Early days of localizing automation

KXEO was automated with country music when I started in 1978. This was long before personal computers with their big hard drives and digital audio would become the norm in later years. Most music was on 10" reels of tape. When a tape ran out, you put the next tape in numerical sequence on the tape deck. The tapes were stored tails out - that meant when you loaded a tape deck, you had to rewind a tape entirely and then cue it up for it to be ready to play.

Every time a reel of tape was used, the songs would be played in the same order. But by using multiple tape decks, you could mix up the order of songs somewhat.

The station used an automation tape service located in Bellingham, Washington - BMI. I don't recall what the BMI stood for. It was not the BMI that does music licensing with ASCAP.

Each song had an announcer on either the beginning or the end, and the tapes were played so it appeared these guys had air shifts. They had big, booming voices with generic names - like Don Harris, Bill Jackson, Phil Thomas, etc. Every time a particular song played, the same announcer voice track played with it (since they were on the same tape).

The whole thing was localized with time tapes and weather tapes. The same guys that did the announcing on the music reels, also recorded big cartridge tapes with the time. They recorded generic weather, so you could have them saying "The weather should be sunny and pleasant today."  The time tapes were advanced by the System 90 at one minute intervals, so just about anytime in the hour, the actual announcer from Bellingham on the music tape could announce the current time.

A few music tapes like current hits were updated every couple of weeks, others once a month or longer.

But some of the music tapes got old real quick. When an announcer said something like, "There you have Billy Crash Craddock, who drives the biggest, ugliest orange cadillac you'll ever see." and it aired multiple times a week, and for weeks at a time. It may sound like neat trivia the first time you hear it, but after the 7th or 8th time it got old.

When it worked, it sounded pretty good. KXEO had large market announcers on its little thousand watt signal in Mexico.

When it didn't work - it sounded just plain awful. And it didn't work FREQUENTLY. Static in the guy wires would cause the time tapes to run and run and run, so when things settled down, the time wasn't synchronized.

If you did'n't get it synced back up in time, you'd get a phone call like, "your guy better check his clock, because it's wrong!"

But country music only ran until October of 1978 on KXEO. Then the GM flipped the formats from AM to FM and FM to AM. The sleeping giant KWWR had been beautiful music (aka elevator music or Muzak) for a decade with virtually no advertising, while KXEO had been country music with news and sports. In October of 1978 the formats were switched.  Country music was put on KWWR and beautiful music was put on KXEO. The switch took place in October, because at that time, October was Country Music Month, I believe some kind of tie in with Nashville..

We got a few phone calls but weren't by any means swamped with calls. People in Mexico were upset their beautiful music FM with no commercials was gone, replaced with country music. But people all around mid Missouri were happy to have country music on the FM dial. There was no competition for country on FM at that time, KWWR was the only FM country station around.

But that's the way it was back then. KXEO had been the money maker up until 1978 with KWWR just tailing along behind. Then KWWR became the money maker and KXEO was left to waste away. Beautiful music on an AM station - that was some stupid programming.

Thank goodness for change - BUT - KXEO changed formats 6 or 7 times around 1979-1980. Big band music from the 40s, popular songs done by other bands, popular songs done by the original band, middle of the road music - some popular, some timeless - solid gold rock and more. It took the dawn of a  new millennium  for KXEO to finally find its niche.

So it goes.