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Cousin Brucie Returns To 77WABC To Host Saturday Night Rock & Roll Party

Correction....

Kelly A said:
This.. Anyone who cares about Cousin Brucie, has probably already been listening to him (poorly voice-tracked) on SXM 60's on 6. Even though I applaud the station taking a risk and catering to the older demo, I don't see the show moving the needle to new listeners or advertisers that will justify the expense or effort.
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Brucie's Wednesday night and Saturday night Sirius shows were always LIVE - the only tracked show he had was on Sundays - it was usually a "Best Of Brucie" kind of thing....
 
At ALMOST 85....

TheBigA said:
Unfortunately at 85, Brucie isn't as much of a screamer any more.
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At ALMOST 85 (he turns 85 in October), Brucie doesn't have to be a screamer! He can do the same thing that he's been doing successfully for over 6 decades, and people will STILL be listening - PERIOD!
 
radioman148 said:
Correct at ZBM. After that he was at WINS then WINZ in Miami for about a year then WABC.
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Bruce wrote a book back in '87 called "Cousin Brucie! My Life in Rock 'n Roll Radio." In it, he recalls his time in Miami radio. The bottom line is it wasn't to his liking and from a career standpoint, he didn't believe he would reach his true potential. "I knew early on that I didn't belong in Miami, but when that first Christmas came, I knew I wouldn't survive another."

Bruce took a line from a Late, Late show movie that his wife was cracking up and they needed to move back to NYC. WINZ wound up releasing him at the end of 1960. The end of rest as they say is history but it shows just how one decision could forever change your life.

One of Bruce's competitors was a guy named Rick Shaw. Rick wound up having an incredibly successful career in South Florida radio for many decades both as an on-air talent and in radio management. Bruce may have had a successful career in Florida. Who knows? Perhaps instead of buying radio stations, he would bought a string of hotels and went into the hospitality business.

So Bruce was on to WABC in 1961, a station that was not performing well to get a lousy one hour shift at 11 PM weekdays. He took a chance. He wound up being at the right place at the right time. With WABC's 50,000 watt clear-channel signal and night radio waves, he became known in a lot of the country and parts of the world.

Making the decision to leave Miami and landing on WABC was no doubt life changing for him and his many fans.
 
Kemosabe said:
Do you recall when WABC switched from records to carts?
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The video you posted shows the engineer playing She Loves You from a cart, and I'm guessing that's mid-1964. Sklar talks about using carts in his book, but I don't see a date for when they began. Carts were available to radio starting in the late 50s, so it could have been 1962. I haven't seen any WABC studio pictures earlier than 1963.
 
John FL said:


So Bruce was on to WABC in 1961, a station that was not performing well to get a lousy one hour shift at 11 PM weekdays. He took a chance. He wound up being at the right place at the right time. With WABC's 50,000 watt clear-channel signal and night radio waves, he became known in a lot of the country and parts of the world.

Making the decision to leave Miami and landing on WABC was no doubt life changing for him and his many fans.
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I did not know that Bruce originally did a one hour shift on WABC. When I first heard him in 1962 he was doing a two hour shift after Scott Muni.
 
radioman148 said:
I did not know that Bruce originally did a one hour shift on WABC. When I first heard him in 1962 he was doing a two hour shift after Scott Muni.
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I stand corrected. Somewhere I had read (or perhaps thought I did) Bruce initially had a one hour shift. In Bruce's book he says: "Ten PM to midnight was my corner of the world...I was determined to make something of the hours that were mine." Obviously Bruce did. So, he gave up the evening teen slot in Miami for two hours in late evenings in the biggest market in the country. For some of you, this may prove interesting. It's WABC's jock schedule during their music days.

https://musicradio77.com/sked6065.html

Despite Bruce's not so great initial slot, I believe he gained popularity from his Saturday night 7 PM show and eventually he hosted shows at Palisades Amusement Park. That exposure and Bruce's showmanship couldn't hurt. It's where I first learned of Cousin Brucie.

