A Reaching For The Stars Series Update

My momentum in this series has been off for a few months. No worries for the two or three of you who care about these posts; I’m not giving up on them!

A combination of factors over the summer kept me from listening to American Top 40 very often. Less time in the kitchen, where I play the iHeart Radio Classic American Top 40 channel the most. No more SiriusXM in the car, so no 80s on 8 Big 40 countdowns to supplement my Casey shows.

While every AT40 boradcast ever aired has been re-mastered and digitized, iHeart Radio and Premiere Networks only play a portion of them. No one is sure why. As I’ve been listening to them, one way or another, for close to 20 years, many of them are repeats to me. Which both makes them a little boring and strips them of material for RFTS posts.

There is a way around this. The man who is responsible for those remastered editions also has the right to sell them. A couple weeks ago I learned that I could have the entire original Casey Kasem era – from 1970 to 1988 – delivered on a hard drive for the low price of $1500. Say I just wanted his shows from the 1980s? $750.

Ok, I love American Top 40 but fifteen hundred bucks, or even seven-fifty, is a lot. Me being me, I did think about it for a minute before deciding it was certainly too much to sneak past S when she reviewed that month’s credit card bill. She’s indulgent of my hobbies, but all indulgences have their limits!

However, I do have a high speed internet connection, a web browser, and the ability to use search engines. Thus I spent about a week finding and downloading hundreds of old AT40 recordings for free. My media hard drive in the basement now holds copies of 365 shows that aired between 1976 and 1986, my golden era of pop music.

I did the most damage in the Seventies, grabbing 196 countdowns, or 94% of the shows recorded between 1976–1979. For some reason the shows from the Eighties were harder to find. I managed to obtain just 46% of them, with as many as 37 (1981) and as few as 14 (1986) per year.

Yes, I tracked them in a spreadsheet.

My source was Archive.org, a brilliant, world treasure of a site for all kinds of material. There were several contributors who have uploaded AT40 programs, a few of which had just been updated. I figure if I keep an eye on those pages, some of my missing shows will eventually appear on them.

I also focused on downloading shows that were available in a single audio file. I skipped over dozens and dozens that had been broken into individual files based on either program hour or side of the original AT40 LP. When I’m bored with this original run of 365 countdowns, there should be opportunities to get more.

Most of the programs were ripped from radio broadcasts, so they include ads and local breaks from the stations that aired them. It has been jarring to hear weather reports from who knows when in the midst of some of them.

So what the hell am I going to do with 365 (and counting) American Top 40s? Play them and write some fucking blog posts!

At 3–4 hours per show, that’s a lot of listening.[1] I figure each week I’ll select a couple that correspond to that moment on the calendar, then scrub through them, focusing on Casey’s trivia between songs and tunes that jump out at me as interesting topics for new posts. I can’t see myself playing them all start-to-finish. I have too much other music and podcasts to listen to.

I’ve already reviewed two of my downloads. One was from September 9, 1979. While there was no great trivia for a new RFTS post in it, I was amazed that Gordon Elliott served as the guest host that week. This was before Elliott came to the States and established himself as a third-tier media personality. He was still a radio DJ in Australia at the time. Apparently one with good contacts in Hollywood!

There was one piece of trivia Elliott shared that was familiar. He told a story about Dionne Warwick’s career going sideways when she changed how she spelled her name on the advice of her astrologer. Casey would relay the same anecdote three years later; I wrote about it two years ago.

Kind of sloppy, AT40 folks. I imagine I’ll find other examples of repeated stories as I work through my digital pile of shows.

What does this all mean for you, the blog post consumer? Hopefully it gets me back on track for one or two RFTS posts per month. I’m currently working a draft based on a song from the second downloaded show I listened. The ratio of my collected shows also helps me with a goal I’ve had for a long time: writing more about music from the Seventies.

So that’s yet another weird way I’ve been wasting my time, obsessing about a radio show from my childhood. I know it makes me seem (even more) like a psychopath, but we all need hobbies. And you benefit from my mania, so everybody wins!