I’ve been moving this tape with me for more than 50 years, and never knew what I had.
This past July 4 weekend, a never-before-heard episode of American Top 40 aired on many radio stations. It was a 3-hour show covering the top 40 hits from the Billboard Hot 100 chart from the week ending June 20, 1970.
“But wait!,” you might say. “AT40’s first show was aired on the July 4 weekend in 1970, covering the Hot 100 for the week ending July 11. Casey said so in the opening!”
That’s true, of course. This post is part of the story of a piece of nearly-lost history, a long-forgotten sales demo tape, how I came to have it and my small contribution to giving it back to the AT40 fan community.
I love radio. Always have and always will. In the Summer of 1970, I got a part-time job at WONE/WONE-FM in Dayton, Ohio, where I was born and grew up. Part of the job was playing top 40 records, commercials and jingles back-to-back on WONE-FM (which was mostly automated at the time) while the automation system was down for maintenance and/or programming. The other part of the job was “running the board” on Sunday morning. I played prerecorded religious and public affairs programming, simulcast on both stations. I mention this mainly to illustrate that I was not the first person at the station to have the “lost demo” tape in hand.
My job eventually turned into a part-time then full-time disc jockey stint as “Jim Lyons,” doing overnight and weekend shifts on WONE. The station was playing a Modern Country Format and billing itself as the “Home of the Country Gentlemen.” It was a fun and exciting part of my life. I was getting to be a part of the radio industry that I had loved for so long as a young listener.
When the position of Production Manager became available, it was offered to me. It would be a Monday-Friday office (and studio) job. It is where I met Jane, now my wonderful wife, and where I came to have the AT40 lost demo tape in my hands.
“The tape” is a 7-inch reel-to-reel tape containing a telescoped third hour of an American Top 40 show that was written and produced, but obviously never aired. It was used as a sales tool to promote the brand-new countdown concept to potential client radio stations. “Telescoped” means that all of the songs were removed from the audio, leaving only Casey’s intro and back-announce to each tune. With the songs edited out, the hour of AT40 became a 12 minute, 35 second tape, long enough to fully present the concept and execution but short enough for a busy Program Director to listen to.
My memory is not clear on this, but I believe the tape was stored in the basement of the station, boxed up by some previous Production Director or other staff member. I got it because I saved it from the trash when we (Jane and I) were cleaning out the basement storage to make room to move tapes out of our office. I grabbed a lot of tapes that looked interesting and took them home rather than sending them to a landfill.
How did the tape get to be there in the first place? We’ll never know for sure, but the story that makes the most sense is that some of our management team attended a Billboard radio programming event in New York in June of 1970. (Back when I was spinning records subbing for the automation system.) It is documented that AT40 staff were there, promoting their new show and trying to sign up stations to carry it. It is likely that someone from WONE picked up the demo, brought it home to Dayton and filed it in the basement, never to been seen again until I got it.
I left WONE in 1975. I moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where I lived at two addresses, then back to the Dayton area where I now live (at my third address in the area.) Through all those moves, my boxes of old tapes moved with me.
Now, in retirement, I have the time to go through all those boxes of tapes and try to make sense of why I saved them in the first place! The AT40 demo tape was among the first I listened to, and it immediately struck me that I might have a rare artifact of the show. I did a lot of Google searches and came up with several rumors that a demo show had been produced prior to the official debut of the show, but no hard evidence and no audio copies.
I changed the focus of my searching to AT40 fandom, to see if there were experts that might be interested in my “find” and be able to authenticate it. That search led me to Pete Battistini and Shannon Lynn.
Pete is a collector extraordinaire of AT40 shows and memorabilia and the author of two extremely detailed books of American Top 40 history and lore. Shannon is a preservationist of syndicated radio shows, with a huge digital library of AT40 shows along with American Country Countdown and other radio treasures.
Both Pete and Shannon responded to my query email very quickly. Pete wanted the tape to add to his vast collection of vinyl, CD and reel-to-reel audio. Shannon was interested in the audio itself, as his shop has a relationship with Premiere Radio Networks (the current owner of AT40) to digitize and optimize the audio for preservation and perpetual enjoyment.
I don’t know if the tape has any value as a collector’s item but I didn’t have any interest in profiting from it. I gave the tape to Pete in exchange for a copy of one of his books. I digitized the audio from my TEAC A-2300SR tape deck and sent it to Shannon.
From there, you may know the rest. Shannon has contacts with Toby Petty at Premiere and Ken Martin at WTOJ(FM) in Watertown, New York. All AT40 afficionados, they realized that it would be possible to restore the music from the telescoped third hour on the demo tape to hear the hour as it was produced to be heard.
At some point, it was proposed that a complete countdown could be synthesized from archival clips and studio magic. That story is someone else’s to tell.
Which brings me to the end of my contribution to the preservation and sharing of the “lost demo.” Hopefully, the others involved will share their thoughts and observations.
I’d like to say there is more to it than that, but the facts are that I’m an AT40 fan, a pack rat and a procrastinator. It’s dumb luck and being at the right place at the right time that I came to have this tape in my possession. I’m just glad that it’s “out there” and can be enjoyed by the current and future AT40 fan community.
Here are photos of the tape I took before sending it to Pete Battistini