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Post by matt on Jul 20, 2012 10:46:58 GMT -5
Thanks Pete for bumping this thread--a fun one to chime in on.
I believe the first #1 I actually remember hearing Casey announce on AT40 back in the day (with the drum roll of course) was "Call Me" by Blondie, so I guess that means the first AT40 show I listened to on the radio was in April or May 1980. Listened pretty regularly from then on through Shadoe's first 2-3 years (except mid-1982 to early 1984 when AT40 was off the air in my town).
This past week's 7/19/86 show sure brought back memories--probably when I was into the show as much as anytime. Mowing the lawn on Saturday mornings listening to the show on KQKQ with my Sony Walkman (with the tape player of course!)...ahhh good times.
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Post by doomsdaymachine on Jul 20, 2012 11:53:06 GMT -5
I think it was "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc.
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Post by matt on Jul 20, 2012 11:53:34 GMT -5
I believe it was "Rosanna" by Toto in the summer of 1982, when I was 11 years old. I listened to radio, of course, all throughout my childhood, but I think that was the first one I remember in listening to AT40. You know that Rosanna wasn't a #1 (one of those that got stuck at #2 for several weeks but couldn't push through)...you sure it wasn't "Eye of the Tiger"?
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Post by mkarns on Jul 20, 2012 12:19:54 GMT -5
I believe it was "Rosanna" by Toto in the summer of 1982, when I was 11 years old. I listened to radio, of course, all throughout my childhood, but I think that was the first one I remember in listening to AT40. You know that Rosanna wasn't a #1 (one of those that got stuck at #2 for several weeks but couldn't push through)...you sure it wasn't "Eye of the Tiger"? Or "Don't You Want Me?", which also blocked "Rosanna" from the top? "Rosanna" did hit #1 in Radio & Records; thus both Casey and Ryan Seacrest have retrospectively cited it as a chart-topper (in Seacrest's case, just two weeks ago.) But there was no radio countdown to my knowledge in 1982 that used R&R.
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Post by SFGuy on Jul 21, 2012 1:34:50 GMT -5
I think it was Another Brick in the Wall or Call me. So 1980.
What is strange is that I never really listened week after week for years because AT 40 kept moving to different stations. Wasn't easy back then to find it when it moves so I really didn't listen to the show after 1983 or so.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 21, 2012 12:56:26 GMT -5
Chicago ´s If you leave me now, heard on AT40 with Casey on AFRTS Rota. That was the way I knew the meaning of being a number 1.
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Post by pamelajaye on Jul 21, 2012 13:10:54 GMT -5
wish I could remember whether I replied to this thread already but I think my profile only shows the past few posts.
I'm not sure whether it was Having My Baby or I Shot the Sheriff. At the time, I listened to WRKO, other kids in my HS listened to WVBF, and for some reason AT40 aired on WMEX, which was, to my memory, a puny station in Boston, that I didn't even know existed till I somehow tripped over AT40 (and I don't know how that happened either - I do know that I wondered if such a countdown existed and wanted to hear it if it did, but I was 15 at the time. How did I survive before the internet? I remember I got on AOL the second time (not the 1st free month, but the second time, when I never got offline ever again) in order to try to figure out what was going on with Donny Osmond. Took me 5 months to find out he was in Chicago doing Joseph. A fan of Scott Bakula found the info for me.)
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Post by pamelajaye on Jul 21, 2012 13:12:04 GMT -5
oh. it's in my sig. oops.
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Post by pamelajaye on Jul 21, 2012 13:16:06 GMT -5
I think it was Another Brick in the Wall or Call me. So 1980. What is strange is that I never really listened week after week for years because AT 40 kept moving to different stations. Wasn't easy back then to find it when it moves so I really didn't listen to the show after 1983 or so. Is there a listing of ... stations it was on and when? I think I lost it around 81, but hard to tell as I moved to VA and then back to Boston in 80. I'd love to know what happened. I found it again later, but it had Shadoe Stevens and I wasn't interested. I probably wasn't listening to CHR by then either. Wouldn't have recognized most of the songs. oh, and have I asked about the inability to get email notification when people reply on this forum? is it a proboards failing, or just a choice?
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Post by mct1 on Jul 22, 2012 1:14:46 GMT -5
I began listening to AT40 regularly in early 1980, when I was nine years old. I don't remember exactly what week I started listening, or what song was #1. It has to have been pretty close to the beginning of the year, though, possibly even very late in 1979. I actually have a cassette tape with a number of songs recorded from a show in April 1980, made by placing a standalone tape recorder next to a radio speaker. I haven't listened to it in years, but anytime I've come across it while cleaning or moving, I've always made it a point to hang onto it and not to throw it out. I believe that all of my early listening was on WFTQ in Worcester, MA.
