There were 27 Billboard No. 1s in 1985. Only seven were ballads (two by Whitney Houston, one by Phil Collins, one by Lionel Richie, one by Paul Young, one by Bryan Adams, and "We Are The World.") Many of the rest had the same punchy pop sound as "We Built This City," and just about all of them would sound great at the top of an hour in any year. I can't find a "head scratcher" in the bunch, all the way from "Like a Virgin" to "Say You, Say Me." I thought "We Built This City" sounded like a huge hit the first time I heard it.
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K-earth and those 90's. When are they coming more regularly?
- Thread starter 34james
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There were 27 Billboard No. 1s in 1985. Only seven were ballads (two by Whitney Houston, one by Phil Collins, one by Lionel Richie, one by Paul Young, one by Bryan Adams, and "We Are The World.") Many of the rest had the same punchy pop sound as "We Built This City," and just about all of them would sound great at the top of an hour in any year. I can't find a "head scratcher" in the bunch, all the way from "Like a Virgin" to "Say You, Say Me." I thought "We Built This City" sounded like a huge hit the first time I heard it.
This.
So much this.
I used to like carrots when I was a kid. But you can't sell me any today because they make me want to hurl now.
Music is no different. If I like it now, I'll listen to it. But you can't persuade me to sit through a song voluntarily by telling me how much I liked it when I was 6.
That's a far-fetched analysis. While I agree that isn't a widely accepted song strong enough for airplay today under your industry standards, saying that song is universally "hated" is not accurate. You'd be surprised. Your sample size to conclude that statement, is not a fair representation of the population that remembers it, especially older women. Fans of the 70's decade would differ with you. People that I have played that song to recently also think otherwise. You should take a second look.
As for the 90's (back on topic).....that decade is too fragmented with many genres. While some songs are definitely worthy of airplay, like the ones on 90's at nine, it'll be a bit more difficult to find a good list of songs, due to the genres unsuitable for airplay on a classic hits radio station. The same goes for the 2000's.
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Yeah, my favorite version is the one redone by the then-midday DJ at FM 100 in Memphis. The Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame has a copy of it now.
Yes, I have heard those versions too and they are all worse than the original. It really marked the low point of the band.
Allowing their artistry to be changed by others who they never even met in order to get some additional airplay in various local markets is about as "corporate game" as it gets, and contradicts the whole point of the song - that they "built" the city of San Francisco (along with great radio stations like KFRC). They managed to take a terrible song and make it worse. But I am sure their record company approved wholeheartedly. Nothing like sacrificing the integrity of the band in order to get a hit record played, eh?
Several of the jingle companies had services that personalized hit songs to include the call letters, generally by "adding" the calls ahead of the post in a fashion that made it sound like the background singers or using some filtering or processing.
Occasionally a major station would get the original singer to remake a line of the song; back then labels and artists were far more amenable to the requests of radio stations. It was also not unusual to have an artist sing the station jingle when on a visit.
My favorite was on KUPD from "a crummy trailer down in Guadalupe" around 1973. They had a verse to "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" that said something like "and I get into Phoenix and go over to KUPD".
I remember that, too, oldies76! The only lyrics I remember are:
“Driving (or riding, can’t remember which) along in the summer sun,
The temperature feels like one oh one.”
And:
“K-Earth 101” replacing “Down at Palisades Park.”
I specified "core listeners". In the case of a classic hits station targeting 25-54, the song can possibly be the lowest scoring one on a test. Since we generally divide scores into quintiles of love, like, neutral, dislike and hate, that means that the song is amply hated.
Since the song is now over 40 years old, it's not even relevant to most of the target of a classic hits station.
Am I misunderstanding? First of all, I find it hard to believe that Bill Drake gave a crap if songs were "hippie" music, as long as they were songs that Top 40 listeners wanted to hear, and the lyrics weren't censorable. I could probably go through the KHJ Boss 30 and the KFRC Big 30, and come up with a whole bunch of "hippie" songs. Second, "We Built this City" was released in 1985, and I believe that Drake was long gone from the RKO General stations by that time.
Drake did not initially think that Jefferson Airplane and the likes were Top 40 material, and he thought that the core 18-34 female target would be driven away. Tom Rounds, who was at the center of that music at KFRC, pushed hard to add some of those songs to the playlist.
I brought up that particular situation in reference to how some music had a hard time getting accepted as a Top 40 song in any era.
