#3 | “19th Nervous Breakdown” by The Rolling Stones
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Debuted #46 week-ending February 26, 1966, “19th Nervous Breakdown” peaks at #2 (2 weeks) on the Hot 100, week-ending, March 19, 1966. Having charted 10 weeks overall — on its final week on Billboard, the single drops out at #27 for the week-ending, April 30, 1966.
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Source: The Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts [1966]
#4 | “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot me Down)” by Cher
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Debuted #75 week-ending March 12, 1966, “Bang Bang” peaks at #2 (1 week) on the Hot 100, week-ending, April 23, 1966. Having charted 11 weeks overall — on its final week on Billboard the single drops out at #31 for the week-ending, May 21, 1966.
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Source: The Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts [1966]
#5 | “The Ballad Of The Green Berets” by Ssgt. Barry Sadler
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Debuted #87 week-ending February 5, 1966, “The Ballad Of The Green Berets” peaks at #1 (5 weeks) on the Hot 100, week-ending, March 5, 1966. Having charted 13 weeks overall — on its final week on Billboard, the single drops out at #20 for the week-ending, April 30, 1966.
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Source: The Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts [1966]
Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks.
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Tom Howard, shared his comments (April 4): Jim, this 30 minutes aircheck from March 20, 1970 was sent to me from CKLW PD Paul Drew. This recording was from the master open reel to reel tape and was taped directly from a studio board feed, that’s why it sounds so good.
March 17, 1970 was on St. Patrick’s Day, and my grandmother, on some days, began recording CKLW just before 6 AM the Todd Wallace show, getting the day started, and also that of my good friend Big Jim Davis (Edwards). It was taped on a C90 cassette tapes. Later in the afternoon, it was Duke Roberts . . . also, recorded — unedited and unscoped — both the same day. It was great listening to CKLW in the late ’60’s and ’70’s. My grandmother would then mail the tapes to me here in Orange County, in Southern California. My friend, Charlie Ritenburg, a dear friend of mine living in Toronto, restored many of my recordings, including this one as well.
Enjoy this stellar, CKLW Duke Roberts memory from 1970. On the radio once again like it was only yesterday . . . 54 years ago. –T. Howard
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NEW! A special THANK YOU to our friend, Tom Howard, of Riverside, California, for this recent contribution for our Motor City Radio Flashbacks airchecks repository.
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THE BEATLES break all American chart records when the latest Billboard chart (April 4, 1964) shows them with the ‘Top Five’ records in the country simultaneously with: #5: “Please Please Me,” #4: “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” #3: “She Loves You,” #2: “Twist And Shout,” #1: “Can’t Buy Me Love.” The Beatles had similarly dominated Canada and Australia’s Top Ten earlier in the month. 50 years ago. The Beatles made music history this month, according to Billboard, week-ending, April 4, 1964.
“Can’t Buy Me Love”, #1 this week by The Beatles, debuted at #27 on Billboard, week ending, March 28. Just one week later, the single jumps all the way to #1. The Capitol single would remain #1 for five consecutive weeks, from April 4 through May 2. Thereafter, “Can’t Buy Me Love” began its weekly drops to #5, #11, #23 and #42 (final week on the chart), for the week-ending, May 30, 1964. The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” is the second best-selling single in 1964, behind the group’s #1 single for the entire year, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.
Besides holding an incredible top 5 position on the Billboard chart, it bears noting there are 7 other Beatles’ singles peppered throughout this chart, including two new Beatles singles having been added to the Hot 100, for the week-ending, April 4, 1964.
And there you have it. This week in April 1964. Find ’em. Count ’em. Make it a dozen. TWELVE!
Audio digitally remastered by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
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Program recording audio remastered by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
Audio digitally restored by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
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Monitor was an American weekend radio program broadcast live and nationwide on the NBC Radio Network from June 12, 1955, until January 26, 1975. It began originally on Saturday morning at 8am and continued through the weekend until 12 midnight on Sunday. After the first few months, the full weekend broadcast was shortened when the midnight-to-dawn hours were dropped since few NBC stations carried it.
The program offered a magazine-of-the-air mix of news, sports, comedy, variety, music, celebrity interviews and other short segments (along with records, usually of popular middle-of-the-road songs, especially in its later years). Its length and eclectic format were radical departures from the traditional radio programming structure of 30 and 60 minute programs and represented an ambitious attempt to respond to the rise of television as America’s major home-entertainment medium.
