Airchexx.com

…You’ve got a tiger in your tank!

Now, just added to the world’s LARGEST collection of WQXI airchecks, this fabulous 30 minutes scoped recording of Tony ‘the tiger’ on Quicksie in Dixie and those wonderful PAMS jingles! This comes to us from our friend Matt Seinberg, a trusted source of classics!

It’s April Fools’ Day and Taylor says someone’s playing a trick since he can’t get the Beatles in for an encore performance… actually the record seems to not wanna play at the start of this aircheck but he gets it working with a perfect talkup. You’ll hear plenty of classic commercials and Taylor’s top 5 countdown.

Audio quality is quite good, it’s the reception that has a bit of noise on it, as it sounds like WQXI was received near a noisy power line… all in all very good sound however. This apparently came to us encoded right off the original source reel (credited to Ira Menaker…thank you.).

Courtesy of Karl Phillips, it’s not long and it’s not the best audio quality but here’s a bit of Mark Stewart on Atlanta’s longtime CHR leader, Z-93!

Description by Karl Phillips…

Power 99.7 – when it was new, it was not WAPW, it was WARM “The New” Power 99.7. Here’s Steve Davis in Atlanta in 1986.

Listen to this great morning show! They really knew how to do Country right… but hey, this IS the south.

Included in this aircheck: two full newscasts, traffic and weather. All the full service elements you’d expect from a great station. Full length commercials included also.

Now, remember, this is 1987. Its a few days before Christmas, and these guys manage to be really funny without offending anyone. Too bad I had to scope this… “Merry Christmas Darling” by the Carpenters is great to hear again.

Thanks once again to Karl Phillips, who included some vintage 80s/90s cassettes in that box of old reels!

Courtesy of Karl Phillips, who sent in a ton of airchecks on reel, here’s one on cassette captured when former Atlanta CHR WAPW “Power 99″ flipped to New Rock as 99X. On the tape you’ll hear the old call letters still in use (not WNNX, as this would become), buried in a legal ID buried in a stopset later in this aircheck. The 99X monikker launches just a few minutes into this scoped format change.

At about 12:45 in, you’ll hear… “and now, for posterity, this is the last time you’ll hear…” and the Power 99 jingle played. Very smooth!

Now, your curator has heard a ton of format changes, but this was very classy. They originally kept the CHR jocks during the transition to Rock. Only the name and the music changed. Of course, 99X has become somewhat of a legend in Atlanta radio, although of late has had it’s share of ratings troubles, just a week ago bringing it’s legendary morning team back to try to recapture ratings. You can read up on the new Morning X by clicking this link..

Now, don’t confuse this 99X with our tribute to the ORIGINAL 99X (WXLO) which was in New York City in the 70s and early 80s. That’s a totally different station and we pay tribute to it here!

Return with us back to Mike Dineen’s morning show. Mike makes mention of the Apollo astronauts ‘floating’ back to Earth at 3,000 miles an hour. The news mentions Vietnam, Chappaquiddick and MLK Jr’s brother. This turns out to be quite an historic reel, judging simply by the news headlines.

Lots of old commercials on this one, too.

Our second Simon Trane aircheck – we have lots of fans waiting for this. Less than a half hour in length but we think you’ll enjoy going back to the 60s, as WQXI played LOTS of Motown!

Another, courtesy of Karl Phillips.

WQXI kick the can time…… 8:47

Remastered for better quality!

Originally posted in June 2005, here’s one of our most popular recordings! It’s been completely re-recorded and encoded in our new player.

Aaaah for the days of AM top 40! Check out Gary McKee on WQXI. McKee claims to be the ‘mouth of the South’… a description Rick Dees would use later at WHBQ. Anyway, it was time for something totally different, and for those who’ve requested WQXI – this one’s for you.

It’s the natural progression of the WQXI broadcast day – Don Cox following Gary McKee on WQXI! Actually, it was next up on the same reel containing Mr. McKee from the same day. More great audio quality, but a few splices from me because for some reason, the person recording decided not to tightly scope this one as was the case for the McKee portion of the tape.

No matter, this is great, albeit short. More Quicksie for the fans!

More McKee fun! Here’s one complete, scoped morning show from sometime in ’72. This is courtesy of our old site pal Karl Phillips (and we thank him greatly!). Transferred directly from 7 1/4 inch reel played on an old Wollensack graciously loaned out to us by my good friend, voiceover guy Jack Parnell, this aircheck is presented in unbelievable, stunning audio quality!

It runs 58 minutes, and while there are pauses in the recording, this is so good I decided to leave this recording completely untouched by processing and digital splicing. Just listen, and see why both Gary McKee and WQXI are our most searched and played selections!

Notable because this station uses the only other 99X monikker that we know of, and because we featured this station’s CHR predecessor a few weeks ago, here’s a scoped hour of Atlanta’s New Rock station.

