Did you write AT40 in a notebook?

[pamelajaye]

Do you still have it?
Can you take a picture or a scan?
I'm not sure what box mine is in (and I've amassed more crap since I moved here, and so has my roommate. paper in boxes abounds.) I know the first one was orange.

[doomsdaymachine]

Jul 28, 2012 14:01:55 GMT -5 pamelajaye said:

Do you still have it?
Can you take a picture or a scan?
I'm not sure what box mine is in (and I've amassed more crap since I moved here, and so has my roommate. paper in boxes abounds.) I know the first one was orange.

Yes, I wrote it in a notebook. No, I don't still have it. Sorry....

[dadetim]

i wrote mine in a notebook too.....sorry i didn't keep it though.....i was 10 when i did it

[Josh Joel's Top 40]

Yes I did and my mom threw them away in early 1989 to reduce the "clutter" as we were moving from England to Rapid City, SD! And there were some of my personal charts included as well!!!

[caseyfan100]

I wrote mine in a notebook starting in 1979 when I first started listening to AT40. I don't have
the 79 notebook but I do have every year of the 1980's in notebooks that I updated/cleaned up in the late 80's/early 90's. I kept note of the top 40,long distance dedications,other #1's and extras that were played during the show and after getting into the radio business in the mid 80's,I had access to Billboard that also helped me keep track of what was what and I used Billboard to add the adult contemporary top 20,and the #1 country album and #1 soul album.
I also had a method to the madness of the weekly list. I would use one of those four colored Bic pens to keep track of the music. Songs moving up the chart would be written in red,debuts and other #1's were written in green,songs holding postions and long distance dedications were written in blue and songs moving down the chart and any extras played during the show were written in black. I also had a page with each song that hit #1 in that calendar year,wrote down the top 100 for each year,the AT40 address and the list of stations I could listen to the show on.
I still have these notebooks in a box in my closet at home and every now and then I do look at them and look back at fond memories of my youth and growing up.

[mkarns]

For several years I wrote the charts down on looseleaf paper (not in an actual notebook) as Casey or Shadoe counted them down. I didn't track extras, LDD's, etc., but did make note of each song's chart movement. Missed songs would be filled in the next week or by looking up Billboard in the library.

Later I got rid of them but preserved the chart movements by drawing lines on graph paper. Eventually I was of course able to re-access all the charts by looking them up online; recently I've been graph-papering countdown charts starting from long before I was able to hear the countdown (or was even born.)

[atruefan]

I still do have the notebook that I keep from October of 76 - March of 78 (when I started getting Billboard Magazine every week). I'm most annoyed that I threw out (or more likely someone else threw out) my charts from Casey's Top 40/American Top 40 (the reboot) from 1995-2005.

[mkarns]

Jul 28, 2012 16:53:54 GMT -5 atruefan said:

I still do have the notebook that I keep from October of 76 - March of 78 (when I started getting Billboard Magazine every week). I'm most annoyed that I threw out (or more likely someone else threw out) my charts from Casey's Top 40/American Top 40 (the reboot) from 1995-2005.

You can get all the Casey's Top 40 charts from oldradioshows.com. Most (not all, as far as I know) rebooted AT40 charts with Casey hosting have been posted at various places online; there are probably links further back in this board or they can be searched.

The current AT40.com website has most of the Casey AT40 charts from August 2001 until his departure. Ryan Seacrest-era AT40 charts are posted up each week on the Pulse Music Boards, usually with all extras included.

[atruefan]

Jul 28, 2012 17:10:11 GMT -5 mkarns said:

Jul 28, 2012 16:53:54 GMT -5 atruefan said:

I still do have the notebook that I keep from October of 76 - March of 78 (when I started getting Billboard Magazine every week). I'm most annoyed that I threw out (or more likely someone else threw out) my charts from Casey's Top 40/American Top 40 (the reboot) from 1995-2005.

You can get all the Casey's Top 40 charts from oldradioshows.com. Most (not all, as far as I know) rebooted AT40 charts with Casey hosting have been posted at various places online; there are probably links further back in this board or they can be searched.

The current AT40.com website has most of the Casey AT40 charts from August 2001 until his departure. Ryan Seacrest-era AT40 charts are posted up each week on the Pulse Music Boards, usually with all extras included.

Pretty much any chart data from AT40 can be acquired online. The reason I was annoyed about the loss of the CT/AT40 charts is that I would write down notes about songs I liked and the info that Casey passed along. I'm far more happy that I still have my notebook from the 70s, but it would be fun to review the other charts to see what songs I really liked (and which ones I didn't) 10-15 years ago.

[tarobe]

I wrote down the Top 40 in the summer and fall of 1976 and all the way throughout 1977. I stopped writing down the entire chart in 1978, noting only the debut songs. By 1980 I was only writing down an occasional top ten. After that I only kept track of the #1 song. At the end of 1982 I stopped writing anything down.

[erik]

I can remember the week I started entering AT40's weekly chart in a notebook. It was January 14, 1984.

When I started taking a typing class in school (using real typewriters!), my parents bought a new Smith Corona typewriter for home so I could get more practice. That was around 1986. I had the idea that my weekly Top 40 lists would look nicer if I typed them. Eventually, I typed out all the lists that I had originally hand written and tossed my original handwritten notes in the trash (something I now regret).

