Duran Duran-"Hungry Like The Wolf"

Gene, great analogy!

Ron, I agree with you on those Rio mixes. I also
prefer the non-hit promo 45 version of "Rio" (edit of
UK 12" mix) vs. the commercial 45 version. Again, the
vocals are too loud on the stock 45 mix, and it sounds
slow. I also don't care for the way the drums are
mixed on the commercial 45 version.

Personally, I don't give any weight to the mixes on
the 45s as being the reason those songs originally
tanked and then later (with the new mixes) became
hits. I think it was 100% based on the fact that they
were an unknown band when the singles first came out,
and, for whatever reasons, radio ignored the singles.
Once MTV started playing the heck out of the videos,
radio finally jumped on board, but by that time the
mixes had already been swapped and new pressings of
the 45s released.

Oh dear.

Some background for you non-radio people:

Most radio stations started using CDs in the 1990-92 time frame (plus or minus a few years). At the top 40 where I was in 1990, the CD players were notoriously unreliable. It was a problem. At a different station in 1993, they used Denon CD players to play the promo CD singles on-air. Each disc was permanently housed in a box that looked a jewel box, and you'd insert the whole box into the CD player. Those players worked great.

Anyway, before CDs, just about all the music was on "carts" (short for "cartridges"). They looked and operated like 8-track tapes - an endless loop of tape that would cue itself up when it was done. You could get carts as long as around 8 minutes, but there were lots of different lengths available for individual songs. The stations also had shorter carts for commericals, promos, station IDs, sweeper/bumpers, etc.

For music, the production person would play a record once and record it to cart. The production person would then write or type a notation on the cart like this:

08/12 3:25/F

That means that something interesting happens at the 8-second mark, and the song vocals kick in at 12 seconds. So we could use the timer on the board as a guide to know when to stop talking ("hit the post").

The 3:25 number was the time at which we dump the song, like when the fade starts. It's not the full time of the song, just the time that will appear on the clock when it's time to move on to the next song/ID/ etc.

The "F" means that the song has a fade ending. "C" means that it's a cold ending. I suppose that there was also a "cold fade" ending, like when the band hits a bit last note of the song and that note fades, but I don't remember what the notation for that was. (Not many songs did that in the early '90s when I worked in top 40.)

I would label "Stairway To Heaven" as:

:13/26/53 7:57/C

(I just listened to the song; that's not memorized.)

The 0:26 point in the song isn't all that significant, and I might just use :13/53 instead.

That's how the cart would have been labeled in Gene's old station.

Allow me to continue to derail the original topic.

A local Top 40 radio station I worked at from 1983-1988
had Yamaha CD players around 1986 or so. The first in
studio players were from Yamaha. There were issues of
skipping and some discs over time not being able to be
read properly. Eventually, these were replaced by the
Technics SL-P1200 top load players. Still some issues but
the pitch controls were cool though they were never used.

Edited by eriejwg

crapfromthepast wrote: At the top 40 where I was in 1990, the CD players were notoriously unreliable. It was a problem. At a different station in 1993, they used Denon CD players to play the promo CD singles on- air. Each disc was permanently housed in a box that looked a jewel box, and you'd insert the whole box into the CD player. Those players worked great.

Those CD carts were definitely an improvement over
just using the discs "naked", but they did cause some
concentric scratches in the discs that could cause
readability errors later on.

The station I worked at for most of the 90s went
directly from playing music from carts to a music-on-
harddrive (in our case, Scott Studios) system,
bypassing playing CDs directly. ISTR it being
installed in 1994.

crapfromthepast wrote: The "F" means that the song has a fade ending. "C" means that it's a cold ending. I suppose that there was also a "cold fade" ending, like when the band hits a bit last note of the song and that note fades, but I don't remember what the notation for that was.

The stations I've worked at always used "cool" for a
sustained cold ending, I've seen "natural" used as
well.

aaronk wrote: I think it was 100% based on the fact that they were an unknown band when the singles first came out, and, for whatever reasons, radio ignored the singles. Once MTV started playing the heck out of the videos, radio finally jumped on board, but by that time the mixes had already been swapped and new pressings of the 45s released.

How much influence did MTV have in '82/83? Cable
wasn't as widespread back then, and not all systems
carried MTV (or if they did, it was part of a
"premium" package). ISTR that MTV was the coolest
channel that not very many people could watch.
I'd say at least as much of it was a sea change in the
public's that taste occurred in the last half of 1982
and into 1983, along with the explosive comeback of
Top 40, which had languished in the first couple years
of the decade, much like what happened in late 1963.


Edited by Hykker

aaronk wrote: In any case, it don’t think it was the original mixes of those Duran Duran songs that caused them to flop.

It was a case of not getting airplay on MTV at the time in mid-1982. Keep in mind even when the video did get played it was heavily edited. The band was even touring in the US during July and August to promote Rio to no success.

I also think Capitol promoting the band later vs Harvest and more distribution and promotion by Capitol helped compared to the mid-1982 release.

PS: I didn't think revisiting this thread would lead to such in depth DJ discussions. Thanks everyone for educating us on what life was like before the digital CD age!

PS 2: Personally Planet Earth and Girls On Film are great songs but the video for Girl on Film was way to explicit to make it here in the US.

Edited by PopArchivist