He's lost so much weight he's thinking of changing his name to Jelly Bean.
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Anyone listening to the yacht rock weekend on klos
- Thread starter hotpatrick2004
- Start date
Listened to Yacht Rock for a bit online. My blood pressure went down and I got very sleepy. Also seems to me they're playing some album cuts of songs. Definitely not the shorter 45s I remember from years gone by. Overall I give it it two thumbs up and one sideways toe. Some songs from years gone by I wouldn't classify as "Yacht Rock" but guess they fit that criteria now. Go back 40+ years and it would have the moniker "Mellow Rock", "Lite Rock", "Soft Rock" or some other similar type name.
I read through all the comments pertaining to the Yacht Rock, and the positive comments far outweighed the negative. There are a lot more comments regarding a problem with a Disneyland contest than Yacht Rock, if that tells you anything.Interesting mix of comments from listeners;
Of course not.
One more time: What is now called "Yacht Rock" has its roots in AOR airplay, and crossed over to Adult Contemporary and then to Top 40.
Even on an AM Adult Contemporary in Reno, if I played the 45 edit of something, I'd get complaint calls. We ended up just defaulting to the album versions pretty quickly unless they were insanely long (George Benson's "On Broadway", for example). But the key word was "insanely", so 6:39 for Al Stewart's "Time Passages" would make the cut.
We had a couple of long-term jocks there---guys who'd been there back to the MOR days, and I just told them that if they could deal with 7:20 for Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park", they could deal with this.
Yacht rock wouldn't be noticeable on KOST? Oh please. KOST 103.5 no longer plays yacht rock classics that made it great (and chill) up to 2010, the time when 102.7 KIIS FM started treating KOST as a dumpster for its overplayed, teenybopper hits. A single Boz Scaggs or Christopher Cross song would be a nice, long-needed refresh for KOST in 2025, not Sabrina Carpenter and Benson Boone being shoehorned to replace Phil Collins and Hall & Oates.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I think you missed my point.
Given KOST's heritage, this stunt would have not been as much of the proverbial "fish out of water" there as it was on KLOS.
AC stations in general sound much different than they did 30 or 40 years ago.
Yeah, that's not the difference between the "long version" and the "short version" of "Time Passages".
Just in case anyone doesn't realize, all the artist ever records is the "long version." The "short version" is created by the record company (or sometimes, by the artist or group's producer---but the label isn't shy about doing it) by editing out parts of the original work in order to shorten it to make it more attractive for some formats of radio stations (usually Top 40).
For example, the 45 begins 15 seconds into the complete recording, shortening the instrumental lead-in to the vocal.
There's another cut right after the first chorus, where the brief sax solo is cut, shortening the instrumental between the first chorus and the second verse from 16 seconds to 8.
And finally, the original is faded out, and two minutes of instrumental including a very nice sax solo, is lost completely.
This is the 45:
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I caught your original point just fine; yacht rock would (and should) thematically fit on KOST much more than KLOS, given the former's heritage.
However, concerning your statement that AC radio sounds much different today, let's not kid ourselves into thinking KOST's current playlist still reflects its original soft rock roots at large. iHeart's programming tactics and CHR's increasing influence on AC over the years have stripped away nearly all of the music that made KOST's sound "noticeable" in the first place.
So yeah, yacht rock wouldn't be a "fish out of water" if KOST still had water.
Nowadays, KOST sounds more like a dwindling selection of Phil Collins' classics struggling to survive in a sea polluted with the high-energy, auto-tuned likes of Sabrina Carpenter and The Weeknd.
KLOS may have done it as a stunt, but at least they delivered the vibe KOST abandoned under KIIS FM's influence.
Here's the difference (am I really gonna say this again?):
"Yacht Rock" is (mostly) music that crossed over from AOR. A lot of it (by no means all) was played on KLOS at the time.
By the time KOST morphed into AC, "Yacht Rock" was over. They may have played some of it as gold, but it was never their music at its peak.
KOST is also not a radio station that targets or attracts an audience old enough to remember "Yacht Rock" when new (before it had the name).
KLOS does.
The only Los Angeles station that would have more of a claim on a "Yacht Rock" heritage would be the old KNX-FM, but it's been gone since 1983 (1989 if you count its brief revival in '86).
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I honestly think it’s weird seeing people complain about a classic rock station playing classic rock lol
It was obviously a fun little experiment for Labor Day weekend. KLOS listeners can survive not hearing the same 2 Metallica and Journey songs for a couple days. There’s a lot to classic rock
It was obviously a fun little experiment for Labor Day weekend. KLOS listeners can survive not hearing the same 2 Metallica and Journey songs for a couple days. There’s a lot to classic rock
You realize that the iHeart “Wall of Women” is the most successful combo in the market and has very high billing? The three target an overlapping spectrum of women, and that is what buyers most often want.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
You know, Mike, it's funny that you mention that now.
I downloaded the daily logs for KLOS for these four days and just reading the song list, I started thinking how similar it was to KNX-FM. (And the revival failed for a couple of reasons ... not the least of which was an inability to get the old listeners back after three years.)
The original KNX-FM peaked in ‘76. By ‘81, the same time “yacht rock” was fading, they tried to rock a bit harder, and lost what they had left.
