This could be referred to as the beginning of the end for WABC as a music station. We’ll post a lengthy explanation of this event at a later date because it will take up too much space here. In essence, what happened was that the new Program Director, Al Brady, was forced to make drastic changes on the air at WABC after WKTU 92 launched it’s all Disco format earlier in the year, and beat ABC for the number 1 position. WABC had been number one since the 60s, and corporate wasn’t used to having to play second fiddle.
What you hear in this aircheck, is the first day of broadcasting after the mass firings. Let go were Harry Harrison (mornings), George Michael (evenings) and Chuck Leonard (late nights). Dan Ingram’s first day in morning drive is heard, and so is the first night show by Howard Hoffman.
After this event, top 40 would continue into mid-1980, at which time the station flipped to full service AC, and Hoffman was dropped at night in favor of evening sports. The whole thing was finished in May 1982 – a story we’ll tell at a later time.
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Actually, Hoffman was shifted to overnights, where he stayed for about a year more.
They can call it a massacre, but I think WABC has a very good, ubeat music presentation here. Plenty of great hits and chart toppers on this air check. Big Dan, Ron Lundy, Howard Hoffman and the rest of the gang give their typical lively, ab libbed preforances, something that is greatly missing from today’s radio land scape.
77’s biggest mistake was going to talk, and the runner up mistake was going to a Gates transmitter which made the station sound like garbage and cut their range considerably.
I always thought that WABC was wrong to head in an AC direction in the first place in 1980. They should/could have taken the approach that sister station WLS did in Chicago and gone in a rock direction. AM music wasn’t and shouldn’t have been dead in 1980, it was too early. I maintain that had not management of most of the big AM rockers not been scared to death at that time, they could have squeezed 5-8 more years out of the format.
As for the transmitter… it wasn’t the Gates 50k that ruined the signal, but rather a number of things. First, in the 80s, FCC rulemakers decided that most daytimers should be able to broadcast 24/7, and the ones just outside WABC’s 750 mile protected contour (meaning there couldn’t be another station transmitting at night within 750 miles) were permitted to stay on. Previous to that, ‘clear channel’ meant just that… there were only two stations on 770 – WABC, and KOB (now KKOB) out in New Mexico. This had the effect of creating interference at the fringes of WABC’s nighttime signal where there wasn’t any. Then, as the 80s went on, more and more computers came online… and the noise floor began to rise substantially (even computer/electronic noise is propagated by skywave). In the 90s, the FCC reduced the bandwidth that AM stations transmit (the total ‘envelope’ of frequencies that the AM carrier occupies) to 9khz, thus severely reducing the sound quality, coupled with receiver manufacturers consistently sacrificing the audio characteristics of AM/FM radios to enhance the FM portion. Then, finally, along comes IBOC, or HD Radio as it’s known… add in all the digital hash on two adjacent channels, and you now have an AM band that’s virtually unlistenable.
Were it not for all the factors I just mentioned, music could have survived on AM just fine. AM stereo sounded better than FM, but you had to have a receiver… which is a different discussion altogether….
Has anyone noticed that, despite the aircheck dated in early December, 1979 there is not a single Christmas song played. Ah, the days when radio stations didn’t go all Christmas after Halloween!
AM Drive was NOT Ingram’s forte. Way too erudite at that hour. Like a good soldier, he sounded almost resigned to having to say “good morning” with any sincerity. To make matters worse, Al Brady replaced Ingram in afternoon drive with the late Bob Cruz, a great jock (and later voice of ABC News), but an Ingram sound-a-like clone. Like listeners wouldn’t notice something was awry at the once invincible Big Apple hit machine. And how cheesy is the Ingram drop-in promo reminding each of the jocks (as if he’s talking to them live) about his move to AM Drive.