You would have been an interesting Top 40 PD.
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Song you wondered how they they ever got played on Top 40 radio
- Thread starter secondchoice
- Start date
You would have been an interesting Top 40 PD.
And this is a case where the record had enough resistance at the radio level that it only peaked at #37.
Casey Kasem only had to play it three times, one week at number 40, two at 37 and gone.
Which is good, because the longer a record stayed on the chart, the more stories Casey had to come up with and we could have gotten:
"Here's a letter from Kevtronics in the future, who writes: "Dear Casey, just what is it that they want to do to the guy in the glasses and is it just Mott or the Hoople, too?"
Kevtronics, thanks for your letter. Not a f@#king chance. Now on with the countdown."
[JINGLE: "Casey's Coast to Coast"]
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Okay, gang, we've hit the part of the "Song you wondered how they ever got played on Top 40 radio" where someone submits a song that so few Top 40 radio stations played that it literally failed to make the Hot 100.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Shall I invoke Godwin's Law so Lance has a reason to close the thread?
Nah. I liked that show. LAPD homicide detective with a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Fun stuff.
They originally wanted to sing it about the West San Francisco Bay Area. Too many syllables.
So---this is kinda interesting (if you're just enough of the right kind of geek, and I am):
KJR in Seattle was the first on "The Night Chicago Died". KHJ Los Angeles and KFRC San Francisco were about five weeks behind KJR.
It wasn't until three weeks after L.A. and SF that a Chicago station added it---so two months after KJR. It was WCFL.
WLS was two weeks after 'CFL.
It went to number one on both stations.
And I'll bet Larry Lujack had some classic one-liners.
I think that's true of a lot of us who were teens in the 70s. I've often said that if I hadn't been in radio and needed to listen to understand what was happening in the formats I worked (Top 40 and AC), I would have been an FM listener exclusively from 1969 on. And certainly, if I'd split my time between AM and FM longer, 1974 would have been the nail in the coffin (as it is, it's what drove me to AC from Top 40).
In 1972, a lot of Top 40s flirted with more album-oriented product, and some of that filtered into '73 ("Money", "Smoke on the Water"), but we also had "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" and "Playground In My Mind".
1974 was kind of a turning point for Top 40...in that a lot of stations decided that their best path was to super-serve teens. One of the leaders of that philosophy was Gerry Petersen, who a lot of people were watching, since he'd had great numbers at WRKO, and was tapped to be the new PD of KHJ in early 1974:
...which was not Top 40.
Except, kinda, it was...in 1982, more teens and 20s in L.A. wanted to hear "Beat on the Brat", "Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage" and "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" than wanted to hear Juice Newton and Air Supply, so...
Aha! Stage One of my plan worked!
(Actually, to be honest, I’m still in Switzerland, trying to keep up with things by using an iPad, where certain tasks can be unhandy. And where, on a DAB+ station last night, I heard a version of Bowie/Queen’s “Under Pressure” where the entire instrumental open was taken out. Plus the station was clipping like crazy. Yecccch.)
I think Lujack’s reaction would have been guaranteed.
I didn’t want to get too much into personal history here but, for context, 1972 was the year my family moved from rural Iowa to the St. Louis area. Before that, FM listening for me was either of the easy listening variety or preaching. Once in a while, lower-powered KDPS-FM from Des Moines would make it in when one of the high-school students would play album cuts. Progressive rock was otherwise KAAY late nights from Little Rock. (Edit to add for clarity
So most of my radio listening was on AM, and mostly Top 40 in nature.In the St. Louis area, there were choices on FM. FM top 40 arrived a month after we did, in the form of KSLQ, which slaughtered KXOK. KSHE and KADI were doing progressive rock. KDNA was still on for another year. And so on. At 15 going on 16, I started to find the high-octane personalities of KXOK to be annoying. KSLQ was doing the same kind of presentation, so I went first to KADI and then to KSHE. Thing is, while Shelley Grafman was deservedly a legend, he put some dreck on KSHE, too. Much of it is still played as “KSHE Klassics”, either on a separate KSHE stream, or its HD-2 channel, or on streams operated by others. I also have quite a bit of it in my personal LP collection. I hear some of that stuff now and cringe, particularly at the sexism. I am guilty of the velvet trap of presentism, evaluating the past on present-day terms without adequate regard for the context surrounding that past. I’m not justifying that context, but full understanding requires acknowledging that it’s there. The more benign part of presentism in this thread has been some of the hilarity. It’s been a blast.
Have I analyzed this out of existence yet?
But, I wonder, how many teens, particularly males, had moved on by that point?
(Edit: “unhandy”, not “unhandled”. Danged autocorrect.)
Shoulda worked the Farallon Islands in there somehow.
I think a lot. I really think you had females nine or younger through maybe 34, some older females (moms of teens and pre-teens), and very few males over 14 or 15 by '74. And it got worse.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Apparently not, but please keep trying.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
But the thread was about Top-40, which the Ramones were not.
In fact, it wasn't until KROQ and similar stations that anything from that genre -- and related ones-- started crossing over. And we must not forget the impact of MTV in the 80s.
I'd hardly call watching that show a mind-warping experience. Though judging by that episode guide, sitting through 8 new episodes of Mr. Belvedere premiering on the same day might warp anyone's brain.Meanwhile over on ABC, Mr. Belvedere was dealing with having a curse put on him, among other things, and my brother and I watched it all:
Mr. Belvedere
Looking to watch Mr. Belvedere? Find out where to watch Mr. Belvedere from Season 6 at TV Guidewww.tvguide.com
Yeah, sorry about that one. I erroneously thought 9 PM was included on account of confusing the radio safe harbor transition threshold (10 PM) with the family hour(s) for television.
This is a new one on me. How did prop 13, the property tax proposition, affect the planting of greenery alongside state freeway embankments?
Property tax revenues fell by 60% in the first year. That amounted to $6 billion.
California had been using that money for education, libraries, parks and many other services.
Whether the Caltrans landscaping project was directly funded by them or not, budgets were slashed, the remaining income re-allocated amongst departments and services and maintenance of the embankments and underpasses stopped. Eventually, most of it was removed, though there are still a few places where unkempt remnants of it can be seen.
This was a #12 hit in Canada in 1981... many people didn't know the singer is a woman:
Thanks (I think?)
I did mainly Country, Full Service and Regular AC. The closest I ever came to top 40 was Chicken Rock.
Would it have mattered if they did know? 1981's pretty far down the road and my understanding has always been that Canada was more liberal about sex. They beat us to same-sex marriage by a decade.