Introducing a new feature on this blog…
I graduated High School in 1969. While I was there, the radio station that almost everyone on campus listened to was 93/KHJ, which called itself "Boss Radio." We all listened to other stuff — I was starting to get more interested in jazz, show tunes and (all my life) comedy/novelty records — but we all also listened to KHJ. It was kinda required of every L.A. teenager.
It was a good station if you liked hearing the Top 40 of the present and near-past played over and over with occasional older flashbacks. The disc jockeys — they called them "Boss Jocks" — were fast and funny and most of them seemed to know that they should just shut up and play records. It all had a certain nice energy…but I rarely listened to KHJ directly.
I taped KHJ. I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder that I'd hooked up to a radio so I could record off the radio…and the radio also picked up the sound of local TV stations so I could record their audio, too. I couldn't always stay up late enough to watch Johnny Carson but I could record the audio of his show…or sometimes Dick Cavett's if he had a better guest lineup. So long before there were TiVo or even VCRs, I could record TV programs and watch them — well, listen to them — at a later date.
But getting back to KHJ: I recorded a couple hours of it every now and then, then I'd do some editing, yanking out my favorite songs along with their intros and outros by the Boss Jocks. I'd splice those hunks o'tape onto one tape reel so when I felt like listening to KHJ, I'd just play that reel and hear only my favorite songs. It eventually got to be around a hundred tunes and it felt like KHJ was programmed just for me. Which it should have been.
After I graduated University High (rah!) I kept this up until around 1972, which is why I call it my 1972 "mixtape," using a noun that I don't think existed in 1972. I played that thing a lot, though less so as time wore on and the tape wore out, as did my reel-to-reel tape deck. Fortunately, I have a list of what was on the tape…though if I didn't, I could probably recreate it from memory. What was on that reel is burned forever into what I laughingly call my brain.
All those songs are now on a thumb drive, along with hundreds of others, that I can play in my car when I'm traveling somewhere. Almost all the songs that were on the tape are also on YouTube in little videos of the recording artists performing (or often, lip-syncing) those hits. So I've decided to put one of them up here every day or three in no particular order. When you see this banner —
— that means it's a song that was on my KHJ mixtape compiled between approximately 1967 and 1972. Some of the songs are from before '67 since KHJ played "oldies," defining them as anything (I think) that had been off the charts for more than about eight weeks. This is one of the later entries on the tape. It's "Love Grows," a '72 hit from Edison Lighthouse and I'm sorry I no longer have the Boss Jocks announcing and/or back-announcing the music of my high school years…