Ah, is that where the Dudeās Creedence tape ended up?
The Tucson āclassic rockā station KLPX kicked off its broadcasting in 1980 by playing the Led Zeppelin tune Rock and Roll. It has played that song in rotation continuously for 35 years. They focus rather heavily on the seventies, although the hard rock of the sixties shows up too.
So yes, thereās basically a decade of source material.
They do play Nirvana. Green Day is out, being covered instead by the āalternativeā station KFMA.
The above is the main reason that I built my own āpirateā radio station, Radio Limbo, in the late nineties.
On the Old People Easy Listening Station at a local outdoor food court you can hear: Kriss Kross, Zeppelin, Captain and Tenille, AC/DC, Donna Summer, Eagles, Rage Against the Machine, Bee Gees, Green Day, Deep Purple, Run DMCā¦ yes, all jumbled together. That could actually be one of the playlists.
What I havenāt been able to figure out is why the women of Classic Rock (at least where I live) are exactly four: Janis Joplin, Anne and Nancy Wilson of Heart, and Stevie Nicks.
Itās kind of bonkers that thereās a huge field to choose from and itās almost exclusively straight white guys that get played on the radio in the genre.
Sadly, the classic rock genre will not die until those in the construction trades stop listening to it.
My standard joke about the DeWalt construction site radio:
It has a selector knob on the FM tuner labeled āclassic rockā, ācountryā and āNorteƱoā.
āWhatās with these oldies stations playing the same songs over and over? How about some new oldies, geniuses!ā --Carl Carlson
Mr. Carlson, your prayers have been answered. It took a few decades, but finally classic rock stations are the ānew oldiesā stations.
Andy Patridgeās āHistory of Rock & Rollā ā
Wow, that list of top 25 songs is bad, bad, bad.
Man, that takes me back. Utterly perfect call letters aside, KLSX has been talk radio exclusively sinceā¦ (looks it up)ā¦ holy shit. It aināt even KLSX anymore, not for six years. It stopped playing classic rock in 1995. Now, since 2009, itās Top 40.
Shit, they still make Top 40?
It was my favorite la station, narrowly beating out KROQ. KNAC was great too. KLOS was weak, KRTH was like all Cat Stevens, all the time. 91X never got through but I always tried.KIQQ was fun with the games and giveaways.
I think Jonah from comicbook resources and I once used an Atari 1040ST to repeatedly dial in to a contest line and stay on ice getting through, till we got tickets for a large group of friends.
One wordā¦ Awesome!
Billy Joel gets minimum 4% of the song plays on every station in NYC. Some local law that Ed Koch pushed through as he left office.
this popped into my head when I read your post
I jus leave this here:
Around the time I lived in Hollywood ('91-'92), I liked listening to Pirate Radio 100.3 (KQLZ), which kinda emphasized hard rock and heavy metal. I remember they had a pretty good commercial that sorta sized up the competition:
āIn Los Angeles, you have four choices for rock and roll radio. KLSX [cue the āJeremiah was a bullfrogā line from Three Dog Nightās āJoy to the Worldā], KLOS [cue some forgettable snippet from some forgettable MOR rock song which Iāve forgotten], and KNAC [cue static, since KNACās rather weak trasmitter was all the way down in Long Beach]. And then thereās 100.3, Pirate Radio [cue several snippets of rock awesomeness e.g. GNāR, Metallica, etc.].ā
But then they were out of business by 1993. KLSX was talk by 1995. KLOS became classic rock instead of AOR. I listened to KNAC from then until the end. I was listening on 2/15/95 when James and Lars from Metallica were in-studio guests to see the station sign off. The last song they played on KNAC was āFade to Blackā and after a brief silence, the new Spanish-language programming began. So then I switched channels to the only alternative: KLOS. When the currently-playing song ended, former KNAC DJ Long Paul welcomed āa whole lot of KNAC listenersā and told us that theyād take care of us. Then he proceeded to play AC/DCās āItās a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock & Roll)ā which was the first song the metal-era KNAC had played back inā¦ what, 1984? Things looked promisingā¦ but within six months, KLOS was back to playing a playlist that seemed to consist entirely of R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, and the first Pretenders album.
I had a sad. Soon as I got an iPod, I turned off L.A. music radio more-or-less permanently.
Not sure if joking, because Iām not sure of the percentage but Canada actually has this law to ensure Canadian artists get played; what that means for classic rock radio is you mainly get a lot of Neil Young and also The Band, which is not a bad thing. Also Rush.
Here in Buffalo, the Toronto stations come in across the lake. Partly because of Neil Young and The Band their classic rock station is better than Buffaloās (which is stereotypically bad and repetitive) but I donāt ever listen to it. Iām an always-tuned-to-NPR type. But I also get CBC Radio 1 out of Toronto which is nice.
We actually had an astonishingly good station for a while, it was a mix of classic and modern music, like, the good stuffā¦ the best non-single songs from albums where classic rock radio played the singles to death, and a wide variety of styles of music (they played the melancholy Joni Mitchell song āRiverā, which has a vague Christmas setting but is not a Christmas song, every day during the holidays for example - btw thereās not enough Joni on Canadian radio imo).
It disappeared overnight and now that frequency simulcasts the AM conservative talk radio station.
