• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Top-40 AMs transition in the 80s.

ted chittenden said:
Keep in mind that with the arrival of KHJ on the scene and its almost immediate impact on the ratings at the time, the other LA top 40 stations were trying to figure out ways to best the newcomer. KBLA tried to out-KHJ KHJ--they hired Humble Harv away from KHJ (briefly) before he returned to the KHJ fold.
Click to expand...

No.

Never.

Huh?

Harve came to KBLA from Philadelphia in early 1965 and was on the air there before KHJ premiered.

Drake hired Harve, who was PD at KBLA, and put him on the air on February 2, 1967. KBLA went away on June 16. Harve never left KHJ until May of 1971 and we all know what that was about.
 
ted chittenden said:
In fact, Johnnie was so successful that he was fired for that success. At the time, it was owned by the same non-profit organization that owned KAET Channel 28 (one of Los Angeles' two PBS affiliates) and the rumor was that Board members were jockeying to buy the station but they didn't want to pay the higher cost if it had beatedn KHJ in the ratings.
Click to expand...

Ted, I have to correct you on a misspelling, a Freudian slip, and one huge misconception.

The late Johnny Darin spelled his name the way I am spelling it here.

Channel 28's call letters have always been KCET (unless you include the few months back in 1953 when USC operated a station on that channel as KTHE under a previous license). KAET is your own PBS affiliate in Phoenix on channel 8. Furthermore, neither KOCE/50 or KLCS/58 were on the air yet at the time your are referencing, so KCET was not "one" of two affiliates, it was the only one.

But KCET and KRLA were not co-owned. When the FCC took the license away from Jack Kent Cooke in 1964, they installed an interim operator while comparative hearings were taking place. That was Oak Knoll Broadcasting and any profits were mandated to be given to KCET. In fact, KCET -- being a non-commercial, educational station -- could not have legally owned KRLA.

So the rumor about the board members is patently false, because KRLA's permanent license was still in limbo at the FCC and no sale could be even proposed.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Ted, I have to correct you on a misspelling, a Freudian slip, and one huge misconception.

The late Johnny Darin spelled his name the way I am spelling it here.

Channel 28's call letters have always been KCET (unless you include the few months back in 1953 when USC operated a station on that channel as KTHE under a previous license). KAET is your own PBS affiliate in Phoenix on channel 8. Furthermore, neither KOCE/50 or KLCS/58 were on the air yet at the time your are referencing, so KCET was not "one" of two affiliates, it was the only one.

But KCET and KRLA were not co-owned. When the FCC took the license away from Jack Kent Cooke in 1964, they installed an interim operator while comparative hearings were taking place. That was Oak Knoll Broadcasting and any profits were mandated to be given to KCET. In fact, KCET -- being a non-commercial, educational station -- could not have legally owned KRLA.

So the rumor about the board members is patently false, because KRLA's permanent license was still in limbo at the FCC and no sale could be even proposed.
Click to expand...

First, thank you for the correction of the spelling of Mr. Darin's last name--I thought I had read it like I wrote at the reelradio.com site.

Second, thanks for the correction about KCET/KAET. The KCET had slipped my mind as I was writing that. Also, I was unaware that the Orange County affiliate was not on the air yet in 1972 when we made the final move to Phoenix. In Tujunga, we used Beverly Hills Cable and Channel 28 showed up back then on Channel 6 on that service.

And finally, thanks for the correction about Oak Knoll Broadcasting. Hopefully, you've probably guessed who I was paraphraising on the Reelradio site for that one (if not, it was, if my memory is still working properly, in the comments of the Johnnie Darin aircheck from November of 1970).

I would like to say that I haven't had my coffee yet, but since I can no longer drink it (health reasons), I'll just have to stew in my own mistaken knowledge. (Fortunately, my life doesn't depend on me remembering everything correctly.)
 
ted chittenden said:
Also, I was unaware that the Orange County affiliate was not on the air yet in 1972 when we made the final move to Phoenix.
Click to expand...

Apparently you just missed them, Ted. KOCE signed on November 7, 1972. Initially, they only had a signal serving Orange County so they wouldn't have been eligible for cable carriage in Tujunga anyway.

KLCS followed a year later, on November 5, 1973.
 
ted chittenden said:
IF KBLA had had better reception outside of the San Fernando Valley, they might have pulled it off.
Click to expand...
KBLA 1580 had a rather poor signal in the San Fernando Valley. It shot from a hilltop in Echo Park just east of midtown right towards the ocean. It was poor the farther east you got in the San Gabriel Valley and not good at all in Orange County.
 
davideduardo said:
KBLA 1580 had a rather poor signal in the San Fernando Valley. It shot from a hilltop in Echo Park just east of midtown right towards the ocean. It was poor the farther east you got in the San Gabriel Valley and not good at all in Orange County.
Click to expand...
David, he’s referring to the original KBLA at 1500 in Burbank (which became KBBQ and KROQ).
 
michael hagerty said:
David, he’s referring to the original KBLA at 1500 in Burbank (which became KBBQ and KROQ).
Click to expand...
Ah, gotcha. And the 1500 signal was even worse... I can go on forever about how you should never put an AM transmitter site at the top of a mountain, but the coverage is good enough proof.

