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Huey Lewis & the News "Heart of Rock & Roll"

CTListener said:
WKSS Hartford had a customized "Heart" with a city shout-out. I was in eastern Arkansas when "Fire" was a hit and remember hearing "you turn on the radio ... W-H-B-Q ..." on WHBQ Memphis. None of the Little Rock top 40s had a customized version, IIRC.
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I never heard the WHBQ version, but I remember a WLS customized version that aired over "the big 89" back in its heyday. They also had their own WLS customized version of Reunion's "Life Is a Rock, WLS rolled me"!

WHBQ has its own history for being the first station ever to play an Elvis Presley record (all the way through, anyway), and WHBQ was where Rick Dees landed after being fired from WMPS for just mentioning "Disco Duck" on the air there!
 
bobperry said:
I would think finding those custom mixes would be pretty near impossible to find - even at the stations that aired it originally. I was at KC101 when the song came out and we got a 15ips reel from the record company that had "Hartford...New Haven" as the custom sing.
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I think WKSS-FM 95.7 of Hartford/New Haven played that as well. I have that "shout" on a cassette from New Year's Eve 1987, recorded from their station.

The most recent local insert I know of was "You Make Me Smile" or whatever from Uncle Kracker. A lyric change was added for WTIC-FM 96.5 of Hartford, a.k.a. 96.5-TIC.
 
I was never around to hear the shouts, but the Variety Hits stations air the usual edit. Huey originally recorded "Seattle San Francisco, too" on the regular cut - I wonder what stations like KUBE and KPLZ used. Seattle-Tacoma? Ditto with Z100 in Portland (maybe they used Portland Vancouver?)

In today's songs, Chicken Fried by Zac Brown Band, a popular C/W hit, is huge for this. At first, my local station (92.9 The Bull in Yakima) never used an edit, now it says "Turn the Bull on up". KKWF uses "The Wolf Radio Up" and KMPS 94.1 uses "KMPS up".
Tim McGraw by Taylor Swift is also big. They used "when you turn the Wolf Radio on" for 100.7 KKWF in Seattle, "when you turn KMPS on" for KMPS 94.1, and I think they even had one for KAPS 660 in Mt. Vernon, WA.

-crainbebo
 
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crainbebo said:
I was never around to hear the shouts, but the Variety Hits stations air the usual edit. Huey originally recorded "Seattle San Francisco, too" on the regular cut - I wonder what stations like KUBE and KPLZ used. Seattle-Tacoma? Ditto with Z100 in Portland (maybe they used Portland Vancouver?)

In today's songs, Chicken Fried by Zac Brown Band, a popular C/W hit, is huge for this. At first, my local station (92.9 The Bull in Yakima) never used an edit, now it says "Turn the Bull on up". KKWF uses "The Wolf Radio Up" and KMPS 94.1 uses "KMPS up".
Tim McGraw by Taylor Swift is also big. They used "when you turn the Wolf Radio on" for 100.7 KKWF in Seattle, "when you turn KMPS on" for KMPS 94.1, and I think they even had one for KAPS 660 in Mt. Vernon, WA.

-crainbebo
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There was an additional line that said "Spokane/Portland Oregon". I always hated it because this is the largest city in the US that you have to mention the state for people to know that you're not talking about somewhere other than market #23! The "Fire" version was "You turn on KGW", which required an additional note to be changed.
 
semoochie said:
There was an additional line that said "Spokane/Portland Oregon". I always hated it because this is the largest city in the US that you have to mention the state for people to know that you're not talking about somewhere other than market #23!
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Wouldn't people in the Northwest just assume the singer was singing about the one in Oregon? People here in Connecticut would assume it was the one in Maine. Well, except for this one man who was at a minor league baseball game in New Britain with his son and happened to be sitting behind me. The opposing team was the Portland (Maine) Sea Dogs, and when the little boy asked his dad where the team was from, dad answered, knowingly, "Portland ... you know, near Middletown." That would have been Portland, Conn., population 8,732.
 
One thing I've never understood about this song, is the unfinished verse....

"When they play their music, that hard rock music
They like it with a lot of flash
But it's still that same old back beat rhythm
That really kicks 'em in the...."

Kicks them in the what, exactly? I guess he couldn't find a reasonable word that rhymes with "flash".

R
 
Robert Bass said:
"When they play their music, that hard rock music
They like it with a lot of flash
But it's still that same old back beat rhythm
That really kicks 'em in the...."
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ass.

I will go ahead and say it. It's my thread. Yeah, it doesn't quite rhyme, but I was more hacked off by the fact that Memphis didn't get mentioned in it!

Oh, yeah, and we have Portland, TN, about an hour or so north of Nashville.
 
n/m

R
 
The problem with doing a "roll call" of cities in song like this is, you're going to leave someone out. If you mention the top 50 cities, #51 is going to say "what about us?" "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "Living in America," and "Sweet Little 16" all failed to mention my hometown of Memphis. But that is cool, because we had our own specific songs, like "Memphis," ironically enough written by Chuck Berry, who also wrote "Sweet Little 16." Johnny Rivers' version is probably still my fave.
 
Nevertheless, "the heart of rock and roll is still beating".
 
Back to "We Built This City"... WCAU-FM Philadelphia and the Atlantic City Expressway were mentioned in that station's version's dj patter.

OTOH "B104 WBSB Baltimore", while omitting any dj patter, incorporated a B104 jingle to cue the first verse of "WBTC"

Thanks for saving me the trouble of starting a thread entitled "We Built This City on DJ Patter"! IYKWIM.

ixnay
 
Regarding "Good Lovin'"... this isn't a local dj thing, but who else remembers when Dick Bartley spun GL on Solid Gold Saturday Night (or maybe it was Solid Gold Scrapbook) and cleared his throat during the break after the organ solo?

ixnay
 
firepoint525 said:
The former WLAC-FM here in Nashville, then an AC station, played the one with the "Knoxville, Nashville" shout-outs. Indeed, living in Nashville, I wondered why the "Knoxville" shout-out, too. I should further point out that I moved here in 1992, and "Heart of Rock & Roll" was, of course, no longer a current by then, so that made hearing it with the custom shout-outs even more impressive!

I have a taped copy of the Memphis version of "We Built This City" with the (then) FM 100 midday jock doing the ad-lib near the end. A listener shouted out "FM 100!" at the end of that ad-lib. I did not tape the entire song, because I was really only interested in the FM 100 jock's custom ad-lib at the end of it.
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Yes, I clearly remember it on WIMZ. Haven't heard it in years but I remember Phil Williams was on it and at the time they had moved away from the "Rock 104" name and I remember Phil saying "104 WIMZ" in the custom version that they made.
 
firepoint525 said:
I have a taped copy of the Memphis version of "We Built This City" with the (then) FM 100 midday jock doing the ad-lib near the end. A listener shouted out "FM 100!" at the end of that ad-lib. I did not tape the entire song, because I was really only interested in the FM 100 jock's custom ad-lib at the end of it.
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I just PM'ed you. Would really like to hear that one.

--Russell
 
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