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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

WABC Musicradio 77 was the greatest Top 40 radio station of all time-Allan Sniffen

"Introduction to the Musicradio WABC Website," Allan M. Sniffen 

"How do you capture lightning in a bottle? Is it possible to grasp a piece of your past that captures your feelings about a time now gone? For some, it might be a visit to a baseball game or maybe a high school reunion. For me, that lightning is Musicradio 77, WABC.

This is a webpage dedicated to the greatest Top 40 music radio station of all time: WABC New York. From December 7, 1960 to May 10, 1982 WABC was the definition of Top 40 radio. It was the most influential music radio station of its day and had the power to make a hit record by simply playing it on a hunch. With its 50,000 watt clear channel AM signal at 770 kHz it covered the nation’s most populated region like a blanket and at night could be heard throughout the eastern half of the U.S. on a transistor radio. WABC was even occasionally heard as far away from New York as Hawaii.

But that’s not what made me a Musicradio WABC fan. I grew up in the New York Metropolitan area so all of this meant little to me then. What really was great about Musicradio WABC was that it always sounded like fun. From the music that played to the disc jockeys who played it, there was always the feeling that this was the single most fun thing anyone could possibly be doing. It seemed to me that working at WABC must be the easiest, most enjoyable thing any adult could ever want to do. Of course, I later realized how much planning, work and talent it took to create that sound. But to the listener, it could not have seemed more exciting.

This is not to say that there was anything about WABC’s sound that was left to chance by its program director, the late Rick Sklar. In fact, everything was tightly controlled from its music to its promotions. The magic was in making it all sound spontaneous."...

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Allan M. Sniffen is also the owner of NY Radio Message Board.

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