Contributor Daniel Coulombe writes:
Bobby Day has worked a number of Canadian cities and major radio top-40
stations like CFTR at Toronto. Here’s a great aircheck from March 1979.
Bobby’s first airshift at 13CFRW in Winnipeg Mn. Here – he works the 1 am –
4 am shift trying best he can to learn the board and get comfortable with
the format. The result makes for funny radio. Al Stewart (Al Gravelle) is
in the background helping him out best he can. We can hear Al on Solid Gold
Saturday’s on CJAD 800 in Montreal
**AND NOW THIS MESSAGE**
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It took a Canadian aircheck to put me in an absolutly fantastic mood this morning! This rocks – and for so many reasons, among them, the rememberance that back in the day, an aspiring jock could come into a station, a manager might see a spark of talent and put the guy (or girl) on and let him make mistakes. Radio consultant and historian (and incidently, the person who discovered the rock band Rush) Donna Halper, recently contributed to piece written by Randy Dotinga in, of all places, the Christian Science Monitor, where she notes the rapid decline of local radio jobs, and in the absence of such jobs, where will upcoming talent break into the business? Ironically, Dotinga was fired from HIS Clear Channel Job a few days after this article published.
This aircheck isn’t about today’s bad times, its a funny, REALLY FUNNY look back at an awfully good time when an aspiring jock was encouraged to be himself, make a mistake and just laugh. Because everyone else in the room and the audience surely was… and it made great radio. Think this isn’t funny? The last word you hear at the end of this aircheck is…… oops!
At that time, I worked at CFRW as sports director (Jeff Murray). Fun to hear this. Curious to know where you got it? Do you have anymore?
Jeff, this CFRW aircheck was submitted to the site by my friend and collegue Daniel Coulombe in Sherbrooke, Quebec. He either knew someone there or recorded it himself. I don’t have any other airchecks of CFRW at present, although I can look at the bins – I have hundreds of tapes awaiting encoding. I might contact Daniel and see if he has anything else of that station. Thanks for checking in!
Hi Steve,
I just recently came across some cassettes with airchecks that I have had since the 70’s. I have just begin to go through them. CFRW Winnipeg, CFTR Toronto, CKLW Windsor-Detroit and a few others. You interested in having them? It’ll take ma while to go through them, but if you are, we can find a way to get to them to you.
Jeff
Hi Jeff, of course I’d love to have them for the site. The more to share with the world the better! Email me – steve@airchexx.com