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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
FROM THE ARCHIVE: WNIC RECALLED! HARPER & GANNON ON THE RADIO
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
FROM THE ARCHIVE: WXYZ RECALLED! JIMMY HAMPTON ON THE RADIO
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
FROM THE ARCHIVE: WMJC RECALLED! JEFF & JERR ON THE RADIO
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
FROM THE ARCHIVE: CKLW RECALLED! TOM CLAY ON THE RADIO
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
NEW! FOR THE ARCHIVE: WQKI RECALLED! DANNY BONADUCE ON THE RADIO
A special THANK YOU to Charles Liggett, of Chelsea, MI., for this recent contribution to the Motor City Radio Flashbacks collection.
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Newly restored! This selected audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
WXYZ RADIO 1270! THE DETROIT SOUND SURVEY: SEPTEMBER 22, 1964
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This list is selected each week by WXYZ Radio reports of records sales gathered from leading record outlets in the Detroit area and other sources available to WXYZ.
This WXYZ September 1964 chart survey were digitally re-imaged, restored by Motor City Radio Flashbacks.
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A special THANK YOU to our friend, Larry Good, for generously contributing this featured WXYZ chart for the Motor City Radio Flashbacks Archive.
GOING UP, THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! TEN NEWLY RESTORED DETROIT RADIO AIRCHECKS FROM THE ARCHIVE
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By the time you will read this, I will be on my way traveling overseas, during the next two weeks. But Motor City Radio Flashbacks will remain open, business as usual! Here is what I have per-scheduled to post on this site while I will be away. Beginning Friday, September 22:
WXYZ Detroit Sound Survey [September 22, 1964]
AUDIO REMASTERED AIRCHECKS September 25-29 (four airchecks randomly selected from the Aircheck Library, WKQI is new):
WKQI-FM Danny Donabuce [August 30, 1996] Monday, September 25 (NEW!)
CKLW-AM Tom Clay [June 17, 1964] Tuesday, September 26
WMJC-FM Jeff & Jerr [February 28, 1983] Wednesday, September 27
WXYZ-AM Jim Hampton [July 29, 1966] Thursday, September 28
WNIC-FM Harper & Gannon [March 3, 1988] Friday, September 29
AUDIO REMASTERED AIRCHECKS October 2-6 (four airchecks randomly selected from the Aircheck Library, WKQI is new):
WKNR-AM J. Michael Wilson [October 3, 1966–July 29, 1967] Monday, October 2
WKQI-FM Roy Stephens [January 25, 1997] Tuesday, October 3 (NEW!)
WKSG-FM Lee Alan [Program: June 13, 1963] Wednesday, October 4
WHND-AM Richard D. Haase [November 15, 1994] Thursday, October 5
WKNR-AM Tom Neal [November 23, 1969] Friday, October 6
All above featured audio airchecks were digitally remastered and restored, audio reprocessed and/or enhanced through the Sound Forge Audio Studio 16 Magix application software.
I will be back right here, after this brief two week hiatus, on Monday, October 9. In the meantime, keep it right here at Motor City Radio Flashbacks.
And I hope that you will enjoy these ten Detroit radio memories – newly remastered – all over again. Be back soon!
Jim Feliciano | Curator, Motor City Radio Flashbacks
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WJLB IN NEW PROGRAM POLICY . . . SEPTEMBER 23, 1967
New Detroit R&B Soul Station PD Will Launch “Young Sound” and Apply Consistency To Programming
DETROIT — WJLB, Booth Broadcasting’s 1,000-watt R&B operation here, has just launched a new programming policy centering around tighter production, faster pacing, and a new set of custom jingles created and packaged by Quincy Jones.
Wash Allen, who just recently took over WJLB program director duties after being transferred from Booth’s WABQ in Cleveland, said the Detroit station would be “running with a full-blast, exciting young sound.” Playlist will be 40 records, to which he will add as necessity demands. “You can never tell how many good tunes will come out in a good week, but I think the average will be about five new records a week,” he said.
