by radiofan » Sun Sep 27, 2009 5:08 pm
I am brand new to this board and am very happy I found this vintage KROQ thread. I notice there has not been a post since August but thought I would share some thoughts on taping KROQ and how I started to listen to KROQ.
I grew up in Socal and listened to KROQ on a regular basis from 1984 to the early to mid 90's. (Got tired of the hard stuff they were playing at about 1995). In March of 1984, I was totally into top 40 and did not listen to KROQ. Footloose was huge!!! I became friends with this girl who was friends with Rodney on the Roq. So, I drove her and a couple of her friends to KROQ in Pasadena to hang out at his show. I did not talk to him too much but he seemed like a nice guy to me. I felt like a 3rd wheel in the studio. They knew Rodney and I didn't. So I answered the request lines. I took it really seriously and wrote down every song that people wanted to hear and gave it to Rodney or is engineer. Sometimes, a listener wanted to talk to Rodney. They were actually pretty impressed that I was working hard. I guess I should have applied for an internship. I went 4 times and twice there was a guest. Micky Dolenz and another time Angela Bowie. We were supposed to go on a night the Bangles were a guest but my friend could not go because she got grounded or something. I got really into KROQ after those visits.
In early 1985, I would tape KROQ whenever I had a chance. I did this because I wanted to listen to KROQ at work, but the reception was really bad in the building. I did that for most of 1985 but erased one and tape over it. Then, I would tape when they had flashback weekends in 1986 and 1987 as I was mainly interested in the late 70's or early 80's stuff at that time. I also taped several hours of a weekend on KROQ where they played band segments from A - Z. This was in the fall of 87. Friday started with A bands and by Sunday night they were at Z Bands. I can't remember how much of that I taped but remember thinking I heard stuff I did not usually hear. I lost those too.
What I did not lose and still own but would not even begin to know how to convert them to mp3's are the yearend countdowns. I actually have the yearend countdowns from 1985 to 1993 as they occurred New Years eve. Or, actually, it was New Years day when they replayed it. 1985 is really cut up as I did not think I would care about quality. I just taped it to keep track of which song was which number the songs were. After the 1985 countdown, I called KROQ to see if they had lists of past years countdowns. They told me no, so I never thought I would know what the number one songs were in years past.
New Years day in 1988 was a Friday. So, Freddy Snakeskin was finishing the 1987 countdown, and when they got to about number 20 or so, he says they are going to play the 1982 countdown next. Turns out, they had a flashback countdown weekend and played 1982 - 1986 and replayed 1987 one more time. So, I taped 1982 - 1984 and stayed up all night to do it. I set the alarm for every 45 min as I had 90 minute tapes but missed numbers 53 - 48 of 1983. (Overslept). Now, the lists of each year from 1980 are on the web.
I also have copies of some of the Flashback 500's. The first year they did that, to my knowledge anyway, was 1988. I missed the first 30 songs because I was working and one of the DJ's messed up at about 300. And so, 5 or 6 songs did not get played at all. That seemed to be the last year that KROQ played really cool obscure Flashbacks because it seemed liked a slight format change occurred at around 1989 with regards to flashbacks.
Sorry for such a long post, but this these tapes bring back memories.