Rock Radio Scrapbook

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Talent: MURRAY JOHNSON
Station: CKY Winnipeg
Date: September, 1978
Time: 9:37

(Photo courtesy Murray Johnson)

CKY was one of Winnipeg's three great AM rockers back in the '70s, the others being CKRC and CFRW. Murray Johnson had the rare privilege of working at two of them during that decade, namely CKY and CKRC. He has some behind-the-scenes reflections from his days at KY 58...

"In the photo you'll notice that there are no turntables. The console had no faders, which made things interesting as you had to second guess the song fades. Everything was auto levelled so all we could do was turn audio on and off (this shows in some of the transitions in the aircheck). You'll see that there's a computer keyboard - Moffat was a pioneer in computer assisted music scheduling and playback (remember this was 1978). You selected a song and hit the keyboard spacebar to start it.

The music was dubbed to cart, re-equalized for consistency and sometimes edited to clean up intros or poorly chopped up radio versions (10CC's I'm Not In Love comes to mind). There were a bunch of 48 slot IGM Instacart machines that held the hits and recurrents and the computer provided access to it according to the MD's rotation. We played the gold off a manual 3 decker. The music sources all had delayed reverb and the mic had very subtle gated reverb. Commercials were manually loaded into a separate 3 decker with no reverb.

(Graphic courtesy Murray Johnson)

CKY was a really good place to learn radio. Our GM and PD's were all former CKLW Big 8 guys, and man did they put you through the wringer! But did you ever learn. CKY had a really big, friendly sound and it was a really fun place to work.

We used to have sessions with US based consultants who would work with all the jocks on various campaigns. I remember one fellow, J. Paul Huddleston - he was a Boss Radio News guy from KHJ. He had us running a campaign called "I Like You". I've included the sticker from that one for your collection - it's quite rare. J. Paul put across that news guys were supposed to be performers, too - and CKY had a very upbeat news style.

George Raymond was the Production Manager and he was an absolute wizard with the four track studio. Joey Gregorash was the madcap Creative Director (yes, THAT Joey Gregorash). We had a group of people at KY58/CITI that played musical instruments and George recorded all sorts of special elements and promos that got woven into the on air presentation. We had stuff nobody else could get - including knock offs of the hits with wildly different lyrics. This all made it really interesting to listen to and we all had a lot of fun.

I rounded out my on-air career doing news for KY58 and CITI-FM in 1978. In 1979 I joined the CBC, where I still work today (as of 2009) in Broadcast Engineering in Toronto."

Enjoy Murray Johnson on CKY here.

(The Murray Johnson Collection)

More 1978 airchecks here!

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