99X changed formats in 2007. When we get audio of the flip, we’ll post it on our sister site, The Format Change Archive run by our site administrative guru Lance Venta.

Here’s a very entertaining look at one of those stations that moved away from Beautiful music and into the AC world in the early 80s. 1980, to be precise, here at the FM sister to legendary WSB 750 AM. Yep, WSB-FM has a long colorful history (the first commercial FM in the Southeast, among other things).

We’re actually featuring the morning show from 1991 here, where “B98.5″ is right in the middle of the format, musically. Listen for jingles which are a re-sing of JAM’s “The Best Show” package originally created for KIMN Denver…. and a great Legal ID TOH jingle resing, which is the original (IIRC) WABC Newstalk 77 TOH, also used in instrumental form at 700 WLW Cincinnati for a while.

This is not a terribly long aircheck but its important to see where mainstream AC was in ’91. 5 years before Telcom 96 took it’s toll… the music is right on target, the WSB-FM has an exciting (and fully staffed) morning show, and overall sounds great.

A year before Atlanta’s Alternative station, WNNX “99X” would replace Power 99, WAPW was still a hot CHR pulling decent numbers, and killing off competitors WZGC “Z93″ and WQXI-FM 94-Q in the process.

Here’s a look at the morning show on Power 99, known as The Breakfast Club.

Part two of this fantastic exhibit is yet another 45 minute scoped presentation, with more McKee silliness and morning laughter. But…. McKee is on vacation! And, who is the sidekick? We’re sure our visitors know quite well.

Our statistics show that Gary McKee and WQXI are our most-streamed airchecks, so listen now and find out why!

Now, as promised, Morning guru Gary McKee on 79 WQXI! This comes to us courtesy of new Contributor Lewis Cosby. Lewis is the President and GM of WMAK TV 7 Knoxville and was kind enough to send us a couple of CD’s worth of the legendary morning man himself.

Apologies to all for the delay, we had an FTP problem with our server that prohibited us from uploading for a few days.

It’s old but it’s a great cross section of talent, some of whom include Dr. Don Rose (KFRC) and Tony Taylor (WOR-FM)!

This is mid-60s WQXI, with lots of reverb, cheesy pop tunes and tons of PAMS jingles! Since we’ve become the de-facto WQXI historical site (WQXI is our most popular station according to stats), this one is for the fans!

Another on reel from Karl Phillip’s collection of goodies…

Bob Bolton from his show, Summer ’69.

You know, we’ve been hoping to collect WHBQ airchecks like this – but who’s complaining? Karl Phillips sent us a ton of reels and most are of WQXI Atlanta, so we may end up with the largest repository of ‘Quicksie’ airchecks in the world!

Simon Train (Trane?) was apparently the morning man during this period – late Summer 1969. I’d say he’s not typical of most morning guys, but perhaps it was typical for WQXI. Compare this with Gary McKee’s morning show on WQXI from 1973… any similarities?

As with our other Karl Phillips, this one was delivered on reel. As I did most of the work for this one away from my home studio, I haven’t had a chance to photograph the source reel – will fix that soon!

Tucked away in a box which contains about 15 reels generously donated earlier in 2005 was this 3″ reel of goodies. So, you wanna know what the typical FM station in a large market sounded like in ’73? Here’s a really GOOD representation of the greater Atlanta FM dial. I was expecting a bunch of Beautiful Music stations. Surprisingly, there’s plenty of contemporary formats on the Atlanta FM band at a time before it really began to compete with AM. In particular, listen for the WZGC “Z-93″ aircheck. Wasn’t “Z-93″ around in the 80s during the CHR wars?

The source tape is in good condition, but apparently the left channel has worn through a bit more than the right. Still, I’ve encoded this in stereo so that listeners can get a feel of what it was like to tune an old Marantz receiver around in the early 70s. Think back to your audiophile days…

Back to the 60s for some peachy radio from 1969! This one came in on reel and the audio is stunning – for an AM station! Scoped as always, WQXI is sporting PAMS jingles, some great tunes and tons of commercials. Check out the one for Burger King!

Fans of 60s Atlanta radio will surely remember Randy Robins as a great southern jock with lots of one-liners.

8/9/05 – News! – Randy has checked in and left some comments so be sure to read them. I fixed the misspelling of his last name – hey, I only go by what’s written on the tape!

Here’s an aircheck I’d forgotten about – and apparently never linked back to the archives after it’s initial posting.

Ross & Wilson went to New York after this gig and held down mornings on WABC and later Z100. In fact, they were the last ones to do mornings during the music era of WABC, and stayed for a time into the News Talk era. Anyway, that’s what they did in New York.

On this all-too-short aircheck, Ross Brittain is solo – Wilson is out for some reason. Sure wish we had more of this station. By the way, this is our first bona-fide Atlanta area aircheck.