I didn't notice that until you mentioned it.
I'll go with Escondido is half an hour behind San Diego.
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How was We Built This City considered "bad?"
- Thread starter tall_guy1
- Start date
I didn't notice that until you mentioned it.
I'll go with Escondido is half an hour behind San Diego.
San Diego wasn't really a major in those days---almost on the bubble between medium and large, probably #30-35.
And a cold segue wasn't that unusual, either. If I recall, KFMB did one an hour until '76, when Scott Burton came in as PD from KDS in St. Louis and made the format more rigid.
That should be KSD, St. Louis.
Example: WCAU-FM Philadelphia used localized patter, with a reference to the Atlantic City Expressway.
WBSB ("Baltimore's Best - B104 Means Music"), otoh, erased all traces of DJ patter, employing instead a customized B104 jingle laid over the intro.
I always liked "We Built...", even with its nonsense lyrics.
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You forgot t**s!
As I said in an earlier post, even with a complaint, that’s not likely to result in FCC action.
And even the list of dirty words from the Carlin bit has not been segregated into acceptable and not acceptable words by the FCC. Simply, running that bit was considered a violation.
Seven dirty words - Wikipedia
Wikipedia says, "In 1978, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, ruled that the FCC's declaratory ruling did not violate either the First or Fifth Amendments, but it limited the scope of its decision to the specific broadcast that caused the declaratory ruling and declined to consider whether the FCC's definition of indecency would survive a First Amendment challenge if applied to the broadcast of other material containing the same or similar words which had been cited in Pacifica's brief (e.g., works of Shakespeare – "pissing conduits", "bawdy hand of the dial on the prick of noon"; the Bible – "he who pisseth against the wall"; the Watergate Tapes). It noted that while the declaratory ruling pertained to the meaning of the term "indecency" as used in a criminal statute (18 USC 1464), since the FCC had not imposed any penalty on Pacifica, the Court did not need to reach the question as to whether the definition was too vague to satisfy the due process requirements of the Fifth Amendment"
So we sit, just short of a half-century later, with no real list of what the FCC thinks a "dirty word" is. I invite them to visit the worlds of hip-hop, rap and reggaetón where they can build the list from seven dirty words to, perhaps, seventy. Or more.
And Newton Minow would have a stroke.
Newton N. Minow - Wikipedia
Oh, he already did. He lived about 97 years, though!
And while we're on San Diego studio photos, here's Shotgun Tom Kelly at KCBQ the year before the first KFMB shot---1975.
The board was apparently custom-built by Bartell engineers. Notice the open design cart decks under the board.
Were the pots on that board color coded to indicate whether they were for cart machines or turntables etc?
I don't know. I would assume so. Four yellow pots for the four cart decks...
What confuses me about that board, and always has, are the buttons and lights on the silver panel above the pots and program/audition switches. I've never seen an explanation as to what those are for and why there are so many.
I think the first board that allowed color coding was the Gates Yard that came out around 1960. There were a variety of colored circular aluminum inserts that fit into the indented top of each knob.
You could even buy an extra set of inserts. For some reason, the studio mike had the red insert and was always at the far left.
I bought my first one in 1964 directly at Gates on Hampshire Street in Quincy from Larry Cervone and then lugged it back 3,000 miles to Quito.
The color coding was so useful that other maker's boards I installed got "paint jobs" to identify the pots.
I wonder if either of those songs were censored more not on the coasts back then or if everyone just played the less cut versions?
"Come On Eileen" (Dexys Midnight Runners) always makes me cringe, since I was a kid when it was brand new. I don't care for "Hot In The City" (Billy Idol) much more. I find that strange because I really enjoy most of the rest of his catalog. Those two are way worse to my ears than any of the '80s Starship hits. I really liked "We Built This City", and thought the custom radio station thing was very cool. But I was already a 12 year old radio nerd, so that feature made me enjoy it even more. I just can't recall which Chicago station did the custom cut- B96, or WLS-FM?
"Walk on the Wild Side"---generally the Top 40 stations played the 45, which didn't have the phrase. The 45 was 3:37, the album version 4:13, so Top 40 loved that. Most album stations I'm aware of played the album version because...
...again...
The phrase "giving head" does not include any of the words that would immediately get you into trouble and the typical album rock listener was unlikely to be offended and complain to the FCC. Many of those stations, at that time, were also playing Pink Floyd's "Money", which has "bulls**t" in the lyrics, and Steely Dan's "Showbiz Kids", which says "f**k".
A couple of the really gutsy ones played The Rolling Stones' "Starf***er" off the "Goats Head Soup" album, which says the title 64 times.
And if you think there are little old ladies listening to radio stations they don't like just so they can narc on them to the FCC for naughty lyrics, there aren't and weren't, even then.
As for "You Oughta Know", I recall "go down" being in the versions played on CHR. The edit for that song took out "do you think of me when you f**k her?"
And...minor point...it was 30 YEARS AGO, so who really cares?
I mostly worked on Gates boards early in my career and then worked at stations with the slide pot boards.
“Hot in the City” also had customized city shout outs at the part where he shouts out New York.
I had that board in the production studio at KSLY in San Luis Obispo, and the RCA in the black and white KFMB photo was the same board we had at KOLO in Reno until 1981, when we replaced it with a 14-channel Pacific Recorders slide-pot board.
I worked with plenty of Gates equipment the first 7 or 8 years of my career, which were also spent within a two hours drive from Quincy, Illinois. The first station I worked for full time bought one of the first MW-1A solid-state transmitters. When it was installed, replacing a Sparta tube transmitter, the station got much colder: the AC wasn’t working against the heat generated by the transmitter any more. (The transmitter was literally just steps from the newsroom.)
We also got a Gates slider-pot board in 1980, but, as I recall, it was made by someone else and just had the Gates branding. It wasn’t as durable as the older Gates boards; the interior construction was kind of cheesy, using the same kinds of pots one might have found in a transistor radio. The station had a “Yard” board but it was already out of service by the time I got there.
The reference to KSD points to another instance of a radio-TV combo where the TV station was successful and the radio station….um, not so much. In KSD’s case, the TV station beat the freeze, enabling it to establish a dominant position for decades; there was no FM; the AM held its own for a couple of decades but ultimately had to contend with the mighty KMOX. in the 1970s, it was adult-contemporary but the desired audience never really materialized. Pulitzer didn’t seem too heartbroken when it dealt the station to Combined Communications, which in turn was sucked up by Gannett. It was unfortunate in a way since KSD was well programmed and had good people, but trends were just working against it.
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Now, I’m curious….how did you get it to Quito? Drive to St. Louis and fly it out from there?