As several posts will show later on (well, above), not a name change. A totally different format.
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It's not just KRTH, and not just Los Angeles.
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
Yeah, but did they play "He's the Greatest Dancer" by Sister Sledge?
"One Night in a Disco on the Outskirts of Frisco, I was cruising with my favorite gang
The place was so boring, with out-of-towners touring, I knew that it wasn't my thing"
Betcha they did.
They did.
Which is why it’s important to read the quote I was replying to:
Clearly he meant “Classic Hits”, as the aim for Oldies hasn’t been 20 years in decades.
Maybe Harry Chapin should have rhymed it with something. But disco wasn’t really a thing in 1972.
Pancho and Cisco?
Crisco?
Pisco?
Okay, you're talking about the target audience, not the description of the music.
Literally the only way it would make sense.
Cats in the Cradle was probably Harry's biggest hit, and even stations that wouldn't play Taxi because of length played Cats when it was in the top 40. But I think Michael's wrong about WABC not playing Taxi. It was their #97 song in 1972, debuting on their 5/02 survey at #16, then after a one week pause it went to #9 on the 5/16 playlist, was #12 on 5/23 and #13 on 5/30, after which it was gone. It just took longer than normal for WABC to add it to the rotation, and it was probably dayparted to evenings, weekends and overnights, except when the day-shift jocks needed a bathroom break. Keep in mind that WABC was the station that broke Richard Harris's 7-and-a-half minute MacArthur Park, so they weren't militant about avoiding longer records. And in 1972, their #2 hit for the year was Don McLean's American Pie, at 8:42, which might also have affected the thinking about having another atypically long song in high rotation.
Rick Sklar told that story in his book. He got an advance of MacArthur Park because the song was on ABC's own record label. He says he avoided it for that reason, and didn't want to be seen as giving an advantage to an inside song. But he added it because he felt it was a great song and would appeal to everybody. He says in the book that he wanted to be the first to play it. No stories about Harry Chapin. I would think they'd give him an advantage, since he was a local boy. The area FM stations played his music regardless of the length.
You're right---thanks for that. So, top ten at WABC and KHJ---and number one at WRKO.
So that brings the big AM top 40s that didn't play "Taxi" down to WLS (WCFL didn't, either) and KFRC.
And, as a reminder of why we're doing this, Mediafrog+ had said:
And I think we've established it was more than that. Some significant airplay and chart numbers for a single that peaked at #24 in Billboard.
When Taxi came out, it hadn't been that long since Sebastian Stone was PD at WOR-FM. (This is firsthand knowledge. Sebastian had invited me up to WOR-FM and we had a chat in his office at 1440 Broadway, around wintertime of 1971. He returned to KFRC a few months later. Maybe it was something I said?)
Sebastian might have already been familiar with Harry Chapin and/or his band from NYC or Long Island venues, and possibly based his add/no-go decision on something more personal than the other PDs and MDs were working with. But that's just speculation.
I'm guessing you're not referring to the instrumental "Angela". I don't know how long that one was but it seemed long. WAVO (standards) played it. That station also played "Sing, Sing, Sing" by Benny Goodman (Chips Ahoy commercial), which I know was one that would give a DJ a chance to use the facilities if there was a DJ.
Some stations changed the name of the format from oldies to classic hits but when the style of the music has changed so completely, there are clearly two different formats now.
Billboard's January 29, 1972 issue reports on Sebastian going back to KFRC, replacing Paul Drew, who thought he was going to flip RKO's WGMS, Washington D.C. to Top 40.
WOR-FM became WXLO on October 23, 1972. Its year-end list shows "Taxi" at #67.
The more I look over surveys and consider the landscape at the time, Sebastian was only two or three months into the gig as PD at KFRC and up against Julian Breen, who was programming a very tight list at KYA (and wasn't playing "Taxi") either. My guess is Sebastian chose to stay tight and avoid playing one downer as long as two hits that KYA might play in the same six minutes.
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No, that was Bob James, and it was the theme to the TV sitcom "Taxi":
This is Harry Chapin's "Taxi". No relation and six and a half years before the TV show:
Soft AC seems to be on an island by itself in that regard. A lot of songs on that format seem to have the thene of sorrow and regret (I have for example heard A Long December by Counting Crows on Soft AC and no other format.)
Looking at it from the record label side, Elektra had a lot on the line with Harry Chapin at this time. There had been a bidding war for Chapin between Clive Davis at Columbia and Jac Holzman at Elektra. Holzman won and signed Chapin to a multi-million dollar contract. The pressure was on for the promo department to deliver hits. This was a staff that had scored a string of hits for The Doors. But Jim Morrison had died, so they needed a hit from someone else. They launched Taxi with an appearance on the Tonight Show, hoping that some big adds would follow. They managed to get a few in Boston and the northeast, which was Chapin's main territory. Not so much elsewhere. The song was a disappointment, and the follow-ups did even worse. It wasn't until Cats In The Cradle that Chapin delivered on expectations.
I'm sure there was a lot of pressure on the PDs in San Francisco to add the song, given that the city is mentioned in the first line. Those kinds of things are used by label promo guys to convince PDs to add a song. There have been lots of stories of how artists have changed the city names in their songs to get a radio add. So it's surprising that neither Top 40 in SF responded. But my bet is that Tom Donohue played it at KSAN.
That all sounds about right, and my mental timeline might not be perfect. (Studying engineering does leave a bit of brain damage.) I do recall hearing their promos about the call letter switch in the days leading up to it. ("Coming to 98-point-7 on Monday morning, a whole new radio station!") But that would be a year-or-so in the future, and Taxi charted a half year before then.
Well, there are some timeline discrepancies here---first and biggest that Harry's appearance on The Tonight Show was July 6, 1972.
By that point, the record was over. "Taxi" peaked on the Hot 100 in the first week of June and had already dropped off the chart. The album was in its 17th week and on its way down.
It hit #1 at WRKO in Boston on April 11th. KHJ was late to the party, adding it May 16th. As Weiserguy notes, it peaked at #9 at WABC that same week.
In pulling this information together, I see I missed a KYA chart---they did play it for one week (May 17).
So, as we've said in prior posts, it got airplay in a lot of markets, including most of the majors and it was top ten in a lot of them and number one in some, but the single peaked at #24 nationally and the album at #60.
Right. But it did well enough on the WOR-FM chart that it made the WXLO year-end (which had to be based on the OR-FM lists).
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