I continued to update the weekly AT40 lists until they stopped using the Billboard Hot 100 on November 30, 1991. By then, I was in college and the city public library near campus carried Billboard. Around that time, I began to go downtown and photocopied the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 album chart.

[mct1]

I had recently posted about writing AT40 down in a notebook in the "What was the first #1 you remember listening to?" thread, after a few other posters there had mentioned it. Here's some of what I wrote:

Jul 22, 2012 1:14:46 GMT -5 mct1 said:

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.

I wrote these down on looseleaf paper which I kept in binders. I would always start with #40 and go down to #1, the same way Casey counted 'em down. I remember that on college ruled paper, numbers 40 to 8 would fit on the front of the sheet, and numbers 7 to 1 would have to go on the back. I would write down the song's position the previous week in parenthesis after the song title (or "D" for debut), with its movement from the previous week at the right margin (e.g., "+8", "-2", "0"; debuters got a "D" in a circle).

If Casey mentioned some chart trivia or statistics that I found interesting, I would jot it down on the sheet. I think I kept track of the #1 album, and noted the entire Top 5 albums in the margin during the period where Casey read them off. I think I may have kept track of the #1 soul song for at least part of the time I wrote down the Top 40 (as this song was often but not always in the Top 40) but I don't remember writing down the #1 country or dance song. I know I didn't write down songs played as Long Distance Dedications or extras. If Casey mentioned that a song was debuting in the entire Hot 100, I would make note of that. If Casey said how many Top 40 hits (or Top 10, #1, etc.) an artist had, I would write that down as well.

Someone else mentioned their mom throwing out their AT40 notebook. That's what happened to my 1982-85 notebook. In the fall of 1988 (by which time, to be fair, I was no longer listening to AT40 regularly, let alone writing the chart down), I started college. I lived at home and commuted to school. On my first day, while I was at school, my parents decided to surprise me by switching my room with my brother's, allowing me to move into a larger space. I had no advance notice that they were going to do this. Needless to say, I was not as happy as they apparently thought I would be. No kid that age likes the idea of their parents going through their room, let alone taking everything in the room and moving it to another room, and I arrived home that evening to a bedroom in which I couldn't find anything because I didn't know where anything was.

When they did it, even though I was actually moving into a larger space, my mother apparently decided that I had too much "junk", and threw anything out that looked unimportant to her. For some reason the 1982-85 notebook didn't make the cut, but the 1986-87 notebook did. I can't remember whether or not they told me that they threw out some things (I seem to recall being told "we didn't look at anything, we just moved it"), but either way it was not immediately apparent to me what was missing, because I didn't know where anything was in the new room. By the time I realized the quantity of items that had been thrown out, our household trash from the day of the move was long since gone.

[torcan]

I did too. When I first discovered the show in March 1981, I'd never seen Billboard magazine, so I wrote down the top 40 every week plus any other info Casey gave ... for example, on the first show I heard he mentioned that Air Supply had been in the top 40 for 49 of the past 51 weeks, so I wrote that down!

I started subscribing to Billboard later that year, but still listened every week.

[Deleted]

I use to write the AT40 lists on a notebook and soon I started to do my personal chart, which I called Nogara Top 40 , Nogara is Aragon backwards .

I wrote to Casey in 1987 as Nogara and gave him my Top 5 then, the crew of AT40 sent me a Casey´s pic , dedicated to Nogara :

fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/418522_3144420046013_1929262417_n.jpg

[mkarns]

Jul 28, 2012 22:19:05 GMT -5 mct1 said:

I wrote these down on looseleaf paper which I kept in binders. I would always start with #40 and go down to #1, the same way Casey counted 'em down. I remember that on college ruled paper, numbers 40 to 8 would fit on the front of the sheet, and numbers 7 to 1 would have to go on the back. I would write down the song's position the previous week in parenthesis after the song title (or "D" for debut), with its movement from the previous week at the right margin (e.g., "+8", "-2", "0"; debuters got a "D" in a circle).

If Casey mentioned some chart trivia or statistics that I found interesting, I would jot it down on the sheet. I think I kept track of the #1 album, and noted the entire Top 5 albums in the margin during the period where Casey read them off. I think I may have kept track of the #1 soul song for at least part of the time I wrote down the Top 40 (as this song was often but not always in the Top 40) but I don't remember writing down the #1 country or dance song. I know I didn't write down songs played as Long Distance Dedications or extras. If Casey mentioned that a song was debuting in the entire Hot 100, I would make note of that. If Casey said how many Top 40 hits (or Top 10, #1, etc.) an artist had, I would write that down as well.

I wrote them down in much the same fashion, though I eventually ended up inverting it and counting out spaces on the back of the paper, and starting writing it about 7 lines down where #40 was, so that #1 was on the first line of the front of the paper. In the margin I noted the movement with an up or down arrow and the number of notches moved, with D for debuts and NM for nonmovers. Usually I'd write the dropoffs on the back of the paper, below #40, and sometimes I'd note the other #1's (eventually I stopped doing so and don't remember why).

When I first discovered the Premiere replays of Casey's AT40s I wrote those down as well, until I found all the old charts online as well as the current AT40 lists, eliminating the need for writing anything down.