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CKLW and WJR Radio

KyDXIn said:
Does anyone have any Gary Burbank stories from his time at CKLW? I'm lucky enough to have heard him at his first station WAKY, and listened to him at WHAS where many of his characters were developed. When he left WAKY, Gary gets shot during his last hour on WAKY in 1973 http://www.79waky.com/airchecksgaryburbank.htm
Click to expand...

Not a first-hand story. In 1974 when I was doing overnights in Toledo, I stayed up one morning (that is, instead of hitting the sack or hitting a bar) and airchecked Burbank on The Big 8--the Old Fashioned Way, starting & stopping the cassette recorder on my pre-boom-box portable. Just a completely random morning, selected only because I wasn't tired enough to conk out after six hours on-air or energetic enough to fight off the hookers hanging at the kind of bars open in The Glass City at 6 AM...

Sent the unedited (well, manually edited via start/stop) aircheck off to another jock buddy in a distant market, and forgot all about it. About a year ago, out of the blue, I got an email from that same guy, who had found me via Googling my name + "radio" and I invited him to stop by for a visit. And, lo and behold, he turns up with this same 1974 Gary Burbank CKLW aircheck. And it turns out to be terrific. Very, very funny... fast, dynamic... and competely original. But not just a precursor to WLW Days. Rather, uniquely The Big 8. A great jock. A great radio station.

Yeah, Burbank was great on The Big 8. Even 35 years later!
 
Didn't overnights on CK play a lot more slow-jam type less known Motown tunes & R&B sounds as opposed to regular dayparts playing all-hits?
Tunes I remember listening to on my transistor radio as a kid with my earphone in bed(when I was supposed to be asleep)...
lots of Stylistics
I Wanna Get Next To You-Rose Royce
Float On-Floaters
Sideshow-Blue Magic
Show & Tell-Al Wilson
Me & Mrs. Jones-Billy Paul
lots of Barry White
 
I don't remember CKLW doing slow jams in the overnight hours, but having said that, CKLW was often heavily dayparted. Middays could get downright MORish at times, and I knew, even years before I ever heard the term "dayparting", that if I was home sick from school, the music wasn't going to be quite as good. Sunday mornings, after "Canada Now", seemed to have a lot of Mary Wells, you;d hear "Hello Stranger" by Barbara lewis and other early 60s soul. In the 80s, Charlie OBrien hosted an alternative show.
 
Now tuning to WJR the mystery is still out there about their top of the hour "gong". It used to be there at the top of every hour making me think it fired something, but since it pops on overtop news & spotbreaks sometimes when they're running late that would rule that out. I guess it's just a National Standard Time sounder. I still hear it sometimes, so either 1. the engineers hooked up the aincent module to their modern computer system or 2. whoever happens to be board-op-ing likes it & recorded it as a sound effect & throws it in for show. Seems to me it pops up more on Sunday mornings & once in a while when Anna's running the Ultra Conservative Machine, er, the Frank Beckmann Show. I hear it's a big secret with the engineers what creates the sound.
 
You gotta give CKLW credit for dipping into the edges of the pop format back then, too -- probably more during the daytime, since I recall a few surprises on the school bus ride every day back home to Point Place. Does anybody remember hearing Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" on CKLW? It crossed over from the country charts onto the Top-100, but CKLW processed out most of the steel guitar sound in the chorus to de-country-fy it a bit (sing it Tammy: "Stand by your may-un. .. (insert supressed steel guitar hook here)...)

I think maybe WOHO in Toledo did likewise with that one, no doubt inspired by how CKLW did it to avoid sounding "too country."

God, I miss hearing a good weepy Tammy Wynette song now and then. I loved being able to dip into her albums on the air when I started out at WMGS in Bowling Green OH in 1974. Back when "Country and Western" was a gen-you-ine subculture.
 
CK didn't slack on crossover country. Charlie Rich (TMBGITW), Behind Closed Doors, Billy Swan, Anne Murray, B.J Thomas, Freddie Fender, Kenny Rogers, ...in fact, CKLW is where I heard the parody "You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me Loose Wheel".
 
Okay you guys, you've pushed all my nostalgia buttons and now I can't get all the "More music, CKLW" jingle sweepers that played at all different tempos out of my head. That and "W-K-N-R, Keener 13". I think that golden age of AM is what kept a lot of us interested in radio careers. Everybody was hoping to create the next legend. Sadly, legends are seldom reproducable.
 
I haven't checked out Radio-Info in quite some time and clicked on the "Show new replies" link to find you folks have been busy.

If you'd like a copy of the CKLW jingle packge, I refer you to one of the very first things I did in computer audio, to digitize the CKLW jingles from a metal cassette tape done as a second generation copy from the CKLW masters at the station. In turn, I worked with Jack Deller to get them posted on the CKLW Tribute website when everyone on the face of the earth was on dialup except the dept of defence .. LOL.

