Hammer's Radio Nostalgia
Sept 26, 2015 15:04:37 GMT -5
Post by Ten Pound Hammer on Sept 26, 2015 15:04:37 GMT -5
I hope this is okay to post here. I've given bits and pieces of how I grew up listening to the radio, and I figured I'd give it my all. I hope you enjoy.
I grew up on WKJC out of Tawas City. Throughout the 90s, my mom would call in al lthe time to win prizes from all of their giveaways. A lot of the time, they were things like "name these three songs based on the snippets we're playing". During the summer months, I would hear Detroit Tigers play-by-plays from the late Ernie Harwell, which parlayed nicely into "The Cheap Seats" by Alabama. I also remember in March 1992, then-morning announcer Harry Blaylock played Collin Raye's "Every Second" for me, because we had just seen Collin perform not too long before at a local bar that's now torn down. Mom even remembers going to Kmart to buy the tape of All I Can Be right before the show. Right afterward, he played "Power Tools" by Ray Stevens, which I requested from him again in the fall. I believe I still have both on tape somewhere. I also requested "John Deere Green" by Joe Diffie on my 7th birthday, and brought in a tape to share with the class. Somewhere, mom has a video of me strumming a toy guitar along to the November 9, 1991 American Country Countdown which she planned to submit to America's Funniest Home Videos.
We would also attend live remotes of theirs all the time. I remember one at a local Mexican eatery that opened in a recently-closed TCBY yogurt shop around Halloween 1992. We got some coupons there, but when we returned only a short time later, the Mexican eatery was closed and undergoing conversion to a Subway. It was either in the Mexican restaurant or the Subway that I somehow remember hearing "Two-Timin' Me" by the Remingtons.
Around the late 1990s, I listened to the radio less often, and would listen to CDs more, particularly after mom bought a 60-CD carousel. We still listened sometimes, and would often go to live remotes, where the morning guy, Kevin Allen, would set out a bin of free CDs. Most often they were obscure singles, but at least once, I got a complete Crook & Chase countdown from September 1997. I also remember listening to After Midnite with Blair Garner a lot on my old stereo, and hearing quite a few obscure songs like "Stinkin' Problem" by Cledus T. Judd, "Any Gal of Mine" by Gino the New Guy, "Who's Counting" by Wesley Dennis, "Rub-a-Dubbin'" by Ken Mellons, etc.
From about 1998-2000, mom had become involved with Youth for Understanding, a foreign exchange student program. We would often drive up to the Alpena area, which meant that we had to switch over to WATZ. It's on these trips that I remember hearing a lot of lower-charting songs that WKJC wasn't playing, like "Dance the Night Away" by The Mavericks, "Guilty" and "She Wants to Rock" by The Warren Brothers, "The Fun of Your Love" by Jennifer Day, "Up North (Down South, Back East, Out West)" by Wade Hayes, "Burnin' the Roadhouse Down" by Steve Wariner (they still play that one!), "Me and Maxine" by Sammy Kershaw, and "Are Your Eyes Still Blue" by Shane McAnally (I love that one). I also remember waiting in the car at the Alpena Walmart and hearing "Wrong Five O'Clock" by Eric Heatherly.
WKJC, by this point, had a no-name nighttime show that pitted two new singles against each other. I don't remember too many of the individual songs involved, but I do remember one that stuck out to me was "Louisianna CoCo" by the Kentucky Headhunters, since I was unaware that they were still recording (Pickin' on Nashville was the first album I ever owned). In 2002, the station did a "Top 104" countdown of their most-played songs. "Gettin' Back to You" by Daisy Dern was somewhere near the bottom, which surprised me since I didn't remember them playing that one at all, and "The One" by Gary Allan was at the top.
By 2003, I had started my first organ playing job at a small church. On the way back, WKJC would play church services, so I would switch over to WATZ instead and catch American Country Countdown. Some of the books I owned at the time have song titles scrawled in the margins from when I would hear them — "Run, Run, Run" by Ryan Tyler, "Country Ain't Country" by Travis Tritt, "One Last Time" by Dusty Drake. About a year and a half later, the church closed, but I had a job delivering newspapers. We would package them up Sundays after church, and I would use this time to listen to ACC in its entirety, and follow each chart. (When Bob left for CT40, both WATZ and I followed.) From this, I grew to listen to WATZ much more often, but when I did generally abandon WKJC, their playlists had loosened up some. I remember WKJC playing "I Meant To" by Brad Cotter, "It's Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Lips Out All Day Long" by the Notorious Cherry Bombs, "Crooked Little Heart" by Tift Merritt, "Ain't Drinkin' Anymore" by Kevin Fowler, and "I Love NASCAR" by Cledus T. Judd quite regularly in fall 2004. Their weekly "Top 5 at 5" countdown on Friday nights also had "November" by Emerson Drive for several weeks, which was a major anomaly as their Top 5 was usually very close to the Billboard top 5.
