OK, they had a good signal. Maybe they were Toledo's best top 40 station.
But compared to WJBK, WKNR and WXYZ, they sucked.
I'll attempt to do what David did above, and with some additional observations.
No personality. A vanilla playlist. Just shouting and reverb.
CKLW hardly ran any reverb and I challenge you to find me one jock--aside, perhaps, from nighttime guy Ted Richards--who came even close to "shouting". Drake, Drew, Atkins, O'Brien, Brodie, Diehl, Hennes, Garland, Holiday all HATED the shouting screaming jock. It was a staple of the "personality" radio that was flavoring the airwaves in the mid-late 1960s.
I fail to see how you can allege "no personality" from the likes of Chuck Browning, Steve Hunter, Walt Baby Love, Super Max, Ted Richards, Gary Burbank, and the other Big 8 jocks.
I especially fail to see how you can reconcile your (inaccurate) statement about shouting with no personality. That is an internal inconsistency in your own "vanilla" statement.
Further, on that issue, the playlist is developed according to what listeners want to hear. And CKLW was, by virtue of its signal and its attendant listener base, the go-to spot for new music. It supplanted Keener in that respect--especially when Scott Regan joined the Big 8. CK's playlist reflected DETROIT, not some far off land. Compare a day's playlist of KHJ vs. CKLW vs. WRKO and see what we're talking about.
Drake destroyed top 40 radio, robbing it of spontaneity, excitement, creativity, local flavor and personality.
Oh hardly. That's buying into the cheap anti-Drake talking point that's been industry standard since he started kicking everyone's stubborn asses starting in Fresno and even back to his time in San Francisco. EVERY SINGLE DRAKE STATION was locally operated, locally programmed, locally tested, locally staffed, and locally live. Drake provided a template and guidance, but it was up to the local PDs and staff to implement it.
By the way, the stories of Drake calling up someone on the "batphone" are just that--stories. He listened, true--from his veranda or any other room in Bel Air. But he (or, more likely, Bill Watson, RKO National PD) would contact the station PD and tell him what was wrong. Then, PDs like Drew would make the batphone call.
This spontenaity and creativity argument has been false since it originated. Drake never once said "lose all your personality and just read these damn cards". What the format required of most dayparts was to *contain* the spontenaity and creativity. How spontaneous is something that goes on for a minute or two? The Drake format required extra planning (you really think that Biondi and J. Michael Wilson and the great personality guys just came up with that stuff off the top of their heads? They had crib sheets and pre-produced bits just like the Drake guys. Show prep is show prep, no matter how long your intro lasts) and, more importantly, attention to the clock. It required well-prepared bits, not just something that was slapped together.
20/20 News was clever but it wasn't news.
Tell that to the news directors that came out of there: Dick Smythe, Byron MacGregor, Keith Radford, Joe Donovan, Grant Hudson, and the guys who are STILL in news to this day--including Randall Carlisle, Jon Belmont, and Bob Losure.
Tell that to the news directors who were influenced by it--folks like Ed Coury and Tom Moore.
Did 20/20 News give the who, what, where, when, and how? Yes. Did it use sounders? Did it have reporters? Did it do in-depth reports on topics of interest to its vast audience? Did it do public affairs programming?
Yes.
WXYZ and WKNR hustled for real news.
CKLW did too--and it made it a bit easier to get news when it had folks calling it in too. The decision of
what to air was exactly the same at CK as it was at Keener. The source of the news doesn't affect that news decision-making. Sound is sound, whether Jimmy Goodshoes holds a mike flag or Barbara Housewife calls in with her eyewitness report.
The latter is also more timely--you don't have to wait for Goodshoes to get back to the station to edit and cart.
The memorable personalities were NOT on CK: Mickey Schorr, Ed MacKenzie, Tom Clay, Dick Purtan, Gary Stevens, Dave Prince, Joel Sebastian, Joey Reynolds (among others).
Purtan was on CK too. As was Regan--Keener's most high-profile personality before he jumped over to CKLW. That was a rout, which you inexplicably left off.
To this day, Charlie Van Dyke, Ed Mitchell, Frank Brodie, Steve Hunter, Ted Richards, Super Max, Pat Holiday, and the other Big 8 jocks are as remembered as those you cite.
CK led the way to what radio has become.
Again, hardly. CKLW brought ONE FORM of radio kicking and screaming into a music delivery system. If anything, CKLW and all Drake radio would FAIL in today's culture because Drake DEMANDED no more than 12 minutes of commercials per hour, and no stop-set longer than 70 seconds.
Tell that to a GM or GSM today and see the look on their faces. Even Clear Channel's "Less is More" doesn't come close.
It wasn't the CRTC that destroyed CK. It was RKO-General and Bill Drake.
RKO and Drake were both out of the direction picture in 1971. That doesn't explain CKLW's continued dominance for the next 8 years.
Now, one point of contention with David. He wrote: "CKLW proved that the government can not force listeners to tune in what they did not and do not want." I understand, and am sympathetic to, his point about government interference with radio programming. But that broadside ignores the Canadian programming requirements that were even more onerous than the US ones--even back when the Big 8 started in 1967. Public service was required, as was news, and a percentage devotion to Canadian audiences of that stuff. Cancon was the culmination of continued Canadian government programming.
And even Cancon wasn't the death knell it's been made out to be. The Big 8 survived for years after the Cancon restrictions began in the early 70s. CKLW did prove that government cannot meaningfully require what the market was already accepting itself.
