In the days leading up to Christmas 1987, I drove from Los Angeles to New Jersey — my only coast-to-coast road trip so far. This year, I went back to listen to the airchecks. The first two days of that trip, covering Phoenix; Tucson, Ariz.; and El Paso, Texas, comprised part 1 of this article. Here’s the trip from Dallas to Princeton, N.J., also including some Delaware Valley radio I taped upon my arrival.
Radio road trips were the best way at the time to really hear programming trends. In 1987, I heard more engagement and localism than I hear now. But I also heard a lot of cloning from market to market, even in those pre-consolidation days. Listening back, I was surprised how many liner cards — the longer positioning statements read verbatim by DJs — I still heard, although most of them were conversation-starters, not entire breaks. The liner cards weren’t just on AC radio; there were also a lot of them on Urban Contemporary, whose most successful consultant at the moment was AC programmer Don Kelly.
Top 40-radio imaging was also evolving in 1987. The new more aggressive style of imaging typified by “lock it in and rip the knob off” was supplanting the “serving the universe from the top of the Empire State Building” bigness of the previous several years. Many of the Top 40s I heard used elements of both. Some threw in liner cards as well. WYHY (Y107) Nashville was the best of the aggressive CHR model that owner Jacor would refine a few years later on WFLZ (The Power Pig) Tampa. I didn’t tape Y107 — it was raining and the traffic was heavier that afternoon — but I remember it as best of trip.
The last leg of the trip, up I-81, took me past a half-dozen successful CHR stations that weren’t aggressive-sounding at all, from WQUT Johnson City, Tenn., to WRFY (Y102) Reading, Pa., to WPST Trenton, N.J. I liked hot-sounding radio stations, but I also liked these stations, where I could hear the pop/rock songs that weren’t being played in the big markets, and maybe some unusual oldies. Forgive me for dwelling on the unusual oldies in these write-ups, but they’re the fun of going on radio road trips for me, still.
There were also excited references in various formats to songs being played on “Digital Compact Disc” — already a five-year-old technology, but one that had just been installed in the station where I did weekends before moving east. There were also more names I recognized on the second half of the road trip, ending with one particularly surprising discovery.
KHYI (Y95) Dallas was the most sonically aggressive CHR in America when it launched a year earlier under Buzz Bennett and Mark Driscoll with the secondary handle “Gladiator Radio.” On this trip, it was toned down, which was not to say soft. The songs were still noticeably sped-up. The current cash-call jackpot was $40,909. Future KJYO (KJ103) Oklahoma City morning man Ronnie Rocket was filling-in on overnights for another familiar name, Supersnake. Y95’s music had bordered on Urban in its early days; now it was more mainstream pop.
Rival KEGL had gone “Rock 40.” “The rock ’n’ roll Eagle” was playing “Time Stand Still” by Rush, but also Kenny Loggins’s “Celebrate Me Home” because it was Christmas week. KEGL’s Christi Evans had the only piece of celebrity gossip I encountered on these tapes, and the most prescient line, “This is a scary thought … Woody Allen now has a child.” (That night she was riffing on that child being named after Satchel Paige; now he’s journalist Ronan Farrow.) Perhaps KEGL was rocking harder because of …
KZRK (Z-Rock) Dallas – Los Angeles had its own hard-rock outlet, KNAC. KZRK was the flagship of Satellite Music Network’s syndicated Z-Rock format, which attempted to make hard-rock scalable for markets that wouldn’t otherwise have it. The artist IDs I heard were from Lars Ulrich and Bruce Dickinson. The music was Savatage and Grim Reaper. The presentation was less aggressive than most Active Rock stations now. “That’s ‘Rock You to Hell,’” said Z-Rock’s Pat Dawsey, very matter-of-factly. He was also encouraging listeners to sign up for a “Phone Call from Hell” from the morning show, by sending in a postcard.
KKDA-FM (K104) Dallas was regarded by many as the best Urban outlet in the Country in the late ’80s. I taped it at night, and then again to hear Tom Joyner in the Morning. Joyner was already heard on afternoons on WGCI-FM Chicago, but he was indeed the hardest-working man on the radio here. There was an All My Children update. There were school-lunch menus. There was a bit with morning-show members teasing Joyner about whether he really liked “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa, the hardest hip-hop record to make it to Urban and CHR thus far. Joyner claimed it was the No. 1 song on his “hope tape” — (played at night in hopes of sparking romance) — replacing “Let Me Touch You” by the O’Jays.
