I see that July date on imdb, but I think that was a summer repeat of a show that originally aired in March. I don't have verification of that, but I have no reason to believe they would schedule a TV appearance when a song was dead.
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It's not just KRTH, and not just Los Angeles.
- Thread starter michael hagerty
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I see that July date on imdb, but I think that was a summer repeat of a show that originally aired in March. I don't have verification of that, but I have no reason to believe they would schedule a TV appearance when a song was dead.
I'm familiar with the song. I was familiar with it from a young age, due to one of my mom's records.
I'd be very curious to hear what stations in those formats are playing it today.
I did a song search and found five stations total in the country, the biggest being 2 spins on WDRV The Drive in Chicago and 3 spins on KOAI The Wow Factor in Phoenix. Four of the five are Classic Hits, one is Classic Rock.
No. Interesting fact about the Tonight Show you have to be a certain age (old like me) to remember:
There were no reruns, except on Saturday nights for a few years.
This is why there were so many guest hosts for Johnny and how they were able to get traction. Because if Johnny was off, the show went on. They did 257 Tonight Show episodes in 1972.
In fact, Harry got lucky---a week and a half earlier, and he'd have appeared when Don Rickles was guest hosting, a week later, it would have been Joey Bishop.
There's an urban legend that the response to Harry was so great that Johnny said he'd be back the next night. That's not true---but Harry was back a month later, and again late in the year.
There are some really good reasons:
#1: Harry had just come off a record that was all over the radio---and had been top ten in New York (where Johnny taped until the end of April) and in Los Angeles (where Johnny taped beginning May 1). Without that, the logical question the bookers and Johnny asked would have been "who?" The other musical guests in July were James Brown, Mac Davis, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Bobby Goldsboro, Pat Boone, Al Martino, Charo, Cass Elliot, Jack Jones, Nancy Wilson, Kenny Rankin and Lola Falana.
#2: Harry's management and Elektra Records was looking toward boosting album sales ("Heads & Tales") and selling the follow-up single "Could You Put Your Light On Please", which had been released just over a week before the Tonight Show appearance. It was an absolute stiff---failing to chart in Billboard and getting very little airplay. Arsa-Las Solanas shows 13 stations on it, the biggest market by far being Denver and the highest chart position it reached on any of those stations was #25.
#3 Harry was about to go on tour, from July 24 through August 20.
I've done some additional research and found out you're right. I found a log of Harry Chapin's itinerary from that time. It shows that July 6th is the first Tonight Show appearance, and as you say he had two subsequent appearances that year. The 'urban legend' you referenced was mentioned in numerous biographies. That doesn't make them right.
In that same log, I found an early April appearance on the Dick Cavett show, and then a return. So perhaps some biographers conflated the two shows. But Cavett was the first national TV appearance. That was timed with the early promotion of the single.
Having said all that, I stand by the rest of my post, that Elektra promotion was under pressure to come up with a hit. They didn't get one for two years. Fifty years later, the song has very limited airplay. About a dozen spins total on 5 stations. The airplay on progressive rock FM stations wasn't charted or documented, but it obviously had some impact on album sales. And they managed to get a Grammy nomination out of it.
Right. If you look at Harry's chart performance, both singles and albums, he had one hit single ("Cat's in the Cradle") and one hit album ("Verities and Balderdash"), driven by that one hit single.
Everything else was a disappointment. Bottom line, and I know a lot of people love the guy---Harry Chapin wasn't commercial. He caught lightning in a bottle with "Cat's in the Cradle" because it touched a nerve in people with parent/kid issues (and the older I get, the more of that I see in life).
"Taxi" was a turntable hit. I promise you, if there were Gavins and Rudmans and Hamiltons available at World Radio History-dot-com for those weeks in 1972 that it was getting Top 40 airplay, you'd see "great phones" a lot.
I was on the air then. People wanted to hear the "weird song about the guy and the girl he knew that he picks up in his cab" (the title couldn't have BEEN any simpler, and still no one knew what it was at the time). But it didn't translate to big sales of the single or the album.
And yet, we remember it. ChannelFlipper brings it up as an aside to TallGuy and PTBoardOp mentioning "Cat's in the Cradle", and (apart from VChimp), everyone here knows exactly what record we're talking about.
I was going to ask the rhetorical question "What other song from 1972---51 years ago---that stiffed at #24 do we remember as well?", but let's just haul out Whitburn instead:
Wilson Pickett-Fire and Water
Joey Heatherton-Gone
Isley Brothers-Pop That Thang
Bobby Vinton-Every Day of My Life
Detroit Emeralds-Baby Let Me Take You (In My Arms)
Chicago-Dialogue (Part I and II)
There's only one that I think has the same level of recognition as "Taxi", and I've saved it for last:
Elton John-Levon
That was actually the bigger of the two singles from that album---"Madman Across The Water" ("Tiny Dancer" stiffed at #41). But Elton was able to move albums off those two songs (and others)---"Madman" peaked at #8 and went double platinum---and Harry couldn't.
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And some people live in remote mountains with an outhouse and a stack of dried leaves. That does not mean that the practice is widely preferred or acceptable.
