60's Saturday Night On WRKO

[Donna Halper]

>
> Donna, I would be curious on your imput
>
> What is missing on radio today is the Top 40 on the early and mid 60's 
> and the soft Top 40's of the 70's. The megahits are still being heard 
> from both eras but how about the songs that lingered in the Top 20's 
> for a few weeks and vanished. There are hundreds of songs that haven't 
> seen airtime in decades but would strike memory cords if played again.

The problem is that since media consolidation, top-40 kind of killed the 
goose that laid the golden egg.  These days, with the typical station 
having so many commercials, and not having developed a new crop of 
personality disc jockeys, many folks have abandoned terrestrial radio. 
Those who liked to listen in their car now use satellite, where they can 
find a channel suitable to the specific era they prefer-- 50s, 60s, 70s, 
80s, 90s, etc.  Or they can get their favorites on Pandora or Spotify.  
But you are totally right in saying the great "wow I haven't heard that 
song in ages" tunes are not played as much these days-- it's all 
play-lists that were thoroughly (some of us say too thoroughly) 
researched to be appropriate nation-wide; few stations seem willing to 
take chances, and that has gradually become a trend since the 1970s, sad 
to say.   I have fond memories of local hits that Arnie Ginsburg or 
Bruce Bradley played, and the late great Sunny Joe White had a good ear 
for local hits in the early to mid-80s, but those songs are not easily 
categorized and they just don't seem to fit anywhere on the typical 
station.  Lou Simon, who programs the 60s satellite channel, sometimes 
pulls out a rarity (and tells the story behind it), but even on most 
satellite channels, it's the same songs you've heard before, played over 
and over.