October 11, 1969: The Wisconsin Badgers, riding a 23-game winless streak, get a late touchdown pass from Neil Graff to Randy Marks and beat Iowa 23-16. It’s the first win for the Badgers since the 1966 season finale, a streak eased only by a tie with Iowa in 1967.

November 23, 1974: The Badgers meet Minnesota in their traditional season finale. Wisconsin tailback Bill Marek rushes for 304 yards and five touchdowns as the Badgers destroy the Gophers, 49-14. The Badgers end the ‘74 season with seven wins and four losses, their first winning season since 1963.

I saw both of those games. They weren’t on TV, and I didn’t have a ticket—but they were on the radio, and that was enough.

Bob Miller was the play-by-play man who described the Iowa game. Two weeks later, I’d hear him call the tense final minutes of the game against Indiana, as Wisconsin fought to protect a two-point lead. I can hear him even now, repeating the score over and over again: “Wisconsin 36, Indiana 34.” Miller wasn’t long for Wisconsin sports after 1969. In 1973, he became the play-by-play voice of the National Hockey League’s Los Angeles Kings, a post he still holds today.

By 1974, my voice of the Badgers was Earl Gillespie, a Wisconsin sports legend who broadcast the Milwaukee Braves on radio from 1953 through 1963 before going into TV. By the 70s, he did Badger games on a statewide radio network, and his voice was as much a part of my youth as those of Larry Lujack, Fred Winston, and the rest of my Top 40 heroes. His color man was Ted Moore, who had a significant claim to fame of his own as the man at the mike during the Green Bay Packers’ glory years of the 1960s. Together, Gillespie and Moore provided the soundtrack for several years of autumn Saturdays.  Gillespie would say “First down for Bucky Badger!,” and introduce commercial breaks by saying, “Now before the next kickoff, listen to this.”

Those early 70s Saturdays had their own rhythm. Games almost always kicked off at 1:00. Around halftime, East Coast scores would come trickling in, from places like Harvard and Holy Cross. At halftime of home games, the broadcasters would always pause so the fans at home could hear the fans at the game sing Wisconsin’s traditional song, “Varsity.” And late in the season, the games would end as night began to fall. So it was on the day Marek blew up the Gophers—although his touchdown record has been tied, no Wisconsin running back has ever gone for more yards on a single day.

Not even Rufus “the Roadrunner” Ferguson, my first Badger hero. He almost did it, however, during the first Badger game I ever attended at Camp Randall Stadium, against Syracuse on September 23, 1972. He went for well over 200 yards rushing in a 31-7 win, and would have cracked 300 if a long touchdown run hadn’t been called back by penalty. It was the only time I ever saw him play—at least with my own eyes. The Badgers were never on television in those days, so all most fans knew of Ferguson came to us over the radio.

I’ve been a Wisconsin football season-ticket holder since 2004. One of my favorite memories from more recent seasons is from the day the Roadrunner came back to Madison. During a halftime ceremony in his honor, he broke out his famous touchdown dance, the Rufus Shuffle. The ovation threatened to shake the old stadium to the ground—a greater ovation, I think, than the one received by a more recent Badger hero, Ron Dayne, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1999. Or at least I think it was greater. Maybe it seemed greater to me because Ferguson was a hero to the 12-year-old me the way Dayne couldn’t have been to the me-pushing-40.

Some people say baseball is the best sport on the radio. They could be right. But when I think of my favorite radio sports broadcasts, they’re all football games.

Also: Today at Popdose, there’s another edition of One Day in Your Life.

“Sweet Thing”/Rufus (buy it here)
“Harlem Shuffle”/Foundations (this track seems to be out of print, although there’s a bunch of Foundations music here)

When the sales rep first handed the radio station’s rate card to the client, he burst out laughing. The rep sat there mortified, and her mortification got even worse when the client called to his partner in the outer office, “Come on in here! You’ve got to see this!” She thought they were laughing because the cost of the spots was too high. In fact, they were laughing because they’d come to town from Dallas, and they couldn’t believe how cheap it was to get on the radio in Macomb, Illinois.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Some relationships between radio stations and clients are just business. With this particular client, the bar in one of the local hotels, it was synergy. We were the lone Top-40 station in a college town, so they benefited from being on our air all the time; when they became the hottest party place in town as a result, we benefited from our association with them. They’d run a hefty schedule every week plugging whatever they were doing on the weekend. One of their most unusual promotions was called Pressure Night. Starting at 9:00, tap beer would be 25 cents, and the taps would continue to be 25 cents . . . until somebody used the restroom, then it was back to full price. (It would usually last about 20 minutes, and the person who broke the seal would usually be somebody who was clueless about the whole thing.)

