Top 40 AM radio is alive again with original broadcasts from your home town. “It’s kind of a strange feeling,” says DJ Richard Irwin on the demise of Top 40 radio. “You feel like you’ve lost a friend.” Yet, like everything else in the digital age, your old friends now Facebook and Google you and boomerang right back at ‘cha. Same here: Irwin runs the non-profit website Reelradio. com, in which actual Top 40 airchecks and original radio programs can be heard all over again. Simply by calling up your town, your year and/or your favorite DJ, you are instantly transported back to your first car, your first date or your first…well, your first whatever.
Richard Irwin, on the air, 1968.
Go ahead. Try it. But be warned: your mind will be blown at how much you remember forgetting.
It’s more than just golden oldies: it’s DJ’s bantering, commercial jingles, weather reports and news at the top of the hour. “There is a very individual kind of satisfaction that comes from listening to these old radio programs the way we used to listen to radio,” says Irwin, 60, whose “collection of collections” number over 850 since 1996, also making Reelradio one of the very first websites. His site features the actual broadcasts of such Top 40 legends as Wolfman Jack, Alan Freed, The Real Don Steele and Ron Lundy, among hundreds of lesser-known others in dozens of markets. The stations available include some of Top 40’s historic powerhouses, including New York’s WABC, Los
By Ronald Sklar The Modern | September 2011
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Angeles’ KHJ, and Chicagoland’s WLS. The smaller markets are not neglected, not even the one where Irwin first got bit by the radio bug. “I have my favorites like everyone else,” he says. “I’m fascinated by the stuff that I grew up with, which was Big WAYS in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jack Gale is still, to my way of thinking, the greatest morning man of all time. Jack is still alive and working, and I think he’s in his 80s now and in Florida. He buys a new house every couple of years. He bought a new radio station four or five years ago! He can’t stay out. Big WAYS was on a lower frequency, around 610. And that station with its five kilowatts literally during the day covered both North and South Carolina. It was amazing. You could hear that radio station 150 miles away. People did listen to it 150 miles away because it was www.themodern.us
Big WAYS, and there was nothing else like it.” From there, Irwin got his own start at WMAP in Monroe, North Carolina, and now lives in Sacra-
Jack Gale, WAYS.
mento, California. He carefully spends his time painstakingly adding only the highest quality airchecks to his collection (tapes only – no mp3s). They are offered up by
passionate aircheck collectors all over the world. However, his biggest challenge doesn’t come from the airwaves but from the wallet. “We just need a lot of money,” he says of his non-profit, “because there is extra licensing involved, there is extra hardware involved, and frankly, there is a lot of custom software development that has to be done. And I’m not capable of doing it all because I’m doing everything I can at this point just to try to get us to the point where we could do some kind of mobile presentation. It’s a big job, and maybe it’s bigger than we can handle.” In the meantime, Reelradio still keeps on keeping on as the site that always rocks, the site that never stops! Listen to Reelradio’s incredible mix of the Top 40 era here: www.reelradio. com To help with a donation, go to reelradio.com The Modern | September 2011