I still enjoy digging out the jingles and time clock and playing some of the songs from the late 1969 or early 1970 copies of "Big 30" and mix them together after a few brewski's and feel nostalgic.

It was quite a station, and I'm still "Super-Proud" to have been a very small part of the great sound of "The Big 8!" Here's the link to the jingles we put up on the net over 10 years ago. http://www.thebig8.net/sounds.html

Regards to all,
Lee Smith
 
Got most of them on my cellphone. My text sounder is the 20-20 news open, and myh alarm is the CKLW Top of the Hour Stager with the late Bill Drake saying "and the hits just keep on coming!".
 
CKLW: What a great station! I lived in the Cleveland, Ohio market back in "the day" (1970s) and I remember that CKLW was so strong, listener wise, that they even had a few commercials for businesses in Cleveland! Anybody else remember these? Also, as a teenager, I always listened to the Top 30 countdown show which I think started at 6pm on maybe a Monday evening. One of my favorite kinda-sex stories is an early 1970s CKLW story. As a listener I got to know when to expect a few things. At 9:55 am on most weekdays, they would always play one of their "extras", songs that were not in the Top 30, and it would be the same one. I later came to understand that these almost always had some Canadian content to them for legal reasons. Anyway, for a few weeks one of my favorite songs they played was one of these extras. It was "Coco" by The Sweet released on Bell records in the U.S., three years before their break-out hit of "Little Willy".
I knew that it would come on between 9:55 and 10:00am. I was in home-room in high school at the time, and we were inbetween classes. So I used to hide my tiny transistor radio under my coat, lay my head on the coat to hear it and look at the legs of this pretty girl who sat next to me while listening to "Coco" by The Sweet. The song was not a love song, however. It was about a native dancer on an island and had a cool steel drum lead instrumental bridge in mid song.

Other great "extras" of the era included a cover of the George Harrison tune "Awaiting On You All" by a group called (I think) Silverhorse. Then there was one that actually made the Top 30 for a bit, "For Better or Worse" by The Bells (of "Stay Awhile" fame). I think CKLW may have also played "Fly Little White Dove Fly" by The Bells which was the single that preceded "Stay Awhile". CKLW was also the only station to play "Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On" by Motown artist Edwin Starr. That song is used on one of the Edwin Starr websites. It wasn't a big hit, but packs a wallop. I remember the CKLW countdown show DJ saying, "Here's a surprise...at #25 Edwin Starr is back with..."

Also, any memory of a DJ who was leaving CKLW, but on his last show he was crowing about going to a "progressive Rock" station and happy he wouldn't have to play anymore Donny Osmond, and the like. I can't remember who that was, but it was in the early 1970s.

The Big 8 was a Big One to me.
 
I remember CKLW running spots for Hills Dept. Stores in Sandusky(Ohio) & Toledo & in the summer they ran lots of ads for Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, where MANY a Michigander (still) go for fun.
Another jingle that stands out was for a tanning product called(sp) "Bandesole'", with the mellow jingle "Ban-de-so-lay for the cen-tral bayyy tannnn". :D
 
Greetings to all - my first post here on the Motor City board. I'm Bob Savage, alumnus of CKLW, 1973.

Indeed there was dayparting of the playlist on The Big 8, as there was on most big Top 40 stations of the era. But there was a form of defacto dayparting on CKLW owing to the fact that the CanCon carriage rules -mandating 30% Canadian music - were not in effect during the overnight hours. From 6am to 12M, generally you had to play 5 canadian songs in a typical 14-song hour.

Offsetting this however was the fact that the CRTC had saddled CKLW with an absurdly large local news commitment, so overnights 20/20 news would be about 11 minutes per hour. Fortunately the station was resourceful enough to transform news from being a tuneout to a programming feature people couldn't resist! The outrageousness of CKLW 20/20 news is deservedly the stuff of legend.

The CKLW jingles were sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, $1000 per cut in the day, and very pricey at 1970 dollar values. They were 'logos' in Big 8 parlance (ballad logo, sweep logo, etc.) A little-known piece of CKLW trivia: CE Ed Buterbaugh actually rigged an electromechanical doorbell which played the CKLW logo when somebody pressed the after-hours button at the back door! It played over the house monitors all over the station on Ouellette Avenue.
 
I remember listening to CKLW in Erie, Pennsylvania. The signal wasn't too great during the day, but at night, it was loud and clear. This was during the early 70s. Boy I loved that channel.
 
I remember CKLW from the sixties while living in Pittsburgh. It was better than KQV or KDKA cause they both had at least two hours a day without music( KQV 2 and KDKA 4) and KDKA was seriously dayparted.
 