A few of the 1980 shows re-broadcast by Premiere this year have jogged my memory. On 2/23/80, Casey played the Beatles' "Hey Jude" as an extra. I have a memory of hearing Casey play this song while I sat at the kitchen table and my mother explained who the Beatles were. That has to have been the 2/23/80 show. (As I was listening to the Premiere re-broadcast over the internet, my own daughter, who is now nine years old and is a budding Beatles fan, was also in the room. When Casey stated that it was the Beatles' biggest hit, she commented that she didn't know that. A bit of a case a deja vu....) The recent 6/28/80 episode also contained a few items that sounded familiar. One was Casey's comment that Air Supply had been around since 1976 in Australia; I remember hearing Casey say that back in 1980 and finding that odd. I'm drawing a blank at the moment on what the other one was.
Others have commented that going to church on Sundays interfered with their ability to hear the countdown. I had the same issue. My family went to a church service that started at 11:45 and ended around 12:30. My recollection is that back in 1980 I would get to hear part of the countdown, miss a portion of it, then catch the end. WFTQ must have run AT40 from 9:00 to 1:00, or 10:00 to 2:00, or something like that. They also ran AT40 on Sunday night, and I would sometimes listen to it as I went to bed, hoping to stay awake long enough to get to the part of it I had missed in the morning.
After listening to AT40 with varying degrees of devotion for about two years, I began to write the countdown down each week starting in April 1982. By this time I had discovered that I could get AT40 on multiple stations, some of whom ran it more than once per weekend. Besides Worcester (if WFTQ was still running it at that point), I could also get it on WPRO in Providence, RI, as well as various affiliates in Boston that came and went over time. Even if there was no time when I could listen to the show for a solid four hours, I could hear the entire thing in various bits and pieces.
I remember that at one point I could get two stations that carried AT40 on Sunday morning, one of which started an hour later than the other. If I got up in time to catch the start of the countdown on the station that started later, I would switch back and forth between the two until the later of the two caught up to the point where the earlier one was when I first tuned in. If I was going to be away from the radio for a while (e.g., to go to church), I would pop a cassette tape in my radio and record at least some of what I missed. IINM, there was a station in my area that ran the show on Saturday nights for a time, offering another possible opportunity to listen/record.
I continued writing down the countdown each week until April 1987. By that time I was 16, and my musical tastes had gone in an AOR direction. The last several months before April 1987, I had completely stopped listening to Top 40 radio except for AT40. (I also think that 1986-87 was a less interesting period for Top 40 music than the years that preceded it or followed it, which couldn't have helped.) I also now had things going on in my life that made it more difficult to spend large amounts of time on the weekends listening to AT40. I would get my first part-time job a few weeks after I stopped writing down the chart each week, which would result in my working during part of the time I had previously listened to AT40. It just didn't seem to make sense to devote the time necessary to keep track of the chart. I would hear bits and pieces of AT40 here and there -- I remember being aware that Shadoe had taken over for Casey -- but I no longer made it a point to listen regularly.
The notebook that I started using to write the chart down in April 1982 was full by the end of 1985, and I started another one at that point. The 1982-85 one is long gone, but I still have my original written-down charts from January 1986 to April 1987.
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Post by mct1 on Jul 22, 2012 1:35:08 GMT -5
At the time, I listened to WRKO, other kids in my HS listened to WVBF, and for some reason AT40 aired on WMEX, which was, to my memory, a puny station in Boston, that I didn't even know existed till I somehow tripped over AT40 In another thread recently, I had made the observation that, for a variety of reasons, American Top 40 with Casey Kasem -- both when it was new and the current Premiere broadcasts -- seems to be more popular with stations in smaller cities than in big metropolitan areas like Boston. In the '80s, my recollection is that the AT40 affilate in Boston changed several times, and was never any of the big Top 40 stations like WZOU, WHTT or WXKS. IINM, 105.7 FM (known as WROR at that time?) had it for a while. It was actually on WBZ for a while, an AM station that was mostly news/talk and had a definite AC leaning to what music it did play. (It later went entirely news/talk.) As for Classic AT40 today, until recently the '70s affiliate in Boston was WODS, which ran it from midnight to 3 a.m. on Sunday night/Monday morning. I'm not aware than any station in Boston has ever carried Classic '80s AT40. With WODS' recent format change from Oldies/Classic Hits to CHR, there is now no station in Boston carrying either the '70s or '80s version of Classic AT40. The closest thing is WORC in Worcester, which carries the '70s version only and whose signal can be picked up in the western part of the Boston area. In response to my comments in the earlier thread, another poster reported that the New York City area also has no local station carrying either edition of AT40.
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Post by mct1 on Jul 23, 2012 22:02:41 GMT -5
IINM, 105.7 FM (known as WROR at that time?) had it for a while. Actually, WROR is what it's called today. Back then, I think it was still WVBF, the same as it was when pamelajaye listened to it a few years earlier. This station is actually licensed to Framingham, which is about 20 miles west of Boston, and I think it was historically stronger out that way than in other parts of the Boston area.
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