Indiana Wants Me

eriejwg wrote: To add to my post, usually the jocks in smaller markets played the vinyl themselves and ran their own boards, unlike the big union stations like CKLW, WLS and the like.

Just FYI, WLS went to all carts somewhere around 1970 or 1971 (ABC reached an accord with I believe NABET to allow DJs to run their own boards and use carts for music instead of having a record turner cueing the records in studio).

I'm not sure if CKLW ever went to cart or not--I seem to recall seeing a photo from the early 1980s in which multiple turntables were visible in the studio.

sriv94 wrote: When record labels issued copies to radio stations who actually played the vinyl (or even used it for carting), did they generally service only one copy and if a record became unplayable for whatever reason it was incumbent on the station to request additional copies? Or did they service multiple copies, just in case?

A station's reporting status and/or its ability to sell records largely determined the level of record service it received. Small market stations which developed reputations for breaking records were also well-serviced in the days before tier reporting took hold.

In a case like "Indiana Wants Me", important stations received copies both directly from Motown and from independent distributors. This sometimes resulted in a given station receiving multiple promo copies from different pressing plants.

When I worked at Heilicher Brothers in Minneapolis during the mid-'70s, we typically were not sent enough promo 45s to service all of the format-applicable radio stations within our large geographical region. The pecking order was the reporters, first, the secondary, non-reporting stations last.

The problem was that the secondary stations weren't already getting copies directly from Motown, so if the allotted copies ran about before their turn, they went without product (or relied on RSI or local sources) while the bigger stations ended up with multiple copies. But to the labels and the distributors, selling records was the ultimate purpose of the promo 45s, so they were sent to where they were most likely to make the most sales, or to get the crucial adds on radio. It didn't matter whether or not the stations played vinyl or carts on the air; ensuring that the important stations had the records was what mattered.

The worst all-time offender that I recall was Linda Ronstadt's "(She's A) Very Lovely Woman" Capitol 45 (#70, 1971.) Even the few stations I heard it on were stuck with crackle-infested copies. I've often wondered whether or not the record's chart fate may have been hindered due to its extremely poor pressing quality.

Edited by Yah Shure

my commercial 45 which has a different pressing font than yah shure's...