They were able to transition from the whole early 70s Laurel Canyon thing into the late 70s slickness, but they had nowhere to go after that.
If there was a successor to KNX-FM, it was years later with the first couple of years of “The Wave”, mixing KNX-FM artists with the smooth jazz.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
No lie there, Mike.
I remember thinking that the end was near when they tried rebranding as "Quality Rock 93-1" in 1988. And that was only a couple of years after the rebirth.
But I still remember -- quite vividly -- listening to the transition back from KKHR. Pat Garrett was the last jock on the air, and played what I took as wishful thinking as their last song: "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds. Then came a surprise ... back when the Hitradio format was launched, there was no such thing as instant call letter changes, so for the first week or two, the calls were unchanged. And to make matters worse, for the first several days Dave Hall was still doing mornings with his best imitation of a "boss jock". And someone found an aircheck of him, and the 10:00 legal after the Simple Minds song was Dave screaming "Hitradio 93! KNX-FM! Los Angeles!", followed by Michael Sheehy saying "hey Dave ... mellow out, will ya?"
Then came a dig at the suits, which I later found out was the result of focus groups CBS had commissioned as they realized KKHR was never going to dethrone KIIS-FM. Apparently (as it was told to me) practically every focus group had at least one person who asked "whatever happened to KNX-FM?"
So the very first song played was "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell, with the lyric "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" Then one of the original super-long jingles, and the perfect second song, Emerson Lake and Palmer's "From The Beginning".
I still wonder what would have happened if KNX-FM hadn't been ripped off the air in the first place. My best guess is that it would have evolved into one of the early AAA stations. (Which would have meant no "Channel 103.1" in 1998.)
Of course, we all know what ultimately happened to Dave Hall, right?
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That's a great observation. One of the yacht rock songs was Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione. That song opened the door for what became smooth jazz.
I personall
u dislike 70susic but al Stewart is one of the few artists I enjoy
I've waded through 13 pages of comments here and while I'm a very geriatric millennial, I wasn't consciously listening to the radio when any of this was new. Thus I'm less interested in which formats played this music originally, versus how a certain sound, from a certain time period has been aggregated in 2025 into something called "yacht rock."
While many of the songs I heard I was familiar with and still hear semi-regularly, there were quite a few songs that get little to no radio play that I hadn't heard in years. It's honestly been at least 20 years since I've heard Al Stewart's Year of the Cat, for example.
I had a blast listening to KLOS all weekend. When you hear these songs we are now grouping together as "yacht rock" one after another after another (as opposed to interspersed with harder classic rock or even 80s pop), you're able to recognize the similarities in sound.
I used to look forward to the long holiday theme weekends to hearing some deeper tracks on the radio again. Whether it was a countdown weekend, or 80s rock classics, or whatever, they were always fun.
This is the first time in, I don't know, a decade at least that a theme weekend caught my attention and kept it. Great job to KLOS's crew.
While many of the songs I heard I was familiar with and still hear semi-regularly, there were quite a few songs that get little to no radio play that I hadn't heard in years. It's honestly been at least 20 years since I've heard Al Stewart's Year of the Cat, for example.
I had a blast listening to KLOS all weekend. When you hear these songs we are now grouping together as "yacht rock" one after another after another (as opposed to interspersed with harder classic rock or even 80s pop), you're able to recognize the similarities in sound.
I used to look forward to the long holiday theme weekends to hearing some deeper tracks on the radio again. Whether it was a countdown weekend, or 80s rock classics, or whatever, they were always fun.
This is the first time in, I don't know, a decade at least that a theme weekend caught my attention and kept it. Great job to KLOS's crew.
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There's no world in which that happens.
I had thought KNX-FM's best book ever was a 3.8 in fall of '76.
I was wrong. It was actually a 4.3 in winter of '81 (following a 4.0 in the fall of '79). Tied (with KJOI) for fourth overall, behind KABC, KBIG and KFWB, making it the #1 contemporary music station.
After that, the air left the balloon fast.
1981: 4.3-2.8-3.0-2.6
1982: 3.2-2.2-1.6-2.5
1983: 1.4-1.2-1.4
That's the summer book that wouldn't have been out when CBS announced the change---so the 1.2 in the spring was the deciding book. 32nd overall...losing to KNOB, KACE, KKGO and KLVE by 0.1.
4.3 to 1.2 in nine books. Tied for fourth to 32nd in the same timespan.
CBS had no choice but to pull the plug. There was no lane for this format. It was KROQ (4.4), KLOS (4.1) and KMET (3.2)'s world.
CBS's mistake was in bringing it back. "Whatever happened to KNX-FM?" is the same thing as when any formerly beloved station changes format. "It can't! It's number one!" No, it's number 32. "When did that happen?" When did you stop listening?
Anyone who asked "whatever happened to KNX-FM" wasn't still listening when Hitradio 93 took its place. If they had been, they'd remember.
That would have been counter to the CBS radio group-think at the time. Remember this is the company that replaced KNX with Hot Hits in a group deal with Mike Joseph. That was what they were looking for. A single national solution for all their FMs. They later did the same thing with Jack on that very frequency.