KZOU (Zoo 98) Little Rock, Ark. – One of CHR’s most aggressive stations in that era under PD Jerry Lousteau, although the two songs that stuck out were holiday songs. One was “Christmas Time Without You” by soap opera star Michael Damien, not yet broken through with “Rock On.” The other was the first taped evidence of “Last Christmas” by Wham. I can’t imagine that I had actually avoided Whamageddon until that moment, although nobody was trying to avoid that song yet in year three.
WMC-FM (FM100) Memphis – WZXR’s more aggressive version of CHR had been gone about a year, leaving FM100 alone to cold-segue from “Catch Me I’m Falling” by Pretty Poison to “I Go Crazy” by Paul Davis. The night host I heard was Harry Nelson, later the PD/morning host of Adult R&B WRBO. The station was also teasing an upcoming New Year’s Eve broadcast.
WHRK (K97) Memphis – Legendary K97 was also calling itself “Electric 97” and, like many R&B outlets of the time, playing a lot of pop titles. Most Urban stations in late ’87 played “We’ll Be Together” by Sting. K97 was playing “Hazy Shade of Winter” by the Bangles. It also had very CHR-style station imaging, including one that declared the station “a fire you can’t put out.” Like KVIL, K97 also had an impressive holiday prize package, this one in conjunction with the Mall of Memphis.
KRNB (Magic 101) Memphis – “Hot and exciting Magic 101” was playing “30 minutes of continuous strong songs” without K97’s crossover titles. It was, however, using “lock it in and tear your knob off.” (It was also the first station on the tapes playing the Temptations’ “Silent Night” — R&B radio’s biggest holiday song.) Another Memphis legend, Johnnie Walker, was on the way for overnights. The night jock’s evening sign-off ended with, “I promise you: We’ll make it.”
WDIA Memphis – In 1987, WDIA was one of a handful of stations already doing what WVAZ (V103) Chicago would help crystalize as “Urban AC” a year later. Bobby O’Jay, who passed away in May, was already PD/mornings. Talk host Beverly Johnson was in middays; her guest that day was an attorney. There were ’70s R&B twin-spins from the Spinners and Joe Simon. But there were also currents and the “Southern Soul” that remains vital in the region to this day.
WDIA had the classic sound of the R&B radio I’d grown up with a decade earlier. Yet, it also had a through-line with the station I revisited in 2020 to hear how it was handling the pandemic. That Christmas Eve, O’Jay had advice as well for anybody experiencing a hard year: “This can’t last forever, and today and tomorrow will be over soon. In 1988, just go for it.” Then, he announced that he would be back on Christmas morning “just because I want to be with you.”
WQUT vs. WZXY Johnson City, Tenn. – As the weather and traffic got worse, Day 4 took me only from Memphis to the Tri-Cities. WQUT remained quirky and rock-leaning through CHR’s changes, eventually segueing to Classic Rock. Here it’s playing Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart” into Heart’s “Crazy on You,” and Kiss’s “Heaven’s on Fire” into Bourgeois Tagg, “I Don’t Mind at All.” The University of Tennessee is in the Peach Bowl and WQUT is giving away tickets. WZXY calls itself “continuous hot hits.” It’s more current than WQUT, but when I hear it it’s not much hotter presentationally.
WXLK (K92) Roanoke, Va. – At a time when Oldies was just starting to explode on FM, an adult-leaning CHR could still get away with “lunchtime at the oldies,” so the first two songs I heard were “Born to Be Wild” and “The Letter.” One of the sweepers was a play on an old advertising slogan, “You expect more from Virginia’s Music Station … and you get it!”
WNNK (Wink 104) Harrisburg, Pa. – The jock was Rick Mitchell, on the air for PD and station legend Bruce Bond. Wink would eventually segue to Hot AC as the CHR format became more extreme, but even in 1987, it was playing both “Evil Woman” by Electric Light Orchestra and then-current R&B crossover “Criticize” by Alexander O’Neal. Before Mitchell left the air, he put on Mannheim Steamroller’s “Silent Night” as a music bed and shared his holiday thank-you message: “If one of us can put the smile back on your face, then we’ve done our job.”
WIOQ (Solid Gold 102) vs. WOGL Philadelphia – My biggest week as the newly minted Oldies editor of Radio & Records had been when both Top 40 WCAU and Soft AOR WIOQ switched format at the same time just before I left. WOGL had the credentials (and the jingles) of format flagship WCBS-FM New York as its sister station, but its music was a little softer and older than WIOQ. But a year or so later, Q102 was Top 40 and the host I heard, Tommy McCarthy, was to become a WOGL fixture.