Often, what the bar was doing on the weekend involved us. We’d frequently do a live broadcast from the place on Friday or Saturday nights, and the remote breaks always sounded great because it was clear on the air that the place was packed. Among those having the most fun: the radio crew. The bartenders were under orders to take good care of us, and during a postgame party one football Saturday, I realized around the midpoint of the broadcast that I’d had far too much to drink for somebody who had to be on the radio. On future remotes, I resolved to stick to diet soda until I was completely off the air.

On Halloween Night 1985, the weather was miserable. It had been raining all day, the wind was whistling, and the temperature was in the mid 40s. We weren’t expecting very many people to venture out on such an awful night, particularly in costume, yet venture they did. By 10:00, the bar was full and the party was raging. Even I was in costume that night, sort of. I’d bet a friend that the Chicago Cubs would finish ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1985; the loser of the bet had to be photographed in public wearing a T-shirt of the winner’s team. The Cardinals lost the World Series that season; the Cubs, after their miracle 1984, finished fourth. So there I was, in a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt and a mask of Bob Uecker, the former Cardinal-turned-broadcaster.

Somewhere in my archives I have a tape of the remote we did that night, and it sounds like the greatest blowout in the history of mankind. (This may have been before the institution of my no-drinking-on-remote rule.) At some point during the night, we learned that the other bars in town, some of which had promoted their Halloween events on our air, were dead. We had the only real party in town.

In 1985, radio was what I lived to do. The fact that I made practically no money doing it couldn’t have mattered less. When I was in a crowd with a mike and a set of headphones, where everybody knew who I was, it felt like the only thing in the world worth doing. It wouldn’t long before I’d begin to imagine that there were other things in the world worth doing, too. But on that rainy night, the radio station’s success felt like a personal triumph, and it was as intoxicating as anything the bartenders could have served me.

Here’s a song we probably played on the radio that night. If the DJ had played it in the bar, we’d have had ourselves a singalong.

Erratum: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is on ABC tonight. Yesterday’s post said it was on last night, because this is not a very good blog, really. But you ought to have the show on DVD anyhow.

Recommended Reading: Today at WNEW.com in Rock 101, just where the hell did “Monster Mash” come from, anyhow?

(Edited to add a link.)

What makes old record charts endlessly enchanting to me is how they can be viewed as a montage of people, places, and moments. Take the chart from WGRQ in Buffalo, New York, dated October 1, 1973:

2. “Heartbeat–It’s a Lovebeat”/DeFranco Family (holding at 2). What radio people call the “news sounder” is out of fashion today. (Not unlike radio news itself.) In days of yore, stations would play some kind of attention-getting, authoritative musical theme to signal a newscast. When I was working for WXXX (which is not its name), somebody hit upon the idea of using the opening seconds of “Heartbeat–It’s a Lovebeat” as the station’s news sounder. It’s not a bad idea—certainly not as bad as starting an especially lightweight teenage bubblegum record with it—it was just weird.

3. “We’re an American Band”/Grand Funk (down from 1). For a period of years starting in junior high, I was tight with a kid we’ll call Kyle, because that is not his name. We both dug this song a lot. We went through high school together, but attended separate colleges and drifted apart. We’d see each other now and then as the years passed, but we had little to say to one another. In the new millennium, he found his way to my political blog, and he left a comment one day saying he was a Republican, I was wrong about everything, and goodbye forever. In my pantheon of personal losses, it wasn’t an especially big one since we were lost to each other by then anyhow, but I’ve always wondered why he felt the need to slam the door so hard.