Here's one. I was a freshman in college in September, 1972. I worked at the college radio station (WBWC 88.3 FM at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio-still there and going strong). In October, myself and 3 other guys hopped into one of the guys car and set out for the FCC regional office in Detroit to take the 3rd class FCC (with Broadcast Endorsement) tests. We started out at about 3:00am. Between 4:00am and 5:00am CKLW played the long LP version of "Light My Fire" by the Doors. It was really cool to be speeding down the turnpike, with darkness all around, listening to that song. Nobody in the car said a word while that song blasted out of the cars speakers thanks to "The Big 8".
 
Savage said:
Greetings to all - my first post here on the Motor City board. I'm Bob Savage, alumnus of CKLW, 1973.

Indeed there was dayparting of the playlist on The Big 8, as there was on most big Top 40 stations of the era. But there was a form of defacto dayparting on CKLW owing to the fact that the CanCon carriage rules -mandating 30% Canadian music - were not in effect during the overnight hours. From 6am to 12M, generally you had to play 5 canadian songs in a typical 14-song hour.

Offsetting this however was the fact that the CRTC had saddled CKLW with an absurdly large local news commitment, so overnights 20/20 news would be about 11 minutes per hour. Fortunately the station was resourceful enough to transform news from being a tuneout to a programming feature people couldn't resist! The outrageousness of CKLW 20/20 news is deservedly the stuff of legend.

The CKLW jingles were sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, $1000 per cut in the day, and very pricey at 1970 dollar values. They were 'logos' in Big 8 parlance (ballad logo, sweep logo, etc.) A little-known piece of CKLW trivia: CE Ed Buterbaugh actually rigged an electromechanical doorbell which played the CKLW logo when somebody pressed the after-hours button at the back door! It played over the house monitors all over the station on Ouellette Avenue.
Click to expand...
Thanks Bob...also, do you remember when they started transferring their vinyl onto cart...and one more question...when they ran those Top 500 countdowns, were there number jingles(Johnny Mann Singers or sonovox) between songs, and (like most do today)...did they "shut down" the countdown after a certain hour or did it just roll on all weekend? Seems to me I remember my older sister with our dad's G.E mono cassette recorder up half the night with the old condenser mic on it's little plastic stand with it to the radio, recording the Top 500. Wish I knew if those tapes were still floating around somewhere!
 
I'm not Bob but I do remember the Big 30 preview running on Tuesday nights with Tom Shannon (I don't know that it ran on-air much past 1970 if that long..I'm sure can-con may have made that difficult, though CKLW still ran "goldens" during the countdown). I'm thinking the top 300s, 500s, whatever ran continuously except for the Sunday morning Public Affairs block. I remember hearing a weekend-long "History of Rock and Roll" playback, and they took Sunday morning and just segued Canadian music. I heard it for 45 mion, don't know how long they actually did it. I don't remember Casem style number jingles at all.
 
Well, I for one really appreciate the CKLW love. A CKLW fan for life. I remember the 1970s on CKLW and the many songs recalled in this thread. My favorite CanCon was "Peace In The Family" by the Johnson Family. I do remember "Funky Music..." by Edwin Starr and bought that record. I first heard CK in 1968 when I would hear "People Got To Be Free" by the Rascals, "Don't Give Up" (Bobby Martin?) and "The House That Jack Built" by Aretha Franklin over and over and loved it! "Harper Valley PTA" was another one during that time, which I believe was in August 1968. I was around 7 or 8 and on a family trip to Cedar Point. Years later in 1975 we returned and then it was "Jive Talkin'", "Fame" and "Get Down Tonight", all sounding ten times bigger than my records. Interestingly, "Fame" on CKLW was the album version. The single version played on most stations didn't have the "be my babe-won't you please" section, so that song was a nice experience for CKLW listeners. They knew when it was appropriate to give you a little more of a good song. I remember their special edit of "Got To Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye, which completely sidelined the infamously debatable "you can (bump?) me if you want to, baby". CKLW flipped to a section of "Got To Give It Up, Part II" for that part then flipped back to close with the last minutes of "Part I". A brilliant edit. The 20/20 News...man! It was great! Brother Bill Gable, Charlie O'Brien, so many more great names. They didn't talk long at all. I only remember one line of DJ dialogue and it was O'Brien commenting on "Fame". He said, "C-K-L-W! Anyway you look at it, it's a hit. "Fame by David Bowie". Then he went into a "Farmer Jack's" commercial. They were all short like that. I remember the temperature given in Farenheit and Celsius. That was interesting entertainment in itself. Good rock and roll with Bob Seger and soul stuff you didn't even hear on the soul stations sometimes. I remember a lot of Funkadelic, in particular "I Wanna Know If It's Good To You" or similar title. The R&B was always interesting and universal sounding. Just a refreshing sound, followed by a sure fire pop hit, then a rocker, then an interesting CanCon. You'd never know they were sidelined by that law. I just thought they were trying be interesting. Any station that started with a "C" I expected to be interesting!
 
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