The LuLac Edition #5, 103, April 30th, 2024

 

MAYBE I’M AMAZED

Our “Maybe I’m Amazed" logo. 

CKLW THE BIG  8 EDITION

One of the most consequential top 40 radio stations in the 1960s, 70s world of rock and roll radio was CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario. The Canadian city is right across the border from Detroit. When I was growing up, I tuned my AM radio after 9pm to CKLW to hear The Big 8. Located on 800 on the AM dial, CKLW was a 50,000 watt tower of power, a veritable blowtorch that reached my bedroom in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Having relatives in Windsor, back in 1971 I actually had a tour of the studio with my Uncle Timmy Pribula. It was days before the death of Jim Morrison. CKLW is now a News/Talk station. It runs George Noory’s “Coast To Coast” every night then goes into a local morning show at 5am. All the bells and whistles are there except for the music and the tabloid style staccato newscasts at twenty before and after the hour.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……that even today, the Big 8 is remembered with fondness by a generation of listeners who came of age in the 60s and 70s. The Big 8 was one of the most influential and popular Top 40 stations, captivating audiences on both sides of the border—Canada and the U.S. Its impact extended far beyond its immediate region.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…..that CKLW joins the ranks of If you of legendary music stations like WKMH, WXYZ, CKLW, WKNR, and WJBK in Detroit and Windsor, and WCFL and WLS in Chicago, WABC in New York and WFIL and WIBG in Philadelphia, WKBW in Buffalo and KHJ in Los Angeles  you’ll appreciate the tunes played on Big 8 Radio. They featured the best Motor City music from the '50s, '60s, and '70s, including Motown hits, the British Invasion, and memorable rock and pop tracks.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……much like WARM Radio’s jocks, the station’s lineup included iconic voices like Dave Shafer, Tom Shannon, Scott Regen, Big Jim Edwards, Walt ‘Baby’ Love, Charlie Van Dyke, Randall Carlisle, Pat Holiday, Super Max Kinkel, Frank Brodie, Ted Richards, Bill Gable, Kris Erik Stevens, and Charlie O’Brien, among others.

 

