Running about 3 minutes, Courtesy of Contributor Steve Bleecker, here’s a short, clean, and well processed WRKO featuring Chip Hobart. I’m guessing the year 1974 here, since the tape came without the date on it. Could be ’73. Somebody knows.
WRKO is using their original jingle package. Sparingly. The Drake era was over, and it’s apparent that WRKO is playing a lot of album cuts. Strange, in a way, as the big thing happening (at least in Boston) on FM was Album Oriented Rock. WBCN at 104.1 was just emerging as a rocker, coming out of its Classical era. 94.5 WCOZ was “Cozy”, a Beautiful Music station playing orchestrated contemporary music without singers. WCOZ would famously go on into the world of AOR, and in 1978 Programmer John Sebastion would take the station all hard rock with the moniker “Kick Ass Rock and Roll”. There would be others. But here at this point in time, WRKO has the Top 40 audience AND the Rock audience pretty much to itself.
Chip Hobart sounds very comfortable in the format, if not laid back, in the style that many of the emerging, aforementioned AOR stations used. Its so strange to hear WRKO in this quasi-AOR approach to Top 40 that its sort of wierd. Certainly, most of the broadcast day was more up-tempo than this (and I’m guessing that this was at night, but again, no liner notes allude to date or time), and the jocks were world-class… even for 1974. The late Dale Dorman was doing wakeups and Dorman was anything but laid back!
I wish this was longer, but just over three minutes is all we have of Chip Hobart, and the WRKO of this era. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the little bit presented here in the interest of preservation of Radio History.
Any “Footage” of Chip Hobart is Rare…to say the Very least ! And, having known Chip from back in the day…thru’ these days on Facebook…he is not the kind to post anything of himself…just that kind of guy…he now does a Wednesday Internet Broadcast at 2:00 Eastern…I’ll check the name of the site, ‘n Get Right Back to You ! THANKS, Steve West !
musicheads.us
Based on airchecks I have heard, this is not from ’74. It might be as early as ’72 when Scotty Brink was programming. By 1974 Paul Drew was consulting.
I think this aircheck was from 1972, as Chip Hobart said Sunday, April 9. April 9 was Sunday that year. However, I did hear Bowie’s “Changes”, which charted it ’74, but it seems I read that it was released prior to ’74 as well. One other thing, at 0:35, John Kay did “I’m Movin’ On”, which was a cover of a Hank Snow (country) song from 1950.
Gary, “Changes” was released three times, although Wikipedia only acknowledges the first release in 1972. Second release was early ’74 and the third time was ’75, when it finally became a hit.
1973
It took me all of one minute (between listening to the first 30 seconds of the aircheck and another 30 seconds on Wikipedia) to determine the aircheck is from 1972. The first song is referenced as coming “from the new album Forgotten Songs and Unsung Heroes…” from John Kay, which according to Wikipedia came out in 1972.