My wife did shifts on both 1090 and 1500. From her apartment near Hancock Park, she could not even pick it up clearly until she got to Hollywood! The studios were in Toluca Lake, and shared with the FM gang. Despite what many have said about them, she recalls that they were very nice, kind and decent! The building did have an interesting smell, though...
 
Going back to the crux of the thread, with Charleston, we had two top 40 stations in the late 60s, 70s and early 80s, WTMA 1250 and WCSC 1390.

WTMA was regular CHR until about 1981 when their sister station WSSX (95SX) flipped from urban/soul WPXI to top 40. After that TMA went to adult contemporary or at least a version of it for the first half of the 1980s through 1986 when it went to satellite country. This was with heavy news and full-service elements before the flip.

WCSC stayed a couple more years in top 40 before it went AC as well in the early 80s. About 1985 it went oldies during the daytime with sports and talk at night. For a time it simulcasted 96.9 overnights. Then it got sold from WCSC-TV and flipped call letters.

Charleston had a daytimer (910 AM) which was the first news-talk station in town around 1981 or 1982. WTMA went news/talk June 1, 1989
 
ThePowerCow said:
I remember WLS's transition from Top 40 to talk was brutal
Click to expand...
WLS had been slowly adding talk elements for some time, with Tom Snyder and Sally Jesse Rafael at night. Don and Roma did a lot of talk in midday, before moving to mornings. The music had gotten almost to MOR. MusicRadioWLS went out with a whimper, not a bang. The impending flip to all-talk was the worst kept secret in the industry. The first 10 years of talk format was great IMO. The hosts didn't all have the same opinon, and the hosts and producers kept things moving, re-setting the table with topic and/or guest frequently.
 
KeithE4 said:
KRIZ/1230 Phoenix was sold to Family Life Radio in 1978. It ended Top 40 and got religion on 7/30/1978 as KFLR.

Also in Phoenix, KRUX/1360 switched from Top 40 to all-news via NBC's short-lived News and Information Service
in 1975.

KTAR/620 tried a Top 40 format in the early '70s, but dumped it for all-news in 1973.
Click to expand...
One of those station went out #1
 
ThePowerCow said:
One of those station went out #1
Click to expand...

Yes! From my memory of events and comments on the old Reelradio site, it was KRIZ that left the top 40 format while it was still #1. However, as I noted earlier on this thread, KFLR didn't come on the 1230 frequency right away--there was a two- or three-week (I can't remember which) period between the signing off of KRIZ and the launch of KFLR.
 
Jody-Thornton said:
We Canucks also saw 680 CFTR (Toronto) flip to 680 News in June 1993, 1410 CKSL (London) flip to News/Talk in 1994, and AM 640 (Toronto) go News/Talk in October 1995.
Click to expand...
Last week, I spent a lot of my Labor Day weekend listening to the WLS-WCFL aircheck marathon on rewoundradio. Besides Chicago, Toronto may be the only other major city with two 50 kW AM Top-40 stations competing with each other
 
spiritof67 said:
Last week, I spent a lot of my Labor Day weekend listening to the WLS-WCFL aircheck marathon on rewoundradio. Besides Chicago, Toronto may be the only other major city with two 50 kW AM Top-40 stations competing with each other
Click to expand...
Boston had WRKO, WMEX and WBZ briefly after WNAC became WRKO in March 1967, but WBZ soon toned down its presentation and music. WBZ and WMEX completed as Top 40 stations before that, but WMEX wasn't 50kw full-time.
 
Jody-Thornton said:
We Canucks also saw 680 CFTR (Toronto) flip to 680 News in June 1993, 1410 CKSL (London) flip to News/Talk in 1994, and AM 640 (Toronto) go News/Talk in October 1995.
Click to expand...
CKLW added a sports talk show and University of Michigan football, tried one last run at being a true top 40 station before winding down and flipping to Music of Your Life in either 1984 or 85. This after the CRTC would not allow the FM incarnation "94 Fox FM" to fully launch. CKLW flipped to News-Talk sometime in the early 90s. CKLW-FM went oldies as a Big 8 reboot on 2 occasions.
 
ted chittenden said:
Yes! From my memory of events and comments on the old Reelradio site, it was KRIZ that left the top 40 format while it was still #1.
Click to expand...

That's what they said...but it's not true.

So here are the facts:

Phoenix at the time was a two-book-per-year market. Spring (April/May) and Fall (October/November):

KRIZ' last book (April/May 1978) was a 3.0, a tie for 11th place with KOPA AM/FM.

KRIZ' last #1 book was three years before its format change, April/May 1975, when it had a 9.3.

But that didn't last---it dumped nearly half that number, falling to a 4.9 in the fall. The benefactor was KUPD, which was Top 40 at the time and beat KRIZ in every book from October/November 1976 on. So it can't even be argued that KRIZ went out as #1 in its format.

Urban legend, which I bought until five minutes ago.
 
gr8oldies said:
MusicRadioWLS went out with a whimper, not a bang.
Click to expand...

michael hagerty said:
As did pretty much every AM Top 40. If they were capable of a bang, they wouldn't have needed to flip.
Click to expand...

I, for one, believe that none of the big, legendary top-40 AMs would have dropped the format if they could have continued to be profitable with it.

But FM took that audience away ... big time.
 


Back
Top Bottom