Radio Romance: The Rock of Chicago, WLS AM 89 & FM 95, 11/27/82

A very personal look at the blossoming of my teenage romance with top 40 radio

Thanksgiving seems the perfect time to share this essay about the virtual moment when I was becoming especially thankful for Top 40 radio, 42 years ago. Lots of personal context here, along with some blazin’ airchecks of radio from the time.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in the fall of 1982, I was an almost-12-year-old 7th grader in love with top 40 radio but without a radio of my own, having to rely on when I could listen to my Mom’s stereo in our den (and competing with three younger sisters and the TV). My local school system had something called “Music Boosters,” who consisted of the parents of the band and choir kids in grades 7-12. And they did a fundraising variety show of some sort that fall. In order to get those of us in band and choir to sell tickets to said variety show, there were prizes, the grand prize being an AM/FM/cassette boombox.

There was no way this determined 11-year-old trombonist wasn’t going to get that boombox.

We lived on a farm, so I couldn’t sell door-to-door out there, but I could sell door-to-door in my grandparents’ neighborhood in town, which I did. I also sold a lot of tickets at church. And over the phone, to adults who knew my parents. I was brazen. I was driven. I was going to win that fucking boombox.

When the final tallies came in, the second-place finisher sold 62 tickets; he was an eighth-grader, the trombone chair in the junior high band. The winner sold 64 tickets, just a single pair more than the trombone chair, and was the second trombonist in the junior high band: me. And you bet that the chair hated me for my victory over him. Not that I cared. The boombox was MINE. I could now listen to the radio to my heart’s content, and in the fall of ’82, top 40 radio was awakening from its early ’80s doldrums and getting hot again, both musically and in its presentation.

Don’t believe me or don’t recall? Check out these four scalding airchecks from the back half of 1982 for ample evidence, from Southern California’s XETRA in August, Chicago’s WLS in September, and from Northern New England, Boston’s WEEI and Portland, ME’s WJBQ in December. The music was hot, and the DJs may well have been even hotter. I love the way that ‘JBQ’s Harry Nelson punches in “J! B! Q!” over the opening guitar stabs of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” starting at 1:24, for example, and how Michael Boss drills the tagline “the mighty 690” into your brain on XETRA. And the music lent itself to exciting radio: just check how thrilling the openings of “Mickey,” “Gloria,” and “Jack and Diane” all sounded coming out of top-of-the-hour IDs. This is how radio was done and done best, kids.

I made myself an iTunes playlist years ago of 200+ songs representing what top 40 roughly sounded like during this time, including recurrents (“Physical”) and gold titles (“Peg,” “Start Me Up”). For the purposes of this post, however, I wanted to pick one particular week’s hits, so it was natural that I went with WLS. WLS was a 50,000-watt AM blowtorch out of Chicago, heard at night over a fair chunk of the U.S. As my hometown was only 2.5 hours from Chicago, my local electronics-and-records store, Hire’s Gifts & Electronics (named after its proprietor, Jeff Hire), “stocked” the WLS weekly surveys as seen above. I collected those surveys every week, fascinated by the way records moved up and down their surveys as opposed to on American Top 40 (which I listened to faithfully every Sunday after church), and by the songs which didn’t even make Casey Kasem’s countdown, either because they were too local (the Kind, #32, and not on Spotify) or too rockin’ (Judas Priest, #27) — WLS was a very early example of a “rock 40” format, almost equal parts AOR and top 40, as very clearly evidenced by the Don Geronimo WLS aircheck linked above in which he plays not only “Brown Sugar” but Jethro Tull’s “Bungle in the Jungle”!

The week I chose, November 27, 1982, is exactly one week before my twelfth birthday, at which my buddy Curt gave me my first cassette, Toto IV, and by my historical math a few weeks after I won my beloved boombox. I wrote about much of this chart pretty recently…

…and my love for Toto IV is well documented.

I’ll just make a few more points.

-Joe Jackson was popular in late ’82, but really popular in Chicago: note that not only had “Steppin’ Out” just peaked at #2 on WLS, but according to their album survey, parent album Night and Day had just hit #1 in the Windy City.
-You can especially see WLS’s AOR leanings on their album chart, which in its top 33 — and I always loved that during their ’80s heyday, they did their album chart as 33 positions and singles as 45 — makes room for the likes of Dire Straits, the Scorpions, Judas Priest, and Robert Plant, none of whom were charting singles nationally at the time.
-”Mickey” caught on late at WLS — it was already in its 13th week on the Hot 100, up to #6 this week — but when it caught on, wow: check out that 45-11 leap. It went on to top the WLS survey for 6 weeks in December ’82 and January ’83.
-”Sexual Healing,” #13 in its 5th week on the Hot 100, hadn’t shown up on WLS yet. In contrast, “Eye in the Sky,” just falling out of the top 10 here, plummeted 26-55 nationally.

You want top 40 magic? This survey/playlist is my epitome of top 40 magic. Granted, my taste for softer pop may be stronger than yours, but still: this is pretty great stuff. What a time to be alive.

[Parts of this originally written in 2019.]