old song.

They say music is timeless. Judging from YouTube comments one could draw an opinion that millennials and Gen Z like listening to music from back in the day.

 

[Bongwater]

"Dear Future Survivors,

We did all we could.

But try as we may, we utterly could not stop this radio aging conveyor belt. Once the last Slipknot fans were courted by KIXI, The time/space/music continuum simply snapped when there was nobody left to replace it. I mean, the scientists are baffled. There were back room discussions on hopefully having Lady Gaga, Psy, Foster The People, Carly Rae Jepsen, Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift help continue on the Oldies cycle for at least one more generation. But it was no use. The radio aging conveyor belt snapped and threw everybody against the wall. There were no survivors and I'm the only one left to tell about it....- B.W."

 

[bobdavcav]

Lol. I think you might be a generation early on that though given the success of CHR a decade ago.

 

[DMK]

Props to BW for some well timed levity. Vinyl sales outpaced CDs again. There maybe hope for humanity after all.

 

[Bongwater]

Props to BW for some well timed levity. Vinyl sales outpaced CDs again. There maybe hope for humanity after all.

The biggest lie in the history of the recording industry is "Vinyl went obsolete".

It never did. Ever.

Not as long as there are indie fans, hipsters, collectors and people who are just plain cool.

 

[Scoobyfan1]

That's my own personal experience. When I was in high school and starting college, there was a lot of older music being played on the FM Top 40 stations that I listened to. Since I recently digitized a whole bunch of old radio recordings, I've been reminded of that. As an example, I have recordings from July of 1981 from 'The New 93' (the station that later became KUBE) right after they went to their live format that include "I Saw Her Standing There" from the Beatles -- a song that 17 years old. A recording from KNWR (TM Stereo Rock automated Top 40) a month later includes the 16 year old "Tell Her No" from the Zombies. "Stairway to Heaven" and "Nights in White Satin" were regularly heard on multiple Top 40 stations in the area in the late seventies and early eighties. My classmates who preferred AOR-formatted KISW could expect to hear quite a bit of sixties rock in that same time frame.

TexasTom: is there any way that you can send the digitzed versions of those airchecks through e-mail, or post them online or on here somewhere?

Just curious, as I would kind of like to hear them being a Seattle-Tacoma radio history buff...

 

[TexasTom]

At this point, the files are too large to send, and I'll need to do a lot of sorting. That said, at some point I hope to have something to share and would like to find a place to do so.

In the meantime, I see it is possible to attach audio files here, so I've attached a couple of top of the hour IDs from way back. If successful, here's KVI-FM (now KPLZ) from November 1976, KNBQ (now KIRO-FM) from January and February 1977, and KYYX (now KJAQ) from February 1977. These reflect KVI-FM just a few months after switching to Top 40, KNBQ in its final days of a soft contemporary format and just when it was beginning to transition to the Drake-Chenault XT40 automated Top 40 format, and KYYX probably within a few days or a week after it went on the air as a Top 40 station.

If there is interest, I can post more of these as I have time to edit down what I've digitized.

 

[Scoobyfan1]

At this point, the files are too large to send, and I'll need to do a lot of sorting. That said, at some point I hope to have something to share and would like to find a place to do so.

In the meantime, I see it is possible to attach audio files here, so I've attached a couple of top of the hour IDs from way back. If successful, here's KVI-FM (now KPLZ) from November 1976, KNBQ (now KIRO-FM) from January and February 1977, and KYYX (now KJAQ) from February 1977. These reflect KVI-FM just a few months after switching to Top 40, KNBQ in its final days of a soft contemporary format and just when it was beginning to transition to the Drake-Chenault XT40 automated Top 40 format, and KYYX probably within a few days or a week after it went on the air as a Top 40 station.

If there is interest, I can post more of these as I have time to edit down what I've digitized.

I definitely would be interested, as I mentioned i'm kind of a Seattle-Tacoma radio history buff...

Whatever you would be able to get online in the future would be awesome

As far as a place to share audio, I would try YouTube, and if that doesn't work somewhere like the Internet Archive might work, as i've noticed they're pretty good as far as posting audio.

 

[TexasTom]

I found and digitized a few more tapes that were hidden behind a stack of CDs. A few surprises -- such as a recording of "Get Closer" by Seals & Croft that turned out to be from KISW, which then called itself "FM 100". This was from late summer or early fall of 1977, and the station was already in the album rock format by then. So just a reminder of how much rock radio changed in just a few years, because by 1979, there is no way that they would have played that.

And from the same time period, I found a particularly awkwardly phrased liner from automated Top 40 KNBQ (Q97-FM) in Tacoma: "You know we're glad we're an FM station because we can play all of your music in stereo because of that here at Q97-FM".

For anyone who wants to hear it:

 

[LITTLEBOYBLUE]

And from the same time period, I found a particularly awkwardly phrased liner from automated Top 40 KNBQ (Q97-FM) in Tacoma: "You know we're glad we're an FM station because we can play all of your music in stereo because of that here at Q97-FM".