13. “China Grove”/Doobie Brothers (up from 17). Sometimes it takes a psychiatrist to explain the images conjured up by the songs we remember. Since I’m not a doctor, I can’t tell you precisely why I associate “China Grove” with the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor, but I do. (The Massacre was just one event in a month jammed with history. As I put it at Popdose last year, “Egypt and Israel brought the world to the brink of war, Richard Nixon went nose-to-nose with the Constitution only to blink first, and Cheech and Chong had a hit single.”)

17. “Summer (The First Time)”/Bobby Goldsboro (up from 20). Each year at the campus radio station, a new crop of freshmen would come aboard. We veterans were always interested in sizing up the new talent to see who’d be a good fit. One kid, whom we’ll call Chad because that is not his name, was too eager to get involved. One day, he was in the studio watching one of the veterans while she was on the air. Sensing she was coming to the end of a talk break, he helpfully reached over and switched on the turntable for her. She didn’t murder him, although that seemed to us like an act of extreme forebearance, and less than Chad deserved.

The kid was not without talent, but he chafed at format rules. “Summer (The First Time)” was his favorite song, and he would frequently play it during his shows, despite the fact that we were running a classic-rock format. It’s also said that he once got to work at his commercial radio job on a Sunday morning and couldn’t get the transmitter on.  Instead of calling the engineers, he went to the transmitter building and broke in to see if there was anything he could fix. My suspicion is that the story got embellished by the time I heard it, but I dunno—it sounds like something he would have done.

24. “Touch of Magic”/James Leroy (down from 14). I’ve got no personal story about this song, but what the hell. It was a big hit in Canada for Leroy, a singer/songwriter who once toured with the Stampeders (“Sweet City Woman”). While on the road, Leroy and one of the Stampeders started fooling around with dueling Wolfman Jack imitations. That ultimately resulted in the Stampeders’ version of “Hit the Road Jack,” which features the real Wolfman Jack—and which keeps the Stampeders from being a true one-hit wonder by virtue of its having made Number 40 for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1976. As for “Touch of Magic,” it’s another one for the “how-did-this-fail-to-chart-in-America?” file.

All my life, there’s a sound I’ve associated with early fall. It’s the trilling of the tree frog. I have never actually seen a tree frog—in fact, I don’t even know if the sound is really made by tree frogs, or if it comes from something else. But my mother always called them tree frogs, and that’s good enough for me. When we’d start to hear them, she’d say, “Six weeks till frost.” That wasn’t always true, of course, but it was usually close. The tree frogs would come out in mid-to-late July, and our typical first frost up here in southern Wisconsin comes during the last week of September.

Maybe it’s a consequence of the weird summer weather we’ve had, or global warming, or something else, but I haven’t heard any tree frogs yet this year. As a result, September has sneaked up on me. Last June, after summer had sneaked up on me, we took a look at summers past, one song at a time. So let’s try it again with fall, grabbing the Number 40 song from the Hot 100 on Labor Days past to see what they can tell us about the season to come.

1970: “All Right Now”/Free (eventual peak: #4, October 17). The fall of 1970 is where time begins for me, and this was the hardest-rockin’ thing on the radio when I first started listening. One of the memories it brings back is an an odd one. We’re on our way back from Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents’, I have cajoled my dad into turning on WLS while we drive home, and this is one of the first songs we hear. It’s not his cup of tea, but it’s definitely mine.

1974: “Can’t Get Enough”/Bad Company (eventual peak: #5, November 2). Sometime in the fall of 1974, I would discover FM radio, and switch my allegiance from WLS and WCFL to Madison’s Z104 and WACI from Freeport, Illinois. (I think I probably heard “Can’t Get Enough” for the first time on Z.) As a result, I would spend a lot of time that fall listening to my music on the big console stereo downstairs—better speakers—and would eventually retire the portable radio and record player I had in favor of my own stereo system.

1976: “Don’t Fear the Reaper”/Blue Oyster Cult (eventual peak: #12, November 6). That big console stereo was located in a little room on the front of our house that we called the sunporch. By 1976, it was equipped with a couple of comfortable chairs and upholstered with an unforgettable orange-and-yellow shag carpet. Although the console stereo and the shag carpeting are long gone, the sunporch is still one of the most pleasant rooms in the house I grew up in, although nobody spends much time there anymore.

