Somehow, this airbrushed photo and straight from the skimmer machine recording escaped my attention all these years, only to reappear recently as I was going over a CD I thought contained a different set of historic airchecks. Here’s the Young & Elder show from the early Summer of 2003. At this point in the evolution of the Kix 106 morning show, Young and Elder were a fairly recent addition – although, I seem to remember Capt. Pat telling me once that these guys had been at Kix previous to the Andy and Debbie Kix 106 “Breakfast Club” show. Fact, or a figment of my aging imagination. Well, someone out there knows for sure.
I’ll describe this one from memory.
This begins in the 5:00 hour. Brian and Jay’s first bit has to do with a story about Shelby County cracking down on homeowners who haven’t kept up with their pools, and allow standing water to breed mosquitoes. As it happens, a story about West Nile Virus carrying mosquitoes leads my first newscast about 10 minutes into this aircheck. Lots of contesting going on, plenty of callers, lots of snarky comments from Captain Pat Adams… and his traffic reports. Oh, let’s just stop here and mention that Capt. Pat really WAS a retired Police Captain, who early on in his career, flew a helicopter and did traffic reports for the old WMC 790, and presumably, other radio stations in Memphis, alongside his police duties. So, he was the real deal.
Want a really good laugh? Listen to the full recording of Kenny Chesney’s “Big Star”. Left that way for but one reason… Brian Elder ran the board for every show and at this particular point, had the monitor turned down and forgot to turn off the studio mics. You can hear all of us talking underneath the song, but where it gets really funny, about halfway through, Brian takes a call who gives the CORRECT answer to that hour’s question… except there was no contest! No harm was done however as Brian did the right thing. I’ll leave it to you to listen and understand.
This is probably the cleanest recording (so far) that we have of Kix 106. I haven’t posted any in many years. This one brought back a flood of good memories. If you’re from Memphis or lived there back then… it surely will for you as well.
Features one complete Steve West newscast. Steve West. A news anchor. Who knew? (Jack Parnell did! But that’s a whole different story.)
Oh… and the ‘little’ staff picture of us? It’s that size because I screenshot it from the Kix 106 website back in 2003. I never did get an original portrait from the station photographer.
