Over and Over

I did something on the radio yesterday I haven’t done in donkey’s years—I played the same song twice on the same radio show.

Although I’ve been on Magic 98 for a year now, I’m on mostly during weekend specialty shows devoted to the 70s and 80s, where nothing repeats. And when I work during the week, the station doesn’t repeat songs between 9AM and 5PM, and the list of current hits is pretty small anyhow. Before that, my last two jobs were on classic-rock formats, which tend to beat the hell out of songs one day at a time, but not to repeat them within the confines of a single five- or six-hour shift. At my last full-time gig, in the early 90s, we didn’t repeat songs very often either. We ran a satellite-delivered format most of the time; its list of current hits was very short. (It stayed on them forever, too. If I’m recalling correctly, “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette was in current rotation for nearly a year.) I might have heard one or two songs twice in the course of a normal workday, but since my airshift was only three hours long, I’d never play a song twice. (Except for that day I played “Starting All Over Again” by Hall and Oates twice back to back because I liked it so much.)

But when I was a little baby disc jockey in Dubuque—a job I got 30 years ago this spring—we repeated stuff a lot. For a stretch in those years, I was on the air weekend nights from six to midnight, and over the course of those shifts, we’d play the 10 hottest songs on the playlist three times each. Much of the rest of the top 30 would get on twice per night. But even a two-hour rotation for the hottest hits isn’t the tightest one I know of. In the 70s, some top 40 stations (WLS was one) would play a few of their top hits on a  75-minute rotation, and a few others every 90 minutes. But at least these frequent repeats were balanced by a selection of oldies and recurrents. When the Hot Hits format was launched in the early 80s, some of those stations played only two dozen songs in all, and kept playing them over and over. You’ll have to tell me what’s standard in the Top 40 biz today, if you know.

If I’m recalling a hallway conversation correctly, the hip-hop station in our group was playing only two dozen songs in all shortly after its launch a couple of years ago. (It may be playing more now, but I dunno.) Some new stations have chosen the strategy of playing a tight rotation of extremely strong songs as a way of establishing their identity. Years ago, WXXQ in Freeport relaunched itself as an album-rock station as I started my summer job there, and did so by playing “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird,” and other classic-rock staples like they were current hits, repeating them every five or six hours. (It drove the jocks nuts.)

I am not saying repetition is a bad thing. On the contrary, if you’re a station whose identity involves playing the hits, then you ought to play the hits. And there’s this: I’m convinced that the record charts wouldn’t have become the calendar of my life if the songs hadn’t been hammered into my head over and over every day for weeks or months at a time. And without that, who would I be?

At WNEW.com: a brief history of some famous band names.

“Again and Again and Again”/Paul McCartney and Wings (lo-fi mp3; buy the mp3 album here)
“Over and Over”/Delaney and Bonnie and Friends (buy it here)