1979: “Young Blood”/Rickie Lee Jones (peak position). My college radio station was under new management this fall. The program director and music director who had run the place during the first semester of the year had left school; the new guys installed an album-rock format lifted from a successful album-rocker in Milwaukee, where one of them had worked. I was paying close attention, and the semester wouldn’t be very far along before I decided I was going to run for program director in January.

1981: “The Night Owls”/Little River Band (eventual peak: #6, November 7). My term as program director was up in January 1981, and I didn’t go gracefully—I spent the next semester constantly criticizing everything the new regime did. During the summer, as one of the few students spending the whole summer at school, I anointed myself the de facto station PD—and found myself officially reappointed to the position that fall when the guy who had been elected in January quit. At the time, it seemed to me like a restoration of the natural order. In actuality, given the way I’d left, it was the most unlikely resurrection since the Resurrection.

(Speaking of resurrections, Echoes in the Wind will return to the Internets tomorrow. You can bookmark it here. A couple of our fellow bloggers have tried to pick up the slack during whiteray’s brief absence: AM, Then FM, and Any Major Dude With Half a Heart.)

Although I have played “All Right Now” 10,000 times on my own radio shows, it only sounds right to me in its remixed-and-shortened 45 version—which I don’t think I’ve ever played on the radio.

“All Right Now” (single version)/Free (buy it here)

A backstage pass is one of the most sought-after totems in rock—but it’s also one of the more overrated. You expect tables laden with food, liquor flowing freely, and dissipated rock stars cavorting with scantily clad groupies. Maybe that happens with acts like the Stones or Van Halen, but in my experience, backstage is mostly people milling around waiting for something to happen. It’s almost as dull waiting backstage for a concert to start as it is to wait out in the audience.

The most entertaining occurrence I ever saw backstage came at an REO Speedwagon show in 1992 or thereabouts, where I watched Kevin Cronin go off on some roadie over the brand of bottled water he’d been given. He said something like, “If you don’t get this shit right man, I’m not going on.” At the same show, REO’s road manager offered to trade me an REO hat for the one I was wearing, from Harry Caray’s restaurant in Chicago. Since I was going back to Chicago the next week anyhow, I took the deal. (I’ve still got the REO hat.)

My favorite backstage experience came with Jefferson Starship, also in the early 90s. Officially, the band was called Jefferson Starship: the Next Generation, and it featured original Jefferson Airplane alumni Paul Kantner, Jack Casady, and Papa John Creach. I spent a thoroughly pleasant half-hour just hanging with Kantner, Casady, and drummer Prairie Prince, who’d been in the Tubes. All the while I’m thinking how Kantner and Casady were practically present at the creation, San Francisco, 1967, the whole bit—but how remarkably normal they seemed in spite of it. I was there to introduce the band, as local DJs have done since the dawn of time. Whenever I’d done it before, I’d go out onstage, make my speech, come off, and the band would go on within a minute or two (or five, or 10). When I got ready to go out and introduce the Starship, however, Casady grabbed me by the sleeve and said, “No, wait . . . come out with us.” And so I did, taking the stage with the Starship just like I was one of them.

Over at Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas today, Tom discusses his experience interviewing Louie Perez of Los Lobos a few years back. When he mentioned how Perez looked “worn,” it reminded me of the time my radio station co-promoted a show featuring John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. I got to interview Cafferty backstage—”backstage” being the locker room of the basketball arena at Western Illinois University. The road manager took The Mrs. and me into the locker room, where Cafferty was dozing on one of those bolted-to-the-floor benches. He sat up, rubbed his face, and shook our hands, but before I could ask him a question, he asked me one: “Where am I?” He was neither drunk nor stoned, like many rock stars who have asked that question; it was clear that he’d gotten on the bus the night before and headed for the next town without worrying about where it was.

At the time of the show (January 1986), things were as good as they ever got for Cafferty and his band. They were about a year removed from the surprise success of “On the Dark Side” and other songs from the movie Eddie and the Cruisers, and were touring in support of Tough All Over, their latest album. The songs on the album are about working-class people looking for love and adventure on the streets of the Reagan-era city, lifted wholly from Bruce Springsteen in style and subject matter, at a moment when that was the best of all possible career moves. How good a move? Four songs from the album ended up making the singles charts; the most successful, “C-I-T-Y,” was on the radio this week in 1985.