WATZ, when I first began listening to it for more than ACC, was a goldmine of new material I wasn't hearing anywhere else. Not only were they playing low-charting songs that WKJC hadn't added yet (they put on "Hillbillies" by Hot Apple Pie the day it was released, and my sister loved the song. She begged WKJC to add it for months until they finally did), but also a bunch of interesting independent material. A singer named Todd Fritsch had a song out called "Small Town Radio", and he even altered the last couple lines of the song to name-drop WATZ. Their nighttime guy was a young man named Rich Stone, who would play a lot of "out there" stuff like Ryan Adams or American Recordings-era Johnny Cash album cuts. He left abruptly on a Tuesday in July, and was soon replaced by a very old man named Bob.
Around summer 2005, I discovered a third station, WWTH "Thunder Country" 100.7. This frequency had previously been a country station for a short time in the late 90s before switching back to AC, but it had been off the air for a while. Thunder Country poached a former DJ from WATZ for the morning shift, and a former WATZ news anchor with a really weird voice (he would always start out really high voice and slide down to a low voice at the end of EVERY sentence) for the noon news, but for the rest of the day, they were mostly automated with barely any commercials. Their playlist had a lot of oddities in it, like just about every Amy Dalley single, "Love on the Loose, Heart on the Run" by McBride & the Ride, and a copy of "My Kind of Music" that had a hiccup right before the second verse. One time, Ricochet was doing a concert here, so they played ALL of Ricochet's singles. Even their cover of "Seven Bridges Road". This lasted about a year and a half before they changed to a Dial Global feed that made some weird cuts to songs — among other things, I remember that "Back to December" had almost all of its second verse chopped out (only "And then the cold came, the dark days…" onward stayed), the round on "Already Gone" faded out early, and "I Cross My Heart" was slowed down about 8%. And yes, they played the reggae-rap-less version of "Stuck Like Glue". (Oddly, WKJC did this too, but they actually went so far as to chop it out themselves. Likewise with "kiss my ass" on "Drunk on a Plane".)
I've mostly stuck with WATZ ever since, out of frustration over how freaking long WKJC's ad breaks were. (To give just one example: their "Top 5 at 5" consists of 5 songs, each of which has a 3+ minute ad break in between! To say nothing of how unnecessarily gabby their nighttime DJ is…) Listening to ACC on them was a chore in the mid-2000s, since they'd cram Paul Harvey and a live remote into one of the already overlong ad breaks, and it could take over 5 hours to play a 4-hour show. Sometimes they'd even skip 31-40, or even 21-30 as well, and mom remembers them once playing only 1-10 because they had to switch over to a football game. (I e-mailed the show and informed them of this, and they said that affiliates are not allowed to do this. ) Things only got worse when I noticed WKJC starting to speed up songs a tiny bit; I first noticed this around the time Gloriana released "Wild at Heart", and I noticed it the most on "Neon Light" by Blake Shelton, which has to be at least a good 10% faster! To their credit, WKJC does have a decently deep play list. I've heard them break out an obscure early 90s singer like Davis Daniel now and then.
WATZ does lean a bit more "mainstream" now, but I still hear plenty of lesser known songs from them. Whenever I hear them play a barely listenable piece of indie garbage like "You Part II", they surprise me again with either something solid from Bobby Wills, or some rarity I haven't heard in a long time like "Good to Go" by John Corbett. They also love playing the "Michigan Dogman" song a lot around Halloween. (For those who don't know, a DJ at their sister station in Traverse City recorded a 5-minute song in 1987 about a mythological beast said to haunt our parts of Michigan. He originally recorded it as a joke, but when it helped popularize the legend, he ran with it. His station and WATZ play the song all the time around Halloween. Also bound to make yearly appearances on these stations and WKJC are "Second Week of Deer Camp" by Da Yoopers and "Da Turdy Point Buck" by Bananas at Large, NOT DA YOOPERS.)