Here’s WIOQ on Dec. 26:
- Animals, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
- Jimmy Ruffin, “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”
- Al Green, “Call Me (Come Back Home)”
- Maurice Williams & Zodiacs, “Stay”
- Brook Benton, “It’s Just a Matter of Time”
- Tommy James & Shondells, “Hanky Panky”
- Ernie K-Doe, “Mother-in-Law”
- Earth, Wind & Fire, “Sing a Song”
- Supremes, “I Hear a Symphony”
- Kinks, “A Well Respected Man”
- Crystals, “Da Doo Ron Ron”
- Yardbirds, “Shapes of Things”
- Gladys Knight & Pips, “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”
And here’s WOGL:
- Temptations, “Cloud Nine”
- Every Mother’s Son, “Come On Down to My Boat”
- Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”
- 5th Dimension, “Stoned Soul Picnic”
- New Seekers, “Georgy Girl”
- People, “I Love You”
- Connie Stevens, “16 Reasons”
- Roger Miller, “Dang Me”
- Marvin Gaye, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)”
- Jackie Wilson, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”
- Del-Vikings, “Come Go With Me”
- Chicago, “Color My World”
- Beatles, “All My Lovin’”
- Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”
- Newbeats, “Bread and Butter”
WSNI Philadelphia – Mainstream AC meant something different in 1987. WSNI (not called Sunny at that moment) was AC in texture, but heavily current and recent gold. Like a lot of stations I heard on that trip, there were liner cards — e.g., “consistently more music and much more fun” — but Bob Newman was using them as conversation-starters, not entire breaks. The sweeps were “music sunbursts.”
WUSL (Power 99) Philadelphia – Already established by that time as one of the Urban format’s great stations, Power’s presentation also feels very clean/AC when I listen now. Some of that was probably a function of a former AC programmer, Don Kelly, who gave Urban radio a lot of its structure in the mid-to-late ’80s. (One liner describes Power as “the station you made famous.”) There was, however, a very big-sounding promo — the 1987 contest recap — a trip to Australia and four cars had been just a few of the previous year’s prizes, along with “enough movie and concert tickets to fill the Spectrum.”
WPST Trenton, N.J. – Even in CHR’s “rip the knob off” era, WPST remained successfully low-key and conversational, as it was on this aircheck of part-timer Gene Lanzoni. (PD Tom Cunningham had just replaced Tom Taylor.) The music was always different too — bordering on what we’d now call Rock AC. Another unusual touch here was the promo for “Sexually Speaking” host Dr. Ruth Westheimer, heard on Sunday nights. Here’s the music monitor:
- Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
- U2, “In God’s Country”
- New Order, “True Faith”
- Robert Palmer, “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On”
- Prince, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”
- Eric Carmen, “Hungry Eyes”
- Fleetwood Mac, “Everywhere”
- Elton John, “Candle in the Wind”
- Robbie Robertson, “Sweet Fire of Love”
- Heart, “There’s the Girl”
WPRB Princeton, N.J. – When I was in 10th grade, Princeton University’s WPRB used to let me raid its promo singles, since few of them were relevant to its college AOR format. In late 1987, it was Alternative and seemed far to the left of what I was about to encounter at WDRE/WLIR, the station I was driving East to work for. WPRB’s host was playing the early punk/industrial band Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel. The host noted it was a return to form for the band also known as Foetus, after two albums that disappointed him.
Now, I realize that WPRB wasn’t that much edgier than the commercial outlet to which I was headed — it also played 10,000 Maniacs, Pretenders, Don Dixon, UB40, and the Smiths on this aircheck — it’s just that no two Alternative stations sounded the same in 1987. WPRB’s imaging was very mainstream, given that night’s music (“blasting all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania”).
It’s was also apparent now that the DJ I heard, whose name sounded like Scott Wolf (or Wolb? Woll?) was already pretty good at talking on the radio. That’s because he was an 18-year-old Scott Lowe, soon to be known for helping bring Alternative music to WPST, and more recently as the host of Audacy’s Postmodern, heard on New York’s Alt 92.3 until its recent format change. (I’m now guessing that other DJs not identified or recognized on these tapes might have similar stories.)
This story comes full circle in a number of ways. On Christmas Day this year, Lowe was hosting his annual holiday show on New Jersey’s Felician Radio. WPRB had its own holiday marathon from Jon Solomon, who began his Christmas tradition there a year later. But here’s what I heard in 1987.
The last real Christmas radio road trip I made was in 2015. Out of consideration for those in the car with me, the listening was mostly to SiriusXM. But I staged a virtual radio road trip from Miami to New York two years later. What are your radio road trip memories?
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com