Rick Dees Year-End Shows (In The Olden Days)

[Michael1973]

Does anybody remember how Rick Dees used to structure his year-end specials prior to the PPW era, when there was only one frozen chart at the end of the year? I listened to his show regularly from 1988-1990 and yet I can't remember.

I know he used to do the "top 88 of '88", "top 89 of '89", etc., but I don't ever recall him doing anything longer than a standard 4-hour show. And yet I also don't remember him skipping a regular weekly show to fit in the year end survey.

Anybody?

[Hervard]

As long as I've been listening (since 1986), Rick did skip the last chart of December that year in order to count down all 86 songs over a two-week period.

For 1987 and 1988, I believe he only did a Top 40 of the year, since he didn't want to skip that week. My station dropped the show in December, 1989, so I have no idea what the year-end show was like, but I'm assuming he did a Top 40, since R&R was still only taking a one-week break from the charts. In 1990, they resumed taking two week breaks (as they'd been doing from their inception in 1973 through 1985), so Rick started counting down the Top 90 songs, then the Top 91 in 1991, and so forth Starting in 1992, since there wasn't enough time to play all the songs, he started skipping over songs, most of them songs that they didn't play on the radio much anymore, giving the title and artist. He's done it that way ever since (except, in order to run the Top 80 hits of the 1990s, he didn't do a regular show, but at the beginning of Part 2 of his Top 100 of 2000 show, he listed the Top Five songs of 1999, as listed by Radio and Records.

So, as far as I know, Rick only skipped that one week in 1986 to do the year end countdown. Of course, he does skip charts in order to do his specials (back in "the olden days", he skipped the chart that would have been aired the week of the special, but now he seems to "delay" the chart in which he desires to skip. For this reason, to avoid headaches, I just listen to the show instead of taking notes anymore).

[BillboardBoy]

There was one year that was kind of screwed up. I believe it was 2001. It was impossible to figure out all the ranks because he didn't list them all on the show and it didn't match up to his website.

[BillboardBoy]

What did he do at the end of 1983? By then, the show had only been around a couple of months.

[Hervard]

billboardboy said:

There was one year that was kind of screwed up. I believe it was 2001. It was impossible to figure out all the ranks because he didn't list them all on the show and it didn't match up to his website.

Yeah, that was the year that he began using a chart that went by a different time frame than R&R. I think instead of November through December it was mid-December through mid-December because songs from the early part of 2001 were ranked lower than on the R&R year-end chart and songs from late 2001 were ranked higher. I wonder if he used the R&R Top 100 of 2001 on his website then?

billboardboy said:

What did he do at the end of 1983? By then, the show had only been around a couple of months.

Not sure what he did. I would imagine that he just used the Cashbox year-end chart, since that's the chart he went by during the show's first few years. But I'm not sure if he did a full Top 83 (or Top 80 or whatever) or just a one-week Top 40 of 1983. I didn't start listening to the show regularly until September, 1986.