"Bennie & The Jets" - Elton John

Was just listening to SiriusXM's rebroadcast of the 3/30/74 AT40, and noticed when they got to "Bennie & The Jets" they (like a lot of radio stations) went past the first 10 seconds or so (the fake crowd ambiance and the false start first note) before starting the song.

This is more of a question about how radio was in those days. Obviously for pop stations that carted the song as a current, or for oldies stations now that use CDs/MP3s/hard drives, editing out that first sequence isn't that much of a trick. But for those stations who played it from vinyl, were copies serviced without that intro? And if not, if you wanted to excise the intro (as it seems most stations did), how would you cue the record forward without it having the "wow" effect when you started it come out over the air?

If that makes any sense. . . :)

True, but then it seems you'd have to have impeccable timing to hit the song right on the downbeat.

And it'd be hard to talk the record up if you're doing your own engineering.

/Wow. 750 posts. And they said it wouldn't last.

Edited by sriv94

Or, they could have carted the song up to a certain point and just play it from cart. :)

The "Bennie And The Jets" DJ and stock 45s were the same length.

Doing things on the fly was one of the things that made radio fun! When you played the same records day in and day out, you got to know *exactly* what spot you wanted to cue each one up to if you were skipping over a particular passage (the "tune-up" intro of "Whenever I Call You 'Friend'" immediately comes to mind, as does the memory of the record developing two separate cue burn spots, thus creating even more talk-over opportunities!)

In my experience, the most user-friendly setup had the rotary turntable pots on the board wired in such a way that the turntables would start as soon as the pots were turned up out of the cue position. That arrangement made it easy to avoid any wowing, plus everything could be done with one flick of the wrist. Many slide pot or toggle switch setups required one hand to hit the turntable start button, while the other slid the pot up, and the left big toe...

Our 12 inch of Glenn Frey had a no sax intro on one side and the full length on the other.
Being that I worked overnights (remember when radio was live overnights?) I played the long version. I must admit I'm getting good at voice tracking airshifts.
I recall a station cueing past the intro to "Waiting For A Star To Fall" to the first downbeat skipping over the synth intro.
One more was when Prince had "Batdance" was cued that baby around 47 seconds in because we were afraid listeners would think he was saying "Get the F--- out, instead of "funk" out. If you listen closely its hard to tell the difference.
By the way its probably one of his least played "number one" songs.