That MIGHT be Mark Pierce, who was working there when I joined in Fall/1978. Very clunky (all reel except spots) automated format -- we didn't have any clue what we were intro'ing or extro'ing so all the comments were VERY generic. No jingles.

Wasn't happy there at all, even though there were some terrific people on the team -- and my attitude led to my involuntary exit interview!! Within about a year, they remodeled the place and turned it into a live Top-40 contender; making me shake my head at my 20-something behavior!!

 

[Kento]

I discovered KNBQ in 1979. It was playing in my shop class in Junior High. It was live and local high energy Top 40 by then

 

[Kento]

Who was the voice for KVI FM?

 

[semoochie]

That can come from exposure like the example you give ("Running Up The Hill" becoming a hit again because it was featured on "Stranger Things"), but to some extent it is also a matter of what was getting played on the radio when we were teenagers.

Right now there are Top 40 stations that are playing quite a few older songs, sometimes going back more than twenty years. To the extent that young people still listen to the radio, that means those older songs are part of what teenagers are hearing today. They may still like those songs twenty or thirty years from now.

That's my own personal experience. When I was in high school and starting college, there was a lot of older music being played on the FM Top 40 stations that I listened to. Since I recently digitized a whole bunch of old radio recordings, I've been reminded of that. As an example, I have recordings from July of 1981 from 'The New 93' (the station that later became KUBE) right after they went to their live format that include "I Saw Her Standing There" from the Beatles -- a song that 17 years old. A recording from KNWR (TM Stereo Rock automated Top 40) a month later includes the 16 year old "Tell Her No" from the Zombies. "Stairway to Heaven" and "Nights in White Satin" were regularly heard on multiple Top 40 stations in the area in the late seventies and early eighties. My classmates who preferred AOR-formatted KISW could expect to hear quite a bit of sixties rock in that same time frame.

Some of that music stuck, and those of my generation still like those songs -- even though radio programmers never quite seemed to believe that those of us who grew up with Top 40 radio liked those songs. Even when those songs tested well, they were dismissed as "not fitting the format".

If radio is still around in 25 years, programmers who see good test results for something like "Running Up The Hill" will dismiss those results the same way.

"Running Up That Hill" didn't become a hit AGAIN unless you count the UK. Its previous chart run here had it stalling at #30!

 

[TexasTom]

That MIGHT be Mark Pierce, who was working there when I joined in Fall/1978. Very clunky (all reel except spots) automated format -- we didn't have any clue what we were intro'ing or extro'ing so all the comments were VERY generic. No jingles.

Wasn't happy there at all, even though there were some terrific people on the team -- and my attitude led to my involuntary exit interview!! Within about a year, they remodeled the place and turned it into a live Top-40 contender; making me shake my head at my 20-something behavior!!

Yeah, I remember those days on KNBQ -- even as a high school student, I could tell that it was automated and that the DJs didn't have any way of matching their talk segments to the music that was spit out by the automation system.

Just out of curiosity, do you know who they were sourcing their music from? I know that from early 1977 until sometime near the beginning of the year they switched to a different syndicated supplier -- but I'm not sure who it was. They kept that second supplier for less than a year and then they switched again -- and while my suspicion is that at that point they may have been locally sourcing their automated music (as KYYX did in Seattle), I don't know that for sure.

I do remember that in 1979 they started transitioning to a more talk-intensive and high energy Top 40 format that was in place by early 1980. And at that point they overtook KTAC(AM) to become the dominant Top 40 station in Tacoma.

 

[LITTLEBOYBLUE]

Just out of curiosity, do you know who they were sourcing their music from? I know that from early 1977 until sometime near the beginning of the year they switched to a different syndicated supplier -- but I'm not sure who it was. They kept that second supplier for less than a year and then they switched again -- and while my suspicion is that at that point they may have been locally sourcing their automated music (as KYYX did in Seattle), I don't know that for sure.

KNBQ had gold reels from Drake; currents were on one reel that was constantly edited a new material was added or dropped. Of course, that meant all the currents always played in the same sequence and no ability to give some songs more weight in rotation as would be the practice starting in the 1980's. KNBQ wasn't really very "strategic" until Gary Bryan et al came in and turned it into a "real" (and live) radio station. KNBQ recruited their previous PD from overnights at KISW so kind of a case of "you get what you pay for".

KYYX was locally sourced...more sophisticated because currents were on an IGM Instacart; gold was on those "tractor" carousels. That proved to be a problem because when song-length carts would sit upside-down for a long time they tended to jam. I don't remember if KYYX actually had record label music meetings or not...but I would suspect they did. At that point KVI-FM and KYYX were head-to-head; KJR and KING still battling it out on the AM side so I think record rep's made "the circuit" every week. As I recall, Frank Coburn was PD @ KVI-FM, Robin Mitchell was KYYX, and Steve West/Tracy Mitchell at KJR, Alan Mason/Rob Conrad at KING (depending on the specific point in time).