From the heyday of WABC, here’s a GREAT aircheck of Bruce Morrow when he was a teen jock. Right off we hear Brucie’s custom jingle recorded by the Four Seasons. You’ll love the classic commercials, like Coca-Cola recorded by Freddie and the Dreamers, and more! Dan Ingram is the voice for WABC’s music promos.. and listen to how young he sounds!
WABC is calling themselves ‘Go Go Radio’ at this point in time. Listen as Cousin Brucie announces that Ron Lundy is in at Midnight on this particular night. Lundy came to WABC from St. Louis’ WIL, and somehow I thought he got to WABC later than 1965 but apparently not. A bit later, a Dan Ingram voiced promo saying that Ron Lundy is the brand new All American overnight jock. That’s the first time I ever heard that. And just to confuse you, Brucie announces that Chuck Leonard will be in at 11pm. What kind of schedule did they have back then??
WABC’s weekly song positions come from the All American Sound Survey. And… the legendary WABC Chime jingle is dismembered… the CHIME plays by itself!
The audio quality is quite good, although not quite CD quality since there is some tape hiss present, and there’s a bit of gurgle in the recording that I can’t get out while mastering. As always, this is telescoped, so an original 30 minute reel is condensed down to 11 minutes.
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“And just to confuse you, Brucie announces that Chuck Leonard will be in at 11pm. What kind of schedule did they have back then??”
They had the ever-cautious tokenism kind-of-schedule back then. WABC was the networks golden goose, and they weren’t about to take any chances with their primarily white audience. The hiring of WWRL’s (Soul 16) Chuck Leonard was actually considered “bold” back then.
BTW,I haven’t heard the 1965 summer drought jingle in ages. Thanks for the memories!
Either this aircheck was either recorded off the board or, if WABC-FM (now Hot AC-formatted WPLJ) had its Broadway show-tunes format at that time, was broadcast over that station during its AM-simulcast dayparts. Notice the lack of WABC (-AM)’S trademark reverb. For some reason, the reverb on WABC-AM was not on its FM simulcast.
As for the WABC chime jingle being “dismembered,” the part where the girls sang “Dubba you A-B-C” was part of a PAMS jingle that was released circa fall 1965 that went, “The weaa-ther…(spoken) iiIIS *IN*! (horn section hit) (the female jingle singers resume singing) Dubba you A-B-C.” In ’66 if not the end of ’65, the last part of that jingle was added to the chime (which, by the way, was itself introduced in the fall of 1963, concurrent with the WABC jocks being collectively dubbed the “All Americans”).
Almost–but not quite, David–the actual “WABC”(in the Chime Time jingle) sung by the gals was from the “audition” cut where the “Is In” was SUNG–NOT the actual “air” cut–in which “Is In” was SPOKEN.