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The Young Sound vs. Hit Parade on KIRO FM 100.7 1967 - 71

DavidEduardo said:


The big three produced their own custom cuts, most being instrumental arrangements of pop hits. A number of the smaller ones grouped together to do custom music, although not as many cuts and not as prestigious a set of orchestras. Almost all were done in Europe.
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Europe makes sense as many of the lower budget American record labels (and a few major label subsidiaries like RCA Camden) used them from the '50s to the '80s. If I'm not mistaken, 101 Strings was not one orchestra, but several under the moniker and all were European. The European orchestras were not only very talented, but dirt cheap too because Europe was still recovering from World War II in the '50s and '60s and American money was like pure gold. They could play any arrangement you gave them for a flat rate (no royalties.) And there were literally hundreds of them. Though when the recordings came stateside, the name of the orchestra was usually changed to something fancier sounding. Or at least pronounceable before getting on vinyl and into the $1.98 record bins at the drug store.
 
Several people above say "Hit Parade" was a cross between AC, Top 40 and Easy Listening. Unless it was changed in its later days, the Hit Parade I remember had nothing to do with the Easy Listening format, as we commonly define it. Beautiful Music usually means mostly instrumental covers of pop hits, with Broadway and Hollywood show tunes, and maybe a few vocals per hour. Easy Listening steps up the vocals, maybe as high as 50%.

But Hit Parade was all vocals, unless an instrumental song was a legit Top 20 hit. I guess we could call it Soft AC. Yes, many more MOR artists made the Top 40 in those days, so there were plenty of Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Brazil 66, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick and Anne Murray songs in the mix. But only songs that made the Top 20. I don't think Hit Parade played songs that had not reached the Top 20.

And there was also plenty of Soft Rock in the mix too. Carole King, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens, The Association, The Beatles, The Fifth Dimension, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, John Denver and Linda Ronstadt were also included.

I can name plenty of stations that carried it at one time or another. I remember in some places in New England, when my family would rent a cottage for a week or two, you could often pick up a couple of Hit Parade stations from one location. 102.3 in St. Albans VT and 107.1 in Barre VT. Or in Maine, 104.3 in Gardiner and 92.1 in Sanford. It also aired on 96.1 in Easton PA and in Asbury Park NJ on 94.3.

In those days, many FM stations that weren't simulcast with their AM sister station, and were outside the largest markets, ran an automated format. Or maybe a DJ would be heard during weekdays, with automation nights and weekends. That was true of Top 40, Easy Listening and AC stations that used Hit Parade. The live DJs were usually found on the AM station, while FM penetration was low. It didn't pay to put live DJs on the FM station if few people owned FM radios. If you did own an FM receiver, it was likely the big stereo in the living room, not your car radio or kitchen radio. So why bother to hire a DJ staff for a band that had only limited penetration?
 
Gregg. said:
It didn't pay to put live DJs on the FM station if few people owned FM radios. If you did own an FM receiver, it was likely the big stereo in the living room, not your car radio or kitchen radio. So why bother to hire a DJ staff for a band that had only limited penetration?
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One example I give about the state of FM radio during this time was that the Washington Post donated WTOP-FM to Howard University in 1971 because it had no use for the station and couldn't find a credible buyer. This station, which became WHUR-FM, has since become among the highest rated radio stations in the city. Had they just waited a few more years, the value of the station would have been obvious. But at the time, FM radio was mainly the domain of a small number of audiophiles and classical music enthusiasts.

This was in the waning years of US electronics manufacturing, before the explosion of Japanese electronics, and RCA was still at war with the man who invented FM. Edwin Armstrong's family allowed the patent to expire, and RCA and many other manufacturers almost immediately began at add the FM band to their portable radios. So FM became more available.
 
Bongwater said:
Europe makes sense as many of the lower budget American record labels (and a few major label subsidiaries like RCA Camden) used them from the '50s to the '80s. If I'm not mistaken, 101 Strings was not one orchestra, but several under the moniker and all were European. The European orchestras were not only very talented, but dirt cheap too because Europe was still recovering from World War II in the '50s and '60s and American money was like pure gold. They could play any arrangement you gave them for a flat rate (no royalties.) And there were literally hundreds of them. Though when the recordings came stateside, the name of the orchestra was usually changed to something fancier sounding. Or at least pronounceable before getting on vinyl and into the $1.98 record bins at the drug store.
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Custom instrumental was not a big thing until the mid-70's. It was, in a large part, a reaction to the fact that US record labels quit producing a lot of smooth instrumentals in the early 70's as consumer demand fell.

