Station: 1400 KRCQ Indio, California
Format: Top 40
Branded: “14Q”
Featured Air Personalities: Various
Contributor: Big Apple Airchecks
Airchexx Entry: 1,550
14Q at Six Forty One with Ron Young, My Request Lines are now open...
Curator’s Notes:
This starts with the sign on announcement and ends with the sign off… and that’s another thing you never hear today! This blows by pretty fast. Morning (and presumably, afternoon man) Ron Young is heard doing a few breaks and even a live PSA they called a “Q-Tip” (how original). Then there is a female jock who doesn’t identify herself but who does the night show right up until sign off. This is AM radio that I remember so well, and as the 70s gave way to the 80s, this type of simple, play the hit music and take requests AM radio style went out of vogue very quickly as FM stations took what little audience these stations had.
Interestingly enough, this station is an iHeart talker these days with the same Rush, Hannity, etc fare heard all over the AM dial. The KRCQ call letters are now in use on a Country station in Minnesota. It was so small, we can’t even find a logo from this station’s pop music era.
Night female jock gives her name once as Lady J…
This definitely reminds me of the back woods AM stations of years ago. They were hard to find here in the NYC area and usually required a good antenna and quiet evening without thunderstorms to seek them out.
Let’s see here—an audience pre-occupied with FM? Not in Indio/Palm Springs in early 1978 (first time the jock cracks the mic, he does a PSA for an event the weekend of January 20, 21 and 22)….the FMs there (maybe four?) were beautiful music. L.A. FM couldn’t get past Mt. San Jacinto.
This was actually one station in a two-station Top 40 battle in the market. The other was KDES (AM 920), which was the big dog with 5,000 watts to KRCQ’s 1,000. They’d been going at it since the late 50s or early 60s, with KRCQ using the call letters KREO until 1976 and a re-positioning to “14Q” under the KRCQ calls. They went Spanish in ’76.
God Bless George Junak for actually listening to the aircheck and hearing the female jock identify herself. “Lady Jay” bailed out of Palm Springs for KKBC-FM in Carson City, Nevada a year or two after this was recorded and has been in Northern Nevada since. She did two years in mornings at the old KOLO-AM in the early-mid eighties, went into radio sales in the 90s and was the PD of Reno’s smooth jazz station from 2000-2008. She now has a streaming station: //ladyjayzstream.com/
And all that took roughly seven minutes with Google.
I actually listened to the aircheck as I do all that I post. I do have concentration issues, however, which I won’t go into here. Not making excuses, mind you, just trying to convey that I have things going on that make me prone to miss some important details. That’s why I throw it out to you guys to add in the stuff I miss.
Okay. This one’s fixed.
Lady J is Jay Davis and yes she works up in the Reno/Tahoe area. She was great! I worked at the station starting in 1975/76 thru 1980 just after they dropped Top 40 for Country. Ron “Q Kid” Henderson. I started when I was 15
I came to the Coachella Valley in late 1982 to engineer at the AM/FM combo, KCHV/KVIM in Coachella. I also did some work at KRCQ which was Spanish at that time and run by Terry Ayers who was huge back at KHJ.