The show was the brainchild of Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, whose career bridged classic radio and television’s infancy and who sought to keep radio alive in a television age. Believing that broadcasting could and should educate as well as entertain, Weaver fashioned a series to do both with some of the best-remembered and best-regarded names in broadcasting, entertainment, journalism, and literature taking part. Monitor and the Sunday-afternoon TV documentary series Wide Wide World were Weaver’s last two major contributions to NBC, as he left the network within a year of Monitor’s premiere.
When Monitor began on June 12, 1955, at 4pm, the first hour of the program was simulcast on NBC-TV. That initial June 12 broadcast lasted eight hours, from 4pm through 12 midnight. Following the Monitor beacon, Morgan Beatty was the first voice ever heard on Monitor. After an introduction by Pat Weaver, news headlines by Dave Garroway and a routine by Bob and Ray, Garroway cued Monitor’s opening music remote: live jazz by Howard Rumsey and the Lighthouse All-Stars at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, California. It was the first of many jazz remotes in the weeks to come.
On the following Saturday, June 18, Monitor began broadcasting 40 consecutive hours each weekend, from 8am on Saturday to midnight on Sunday. Monitor aired from a mammoth NBC studio called Radio Central, created especially for the program, on the fifth floor of the RCA Building in midtown Manhattan (the same space which is now home to MSNBC). NBC unveiled Radio Central to the national television audience during a segment in the October 16, 1955 premiere of Wide Wide World, including a Monitor interview with Alfred Hitchcock (seen through glass in an adjacent studio and minus audio) and a Monitor newscast (with audio). Built at a cost of $150,000 the glass-enclosed studios of Radio Central were described by Pat Weaver as “a listening post of the world.”
The enduring audio signature of the show was the “Monitor Beacon” — a mix of audio-manipulated telephone tones and the sound of an oscillator emitting the Morse code signal for the letter “M”, for “Monitor”. It was described by one source as “a tape loop made from a sequence of 1950s AT&T telephone line switching tones generated by analog oscillators”.
The Beacon introduced the show and was used in transitions, for example, to station breaks, accompanied by the tag line: “You’re on the Monitor beacon.”
The innovative approach of Monitor made it a profitable success for NBC Radio over many years, helping to sustain the network in an era when network radio was collapsing. Its strong start and high popularity led the show to air on Friday nights from 8pm to 10pm in 1957, followed by an expansion to weeknights in 1959, all in addition to its 32 weekend hours (reduced from 40 in late 1955).
By 1961, the weeknight Monitor was gone and the weekend schedule cut in half – from 32 to 16 hours each weekend. This was not quite as drastic a cut as it seems, as some programming that had been counted as part of Monitor’s 32 hours—such as Sunday morning religious broadcasts and the radio version of Meet the Press—continued to air on NBC outside of the Monitor schedule. This was further shortened in 1974 to only 12 live weekend hours (plus nine repeated hours).
Radio stations, especially in large markets, had increasingly adopted personality-driven formats featuring local disc jockeys and sought to establish a clear-cut musical or talk identity for themselves. Because of this, Monitor’s “something-for-everyone” programming often did not fit in with schedules and viewpoints of stations, and fewer affiliates carried the program in major markets. Due to this, many of the show’s sponsors also pulled away, requiring a shortening of the schedule to keep costs low.
About 125 stations still carried the program on its last day, with few in major markets. After 20 years of broadcasting, Monitor signed off after airing it’s last program on January 26, 1976. Source: Monitor (Radio Program) Wikipedia
On Sunday, March 28, 1965, the presented NBC Monitor program aired on WWJ 950 (Detroit) at the top of the 5:00 p.m. hour, according to the Detroit Free Press radio guides, as dated, and published that year [Detroit Free Press Newspaper Archive, copyright 2024].
In this Monitor segment, the guest speaker was 1964 Nobel Prize winner and ’60s civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The program panelists and the voices you will hear are those of James K. Kilpatrick (The Richmond News Leader), Tom Wicker (The New York Times) John Chancellor (NBC News), and Lawrence J. Spivak (Producer; Meet the Press). Program was moderated by Ned Brooks.
The panelists queried Dr. King for answers and his views of the civil rights movement under his leadership.
Dr. King provided direct responses to inquiries and remarks, alongside those of other panelists. The discussion encompassed topics such as racial segregation in Southern states, the Supreme Court’s stance on racial justice and injustices, the administration of Governor George Wallace in Alabama, the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, and the tragic death of Viola Liuzzo in Alabama (originally from Detroit; for further details, refer to the newspaper insert).
Also addressed were Dr. King’s consistent appeals for “moral” and “non-violent” demonstrations, the organization of additional Southern economic boycotts, and the movement’s future prospects, with a focus on contemporary topical debates at the time.
