Colorado Media Newsroom
September 13th, 2023, 01:13 PM
From Radio Insight:
https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/2023/09/musicradio89-200x200.jpgWas the radio that Ross on Radio readers remember fondly ever really that good? Or was it something most listeners put up with only because there were fewer choices for music? It?s a question I?ve been asked over the years. It?s something I?ve certainly wondered while listening to airchecks. Sometimes I would hear a treasured voice from childhood enthusiastically giving the request line number or congratulating caller No. 4 who just ripped them off for a Q-shirt. Even I would think there wasn’t much going on there.
But I really enjoyed the second annual ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? special over Labor Day weekend on streaming Oldies outlet Rewound Radio, (http://rewoundradio.com/) three days of restored airchecks from the ?60s, ?70s, and early ?80s from the Chicago AM powerhouses that gave Top 40 radio one of its fiercest battles. A great piece of archival work by Ted Gorden Smucker and Bill Shannon, ?Rewound? was rapturously received by radio people, including WLS night legend John Landecker, who described it on Facebook ?as if these stations never left the air.?
I listened to this year?s ?Rewound? with extra scrutiny. I wanted to hear how those stations held up. I also wanted to listen with special attention to both Landecker and to Dick Biondi, who died June 26. Biondi?s death prompted LiveLine?s John Garabedian to write about the influence that Biondi had on him at WKBW Buffalo, N.Y., his job before WLS. That made me want to dig more into the early airchecks from a ?before my time? era that was often hard for me to fully appreciate.
The aircheck of Biondi that I heard on Monday night was from May 1962, his second anniversary on the air at WLS. More than any vintage radio I?ve heard, it is a demonstration of Top 40 radio?s place at the epicenter of rock ?n? roll and youth culture, a position that had been fragmented even by the time I began hearing Top 40 regularly in the late ?60s.*
Break after break is devoted to the goings-on at various high schools and colleges, most local, some in Missouri. There are high-school socials, but there are also upcoming volleyball games, jam sessions, camera day, a school written up in the local newspaper. A teacher thanked Biondi for allowing her to bond with her students who ?thought it was neat? that she listened. ?C?mon, everybody,? Biondi urged listeners. ?Let?s get that homework done! Let?s all be happy!?
WLS was tying in with one sponsor for a prom dress giveaway. Listeners could also win tickets to upcoming auto races by sending in box-tops from an acne medication. They could also send a wrapper from Mohawk Paper to the station ?for a little bit of a surprise.? (?They?ve got a lot of courage to sponsor me.?) Students at New Trier High had sent Biondi two cigars to commemorate the anniversary. It sure sounded like an engaged audience, not merely a captive one.
I became a Landecker listener in the mid-?70s after hearing about him from a fellow student who had moved from Lubbock, Texas, a reminder of the magnitude of the shared WLS experience. So was the nightly signature Boogie Check, an elaborate supercut of listener comments from a time when most stations didn?t yet use the phones that way.*
On the 1975 aircheck I heard, Landecker is sometimes leering (?I?ve got a great dirty line that I can?t say?), sometimes florid (there?s a line I can?t quite recreate about ?sounds emanating from the land in the sky?). You hear the influence he had on two up-and-coming DJs, David Letterman and Rush Limbaugh. He is not addressing teens as overtly as Biondi, but he still comes off as a subversive older brother. One of the things that became clearest listening to both jocks is that they were probably the first person in many listeners? lives to talk to them as adults. That may well hold for whomever the DJ of your formative years may have been.
For a lot of ROR readers, what they appreciated about WLS and WCFL was the larger-than-life feel of the stations and their personalities. ?I knew who the afternoon DJs were on WLS and Super CFL,? writes Chicago radio veteran and airchecker Don Beno. ?I knew what types of personalities they were on-air. I preferred Larry Lujack over Bob Sirott. But when Lujack went on vacation ? Sirott was better than Lujack?s fill-in.?
But if you think of radio as ?music shared with friends: the one on the radio and others listening,? you realize that the radio we love is in no way diminished even in its smaller moments. That probably describes your relationship with your real-life friends as well. Some memories are funny and outrageous. Some are the ?there when the car broke down? moments. Many are about just being together.*
My other takeaway was that ?real time matters.? Even when the breaks were ?that was? and ?this is,? the WLS/WFL airchecks were reminders of the urgency missing from today?s voice-tracking. Radio veterans still have nightmares about finding the next cart. Reader Nick Straka points out that the energy of trying to keep a show going in real time ?translated to the on-air product.?*
For all the industry love ? much of it from my contemporaries ? that ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? received, there were also a lot of comments on Rewound Radio?s Facebook page from listeners with no apparent radio or music industry connection, including some asking for the show to be repeated because friends had missed it or learned about it too late. Most of those on the Saturday-afternoon American Top 40 Twitter thread are non-industry as well. Those inspired by WLS or WCFL to pursue radio as a career might not be impartial judges of ?was it ever that good?? But they are not the only ones with whom it endures.
