Vintage Airchecks of the 1980's and 1990's

As the 1970s became the 1980s and then the 1990s, American radio was changing.  In the decades prior, your car radio, the radio in your home, or that personal radio in your bedroom started to see the death of the radio star with the birth of MTV in 1981.  In fact, you could say that video killed the radio star and that a new generation would no longer be raised on the radio.

Generation X was coming of age in the 1980s and the 1990s and there were ways to get that favorite song once the request was made and you waited by the radio with you tape recorder propped up by the speaker to record that song with the hopes that the DJ would not talk during the song.  That would just ruin the homemade mix tape of songs on the radio that you were hoping to make for yourself or for that special boy or girl in school by putting together songs that told him/her how you felt about them.

With the Greatest Generation retiring and the Baby Boomers traveling further for work as jobs starting in the 1980s were leaving the towns, you just didn’t have time to read a newspaper or watch the news.  Talk Radio started to make a mark on the AM dial in your car radio.  It was during that drive time commute that you would hear the likes of Rush Limbaugh.  While there were shock jocks like Don Imus and Gary Dee, personalities like Howard Stern were making their own mark in the industry.

If talk radio wasn’t your thing, but you were still aging, what was once classified as Rock and Roll in your youth in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s were seeing your music shift from a contemporary format to, depending on the song a Classic Rock or an Oldies station.  One such example would be a 1988 reunion of the old WIXY 1260 AM station out of Cleveland doing a weekend long reunion on Oldies station WMJI.

By 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was rescinded and then in 1996 the Telecommunications Act was signed into law.  The latter made it possible for locally owned radio stations to be bought up by one or two companies like at the time, Clear Channel which later became iHeart Media.  What that did was take numerous radio stations with the same format play the same song in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles at the same time with the punch of a button by one person.  So what was once an industry of unique personalities of local talent and flavor that did work to improve their communities became a cookie cutter version of the industry. 

There was one station in the Midwest who for years, in fact well into the 21st Century that was family owned and live and local remained number one.  That was WNIR out of Kent, Ohio.  This was a station that at one time did live and local talk 100 hours a week.  There were no screeners as the on air personalities answered the phones cold.

The early format worked well after it went all talk on an FM dial in 1985.  You would have your morning zoo that was anchored by Stan Piatt.  For five hours every day, Howie Chizek would have no guest talk radio where he wanted to talk with the callers as he felt like his show, unlike nationally syndicated shows like Rush Limbaugh was over the fence conversation among friends and neighbors.  Howie would say that Limbaugh didn’t have callers calling in to talk about their child and/or spousal support, or to get his advice on the best price to lock in on natural gas.  Joey Finan would follow Chizek and rebutt for the next four hours what was said the previous five hours.  And rounding out the day until midnight would be Dial a Date, later called the Dating Show with host Jim Albright.

The premise was simple.  From 7PM to midnight Monday through Saturday, a contestant from the area would call in wanting to get a date.  It was usually a female caller.  After a 20 minute conversation between the host and the caller, phone lines were opened to find three suitors to be interviewed with; after the crank calls were weeded out.  Then, for the remainder of the hour the contestant and the three suitors with Jim Albright moderating would talk and someone, usually be picked. This was before Internet dating and because there were no screeners, it made the show all the more interesting.

Take a trip down memory lane during these two decades of the coming of age of Generation X, before monopolies, the Internet, and satellite radio changed terrestrial radio forever.

See also…

• Airchecks of the 1960s
• Airchecks of the 1970s
• Airchecks of Great Radio Stations
• DJ Madness
• Howie Chizek
• Wolfman Jack
• Alan Freed Show