In the 60’s and the 70’s before the advent of FM and the extended mixes of songs, DJs on AM talked over the musical intros of songs with what I would now call blather, but was called patter back then.
You can’t really do it justice with the written word. You had to hear the pounding wall of sound that poured out of Grandma’s radio: Song to commercials to station ID to song in a seamless hosing of rock and roll radio energy. There were three stations in Canada that provided that blast of power: 680CFTR, The Big 8, CKLW and the one and only 1050CHUM.
Mark Daley at City-TV was one of the big voices at 1050CHUM. You can still hear the resonance in his pipes when he introduces Great Movies, but imagine that basso profundo, with a tiny bit of echo, two paces back from the microphone, bellowing Ten-FIFTY CHUM! like the Voice of Doom. It made “This is CNN” by James Earl Jones sound like the Vienna Boys Choir having a hissy fit.
That was how it was in AM radio back then. I was fortunate to come into radio as a DJ during the last twitch and gasp of AM. You could play rock and roll at 7:50 in the morning and people thought it was great, even in small towns up in the Ottawa Valley, which was where I was a fish in a pond.
I was lucky enough to go to a couple of radio station conventions in Canada. I got to meet some of my colleagues before AM went away to become the last bastion of the call-in show catering to the shrill and marginally sane.
Some of the wildmen were, Art Stevens, Mark Elliot, Terry Steele, Tom Lucas, Casey Fox, Jim Hunter, Dan (The Canadian Spy) Ferguson, Ivan Hunter, Shotgun Tom Rivers and Mike Cooper. There are too many stories and many of the participants are still alive, so the stories will have to wait, but they were all talented and as crazy as bedbugs on Laughing Gas.
Yesterday a huge conglomerate, BellGlobemedia bought CHUM Limited, which had become another huge conglomerate. The new company will own about 40% of the radio, television, cable channel and newspaper outlets in the country. The layoffs have already started as CHUM is absorbed into the Borg.
1050CHUM will probably go away. The format and the spirit are long dead ghosts today. But late at night, find an AM radio and tune up and down the dial, slowly. Maybe, if the stars line up right and the Gods of AM are on your side, you might just hear a station identification from the past that will make your hair stand on end while the opening notes of Junior Walker and the All-Stars “Shotgun” runs up in the background.
RoadDave 