I heard a few hours of ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? last Labor Day. I found myself drawn more to it this year. By Monday night, I felt reassured that WLS and WCFL were who they were in radio history for a reason. Several Facebook friends who either left Chicago for smaller markets or lived where they heard both small- and large-market radio had long drawn similar conclusions.*
Veteran Midwest programmer Tony Waitekus summed it up for a lot of readers. ?The energy and excitement were there. The jocks were excited about the music. The momentum was mostly continuous, including during stopsets with musical commercials and live copy the jocks genuinely sold. There were very short stopsets that didn?t seem to get in the way of anything. There were no sweepers that, today, are mostly commercials for the radio station. The processing helped make the music exciting, including ballads.
?Today, the jocks seem to ignore the music and hardly acknowledge it. The jocks stop down to give two-day-old, unrelated-to-anything Hollywood bits or random pop-culture trivia unrelated to the songs being played, killing the momentum. Listening this weekend, I was afraid to turn it off for fear of missing out.?
Classic radio isn’t diminished by whatever the context of the times might have added to it. It was meant to be of the moment. The test isn’t whether today’s civilian listeners would appreciate Big Ron O’Brien on WCFL in 1975. It’s whether current programmers can take something from it. But I’m encouraged when I hear that new radio students still react to classic airchecks. And I have, in fact, developed an appreciation over the years for some radio that I had initially dismissed as “maybe you had to be there.”
Classic radio isn?t diminished by the listeners who sat through it only for the music, only by our decision as an industry to cater to those exact people for the last 15-or-so years, even as their other choices proliferated. The not-insignificant number who remained don?t hear ?WLS vs. WCFL, but for today.? They hear the radio Waitekus described. We won?t know how compelling the WLS/WCFL model is unless we are somehow able to offer it again. But be very clear– what I want to be able to listen to this weekend is new radio with classic values, not just airchecks.
more (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/258524/was-classic-radio-ever-that-good/)
https://radioinsight.com/wp-content/images/2023/09/musicradio89-200x200.jpgWas the radio that Ross on Radio readers remember fondly ever really that good? Or was it something most listeners put up with only because there were fewer choices for music? It?s a question I?ve been asked over the years. It?s something I?ve certainly wondered while listening to airchecks. Sometimes I would hear a treasured voice from childhood enthusiastically giving the request line number or congratulating caller No. 4 who just ripped them off for a Q-shirt. Even I would think there wasn’t much going on there.
But I really enjoyed the second annual ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? special over Labor Day weekend on streaming Oldies outlet Rewound Radio, (http://rewoundradio.com/) three days of restored airchecks from the ?60s, ?70s, and early ?80s from the Chicago AM powerhouses that gave Top 40 radio one of its fiercest battles. A great piece of archival work by Ted Gorden Smucker and Bill Shannon, ?Rewound? was rapturously received by radio people, including WLS night legend John Landecker, who described it on Facebook ?as if these stations never left the air.?
I listened to this year?s ?Rewound? with extra scrutiny. I wanted to hear how those stations held up. I also wanted to listen with special attention to both Landecker and to Dick Biondi, who died June 26. Biondi?s death prompted LiveLine?s John Garabedian to write about the influence that Biondi had on him at WKBW Buffalo, N.Y., his job before WLS. That made me want to dig more into the early airchecks from a ?before my time? era that was often hard for me to fully appreciate.
The aircheck of Biondi that I heard on Monday night was from May 1962, his second anniversary on the air at WLS. More than any vintage radio I?ve heard, it is a demonstration of Top 40 radio?s place at the epicenter of rock ?n? roll and youth culture, a position that had been fragmented even by the time I began hearing Top 40 regularly in the late ?60s.*
Break after break is devoted to the goings-on at various high schools and colleges, most local, some in Missouri. There are high-school socials, but there are also upcoming volleyball games, jam sessions, camera day, a school written up in the local newspaper. A teacher thanked Biondi for allowing her to bond with her students who ?thought it was neat? that she listened. ?C?mon, everybody,? Biondi urged listeners. ?Let?s get that homework done! Let?s all be happy!?