Bruce will probably always be grateful for the song "Hello Dolly!" by Louis Armstrong. Despite Beatlmania of 1964, that song became the #1 song of the year on WABC and it was played virtually every hour for many weeks. The song was on the "survey" for many months as well. For Scott Muni, it was too much. He had the teen slot before Bruce and wanted that song off his show. He and Rick Sklar bucked heads. Muni was gone and Bruce was rewarded with the coveted teen slot that he owned for a good decade.
 
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radioman148 said:
I'm not sure when WABC switched to carts, but Dick Biondi has stated that WLS was using them in 1960.
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I asked on another board, and (while not WABC) the 1959-1960 period was confirmed as when nearly every major station that had not pioneered finally switched to carts. At some it was initially for spots only, but others switched for songs, too.

The response I got was "1959" marked the installation at most major stations.

My research revealed,

" Spotmaster was, in the earliest times, the dominant brand. The brand was developed by, IIRC, an engineer from WWDC in Washington who took a Viking Series 36 deck and made a broadcast machine using cue tones to stop at the beginning again. The Viking deck was intended to run in-store continuous messages or background music, or for other messaging or "experimental" purposes.

Ross Beville from WWDC developed his machine with the Viking, while Bailey and Jenkins did their version at ATC at WJBC in Illinois. They each realized the existence of the other at the '59 NAB convention. ATC's were direct drive and self-engaged with a big solenoid with a shaft, while the Spotmasters used the lever to bring up the roller to the capstan in near-engagement and a solenoid pulled the final fraction of an inch.

So '59 was the more or less official NAB introduction.

Viking made the Fidelipac tape cartridges, in 3 sizes.

A similar device, the McKenzie "repeater" debuted in 1955, and did not get into many stations. I did, however, find a home in Disneyland doing special effects in the new amusement park! It had open tape transports in an endless loop, but the tapes were not easily interchangeable.
 
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radioman148 said:
I'm not sure when WABC switched to carts, but Dick Biondi has stated that WLS was using them in 1960.
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In Chicago, the strange union system had "record spinners" who did nothing else but what the name suggests. When carts came, at each station one "spinner" recorded all the music to carts, and the rest were fired. So Chicago apparently rushed to adopt cart machines at many stations.
 
TheBigA said:
They also used them when they built Disney World in Florida.
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Not those McKenzie devices. They were discontinued as soon as it became obvious that cartridge tapes in the Fidelipac format would become the standard.

The McKenzie had the disadvantage that the tape was "in the open" and exposed. You had to record on a reel to reel, and then transfer to the device after marking with a magnetic substance the start of the audio.

https://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/carts.htm

And another website has a history of cart machines:

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archi...acturers/SBE-1959-History-of-Cart-Machine.pdf
 
DavidEduardo said:
In Chicago, the strange union system had "record spinners" who did nothing else but what the name suggests. When carts came, at each station one "spinner" recorded all the music to carts, and the rest were fired. So Chicago apparently rushed to adopt cart machines at many stations.
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That would explain why Chicago went to carts as quickly as possible.
 
DavidEduardo said:
In Chicago, the strange union system had "record spinners" who did nothing else but what the name suggests. When carts came, at each station one "spinner" recorded all the music to carts, and the rest were fired. So Chicago apparently rushed to adopt cart machines at many stations.
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WABC had them too. Dan Ingram often recalled that when he started at WABC in mid-1961 there were *four* unionized employees in the studio: an engineer (NABET), a “platter turner” (AFM), a director (Directors Guild) and the DJ (AFTRA). Throwing a cue which would insure a tight flowing presentation took some doing back then.
 
radioman148 said:
I'm not sure when WABC switched to carts, but Dick Biondi has stated that WLS was using them in 1960.
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In late 1974 I asked that question of an engineer who worked there at the time. Spring 1963 was the answer.

He also mentioned an odd "experiment" in which a control board was built without gain pots and relied on level-averaged carts and overall AGC. It was a disaster leading to DJ's shouting themselves hoarse and causing distortion. They added three geared 'linear" gain pots at the right hand of the engineer. From a now distant memory; one pot for DJ mic, another for carts and a third for net feed. There are a lot of pic's of that board in their pre-1966 studios

BTW: it seems that sometime in the mid-seventies an engineer at WPIX-f tried a similar approach by removing the knobs from their RCA board.

LCG

.
 
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