“C-I-T-Y”/John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band (buy Tough All Over here)

I’m taking the day off today and letting some of my favorite bloggers do the heavy lifting instead.

–Any Major Dude With Half a Heart recognizes the greatness of early 70s soul.

–At Bloggerhythms, Charlie picks 10 lesser-known/underrated Beatles songs.

–Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas welcomes you to July 36th.

–SHHH/Peaceful breaks down the American Top 40 broadcast from July 26, 1980.

–The latest entry in the annals of dumb corporate marketing decisions: Radio Shack dropping “radio” from its name. At Inside Music Media, Jerry Del Colliano finds a parallel in the radio industry itself.

–From Cracked, “Seven Songs From Your Grandpa’s Day That Would Make Eminem Blush.” For aficionados of the dirty blues, and not safe for work.

–Yesterday at WNEW.com, I wrote about the history of American Bandstand.

Also, if you have never been over to the Research Garage, check it out today, since there’s nothing more to see here.

Except this: I have recently received a couple of inquiries from fellow bloggers about a Vinyl Record Day event for this year. We have celebrated VRD the last couple of years on August 12 with a blogswarm, coordinated by me, but I’m not doing it this year. While I’m completely in favor of the celebration and preservation of music on vinyl, its up to the VRD Foundation to promote its own event. If it will.

Many people reading this blog never listened regularly to music on AM radio. The generation born after 1970 got its first music fix either from FM or MTV, and therefore has little use for AM, unless they’re looking for talk shows or sports play-by-play. A few AM stations are still playing pop, soul, or country oldies, big-band, or gospel, but nobody who’s making money on AM is doing it with music. And why shouldn’t it be that way? Despite staggering technological advances in broadcasting, the audio fidelity of AM is still terrible compared to FM.

AM stereo was supposed to help. Throughout the 1980s, several manufacturers competed to have their system adopted as the standard, much as TV broadcasters did for color in the early days. It wasn’t until 1993 that the FCC adopted a single system. At that time, I was working at a small station in Iowa, where our crosstown competitor began broadcasting in AM stereo. They promoted it fairly well at first, taking AM stereo equipment into the community to demonstrate it. Their next idea was not so brilliant, however—they began ceaselessly promoting the stereo simulcast of a Whitney Houston concert on HBO. It didn’t occur to them that the vast majority of AM stereo installations were only in cars, which were not generally equipped with HBO. (Car makers had begun installing AM stereo equipment with the 1985 model year.)

It didn’t matter, however—AM stereo was largely a dead letter by then, although the odds are good that your car’s AM receiver can still get it today. Mine does—one day I killed time waiting for an appointment by surfing the dial, and was surprised to find an AM station that lit the little stereo light.

Another problem with AM was the fading of distant signals, particularly at night. It’s got something to do with sky waves versus ground waves, which is also why AM signals travel so far at night, but whatever the reason, you had to live with fading if you were an AM listener (although it was frustrating when it happened in the middle of your favorite song). AM stations were also subject to interference from the whispers and shadows of other signals (and sometimes from the buzz of Mom’s vacuum cleaner downstairs), but you had to accept that, too. After all, it was a long way from their tower to your radio.

The distance was part of what made AM radio seem larger than life. On a typical day in Wisconsin, I could easily hear stations in Chicago, but at night, the stations I heard could be many hundreds of miles away—Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, San Antonio, Richmond, Winnipeg. And the distance was also metaphorical. Even the AM stations close to home had a distant sound. The DJs didn’t sound like they were in the same room with you, as they can on FM. It was clear that they were someplace else, and it didn’t take long before I wanted to be wherever they were.

In the United States, AM signals are capped at 50,000 watts of power. In the early years of radio, however, there was no such restriction. In the 1930s, WLW in Cincinnati operated at half-a-million watts for a time, so much power that some people could hear it without a radio—almost anything metal would pick it up. (Read more about WLW’s transmitters here.) Even after American stations were limited to 50,000 watts, Mexican stations could operate at higher rates of power, and some did—from 250,000 up to a million. A few Mexican stations close to the border (and in the hands of American owners), known as border blasters, became legendary. Wolfman Jack became famous at XERF, across the border from Del Rio, Texas; XEAK in Tijuana was the first top-40 station heard in southern California; and 150,000-watt XEROK in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, claimed to be the highest-rated station in the United States in 1975.