WLS was tying in with one sponsor for a prom dress giveaway. Listeners could also win tickets to upcoming auto races by sending in box-tops from an acne medication. They could also send a wrapper from Mohawk Paper to the station ?for a little bit of a surprise.? (?They?ve got a lot of courage to sponsor me.?) Students at New Trier High had sent Biondi two cigars to commemorate the anniversary. It sure sounded like an engaged audience, not merely a captive one.
I became a Landecker listener in the mid-?70s after hearing about him from a fellow student who had moved from Lubbock, Texas, a reminder of the magnitude of the shared WLS experience. So was the nightly signature Boogie Check, an elaborate supercut of listener comments from a time when most stations didn?t yet use the phones that way.*
On the 1975 aircheck I heard, Landecker is sometimes leering (?I?ve got a great dirty line that I can?t say?), sometimes florid (there?s a line I can?t quite recreate about ?sounds emanating from the land in the sky?). You hear the influence he had on two up-and-coming DJs, David Letterman and Rush Limbaugh. He is not addressing teens as overtly as Biondi, but he still comes off as a subversive older brother. One of the things that became clearest listening to both jocks is that they were probably the first person in many listeners? lives to talk to them as adults. That may well hold for whomever the DJ of your formative years may have been.
For a lot of ROR readers, what they appreciated about WLS and WCFL was the larger-than-life feel of the stations and their personalities. ?I knew who the afternoon DJs were on WLS and Super CFL,? writes Chicago radio veteran and airchecker Don Beno. ?I knew what types of personalities they were on-air. I preferred Larry Lujack over Bob Sirott. But when Lujack went on vacation ? Sirott was better than Lujack?s fill-in.?
But if you think of radio as ?music shared with friends: the one on the radio and others listening,? you realize that the radio we love is in no way diminished even in its smaller moments. That probably describes your relationship with your real-life friends as well. Some memories are funny and outrageous. Some are the ?there when the car broke down? moments. Many are about just being together.*
My other takeaway was that ?real time matters.? Even when the breaks were ?that was? and ?this is,? the WLS/WFL airchecks were reminders of the urgency missing from today?s voice-tracking. Radio veterans still have nightmares about finding the next cart. Reader Nick Straka points out that the energy of trying to keep a show going in real time ?translated to the on-air product.?*
For all the industry love ? much of it from my contemporaries ? that ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? received, there were also a lot of comments on Rewound Radio?s Facebook page from listeners with no apparent radio or music industry connection, including some asking for the show to be repeated because friends had missed it or learned about it too late. Most of those on the Saturday-afternoon American Top 40 Twitter thread are non-industry as well. Those inspired by WLS or WCFL to pursue radio as a career might not be impartial judges of ?was it ever that good?? But they are not the only ones with whom it endures.
I heard a few hours of ?WLS/WCFL Rewound? last Labor Day. I found myself drawn more to it this year. By Monday night, I felt reassured that WLS and WCFL were who they were in radio history for a reason. Several Facebook friends who either left Chicago for smaller markets or lived where they heard both small- and large-market radio had long drawn similar conclusions.*
Veteran Midwest programmer Tony Waitekus summed it up for a lot of readers. ?The energy and excitement were there. The jocks were excited about the music. The momentum was mostly continuous, including during stopsets with musical commercials and live copy the jocks genuinely sold. There were very short stopsets that didn?t seem to get in the way of anything. There were no sweepers that, today, are mostly commercials for the radio station. The processing helped make the music exciting, including ballads.
?Today, the jocks seem to ignore the music and hardly acknowledge it. The jocks stop down to give two-day-old, unrelated-to-anything Hollywood bits or random pop-culture trivia unrelated to the songs being played, killing the momentum. Listening this weekend, I was afraid to turn it off for fear of missing out.?
Classic radio isn’t diminished by whatever the context of the times might have added to it. It was meant to be of the moment. The test isn’t whether today’s civilian listeners would appreciate Big Ron O’Brien on WCFL in 1975. It’s whether current programmers can take something from it. But I’m encouraged when I hear that new radio students still react to classic airchecks. And I have, in fact, developed an appreciation over the years for some radio that I had initially dismissed as “maybe you had to be there.”
Classic radio isn?t diminished by the listeners who sat through it only for the music, only by our decision as an industry to cater to those exact people for the last 15-or-so years, even as their other choices proliferated. The not-insignificant number who remained don?t hear ?WLS vs. WCFL, but for today.? They hear the radio Waitekus described. We won?t know how compelling the WLS/WCFL model is unless we are somehow able to offer it again. But be very clear– what I want to be able to listen to this weekend is new radio with classic values, not just airchecks.
more (https://radioinsight.com/blogs/258524/was-classic-radio-ever-that-good/)