Were other RKO stations allowed enough playlist freedom to add songs and artists their music people thought would do well in their markets? As I recall, "Somebody To Love" was an out-of-the-box smash on both Boston Top 40s -- RKO's WRKO and independent WMEX -- and stayed in heavy rotation for weeks. Boston in 1967, I would think, was just as receptive to "hippie" music as San Francisco was. I know the "home office" pushed a lot of female-skewing stiffs onto the WRKO playlist (Ferlin Husky's "Skip a Rope," Hamilton Camp's "Here's To You" and Billy Vera's "With Pen In Hand" come to mind, played only during "housewife time" -- middays) so I assume WRKO had no say over those songs. So, did WRKO get to add "Somebody To Love" only after Drake was convinced it wouldn't drive away the women?
I don't know the specifics; what I have learned about the Drake organization comes from years working with TR and, even though briefly, working with RJ as well.
Drake cared. He actually had a fairly deep antipathy toward San Francisco, telling an interviewer later in life that "you'd send perfectly good jocks to San Francisco and in a few weeks they'd be into the drugs and all the weird stuff up there". It helps to remember that Drake was a southern boy with a crew cut until '67 or so, when he let the hair grow a bit.
As for Tom Rounds, he was embracing the San Francisco sound before it broke nationally, mid-charting the Jefferson Airplane's "Come Up The Years" and going Top 10 with "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the 13th Floor Elevators (both of which failed to chart in Billboard) in the summer of 1966. Those are just two of the examples. Basically, Rounds was about a year ahead of the rest of the country, and certainly mainstream Top 40, in embracing the San Francisco Sound.
Drake wanted a carbon copy of KHJ and instead he got way too much local flavor for his taste. It didn't help things between Drake and Rounds that KFRC was a lot slower to catch and eventually overtake KYA than KHJ was to dispatch KRLA and KFWB. When Rounds left in the fall of 1967, Drake replaced him with Les Turpin from KGB and the music was a lot more mass appeal, with, if anything, an R&B lean.
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I don't think there is widespread hatred (at least among the target audience) of "We Built This City". If there were, it wouldn't be getting airplay. The "worst song" thing started with some music critic writing for Blender and it's just been fueled by constant reposting on social media. The tale is told here: https://news.avclub.com/read-this-how-we-built-this-city-became-the-worst-so-1798251389
And Llew, you're right...Drake was long-gone...he and RKO parted ways in 1973. For that matter, Les Garland wasn't at KFRC at the time, either (he left in 1980)...and KFRC didn't air his voiceover. Instead, Dave Sholin re-cut the rap, word for word, but faster so he could say "610/KFRC" at the beginning and the end.
That's how I remember it starting as well. There might have been some disgust in 1985 from old fans of the psychedelic-era Airplane, but Starship had already gone in a far different direction. Musically, "WBTC" was a solid piece of mid-'80s pop. I was 30 when it came out and I liked it, and I don't remember a whole lot of people my age hating it. I don't even remember a whole lot of outrage in the pre-internet media of the time. I'd imagine ivory-tower types like Robert Christgau had little use for the song and probably wrote as much, but worst of all time? Sorry, it just had too much going for it to even be thought of that way back then, IMO.
Let's see. In what I think was TR's last book, June/July of 1967, KFRC had an 11.9 and KYA had an 8.4
In 1968, May/June, KFRC was at an 8.6 and KYA was an 8.4.
David:
My point wasn't that Les did better, but that Tom was up against an impatient Drake, playing music the boss didn't like.
What I've got (Hooper) shows:
May '67: KYA 9.5, KFRC 8.1
June-July '67: KFRC: 11.9 KYA 7.4
May-June '68: KFRC 8.6 KYA 8.4
My understanding is that June-July '67 was the first time KFRC beat KYA...so that's a year and four months after launch. KHJ was number one in six months. Rounds probably saw that as gold (or a fluke) and got out rather than ride the ship down. That June-July '67 number is out of whack with what came before and after, and could easily be considered a fluke book. From that point on:
October '68 (ARB): KYA 7.0 KFRC 6.1
Aug-Sep '69 (Pulse): KYA 12.0 KFRC 10.0
Oct-Nov '70 (ARB): KFRC 8.0 KYA 7.9
In fact, KFRC didn't beat KYA by a full point or better after June-July '67 until October-November 1971...which was Paul Drew as PD, playing it very safe.
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