In the 60's we had all the instrumental hits, from Santo & Johnny to Paul Mauriat to The Ventures. They were big hits on Top 40 radio.

We had the Hollyridge Strings doing covers of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We had stars ranging from Floyd Cramer to Ferranti & Teicher.

But the 70's not only saw a decline in the production of this kind of music, but also a change in the texture of pop hits, with tastes fragmenting into harder and softer pop.

Yet in Europe, instrumental music and pop orchestras were thriving, driven both by demand and the fact that many of those orchestras were part of state radio companies, like the BBC. Much of what was played that came from commercial recordings was European: Mauriat, Caravelli, Kaempfert and the like.

It wasn't that Europe was cheaper, it was that Europe had plenty of orchestras and lots of arrangers. It wasn't any cheaper... when custom music started to be recorded, Europe was actually as expensive and as prosperous as the US (and most of the material, due to language issues, was done in England).

There was also a cheaper back door to custom music, which was the licensing of the Canadian Talent Library, very good material that was covered by broadcast limitations that required buying a blanket license separately. I used a lot of CTL material in my Beautiful Music format because I got a good price since nobody else had even offered to license the material for Latin America.

There was a huge available for license BBC library, too.

There were plenty of orchestras. Norrie Paramour (BBC Midlands Orchestra), Geoff Love, Frank Chacksfield, Syd Dale and many others had orchestras and were also arrangers and helped produce recordings. There were far fewer options in the US.

Each syndicator put their own name on the orchestra. I used "Orquesta Música en Flor" for many Paramor and Dale cuts. Kind of like jingles, these recordings were buy-outs.

Generally, the process was for the syndicator to give a list of songs they wanted insturmental covers of and some guidance as to style. The job of arrangements was done in Europe, and there were a number of occasions where an orchestra leader would say that they could not come up with a way of doing certain pop hits in smooth instrumental fashion. Sometimes options were given as to whether a full orchestral approach was wanted, or whether a featured instrument might be desired. The orchestra leader might send a solo... often piano... rendition of the style and tempo on a tape as part of the approval process.

And sometimes there was another back door: when karaoke and bar band covering became very prevalent, there were companies that put together tracks for a soloist to sing along with or to sing along with while playing lead guitar. I found hundreds of hit tracks in Spain done this way, and only paid to have a solo instrument record the lead... piano, sax, guitar, etc. Since I did not have to pay for the arrangements, just a producer and the soloist and the license to the track, this was a great way to get all the Spanish hits in solid, instrumental versions.
 
I saw my first automation system before I saw my first live radio studio. It was in the back of the Celina Music Store in Celina, Ohio, playing Hit Parade '68 on WMER, 94.3. It had some current hits, lots of gold and some instrumentals. You might call it soft A/C today, but for those who never heard it, or weren't born yet it's hard to describe. It wasn't aggressive on current hits, and played some songs that didn't really chart. WOR-FM New York, from 1967-69, was said to be the "live" version of Hit Parade. There are airchecks of OR-FM floating around from that era. D-C also syndicated "Solid Gold Rock and Roll" with mixes that allowed for either 40% or 60% gold vs. current top 40 hits. Hit Parade was designed for the 18-49 demographic, consisting at that time of a lot of housewives (when we used to use that term).
 
I heard a demo of Hit Parade once, I believe it was of WRAL. I remember being quite bored by the presentation. Did these formats have any kind of set rules, or did the stations have the freedom to play the tapes in just about any order they could? If you could get two Hit Parade, or Stereo Rock, or any of the other automated formats where you were, would those logs match, or would they just sound similar?
 
bobdavcav said:
Did these formats have any kind of set rules, or did the stations have the freedom to play the tapes in just about any order they could?
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I don't know why you'd play tapes out of order. They seemed to think long and hard about what they played and how they played them, with the segues designed to match in terms of the key and tempo. No train-wreck segues as they do today, but this was also before the invention of imaging. These stations had a GM, sales department, and operations department that ran tapes with the precision of the German army.
 
bobdavcav said:
I heard a demo of Hit Parade once, I believe it was of WRAL. I remember being quite bored by the presentation. Did these formats have any kind of set rules, or did the stations have the freedom to play the tapes in just about any order they could? If you could get two Hit Parade, or Stereo Rock, or any of the other automated formats where you were, would those logs match, or would they just sound similar?
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I don't know about Hit Parade, but we ran an AC taped format back in the 80s from another syndicator. There were 3 oldies categories of tapes, I think they were softer, more upbeat, and the biggest hits. The 4th category was currents.

