Reasons No. 999 and 1,000 why XM rules

1. They've begun playing American Top 40s in their entirety, in original form. Tonight on a drive I listed to about half of the Sept. 4, 1982 countdown -- including Long Distance Dedication which was the suitably sappy Leader Of The Band by Dan Fogelberg. Also, among the new stations Casey welcomed to fold was Milwaukee's WKTI -- the station of my youth and the station where I listed to AT40 religiously in the 80s.

Listening to the countdown, I realized that the reason some people think songs remain great even though they don't stand the test of time is because compared to the songs they shared the radio with, they were great. John Cougar's Jack & Diane, for example. To me, it's an overplayed song that Cougar/Mellencamp topped later in his career many times over. But you hear it next to dreck by the Pointer Sisters (they were in a bad way at the time), Air Supply, REO Speedwagon, etc., and it is great in comparison.

I also heard a countdown from the 70s on another road trip. Casey must have had some more artistic freedom back then because he would occasionally call out artists for public screw-ups, etc.

2. Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan. I have a trip tomorrow and I'm happy that Dylan will likely be my radio companion. Awesome show, even if he does play esoteric music based on a theme of the week. It's just weird to envision Dylan as a DJ, but he spins a good yarn and he seems to be growing more comfortable with the medium -- last week he went on a tangent slamming contemporary country music because the music has gone too Hollywood and forgotten about the problems of real people. He was right on target.

 

I'm listening to it right now and am loving every minute of it.
There was a web site that had the run lists for those AT40s as pdfs, so you could follow along, but tonight, the site is down.
I would pay the $12.95 just to hear the AT40s alone.
They bring back a lot of memories.

 

Those AT Top 40s are great. Especially the cheesy long-distance dedications, 20 and 30 years after the fact.

 

No. 1 song, Sept. 4, 1982 (start of my sophomore year of HS) is Steve Miller's Abracadabra.

 

I listened to most of an AT40 from 1983 during a fairly long drive two weeks ago. It was the most fun I've had with my pants on in...well, a long time.

Let me be the latest to point out how entertaining these are in their basic innocence...and how a similiar show would never, ever succeed today. After Casey played some song by a band with its first hit--maybe it was Dexy's Midnight Runners--he said that the band pooled its resources and went broke paying for its first album. Then, a few songs later, he says something like "Getting a record deal is a very difficult thing to do and putting an album together is very expensive. You shouldn't expect similiar results. Be careful out there, folks."

These days, of course, big dreamers are divided into two camps: Those who are already embittered by the industry and know blowing their money on a demo will only lead to heartbreak...and those tone-deaf dorks who think they will be the next American Idol.

Then there are Casey's insider-type stories. Before he played Saga's "On The Loose" (yeah!!! keyboard-driven heavy metal!!!), he told the story of how some businessman at an airport was mistaken for Saga's manager and brought via limo to a Saga show, where he silently ate and drank and smiled at all the hot groupies before someone finally figured out that, hey, this isn't Saga's manager. Nowadays, that story would be told within 12 hours of it happening. There'd be no surprise to it.

My favorite part, though, was the long-distance dedication. Two weeks ago, it was from an Army guy stationed overseas to his girlfriend in Japan. As I listened to it, I thought how irrelevant would this be today? Who needs a long-distance dedication with email, instant messaging, video conferencing, text messaging and cell phones?

And do today's top 40 stations even PLAY 40 songs a week? Isn't it incredibly difficult just to get one song into new rotation per week these days? I can just hear Casey now: "Our next band had its first and so far only number one hit with this theme from Armageddon in 1998. Since then, they've released two more albums and are touring this fall with Motley Crue. At number 39, dropping two spots in its 410th week on the charts, it's Aerosmith's 'Don't Wanna Miss a Thing.'"

 

I think Kasey scaled back to just a Top 10. So he just has to squeeze in a couple of long-distance dedications, play some Jon Bon Jovi and a couple of Nickleback songs, and try not to have flashbacks about Shadoe Stevens.

 

Abracadabra! Wow.

That whole countdown helped me rediscover my fond memories of fall 1982, with the Brewers in the World Series. I remember Channel 12 in Milwaukee played a montage of Brewers highlights during the World Series to America's Magic. As I heard the song in the countdown, I conjured Marshall Edwards leaping up and stealing a home run double from the Angels' Don Baylor late in Game 5 of the ALCS, a seminal moment my buddies and I used to endlessly emulate by jumping and trying to keep home runs from going into our shrubs.

Even though that song pretty much sucks, I still associate it with that TV spot. Amazing what associations stick with you over the years.

 

That pretty much sums it up. And wasn't it unaffiliated with any major music trade pub? It was just poor Casey, doing the radio equivalent of Willie Mays stumbling around in centerfield.

Except he still had like three hours for the top 10. So it was like "Here's our no. 10 song, Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On" followed by six or seven flashback songs, a long-distance dedication and then no. 9. My wife and I used to joke that he'd someday get the show reduced to Casey's Top One.

 

Just for the fun of it...Casey ranting on various topics, including the infamous death dedication:

NSFW (lots of cussin') http://www.madmann.com/sound/casey.mp3

It's fuckin' ponderous, man.

 

I miss the days of old Top 40, when Kasey had to labor through 39 tunes, some of them craptastic, before they cued the drum roll, and he would say:

And your No. 1 song, in its first week, comes from the four-man band from Flint, Mich.! It's Ready For The World with Oh Sheila!

 

Back in the late 1970's, my sister and I would listen and track the Casey's Top 40. All the way to Number 1! Then I would type it up on our typewriter.

Top THAT for geekiness!

 

Enjoy!
Click for a pdf of that week's countdown.
http://www.charismusicgroup.com/calendar.htm