For all practical purposes, the format is dead and has been for well over thirty years.
You keep bringing up "obscure" stations that are obviously either a hobby of an owner or part of the half of all stations that lose money and stay on the air due to a profitable sister station or, as I just said, they are run as a hobby.
Beautiful Music, as a format, is at least 2/3 instrumental. Some were all instrumental. Most, in the late 60's to mid-80's peak period, did quarter hours of three to four instrumentals and one vocal placed in the middle of the set.
"Beautiful Music" with more than 4 vocals an hour is not "Beautiful Music".
I have a theory about that. By 1970, there were many more options to promote music than Top 40 radio. Not all of them were being quantified or documented to the degree that Top 40 radio was. There were lots of charts following Top 40 airplay. Nobody was looking at progressive rock or even mainstream rock radio until later in the 70s. So we don't have real documented information about what was being played.
Consider that Elton John debuted with a huge pop hit, 'Your Song,' but it only peaked at #7. His first across the board hit was Rocket Man. But the difference in time between the two songs was only two years! In that time, he released four albums. Then he went on a tear. Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water had no hits on them. But they got spins on radio stations that weren't being documented. This is where Harry Chapin also got attention, especially in the northeast.
The other factor was TV appearances. I saw lots of TV appearances in that Harry Chapin tour log. He did Midnight Special, American Bandstand, and Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. He did the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a nationally syndicated live concert radio show that was run on hundreds of FM stations. So when we talk about this period, there's a bit of a documentation black hole, and the music industry didn't know how the music was connecting with people. Until Bob Wilson started Radio & Records. Once he got that rolling, there was more detailed documentation of what ALL of radio was doing with music.
No, an evolutionary process.
As many "oldies stations" started dropping the 60's stuff and moving more deeply into the 80's, the station sales managers and general managers found that they were being thought of as stations for people over 55 and it made for a tough sale. In particular, stations selling to national accounts and out of market agencies met with demographic rejection.
So the more progressive oldies stations simply started calling themselves "classic hits" so that buyers would not think they were still playing Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker.
In other words, they marginalized themselves from the stations that still played a lot of Beach Boys and Motown by simply using a different term in sales presentations. They even got Arbitron to use "classic hits" as a separate format descriptor... but there was never a rule anywhere as to what was "oldies" and what was "classic hits". The main reason for calling the updated format "classic hits"" was for sales, not for the audience.
In fact, lots of classic hits stations kept calling themselves "oldies" on the air well after they moved to that "mostly 80's songs" version of the format. A good example is the station in Philadelphia which only recently... and finally... erased its listener connection with the "oldies" term.
In many markets, there was no listener resistance to the "oldies" term but stations wanted to erase the usage of the word as much as possible for sales reasons as the buying community saw it as a growing negative.
And please, don't come back with daytime directional AMs on some high-on-the-dial frequency of some LPFM in West Trashcan, Somestate, as examples of format definitions. In general, we are talking about actual competitive radio markets with multiple stations and a defined market area. You keep bringing up examples in places like Alpena, Michigan and the like were some 80-year-old won't let go of a station he runs single handed with equipment that even Tesla would call "old".
Format names are intended to make station identities easy to understand for media buyers. That's it. On the air, stations can call their format whatever they want and they often do.
Completely agree.
One other factor—-for some artists, even Top 40 airplay moved albums. This was especially true from the late 60s on. At age 13, my classmates knew that if there was a new Creedence Clearwater Revival single on the radio, the smart move was to buy the album. Ditto Led Zeppelin. And that just grew over time.
And—-although it wasn’t talked about much—-when MOR and into the early/mid 70s AC play moved product, it was almost exclusively albums. The only real exceptions to that were novelty records, which MOR/AC didn’t do a lot of.
So, when a KMPC in Los Angeles played “Tiny Dancer” (and they did), they were more likely to move a copy of the “Madman Across the Water” album than the single.
Let me add one more thing to the previous post about new options in 1970. This was also the era of college radio. The FCC set aside a section of the FM band that commercial broadcasters didn't want, and designated it for NCE: Non Commercial Educational. So colleges around the country started student run radio stations. The first that I know of was WKCR, started by the inventor of FM: Edwin Armstrong in the 1940s. But hundreds followed. By the early 70s, the record labels realized that they needed to direct some promotion money to college radio. So they did. What were college kids doing in the 70s? Getting stoned. So you had Harry Chapin singing a song about driving a cab while getting stoned. That image connected with a ton of college kids. They may not have any money to buy the album. But they knew the song. Billy Joel had a similar song with Captain Jack. Big songs on college radio, but none of it was documented. All we know is that boomers recognize those songs today for some reason.
So all this was going on in the 70s. People talk about all of the media people have today, with the internet, satellite, and everything else. But it was just as complicated in the 70s. It continued to get worse, as we moved from vinyl to CD to file downloads.