MAYBE I’M AMAZED,,,,,that CKLW first came on the air on June 2, 1932, as CKOK on 540 kilocycles, (which until 2013 was the long-time home of today's CBEF with 5,000 watts of power. The station was built by George Storer and was sold to a group of Windsor-area businessmen led by Malcolm Campbell, operating as "Essex Broadcasters, Ltd." CKOK became CKLW (and moved to 840 kHz) in 1933, when Essex Broadcasters, Ltd. merged with the London Free Press and its station CJGC (now CFPL), and became "Western Ontario Broadcasting", which was co-owned by Essex Broadcasters, and the London Free Press. The "LW" in the callsign is said to have stood for "London, Windsor", considered the two chief cities in the station's listening area. When the station's power increased to 50,000 watts, its listening area increased accordingly. In 1934, when London Free Press's station CJGC pulled out of the agreement, the station became wholly owned by Western Ontario Broadcasters. CJGC later evolved into today's CFPL, while CKLW moved from 840 to 1030 kHz in 1934, before settling on its present frequency of 800 kHz in 1941, thanks to a shuffle of frequency allocations. So now you know the rest of the story as Paul Harvey (who never was on CKLW used to say.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…..that throughout most of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the cracks between full-service features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Ron Knowles (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957), and Joe Van. For a few years in the early 1960s, CKLW also featured a country music program in the evenings called Sounds Like Nashville. This ended in 1963 when WEXL 1340 became Detroit's first 24-hour country station.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…..in 1963, CKLW began to shed the variety-format approach and, as "Radio Eight-Oh", began focusing more aggressively on playing contemporary hits and issuing a record survey. Davies, Knowles, Dave Shafer, Tom Clay, Tom Shannon, Larry Morrow (as "Duke Windsor"), Terry Knight, and Don Zee were among the "Radio Eight-Oh" personalities during this time. The station did well thanks to its huge signal, and beat the local competition in Cleveland, Ohio, though in the local Detroit ratings CKLW still lagged well behind competing hit outlet WKNR.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……., on April 4, 1967, CKLW got a drastic makeover with Bill Drake's "Boss Radio" format, programmed locally by Paul Drew. Initially known as "Radio 8" with PAMS jingles, within a few months the station's final transformation into "The Big 8," with new jingles sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, was complete, and the station was on a rapid ratings upswing. In July 1967, CKLW claimed the number one spot in the Detroit ratings for the first time, and WKNR was left in the dust, switching to an easy listening format as WNIC less than five years later.  In addition to Dave Shafer and Tom Shannon, the lone holdouts from the "Radio Eight Oh" era, "Big 8" personalities during the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s included Gary "Morning Mouth" Burbank, "Big" Jim Edwards, "Brother" Bill Gable, Pat Holiday, Steve Hunter, "Super" Max Kinkel, Walt "Baby" Love, Charlie O'Brien, Scott Regen, Ted "The Bear" Richards, Mike Rivers, Duke Roberts, Charlie Van Dyke, Johnny Williams, and newsmen Randall Carlisle, Grant Hudson, Byron MacGregor (who had a three-and-a-half million-selling #1 hit single with his recording of Gordon Sinclair's commentary "The Americans" in 1973), and Dick Smyth.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED….. that longtime music director Rosalie Trombley, who ascended to that position in 1968 after having worked as the station's music librarian for five years and became famous for her apparent hit record-spotting abilities. Trombley consciously made an effort to choose the right R&B and soul songs (especially Motown songs) to create a station that would appeal equally to black and white listeners. As a result, CKLW was sometimes referred to as "the blackest white station in America", and many believe the integrated music mix helped bring Detroiters closer together in racial harmony, especially after the riots of July 1967. The "Rosalie Trombley Award" honours women who have made their mark in broadcasting. Another female employee of CKLW who helped break down gender barriers was reporter Jo-Jo Shutty-MacGregor (the wife of Byron MacGregor), the first female helicopter traffic/news reporter in North America.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…..Another feature of the "Big 8" was its "20/20 News", so-called because it was delivered at 20 minutes after the hour and 20 minutes before the hour - scheduling that allowed CKLW to be playing music while other stations were airing newscasts at the top of the hour or on the quarter-hour. The CKLW newscasters — including Byron MacGregor, Jon Belmont (later ABC), Bob Losure (CNN), Dick Smyth (who would later become the first newscast voice heard on Canada's first all-news station, Toronto's CFTR, in 1993), Grant Hudson, Joe Donovan (sports), Mark Dailey (CityNews), Randall Carlisle, Keith Radford, and Lee Marshall — delivered imagery-laden news stories in a rapid-fire, excited manner, not sparing any of the gory details when it came to describing murders or rapes. This was an attempt to make the news sound as exciting and gripping as the music. The "blood and guts" style began with Byron MacGregor's promotion to news director (replacing Smyth) in 1969. Another memorable feature of the 20/20 newscasts was the incessant clacking of the teletype in the background, which gave the newscasts a unique sound. CKLW's newscasts were acknowledged for more than just their "flash," however; the station won an Edward R. Murrow Award for its coverage of the 1967 riots, helmed by Smyth. This was the first time that this particular award had ever been given to a Canadian broadcaster. This was descriptive news.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED…but not really that Some listeners believe that CKLW started to decline in popularity after Canadian content regulations went into effect in 1971. Although having to play 30% "CanCon" songs that generated little in the way of sales put the station at a competitive disadvantage compared to its U.S.-based competition, CKLW still managed to help break a number of Canadian songs and artists in the United States. These included Anne Murray, The Poppy Family, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who, April Wine, the Five Man Electrical Band, and Bachman Turner Overdrive. Just as, if not more, responsible for the decline in CKLW's ratings as the 1970s wore on was the rise of FM radio as an outlet for contemporary music, as the station gained a direct FM Top 40 competitor, WDRQ, in 1972, and its listening audience was also fragmented between album-oriented rock outlets such as WWWW, WRIF and WABX and adult contemporary stations like WNIC and WMJC. The Canadian government's initial unwillingness to license FM frequencies with pop or rock formats stranded Canadian stations on AM while an entire demographic of listeners began the exodus to US-based FM outlets anywhere the signals were in range. For many younger listeners by 1978, CKLW was the station they listened to only if they had an AM-only radio in their cars.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED……The final death knell for the "Big 8" came in October 1984, when the station fired 79 staffers (including most of the remaining announcers and Rosalie Trombley), closed its American sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, and announced that it would soon change format to Al Ham's "Music of Your Life" format of Jazz standards and big-band music and go completely automated. The "Big 8" was finally laid to rest on Tuesday, January 1, 1985, and the station soon dropped stereo since most of the big-band and jazz standards music in its new format was in mono anyway. CKLW's FM sister adopted a beautiful music format with the callsign CKEZ. Briefly, it attempted to resurrect the glory years of the "Big 8" by playing oldies and the jingles from the AM legend's peak years in the late 1960s. At this time, both stations were also sold to CUC Broadcasting, which would sell CKLW and CKEZ to CHUM Limited in 1993. For a brief time under CUC Broadcasting ownership, it was a member of the NBC Radio network beginning in 1991 (which was by then a shell of its former self), and ending with the station's sale to CHUM Limited in 1993. CKLW was known as K-800 during its "Music of Your Life" days and also became the radio home for the Detroit Pistons. Ratings improved dramatically, as the station shot back into the Top 10, although the demographics of the station's audience were now substantially older. Longtime CKLW jock and Detroit radio veteran Dave Shafer was the "K-800" program director during this time.

MAYBE I’M AMAZED….that the station is still a mainstay in the hearts and minds of avid radio listeners. To this day, CKLW has stayed true to it’s  Motor City roots. Just yesterday there as a plethora of advertising for Windsor businesses and a celebration of Detroit for its stellar performance last week as the host of the NFL draft. Even with its power to all these locations the Big 8 CKLW is what a radio station should still be, informative and entertaining. (LuLac archives, wikipedia, Big 8 Tribute page).