**LISTENING OPTIONS FOLLOW DESCRIPTION BELOW**
…don’t bring any kind of fire water into the city!
Salvaged from my personal collection, here’s Mike DeM’ambro on a somewhat subdued WVBF toward the end of the ‘F-105’ era.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and WVBF was in the waning days of Top 40 before going what would be VERY soft AC within a year. Still, listen for all the hits as a Boston legend rang in 1981!
Most notable on this aircheck, jingles which hadn’t been used on WVBF since about 1977. Someone said that this, “New England Listens to F-105” jingle theme was created by Heller. Maybe someone can give us a bit of insight. Thematic jingles. of course, were nothing new to Boston area stations. These might have been put on the air in response to 98.5 WROR‘s legendary “I’d Rather Be In Boston” jingle series… jingles which literally got requested more than songs!
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
This short aircheck was taken from an orange labelled, Scotch-brand cassette that my father had purchased around 1976 for dictation. Dad was in management at a tool manufacturing company and had a need for it. I ended up with the few cassettes dad owned because by this time, he had no need (or interest) in cassette recording. (Dad never could understand my obsession with recording radio stations). By this time, I owned a (cheap) stereo system that had a stereo cassette deck integrated into an AM/FM receiver. I can’t remember the brand name, only that I purchased it at a place called Mars Bargainland USA. Was that a known chain store outside of Massachusetts? Or anywhere in New England?
When I launched this website back in 2002, the original audio format was Real Audio. At the time, the other two aircheck sites already on the web (ReelRadio and Rock Radio Scrapbook) were also using the Real Player format, as it was the only way to encode for streaming over dialup connections. But, early on, I decided that we would have to move on to higher quality recordings. By 2006, I had converted all of our existing airchecks from ’02-’06 to mp3 from Real. The problem was, anything that had not originally been mastered to .wav or .mp3 would end up having to either be re-mastered from the source tape to a new master, or re-mastered into a low-quality mp3 of the same bitrate as the Real Audio file. This ended up being the latter, because the source cassette broke soon after creating the Real Audio file before I could create a high quality master and no longer exists.
Compare this aircheck, to THIS ONE featuring Jo Jo Kincaid from nearly two years earlier. WVBF was as close to a hot CHR (before the term existed) as one could get on FM at that time. And that was the legacy of Fairbanks’ WVBF – a true rocker which, had FM taken off a bit earlier, would have likely destroyed crosstown 68 WRKO.
LISTENING OPTIONS
The original ‘master’ copy converted from Real Player is UNSCOPED and you can listen by clicking the wavform below.
This is disappointingly short in it’s telescoped form, but you may view this ‘scoped from our Official Airchexx YouTube Channel below.
I’d have to guess that these jingles are from Heller, who usually did the jingles for Fairbanks’ stations.
This is a nice sounding aircheck. In December of 1981, I just completed basic training for the Navy in San Diego, Ca. I used to listen to the “mighty six ninety out of Mexico. Anthony D. Jordan, Sacramento, Ca.
The jingles are definitely Heller, but not the “strange” ones they were using in the seventies. I’ve got a great collection of them, such as “electronic mama”, “I am sound”, etc. Some of them were quite bizarre, especially after doing a little weed back in the day.
Where is Mike Demambro now?