I grew up on WKJC out of Tawas City. Throughout the 90s, my mom would call in al lthe time to win prizes from all of their giveaways. A lot of the time, they were things like "name these three songs based on the snippets we're playing". During the summer months, I would hear Detroit Tigers play-by-plays from the late Ernie Harwell, which parlayed nicely into "The Cheap Seats" by Alabama. I also remember in March 1992, then-morning announcer Harry Blaylock played Collin Raye's "Every Second" for me, because we had just seen Collin perform not too long before at a local bar that's now torn down. Mom even remembers going to Kmart to buy the tape of All I Can Be right before the show. Right afterward, he played "Power Tools" by Ray Stevens, which I requested from him again in the fall. I believe I still have both on tape somewhere. I also requested "John Deere Green" by Joe Diffie on my 7th birthday, and brought in a tape to share with the class. Somewhere, mom has a video of me strumming a toy guitar along to the November 9, 1991 American Country Countdown which she planned to submit to America's Funniest Home Videos.
We would also attend live remotes of theirs all the time. I remember one at a local Mexican eatery that opened in a recently-closed TCBY yogurt shop around Halloween 1992. We got some coupons there, but when we returned only a short time later, the Mexican eatery was closed and undergoing conversion to a Subway. It was either in the Mexican restaurant or the Subway that I somehow remember hearing "Two-Timin' Me" by the Remingtons.
Around the late 1990s, I listened to the radio less often, and would listen to CDs more, particularly after mom bought a 60-CD carousel. We still listened sometimes, and would often go to live remotes, where the morning guy, Kevin Allen, would set out a bin of free CDs. Most often they were obscure singles, but at least once, I got a complete Crook & Chase countdown from September 1997. I also remember listening to After Midnite with Blair Garner a lot on my old stereo, and hearing quite a few obscure songs like "Stinkin' Problem" by Cledus T. Judd, "Any Gal of Mine" by Gino the New Guy, "Who's Counting" by Wesley Dennis, "Rub-a-Dubbin'" by Ken Mellons, etc.
From about 1998-2000, mom had become involved with Youth for Understanding, a foreign exchange student program. We would often drive up to the Alpena area, which meant that we had to switch over to WATZ. It's on these trips that I remember hearing a lot of lower-charting songs that WKJC wasn't playing, like "Dance the Night Away" by The Mavericks, "Guilty" and "She Wants to Rock" by The Warren Brothers, "The Fun of Your Love" by Jennifer Day, "Up North (Down South, Back East, Out West)" by Wade Hayes, "Burnin' the Roadhouse Down" by Steve Wariner (they still play that one!), "Me and Maxine" by Sammy Kershaw, and "Are Your Eyes Still Blue" by Shane McAnally (I love that one). I also remember waiting in the car at the Alpena Walmart and hearing "Wrong Five O'Clock" by Eric Heatherly.
WKJC, by this point, had a no-name nighttime show that pitted two new singles against each other. I don't remember too many of the individual songs involved, but I do remember one that stuck out to me was "Louisianna CoCo" by the Kentucky Headhunters, since I was unaware that they were still recording (Pickin' on Nashville was the first album I ever owned). In 2002, the station did a "Top 104" countdown of their most-played songs. "Gettin' Back to You" by Daisy Dern was somewhere near the bottom, which surprised me since I didn't remember them playing that one at all, and "The One" by Gary Allan was at the top.
By 2003, I had started my first organ playing job at a small church. On the way back, WKJC would play church services, so I would switch over to WATZ instead and catch American Country Countdown. Some of the books I owned at the time have song titles scrawled in the margins from when I would hear them — "Run, Run, Run" by Ryan Tyler, "Country Ain't Country" by Travis Tritt, "One Last Time" by Dusty Drake. About a year and a half later, the church closed, but I had a job delivering newspapers. We would package them up Sundays after church, and I would use this time to listen to ACC in its entirety, and follow each chart. (When Bob left for CT40, both WATZ and I followed.) From this, I grew to listen to WATZ much more often, but when I did generally abandon WKJC, their playlists had loosened up some. I remember WKJC playing "I Meant To" by Brad Cotter, "It's Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Lips Out All Day Long" by the Notorious Cherry Bombs, "Crooked Little Heart" by Tift Merritt, "Ain't Drinkin' Anymore" by Kevin Fowler, and "I Love NASCAR" by Cledus T. Judd quite regularly in fall 2004. Their weekly "Top 5 at 5" countdown on Friday nights also had "November" by Emerson Drive for several weeks, which was a major anomaly as their Top 5 was usually very close to the Billboard top 5.
