Paul_Warren said:
Larry, 3WG sounded terrific once it got past the first couple weeks. I still remember the TM "Listen to Your City" package. (And the hilarious "Tomorrow Radio" spoof on the B-side of the vinyl demo LP, for that matter!) If memory serves me, Brandon went brokered religious, and the last AC-format book, released by Arbitron after the change, made him look pretty dumb for dumping the format!
At around these times, I was a student at French Road Middle School in Brighton, next to the 1370 transmitter towers, which always caused problems for the AV department because the damn signal got into everything from the public address system, the television sets, and the intercoms used to call the office. Our bus driver was partial to WAXC/WWWG (I probably heard "Dust in the Wind" 100 times or more on the ride home). My mother usually preferred WBBF during the day and WHAM during the morning, which my father usually listened to in his truck day or night.
I remember the "1500 Rochester 3WG" Listen to Your City campaign very well. They even ran the generic spots in the movie theaters (the one with throngs of people wandering around downtown). Wow, a radio station that promoted itself. Like the WEZO ads probably done by Dolphin out of NYC with the LSD butterfly. The campaign for WWWG actually did seem to create an interest in the station from people that wouldn't listen to it in the early 1970s. I was too young to really remember why, but the impression I got is that the format must have softened as the 70s progressed because some parents wouldn't let their kids listen to the station earlier in the 1970s.
The other recollection I have of the mid-1970s was the absolute disinterest in FM radio by just about everyone. Nobody cared about FM unless you listened to classical/old people music or were a hippie-type. I remember experimenting up and down the dial and being intrigued by WMJQ who had announcers come on with tinkling glass wind chime-like things heard in the background fairly regularly. And then perhaps later, the moose that turned up at local events and in their ads (my timeline is based on the recollections of a then-ten year old). On what I suspect was WCMF, were programs in the evening that seemed to consist of someone playing entire albums, occasionally left to simply end with "tick, tick, tick, tick" as they reached their end with nobody around to flip them or move on to something else.
And I especially recall the easy listening music battle between WPXY (Pixie-98) 98, which had a more uptempo sound to it, with Jerry Warner's WEZO, which had a rough start with automated time checks which, during the early years, were often wildly wrong. My father used to yell "a**holes... what are they, on drugs?" A lot of folks probably wondered when exactly Jerry Warner got to go home at night, not realizing outside of his morning gig (complete with the endless golf stories), the station was automated. Even back then, people were talking about Warner being able to drink anyone under any table, which I seem to remember shocked me at the time.
And "The Beat Goes On..." WDKX ads showing... ahem... surbanites suddenly getting the funky feeling from the beat and busting out into disco-era dance moves.
The most bizarre format choice I remember from the 1980s was I believe on 1370 before WXXI bought it. After the owners gave up on the talk radio format, they had a bizarre music format on there that seemed to be sort-of country'esque, but I always wondered who in the world around here was going to listen to it. They kicked the format off with a bad stunt that got local press coverage with a DJ pretending to be drunk playing the same record over and over again. People have since wised up to the tricks of the radio business, but back then it was novel enough to get press time in the D&C which was notorious for ignoring local radio in general. WXXI's biggest public service ever was putting 1370 out of its former misery.