The aim will be to establish consistency in programming, Allen said. He felt his philosophy in programming was the same as Bill Drake, consultant to RKO General stations, and Paul Drew, program director of CKLW in Detroit. “Certain top tunes must be played consistently and deejays must be consistent in their shows. One dee-jay can’t make a station; it has to be a total operation and this is a new concept in R&B radio. In the old days, one guy could make a station; he could make a record. It can’t be like that today.”
Things are changing so fast in radio, especially in R&B radio, that Allen felt many older dee-jays were finding it difficult to grasp what was happening. “To some extent,” Allen said, “it was necessary to teach radio to these people. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that this situation developed. It’s just that times are changing and a radio station has to move with the times.”
Allen began his radio career with WVOL in Nashville while attending Tennessee State University. He had been with WABQ about two and a half years before moving to WJLB. He considers himself a “derivative of Ed Wright,” who’d been program director of WABQ prior to joining Liberty Records as head of its Minit label.
Allen wrote lyrics and produced the Jones jingles. Future plans call for psychedelic jingles. Station has brought in new equipment and is building up its news department. In Martha Jean Steinberg and Ernie Durham, Allen felt he had two of the top air personalities of any station in the nation. “Now, with the new equipment, we find we have everything to work with. END
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Information, credit, and news source (as was published): Billboard; September 23, 1967
BLITZ MAGAZINE | CKLW RADIO LEGENDS, BURTON CUMMINGS, HONOR CKLW MUSIC DIRECTOR ROSALIE TROMBLEY
The Rosalie Trombley Commemorative Day Event: Windsor, Ontario. Sunday, September 17, 2023
FROM BLITZ MAGAZINE’S WEBSITE and FACEBOOK PAGE
By Michael McDowell
If you believe that the 1970s represented a banner era for hit singles, you can thank Rosalie Trombley.
The position of Music Director at a radio station could vary widely in terms of aesthetic gratification, commensurate with the state of the art. For such visionaries as Frank “Swingin’ ” Sweeney and Paul Cannon (who each held the position at suburban Detroit’s legendary WKNR Keener 13 throughout the mid to late 1960s), being Music Director meant selecting an average of six to ten new singles for airplay out of the roughly 300 to 600 stellar new releases that surfaced each week throughout that most dynamic and creative of musical eras.
However, doing so meant that hundreds of landmark singles were overlooked at the time of their release. For the past several decades, Blitz Magazine – The Rock And Roll Magazine For Thinking People has been working in tandem with countless musicologists and record collectors around the world to chronicle, celebrate and archive that tremendous body of material.
Conversely, with mainstream music at large having entered into a protracted aesthetic slump by the end of the 1960s, the job of Music Director by definition required a great deal more due diligence in order to sustain the momentum that had been generated by the likes of Sweeney and Cannon. As Music Director for Windsor, Ontario’s CKLW-AM throughout that period, Leamington, Ontario native Trombley nonetheless managed to separate the wheat from the chaff in similar fashion. In the process, she helped enable The Big 8 to dominate the North American market throughout the decade.
On the morning of Sunday the seventeenth of September, hundreds of radio and entertainment industry veterans gathered together with Trombley’s family and friends at Windsor’s Open Streets Festival along Riverside Drive for the unveiling of a statue in her honor. Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens was joined in his opening remarks by Saint Clair College President Patti France, statue artist Donna Jean Mayne and others, including former Deverons and Guess Who vocalist and keyboard man, Burton Cummings.
“I remember the few times I really talked to Rosalie”, said Cummings.
“She really knew the stuff. There are many musicians who are very talented, who didn’t make it. I never took that for granted. Because of Rosalie, I still hear myself on the radio all the time. And she was there, right at the launching point”.
Following the unveiling of the statue by Cummings, CKLW veteran and big8radio.com CEO Charlie O’Brien and others, Saint Clair College hosted a lunch reception for the industry vets in attendance. Also on board were CKLW legends Len Robinson, Pat Holiday, Ted Richards, JoJo Shutty-MacGregor and Joe Donovan, along with Motor City Radio Flashbacks’ curator Jim Feliciano, Edison Media Research’s Sean Ross, renowned musicologist Jim Johnson and Trombley’s son, Tim.
