What follows is all that could be salvaged from two sides of a C-60 cassette featuring music from the first day of the then-new AC format at 1050 CHUM. We don’t feature the music on this website, but endeavor to bring you as much of the radio station’s imaging, the ‘sound between the records’, so to speak.
What happened here is, the person who recorded this obviously was recording for the music, and in a twist of opposites of what we do at airchexx, cut out all the format items in between these songs, except for the two instances you hear in this under one minute recording.
Wikipedia has a page dedicated to 1050 CHUM. The format change to this is explained as follows:
By the mid-1980s, CHUM had lost ground in the Toronto ratings to competitor Top 40 station CFTR and FM-based music stations. On June 6, 1986, at 3 PM, after the playing of Starship’s “We Built This City”, CHUM dropped its Top 40 format for a gold-based adult contemporary format (“Favourites of Yesterday and Today”). The first song after the relaunch was “Beginnings” by Chicago. The change also discontinued the CHUM Chart, which ended the week of June 14, 1986 with Madonna’s “Live to Tell” as the final Number 1 song.
What is not explained, and we’d enjoy hearing from our Canadian friends who know, is whether this format had jocks or was this ‘uninterrupted music’ just for the format day. Please comment below.
Hi Steve. This was a jockless, uninterrupted music sweep that lasted all weekend. The jocks began live again on Monday, June 9th.
Rock Radio Scrapbook has the format change along with a message from then program director, Terry Williams, about the change. After We Built This City, a montage was played of many of the big hits heard on 1050 CHUM through the years.
//rockradioscrapbook.ca/goodbye.html (1/4 of the way down the page)
The format change happened on a Friday afternoon, according to the link I posted above.
Hope this helps.
The “uninterrupted music” was temporary during the introduction of the new music format. When things returned to the ‘new’ normal, the jocks were back.
The delivery became very adult, many of the same jocks from that era stayed. Don Percey who I worked with in Winnipeg was brought in for mornings.
I wonder if anyone remembers the first hour of music after the relaunch?