Contributor David Varnell sent in about a half-dozen airchecks from the Mid-Atlantic region and this one, while short, piqued my curiocity.
WHVY first took to the air on 3/25/1991 and featured the format heard on this aircheck – mainly new, Alternative Rock music. The format had stiff competition from 99.1 WHFS, with it superior signal and deeply entrenched audience. Sometime after this recording, the call letters were changed to WXZL, while the format remained mainly currents, the Rock music shifted to Heavy Metal instead of Alternative. Sometime in 1994, the station changed call letters again, this time to WRNR – and these call letters and the ensuing AAA format would last for a while, in fact, it remains to this day (as of this writing).
Searching for a former DJ from WHVY named Karen Aylor. She also worked at Baltimore’s WLPL 92 Rock for a period of time.
Actually, you got that a bit backward. WHVY started as a heavy metal station, hence the call letters WHVY (originally on low-powered 96.7 in Dundalk). In December of ’92, they boosted their power and changed the call letters to WXZL, changing their positioning from “103.1 The Underground” to “Rock 103 XZL.” The music was still metal, but they quickly phased out the more ’80’s-centric stuff–far less hair-metal, a lot more stuff like Helmet, Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, etc. You would still hear plenty of the big names like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motley Crue or Ratt song, but I don’t think I ever heard the likes of Warrant or White Lion again after the Decmeber ’92 shift.
Well… honestly my memory isn’t quite what it used to be. Some of this I got from an online source, some from memory. I lived in Annapolis from 93-96 and “Rock 103” was there I THINK until 95, then they wrecked it in my opinion, as I was quite into the STP, Alice In Chains stuff. But we still had WIYY 98 Rock at that point. But at any rate, thank you for the update.
Will fm radio ever come back with another 24/7 hard rock and metal station.?