We could set up the hourly format any way we wanted. It was something like every third song was a current. The softer oldies played 2 times an hour, and the rest was about equal between the other 2 oldies categories. It would vary somewhat by the commercial load.
 
There were various tape combinations that could be used within the bounds of DCs and most other syndicated formats for dayparting or as market conditions warranted. TM Stereo Rock had an optional album cut category. When I worked with Century 21, there was all kind of mixing and matching available among the EZ format (soft A/C), regular AC, the "Z" format (CHR) and even their AOR format. Tape 302, for example, would have a version for all 4 formats.
 
TheBigA said:
I don't know why you'd play tapes out of order. They seemed to think long and hard about what they played and how they played them, with the segues designed to match in terms of the key and tempo. No train-wreck segues as they do today, but this was also before the invention of imaging. These stations had a GM, sales department, and operations department that ran tapes with the precision of the German army.
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Absolutely. The tapes were played with very precise instructions as to what tape to use as the "kick-off" for each day.

In the case of the Beautiful Music format I operated and programmed, we had a 2 AM reset where the sequence for the rest of the day was set. That not only included specific tapes from each category, but also the exact cut number to start with. The concept was to avoid both recently played segues of two or more songs and to avoid the same songs always playing in the same hour (which would happen if you always started at the tip of each reel at the same time).

Of course, the Shulke type matched flow only played one reel at a time, as the format was delivered in 15 minute sets, as opposed to playing a far more random mix of songs from 3 or 4 different reels.
 
That rotation was important. When in high school I was working solo some nights at a not very busy spot in the food court of the local mall. The radio served as primary entertainment for much of the shift. The station I listened to most played two oldies an hour, top and bottom of the hour. I knew the reels by listening. I knew, and I still remember this decades later, if I heard Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin at 7:00, I would hear Nights In White Satin by The Moody Blues at 8:30. It happened about every 10 days. I even made a bet with a friend, that I obviously won. When you start the reel at the same spot every time and in the same rotation this happens. Granted I didn't listen to radio, I sort of studied it.
 
Some stations are like this even today. I think they still do this, but a few years ago, KQMV used to play their powers in the same order all the time. They had the same clock from 2012 to early 2014, and I knew exactly when a power would come up. It was at the top of the hour, the first song out of each break, and the bottom. That clock made a lot of sense to me. I'd be willing to guess that I could predict what they will play when even today, but that would take me a lot of time analyzing the playlist on the website for times, then writing out the upcoming playlist, before going back and looking to see if I was right. That's time I don't want to take right now.
 
bobdavcav said:
Some stations are like this even today. I think they still do this, but a few years ago, KQMV used to play their powers in the same order all the time. They had the same clock from 2012 to early 2014, and I knew exactly when a power would come up. It was at the top of the hour, the first song out of each break, and the bottom. That clock made a lot of sense to me. I'd be willing to guess that I could predict what they will play when even today, but that would take me a lot of time analyzing the playlist on the website for times, then writing out the upcoming playlist, before going back and looking to see if I was right. That's time I don't want to take right now.
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Used to be: Power at the quarter hour, starting with the top. The term at the time was: 'Quarter hour maintenance'.
 
Kelly A said:
Used to be: Power at the quarter hour, starting with the top. The term at the time was: 'Quarter hour maintenance'.
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Still is to a degree, since the game is about maximining quarter hours. How you do it may have changed a bit with PPM.
 
Kelly A said:
Used to be: Power at the quarter hour, starting with the top. The term at the time was: 'Quarter hour maintenance'.
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haha...spots at :11, :26, and :54-:55, adding a :41 if sold out! I remember the drill. I never came to a conclusion that this quarter hour theory really meant too much, but it certainly was followed back in the day.

Then there were stations that went against conventional thinking that stopped down every 2-3 songs for a quick stopset of just a couple of commercials. KFRC tried this back in the 70's as I recall. On the news side the famous positioner, "give us 20 minutes and we will give you the world" was completely intended to create two quarter hours of listening. Surprisingly, this positioner can still be heard today, probably with the programmer having no understanding of why it exists.
 
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