A couple of years ago, a reader of this blog (whose name I am ashamed to say I’ve forgotten) sent me an aircheck from XEROK, known as X-Rock 80, from August 1976. I found it in a box of CDs last week, and it’s appropriate to dust it off now. As you listen, notice the intensity of the sound—and how even through tiny speakers with crappy fidelity, AM radio could rock.

X-Rock 80 aircheck excerpt, August 1976

One of my Internet pals posted a link yesterday about the history of radio in Arkansas,  including a few paragraphs about the legendary KAAY and its most famous show, Beaker Street. But it was something else in the article that struck me as I read it this morning: “[Future Stax Records executive] Al Bell learned to jock at the original KOKY with studios near Little Rock Central High School at 1604 W. 14th St.” I couldn’t remember the last time I saw the word “jock” used as a verb, referring to the act of being on the air. In college, however, we used it a lot, as in “I have to jock on Friday night” or “Who’s jocking right now?”

Somewhere, I have a trucker cap I picked up at a radio conference in 1980 that’s emblazoned with the slogan “Jock Around the Clock.” It was a promotional item for a company launching a 24-hour sports-talk network. I wore it constantly after returning from the conference, and it inspired a promotional idea for the college radio station, WSUP—but before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this one:

One of the media highlights of any radio/TV major’s year was the annual telethon for Wisconsin Badger Camp, a place that provided outdoor recreational opportunities for the developmentally disabled (although we wouldn’t have called them “developmentally disabled” back then). It was held each December and broadcast on the campus cable station, and it was all hands on deck for 24 hours—even those of us who didn’t work much TV found ourselves involved, although I tried to remain pure by handling the audio board. It was a rare opportunity to do live, long-form television—and it was usually capped off with an epic party involving the TV station staff, volunteers, and the fraternity that co-sponsored the telethon. One year, when the party was raging at 2:30 in the morning, we looked around and noticed that only the broadcasters were left standing—we’d outpartied the frat boys in their own house.

But anyway: In December 1980, we decided to get the radio station involved in the telethon with a promotion called—naturally—Jock Around the Clock. The plan was for me to do a 24-hour shift on the station, soliciting donations and doing who-knows-what to keep the audience (and myself) entertained. We promoted the hell out of it for a couple of weeks, only to have the station’s transmitter kick the bucket three days beforehand. We were off the air entirely during telethon week (which was also the week John Lennon was murdered), so Jock Around the Clock didn’t happen. There was talk of trying to do it again the next year, but I had lost interest by then. Whether somebody else did the show, I can’t remember.

There is absolutely no guarantee that I would have been able to complete the 24-hour radio show, of course. Thinking back on it now, it seems absurd to have believed I would. In those days, it would not have been out of character for me to bail on it partway through even after the station had spent weeks promoting it. I hadn’t planned anything special apart from staying on all that time—I hadn’t booked any guests, from Badger Camp, from the TV crew, or from anywhere else—and I suppose I assumed that the novelty of all-me, all-the-time was going to be sufficient. Such was the extent of my ego back in the day.

A few of the people who worked on the Badger Camp telethons read this blog, so if any of you have some stories, please share ‘em. Yours are probably better than mine anyhow.

And since I mentioned Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express yesterday, here’s an appropriate taste, from the album Closer to It, which is one of my favorite albums of all time.

“Voices of Other Times”/Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express (buy it here)

When we look back on the summers we remember best, most of them come from when we were in school. That shouldn’t be news to anybody—once we enter the working world for good, we lose the sense of summer as a discrete season unlike the rest of the year. With little to separate it from spring or fall, it blurs. Now, might remember a weekend or a week, but we can rarely call back the season whole, like we could when summer was 12 precious weeks sandwiched between getting out and going back. So when I look at the Cash Box chart dated July 20, 1985, it doesn’t summon up specific moments, or even a whole summer. It brings back a phase of my life that lasted nearly a year, and the group of people I spent it with.

