Weird Al, CBS-FM, Letters & More

69° - sunny at 10:30am

Last Night: Took my kids to see "Weird Al" Yankovic - appearing at our local Common Ground Fest. Near capacity crowd.

While a little bit of Al goes a long way with me - it was a good show - pretty much kid friendly; and I found that both my boys knew the words to most of his parodies. I later shook my head and began questioning my parenting skills. (I'm kidding. Well sort of...)


WCBS-FM returns today. 1:01pm in New York City. Streaming here. Interesting to note the artists featured on the revamped webpage; can you say "classic hits"? This morning Jerry Del Colliano wrote about the station and "classic hits vs. oldies" here.

Added at 1:19pm: Just caught a great year-by-year montage leading up to the 1:01pm kickoff of the "new" WCBS-FM. Great presentation. "The Greatest Hits of the 60s, 70s & the 80s". First song: "Do It Again" - the 1968 Beach Boys classic. First 80s definite "classic hits" type song: "Glory Days" from Springsteen. Start-ups are always awesome...and perhaps even more with this "rebirth".

Forwards or backwards? WCSX/Detroit kicked off "A to Z" this week. And in Houston, KKRW is doing it it reverse: "Ziggy Stardust" to "A Day In The Life". Backwards makes it fresh - especially if you've done A to Z in recently.

Streaming. With no quick legislative relief in sight - and a report today in RAIN that the US Court of Appeals has denied a stay of the new CRB royalty rates - many webcasters are making decisions about their future.

New rates kick in this Sunday.

Meanwhile: can you afford not to stream? Especially when there's a Wi-Max future not far down the road. Read Mark Ramsey's blog here.

A cool week for email....

Tuesday I received a nice note from Greg Solk, VP of Programming for Bonneville - on my posts about his company's WDRV/Chicago. Thank you Greg!

And yesterday brought wonderful things in my Outlook inbox: First from Marilynn Mee of Milwaukee's WKLH - writing that my comments about her show yesterday "made her day".

Listening to the stream, Marilynn made my day mentioning this blog on her air at least twice!

Another email was from original 1977-1978 WLUP/Chicago air talent Les Tracy - who stumbled across these posts written about WLUP's beginnings a few months back.

I put him in touch with original Loop PD Jay Blackburn and talent Tom O'Toole. Les (or "Lester" as he often called himself on-air) was one of my favs on WLUP "back in the day". His note also mentioned seeing Lee Arnold's name here.

Les Tracy is also a veteran of west coast stations KGB, KPRI, KZAP, KOME, KSMJ - and perhaps a few more call letters in his on-air and programming career.