The "tip sheets" got into the rock movement even before Abrams created the hit-based version of AOR under the "Superstars" banner. In particular, Kal Rudman and FMQB covered "rock" quite extensively. At the station level, by the early 70's I don't know anyone in a larger market who was looking at Billboard or Cash Box or Record World. We were using Hamilton, FMQB, Gavin and others. In fact, by the mid-70's there were a number of AOR / Rock tip sheets that followed that format and we all used them, not, ugh, Billboard.
In late '72 (IIRC) Birmingham's Adult AC WERC and its sister rock-leaning Top 40 FM co-sponsored Elton John at the U of A arena in Tuscaloosa. Both stations co-sponsored because both stations were playing songs from his albums. Crocodile Rock was an FM song, but there were ones like Tiny Dance that played only on the AM.
We reported to Rudman and Hamilton.
R&R just picked up on a way to make ad money that he thought the "tip sheets" were missing out on. Instead of being a playlist update service for format specific stations, R&R took the industry news that only "Broadcasting" really covered well up till then but that programmers and even record ducks might want to read, did more music industry news, and SOLD BIG ADS.
By then, Hamilton was gone, FMQB started running ads and soon became a magazine instead of a bunch of stapled legal sized pages you could not copy due to the deep red color of the paper, and a bunch of rock tip sheets sprung up. We even had BRE by the mid-70's covering Black radio.
As an example, in 1975 Gavin covered AC, Urban, Album Rock, Top 40, Country.
And the "chart" said, "The listings below indicate our own estimate of these records' relative programming value and is not intended to represent comparative biggest potential for continued national sales." In other words, "take that, you fools at Billboard... we are only about radio".
NOW. Yes, now. But at the time, stations started using "classic hits" as a format descriptor for sales... like in their SRDS listings... to keep buyers from thinking they were too old.
Buyers did not look at stations in Shelby, WY or Lamar, CO or Live Oak, FL. They looked at the larger, rated markets and that is where the need to stay away from the "oldies" term in sales work developed.
And "The WOW Factor is not "classic hits" by the industry definition... it is pure and simple "oldies". But, to be clear, they selected "adult hits" as their format descriptor for Nielsen.
Absolutely, but those tip sheets didn't have the bandwidth that Billboard had. Even today, when you search songs or artists on the internet, the only chart they reference is Billboard. It's wonderful that your history site collects a lot of the other charts and services that existed. For me, it's wonderful. I use it all the time. For everyone else, there's Billboard, and nothing else.
But you're right, that's why the labels knew they had to service progressive rock and college radio. They knew the trend was shifting from singles to albums. That's why Burkhart & Abrams knew they had a potential gold mine if they could clean up progressive rock radio and turn it into AOR. There was industry documentation taking place, but it was all inside stuff that didn't get the coverage one got from Billboard.
True, but let's not suggest that what were then fringe outlets were what got "Taxi" noticed. It was:
- #9 at WABC, New York
- #67 year-end at WOR-FM, New York (weekly chart peak not available)
- #10 at KHJ, Los Angeles
- #24 at WFIL, Philadelphia
- #11 at CKLW, Windsor/Detroit
- #20 at KYA, San Francisco
- #1 at WRKO, Boston
- #4 at WMEX, Boston
- #5 at WPGC AM/FM, Washington, D.C.
- #18 at KQV, Pittsburgh
And those are just the top ten metro markets at the time. Like I said, it got airplay. It got chart action at local stations. It was a turntable hit that stiffed at retail and didn't move a lot of singles or albums.
I took the information from Mediabase, and they listed the format as CH: Classic Hits. Mediabase doesn't track Oldies.
By the very early 70's there were plenty of AC stations that were essentially what was negatively called "Chicken Rock" and we played CHR with very few MOR type songs. We just, as I mentioned earlier, played Tiny Dancer and not Crocodile Rock.
Where I was in Birmingham, briefly, in 1972, we shared telephone music calls with stations in Jackson, MS, Mobile, AL and a couple of other markets where we'd disuses whether a song about a rat (Ben) or a sinking ship (Morning After) fit the mood of our stations. We didn't pay Andy Williams or Perry Como.
We found that our listeners were adults who still had the teen habit of buying singles. But, by the mid-70's they were into albums entirely, the women still buying plastic disks and the men liking tape for their cars.
It may very well depend on the market.
When I started dealing with record folks in 1972, one of the questions I asked was why they put any effort into promoting KMPC, KFI, KSFO and KNBR (the biggest MOR/AC stations in California at the time). And the answer, universally, was---they move albums.
No, their audience, then 18-49, weren't the biggest record buyers the way teens were, but they had money and if they heard a song they liked enough on the radio, they were more likely to spend $2.89 on the album at May Company, The Broadway or pretty much every other department store in Southern California serviced by rackjobbers than they were 69 cents on the single.
Jerry Moss, the business end of A&M Records, once described the strategy of A&M up until 1969, when the label had much more of an adult-focused roster of talent, as using singles airplay on MOR and Jazz stations to sell albums.
The fact that the Billboard chart at the time combined airplay with sales is why Taxi was such a low nationally charting song.
So I guess the Elektra promo team did a better job than I thought.
You posted some of their charts here a few months ago, and I remember being surprised that they said at the top of their chart: These are the albums we're playing right now. That was for the record labels.
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