Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghoulardi
I know you guys are talking TV but I'll throw this in. Back in about 1973 or so, one of the radio stations in the Cleveland area was switching to a "Brand New Country Music Format".To mark the event, they played Jerry Reed's "When You're Hot,You're Hot" for 24 hours straight. They would speed it up, slow it down, and drop in all kinds of strange noises and audio clips. If you could stay with it for awhile, it really became quite hilarious.
|
I remember that, and yes, I did "stay with it" for quite some time, as it was something no one had ever done before on radio in Cleveland--and it caught (and held) my interest. I was 17 years old and living in a Cleveland suburb at the time, and the radio station was, IIRC, WELW-FM, 107.9 (it's now urban contemporary WENZ-Z107.9 after several callsign and format changes, and who in the Cleveland area can ever forget their fabulous 140kW ERP signal, which they finally had to throttle back to 16kW ERP in the '80s because of new stations having gone on the air on 107.9 in Pittsburgh and Toronto?). That 24-hour Jerry Reed stunt was the darndest thing I've ever heard on radio in my entire life. As you said, they would do all kinds of crazy things with the song: play it backward, play two copies at once, run it at 78 RPM rather than 33 1/3 ... anything they could think of.
As I said, this was a stunt no one had ever pulled on radio in Cleveland before, and may never do again. In fact, in this age of most radio stations being automated and programmed from central studios hundreds or thousands of miles away, it would seem to me that a stunt like that would be almost impossible to pull off, unless some daredevil engineer at the central computer reprogrammed the system to play one or two songs over and over again. I doubt if either of the big media conglomerates (Clear Channel and CBS Radio, the latter formerly known as Infinity) that own and operate 90 percent of the radio stations in the United States would stand for that although, considering the noise masquerading as music a lot of those stations play all day, every day, I don't see the harm in doing a stunt like the Jerry Reed marathon again. Today's teenagers probably wouldn't notice the difference; after all, to that generation, rock and roll is rock and roll, the louder the better. They couldn't care less if the same song(s) repeat over and over again, as long as it's loud enough to rattle the windows. They don't worry about the loudness or what it will eventually do to their hearing, which is too darn bad. I am reminded of the story of two middle-aged men watching a motorcycle race in which the engines were deafeningly loud. The first gentleman said to his friend, "I tell ya, Joe, at this rate these kids will be deaf before they are 25 years old." His friend answered, "Nonsense! I been riding these things for years and I'm still alive!" The second man had thought his friend had said "dead" rather than "deaf", almost certainly because the second man's hearing had been adversely affected by loud noise (probably ear-pounding rock music through headphones with the volume run up to maximum) when he was a teenager. I live on the main street of a small village here in northeastern Ohio and often hear loud rap and other types of "music" blaring from cars passing by my apartment. The cars' windows are almost always closed as the vehicles zoom by. If their "music" is so loud it can be heard on the street and even inside buildings through the car's closed windows, I shudder to think how loud the same stuff must be inside the car. I bet those young men and women will go deaf within a very short time if they keep this up.