Airchexx.com

From deep in the Airchexx vault comes this rare recording of Your Leeeeeader, Jackson Armstrong in a typical lightning fast performance on WKYC. The source tape is a little muddy and this was obviously recorded slightly outside of the local signal contour since some fading is heard, but otherwise this is a decent sounding recording that will harken you back to the good ole days of AM radio, PAMS jingles and jocks who had fan clubs!

Fig Newton… what’s in a name? Plenty, if you’re from northeast Ohio. This is a pretty good morning show, reminiscent of Gary McKee on WQXI Atlanta. But this is Cleveland and WGAR is in it’s last days as a Top 40 station. Indeed, by mid-1980 many of the big and medium AM music stations were dumping their formats for something a bit more adult-oriented, but here, WGAR is still playing the hits.

Fig is identified by one of our commenters as Dave Newton, who also was heard in the Cleveland market at WWWE (now WTAM) for a time.

Listen for Jam jingles used at the time at WLS… a GREAT sounding package for this station!

Brian & Joe bring in Cleveland’s Mayor (White?) for an interview on the occasion of his birthday. It’s a good recording featuring callers and some silliness. Thanks Robyn Watts for another great contribution!

The second of two perfect-quality, right off the air monitor airchecks of Chip Binder on WGAR courtesy of Joy Binder! This time from 1980, listen as Musicradio 1220 sounds essentially as it did in ’79, complete with reverb and all!

Be amazed realizing that Chip was an overnight guy… who today with that talent and voice would probably be holding down a top 10 morning drive gig with a partner. Why? Well, the obvious. Overnights almost everywhere today are either voicetracked, a satellite feed or jockless. And if there’s actually a live jock on the air, they usually sound horrible (apologies to all the overnight jocks out there, but hey, everybody starts somewhere, right?). But certainly almost nowhere does one hear an overnight jock with the professionalism heard on this 6 minute recording.

This is a good history lesson. You MUST listen, to hear what AM radio was just before it all came to an end. Great radio, from the Great Lakes region where there was so much of it before AM died.

This was emailed in a few weeks ago from Joy Binder! Chip Binder did overnights for a time on WGAR, but frankly, he’s so good I would have thought he was doing morning drive!

Here’s “Musicradio 1220″ in fine late-70s form, complete with reverb (just a touch) and a set of JAM WABC jingles to compliment the hits of the day. Unfortunately, even if this were unscoped, you wouldn’t hear much in the way of music since this 10 minutes of extremely crisp audio consist mainly of Chip and a couple of long, complete stopsets…. still, listen for the commercials, and realize that 1979 was a very LONG time ago indeed!

The unidentified jock in this clip sounds like he’s having a good time, on a show called the After Hours Joint. This is full of rock segues (scoped, of course), and includes a great legal ID… something WMMS was always famous for.

Of late we’ve been adding a lot of 90s to the site so now lets go way, way back to the dawn of Top 40 radio!

Pete Myers was one of those early screamer jocks who lived on excitement and had a passion for radio. But you have to understand the times. Radio stations had echo buttons they could push on their consoles to create eerie effects. There were jingles, but they were used infrequently. All the commercials were ‘acetate’ platters – records, in every sense of the word. There were few playlists, the DJs picked their own music, and Top 40 radio was literally feeling it’s way. This was in 1959. And “Mad Daddy”, as he was known, was one of those early pioneers who blazed a trail for others to follow.

Before WHK, Myers had worked at WJW on the other side of town previous to his WHK show (corrected information). WHK was the perfect home for Myers, but this day, he is doing his last show before moving on to New York City’s 1010 WINS.

Lots of echoes, screaming into the mic and even half of a WHK newscast complete with CRC tones and jingles. This aircheck is available nowhere else (at least that we know of).

The source tape is a bit muddy, so we had to do a bit of eq here… but there’s still some tape hiss making it through. But it IS 46 years old, after all…

A correction is in order here. This is another great aircheck courtesy of Big Apple Airchecks! Thanks again to Matt Seinberg for refreshing my *bad* memory !!

This is apparently Phil Gardner’s anniversary show, and judging from the outstanding audio quality, it might have been put out on vynl or something – either that or someone took exceptionally good care of their tape!

Between the jingles, the way Gardner talks over commercials and the music – this is a throwback to 60s style radio with 70s music and it’s all tightly scoped without so much as a pop. Your webmaster didn’t have to touch this other than convert it over to Real Audio!

At just over 6 minutes in length, there’s not much that can be said about this short aircheck, other than it was an AM Oldies station in 1986 – a time when most AM stations had already quit the music race. Still, it sounds good, with a little thunderstorm static on the signal and a lake weather advisory.

A trip back 19 years this Summer…

We don’t have many, but here’s a rare Urban offering from our Annonymous contributor collection. WZAK was, and perhaps still is (we gotta check) Cleveland’s Urban station. Notable partly because it was an early Urban station (they started popping up under the Urban category of radio stations perhaps as early as 1984…), and partly because at under 5 minutes long, its yet another QuickCheck.

Not many stations these days continue using the same call letters and slogan that they did 15 or 20 years ago. Here’s one that does.

When you think of infamous Cleveland radio, audio images of WMMS and 3WE come to mind. Well, here’s a station which was very popular through the years and remains a force in the market.

By the sounds of this aircheck, one could summize that Majic 105 did a little of everything… rightly so, apparently, since they had a killer live Oldies show and even Dick Orkin’s “Chicken Mania”.

Didn’t I hear that Orkin is going to revive Chicken Man? (Not that he doesn’t already make a fortue off the original)…

It’s only 5 minutes long but features two cool jocks… Tom Kent and Dave Collins. Unfortunately TK is only featured on the first break. Another from the archives rebuild.

Click HERE to Listen!

Much has been said of Don Imus’ so-called ‘exile’ to Cleveland. Probably all true. This aircheck is extremely rare. It’s the I-man’s last show on WHK before returning to WNBC and the shift that he still holds today on WFAN.

Click HERE to Listen!