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This recording was made possible, and is the property (and courtesy) of the Past Daily website, from the incredible collection of it’s owner, Gordon Skene.
This featured audio recording, in its presented form, was at one time freely available and downloadable (as all their recordings were) from the Past Daily site, early on. This author obtained dozens of Past Daily historic recordings when they were available, many years ago. Motor City Radio Flashbacks has, and to his credit, featured several of Gordon Skene’s period recordings, such as we have presented here today, in the past. Founded in 2012, Past Daily still thrives on the internet today.
For support, and more on Past Daily, please click on the link in our menu column at the left of our site’s home page. Or, you may go, HERE.
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NOTE: Double-click over newspaper clipping for largest PC detailed view. Or tap, then stretch clipping across your mobile device screen for expanded read.
Audio was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
Shamrock Broadcasting purchased W4 in July 1979. The station is most remembered today as one of the early radio jobs for Howard Stern, who was brought in from Hartford, Connecticut, to host mornings, beginning April 21, 1980. However, W4 was one of four Detroit stations with an AOR format, and faced with increasing competition and rapidly falling ratings, management decided to make a change.
With no advance notice, Shamrock changed the station’s format to country music on January 18, 1981. At first, the DJs, including Stern, were kept on to play country hits. The station reportedly planned to brand Howard Stern as “Hopalong Howie,” which he declined after two weeks, moving to WWDC-FM in Washington, D.C. In the film “Private Parts”, Stern announces his departure in the middle of a song, claiming he didn’t understand country music.
The move to country music paid off; the Detroit radio market, the nation’s fifth largest at the time, had no FM country music station. In addition, Detroit and its suburbs had a sizable percentage of the population whose families hailed from the Southern United States and grew up with the genre. W4 Country’s first years coincided with the rise in popularity of country music, even outside the South. At the time of the country format’s launch, the immediate Detroit area’s only country music station was on AM, WCXI at 1130 kHz. WWWW became the first FM country station in Detroit since WCAR-FM’s and CKLW-FM’s brief tries at the format in the mid-1970s. As a result, WCXI’s ratings fell. By the early 1990s, AM 1130 was being used as a simulcast for W4.
“W4 Country” lasted almost two decades and did reasonably well in the ratings, under the leadership of programmer Barry Mardit, who joined the station in late 1981. The station posted a #1 finish in the Fall 1992 Detroit Arbitron radio ratings with an 8.7 share. The following year, the station gained a strong competitor in WYCD, causing WWWW’s ratings to decline. Recording artist Holly Dunn served as morning co-host on W4 Country during the late 1990s. Declining ratings and revenue led owners AM-FM (which became part of Clear Channel Communications in August 2000) to drop the country format at 6 p.m. on September 1, 1999. The final song played on “W4 Country” was “The Dance” by Garth Brooks, followed by “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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Source and information, credit: WWWW Wikipedia
The featured WWW Jingle package is property of JAM, Incorporated. The JAMS logo and brand is licensed and marketed by JAM Productions, Dallas.
This WCXI Deano Day audio file, in it’s archived, original and unrestored form was selected for today’s special aircheck “restoration” presentation.
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally remastered by Motor City Radio Flashbacks.
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For over 30 years, legendary morning radio personality Joseph Priestley McCarthy broadcast his #1 rated show on WJR-760 in Detroit. “J.P.” regularly interviewed heads of states, world leaders, government officials, corporate figures, champions of sports, entertainment luminaries, and dedicated listeners, highlighting his storied broadcasting career in the Motor City.
One day short of 51 months having passed after this broadcast first aired, J.P. passed away on August 16, 1995.
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NEW! A special THANK YOU to our friend, Jim Nuznoff, of Port Charlotte, Florida, for this recent contribution to our Motor City Radio Flashbacks airchecks repository. Thanks again, Jim, we are grateful for your generosity and your support for this site, always.
Jim writes (January 9, 2024) — “March 17, 1993. J. P. McCarthy Show featuring a remote broadcast on St. Patrick’s Day, live, from the Pegasus Restaurant in Detroit. This was a somewhat, somber show, according to the news you will hear in the audio. For it was also the time when Detroit area restaurant owner Chuck Muir (along with his wife) was reported missing aboard his sailboat during a storm in the Bahamas. And auto dealership owner and long-time friends, George and Lynn Drummey (of Drummey Olds) were also on board as well. I don’t think they were ever found.”
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally restored by Motor City Radio Flashbacks.