By 1987, WNBC had figured out that the audience actually increased when the station started playing a regular diet of Oldies. What had started as an experiment earlier in 1987…
...the "All-New WNBC" - Bob Pittman's mostly failed attempt to remove the expensive personalities and streamline the station down to a more music, FM-style approach.
There's probably never been a jock more suited to be on WABC around 1968-72 than Dan Taylor. Except that DT was a pre-teen in those years and even if he wasn't too young, he would have been mistaken as Dan Ingram's clone...
This includes just about every element that listeners loved about the Time Machine. The great music of the 60s, a GREAT jock (actually, THE jock who invented the Time Machine format), lots of interaction with listeners - phone bits are everywhere, and Big Jay's "Record Pig" segment. You just have to listen to understand it.
Gary Bridges was one of a large staff of known personalities, some of whom listeners had grown up with. Personalities such as Don Pardo (the voice of many of WNBC radio and television's promotions), Soupy Sales, who had been around in the 1950s and on television, Imus, who by this time was already an institution and the whole WNBC news department.
This is another in our series of AM-Stereo airchecks. WNBC used the Khan-Hazeltine AM Stereo system and while the transmitting plant itself was finely tuned and well-processed by NBC’s top-notch engineers, heard on a (then) modern, wideband AM Stereo receiver, this sounds BETTER than modern processed FM stations!