WATZ, when I first began listening to it for more than ACC, was a goldmine of new material I wasn't hearing anywhere else. Not only were they playing low-charting songs that WKJC hadn't added yet (they put on "Hillbillies" by Hot Apple Pie the day it was released, and my sister loved the song. She begged WKJC to add it for months until they finally did), but also a bunch of interesting independent material. A singer named Todd Fritsch had a song out called "Small Town Radio", and he even altered the last couple lines of the song to name-drop WATZ. Their nighttime guy was a young man named Rich Stone, who would play a lot of "out there" stuff like Ryan Adams or American Recordings-era Johnny Cash album cuts. He left abruptly on a Tuesday in July, and was soon replaced by a very old man named Bob.
Around summer 2005, I discovered a third station, WWTH "Thunder Country" 100.7. This frequency had previously been a country station for a short time in the late 90s before switching back to AC, but it had been off the air for a while. Thunder Country poached a former DJ from WATZ for the morning shift, and a former WATZ news anchor with a really weird voice (he would always start out really high voice and slide down to a low voice at the end of EVERY sentence) for the noon news, but for the rest of the day, they were mostly automated with barely any commercials. Their playlist had a lot of oddities in it, like just about every Amy Dalley single, "Love on the Loose, Heart on the Run" by McBride & the Ride, and a copy of "My Kind of Music" that had a hiccup right before the second verse. One time, Ricochet was doing a concert here, so they played ALL of Ricochet's singles. Even their cover of "Seven Bridges Road". This lasted about a year and a half before they changed to a Dial Global feed that made some weird cuts to songs — among other things, I remember that "Back to December" had almost all of its second verse chopped out (only "And then the cold came, the dark days…" onward stayed), the round on "Already Gone" faded out early, and "I Cross My Heart" was slowed down about 8%. And yes, they played the reggae-rap-less version of "Stuck Like Glue". (Oddly, WKJC did this too, but they actually went so far as to chop it out themselves. Likewise with "kiss my ass" on "Drunk on a Plane".)
I've mostly stuck with WATZ ever since, out of frustration over how freaking long WKJC's ad breaks were. (To give just one example: their "Top 5 at 5" consists of 5 songs, each of which has a 3+ minute ad break in between! To say nothing of how unnecessarily gabby their nighttime DJ is…) Listening to ACC on them was a chore in the mid-2000s, since they'd cram Paul Harvey and a live remote into one of the already overlong ad breaks, and it could take over 5 hours to play a 4-hour show. Sometimes they'd even skip 31-40, or even 21-30 as well, and mom remembers them once playing only 1-10 because they had to switch over to a football game. (I e-mailed the show and informed them of this, and they said that affiliates are not allowed to do this. ) Things only got worse when I noticed WKJC starting to speed up songs a tiny bit; I first noticed this around the time Gloriana released "Wild at Heart", and I noticed it the most on "Neon Light" by Blake Shelton, which has to be at least a good 10% faster! To their credit, WKJC does have a decently deep play list. I've heard them break out an obscure early 90s singer like Davis Daniel now and then.
WATZ does lean a bit more "mainstream" now, but I still hear plenty of lesser known songs from them. Whenever I hear them play a barely listenable piece of indie garbage like "You Part II", they surprise me again with either something solid from Bobby Wills, or some rarity I haven't heard in a long time like "Good to Go" by John Corbett. They also love playing the "Michigan Dogman" song a lot around Halloween. (For those who don't know, a DJ at their sister station in Traverse City recorded a 5-minute song in 1987 about a mythological beast said to haunt our parts of Michigan. He originally recorded it as a joke, but when it helped popularize the legend, he ran with it. His station and WATZ play the song all the time around Halloween. Also bound to make yearly appearances on these stations and WKJC are "Second Week of Deer Camp" by Da Yoopers and "Da Turdy Point Buck" by Bananas at Large, NOT DA YOOPERS.)
I was only 15 at the time, and never called a radio station until 2007.