I was working my first commercial program director’s gig in Illinois, presiding over an FM Top 40 station and an AM news-talk station. We had an owner who believed in operating his stations in the public interest, convenience, and necessity, and he encouraged us to make ‘em sound good. Not good enough for where we were—a college town of 20,000 in the middle of nowhere—but just good, period. I hadn’t started as the morning show host on the FM yet—that would come during the winter of 1986—so I worked close to a “regular” day, in by 9:30, home around 6. Although I was officially program director and did some on-air work on the AM, the FM was my baby, and my passion. The record chart brings back memories of worrying about the minutest little things, which is what a good program director gets paid to do. I did a better job of managing people than I’d done as a college program director, although in a town of that size, even with a college population to draw from, the staff was going to be a somewhat motley crew.

During some of that time, The Mrs. worked at the station as a copywriter and traffic manager, although for part of 1985 she worked someplace else. We were extremely successful at keeping our working life and our personal life separate—a few of our co-workers didn’t know we were married, even though we shared a last name. Between the two of us, we made practically no money, but we didn’t need much, although we did buy our first-ever new car that year, an ‘85 Plymouth Horizon, a boxy gray thing with a hatchback.

And blasting on the radio station’s air that summer, there was lots of big riffage, including. . . .

6. “Would I Lie to You?”/Eurythmics (up from 7). I never cared much for Eurythmics, but I loved the crashing guitars and horny horns on this record. Here’s the video, featuring the little playlet that started every damn video on MTV at that time.

8. “Voices Carry”/’Til Tuesday (up from 9). You probably couldn’t have predicted Aimee Mann’s future career as cool-and-clever rock songstress based solely on this. Or maybe you could have. I couldn’t.

10. “Glory Days”/Bruce Springsteen (up from 11). Another video, another prefatory playlet. Confession: This record never did anything for me in 1985, and it still doesn’t. I’m not sure why it didn’t move me then, because I considered myself a big Springsteen fan. Now, maybe its putdown of reminiscing about the old days hits too close to home.

15. “Sentimental Street”/Night Ranger (up from 17). This is “Sister Christian” turned inside out, and it sounds really cool to me despite being complete gibberish. Conceptual video featuring several awesome clichés (girl picks up hitchhiking band member in antique pickup truck, band members’ hair as big as the female actresses’ hair, cutting back and forth from the concept to a live performance, guys making guitar-hero face, etc.) here.

20. “The Power of Love”/Huey Lewis and the News (up from 30). The song that signifies the summer, and the most completely satisfying record the band ever made. My station played it 10,000 times that summer, but I never got tired of it.

One night in early August 1985, we drove about 90 minutes to Peoria to see Huey Lewis and the News perform live with the Neville Brothers opening. After playing three encores to one of the most ecstatic audiences I’ve ever been part of, Lewis said, “We don’t know anything else!” As for The Mrs. and me, this wasn’t summer they way we’d lived it when we were in school, but if it was how summer was going to be from then on, it was fine with us.

When whiteray and I got together last weekend, he asked me if I ever worried about running out of things to write about. Well, not until today. Pending the next bit of inspiration, here’s a selection of this and that from here and there.

Whiteray and I also talked about the concept of music as memoir—relating past to present and present to past through the music we’re listening to now, and what we listened to then. Another blogger working a similar vein is Alex at Clicks and Pops. Today’s topic is the demise of another great radio station: Boston’s WBCN. Recent posts on Ellen Foley and the Long Ryders are also worth a look.

Also worth reading, from Bloggerhythms: Charlie keeps the first 11 Chicago albums straight, and tells you which ones you ought to own.

I’ve posted another edition of “One Day in Your Life” over at Popdose today, and there’s another Today in Rock History post at WNEW.com. Coming here later in the week: More from the 1976 daybook.

On another matter entirely, it didn’t take John Sebastian very long to start making waves at Q106 here in Madison—on Monday, the country format was gone, replaced by oldies. Yesterday it was a sort of smooth jazz/light hip-hop thing. (I haven’t tuned in yet today.) Sebastian told the local newspaper that nobody’s been fired and everyone’s still at work behind the scenes. I’ve got no inside information on what Q106 will eventually become—even if I did and I told you, then I’d have to kill you, except management would kill me first. The stunt is working, however—it’s got me curious about what’s next.

To wrap things up today, here’s a bit of video you will enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, we probably shouldn’t be seeing each other anymore.