At the reception, Tim Trombley shared at length about his mother’s unwavering ability to balance her pioneering work at CKLW with her ongoing responsibilities as a single parent, In the process, he provided one of the event’s most moving moments.
Conversely, Richards spoke of Trombley’s lighter side by sharing the secret of “the record that Rosale hated”.
“It was C.W. McCall’s Convoy”, Richards said, in reference to the November 1975 MGM label tale of the world of truck drivers and their CB radios.
“We aired it late at night!”
Nonetheless, all concurred that Trombley (who succumbed to a lengthy battle against Alzheimer’s disease in her native Leamington in November 2021 at age 82) was unwavering in her determination to keep the atmosphere in the CKLW studios like that of one big, happy family.
“We had fun!”, said Holiday.
To be certain, it was fun that was augmented by gratitude. And perhaps no individual at the day’s festivities was more grateful in that respect than Cummings.
Having left the Deverons in 1966 to join the Guess Who for the release of their third album, ‘It’s Time’, the band went on to sign with Larry Uttal’s Amy label in the United States. At Amy, the Guess Who released their Dave Clark Five – inspired “His Girl” single.
Meanwhile, the Guess Who continued to record for Quality at home. The results included such magnificent singles as Clock On The Wall and their ambitious cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Flying On The Ground Is Wrong”.
However, with the departure of original front man Chad Allan (who had provided the lead vocal for the Guess Who’s 1965 monster classic cover of Johnny Kidd And The Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” for Florence Greenberg’s Scepter label), the band remained in transitory mode for more than a year. In addition to those various projects for Amy and Quality, they managed to sustain their momentum in part by hosting a musical variety television series from their native Winnipeg, Manitoba.
But thanks to Rosalie Trombley, that all began to change at the end of 1968.
Around the time they had completed a joint album project at home with Capitol Records stalwarts, The Staccatos, The Guess Who switched label affiliations to RCA Victor in the United States and Nimbus in Canada. Their resultant Wheatfield Soul album produced an ambitious original ballad (composed by Cummings and Guess Who lead guitarist Randy Bachman), “These Eyes”.
After that single had enjoyed brief success at home in late 1968, Trombley lent her support to the record, putting it in heavy rotation at CKLW in the early weeks of 1969. The single became an instant classic.
One magnificent Guess Who single after another followed in succession, from mid-1969 throughout the first half of the 1970s. Among the highlights were “Laughing / Undun”, “No Time”, “American Woman” / “No Sugar Tonight”, “Hand Me Down World”, “Rain Dance”, “Albert Flasher”, “Dancin’ Fool”, “Share The Land” / “Bus Rider”, “Sour Suite”, “Glamour Boy”, “Orly” and their sublime signature single,” Running Back To Saskatoon”. Without exception, Trombley afforded each and every one of them heavy rotation at CKLW.
“When it comes to Rosalie Trombley, I have no problem saying very easily that she changed my life”, said Cummings. “It would occur to me once in a while that if it weren’t for Rosalie, I wouldn’t be here.
“I kept a journal, as we didn’t have laptops back then. We traveled all over the world. I wouldn’t have had that luxury had Rosalie Trombley not launched our first (RCA Victor) record.
“Rosalie was a huge part in launching that record. This was the gateway into Detroit, where a lot of people heard it for the first time. I would not have a wall of beautiful gold records at home, were it not for Rosalie. For that, I am eternally grateful. I will never forget her.”
The statue of Rosalie Trombley can be viewed from Riverside Drive at the intersection of McDougall Street.
—Mike McDowell September 19, 2023
Copyright 2023. Blitz Magazine. All rights reserved.
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A special THANK YOU to Mike McDowell, Editor of Blitz Magazine, for his guest article published here today at Motor City Radio Flashbacks.
All photographs were taken and is property of Mike McDowell.
A special THANK YOU to Terry Scott. The You Tube video presentation below is courtesy of CKLW 580 newsman Terry Scott.
Also, visit the newly-launched website (September 17, 2023), ‘Honouring Rosalie Trombley’, go HERE
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A MCRFB Note: For detailed and enlarged viewing of all images presented here, double-click over each photo with your PC mouse. Tap over photo and stretch image across your mobile device window for expanded detailed view.
