NYC Radio in the 90s: A Subjective List
Wither WQXR?
On a recent-ish trip home for a school reunion, I dug this radio out of my old stuff. With it a flood of memories of junior high and high school came rushing back.
That Sony bumblebee color scheme is undeniable, recognizable from a hundred feet away and impossible to destroy except by the most accident prone child. My folks gave me this in celebration of my first high-school sports endeavor, when I was tasked with distance running in New York City. Eventually that meant rushing through Central Park and around the Reservoir as kids from the French School flicked cigarette butts at me, but it started with stultifying loops around a few blocks of the city. The radio was to break up monotony and keep me moving. If some kids were food motivated or just lived on endorphins I sure as hell lived for music.
There were ten presets on this radio, and I locked them in the second I opened the package. They have not changed since 1996. What follows is a ranking from worst to first of those musical touchstones I chose for myself, thinking of it both today and my reasoning at thirteen years old. New York was a tremendous place to have a portable radio, but we have to start somewhere, so we'll start where music lives...
102.7 WNEW
Scott Muni was a rock DJ when my dad was in high school. He was basically an evil mummy brought back to life when I was in high school. As much as I liked the great guitar gods it wasn't worth sitting through his weird grumble-mumble to get to them. WNEW was the museum of radio stations at that point. Of course I bow to the tremendous influence and insane curation of a guy like Pat St. John, but even back then I knew that Enn-Eee-Double-You wasn't long for this world. And then management put all their chips in on Opie and Anthony, shock jocks and actual heretics. Look, when both Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen call the station live on air to tell you to not switch to an all-talk format I think you should listen to them, but I didn't have the incredible wisdom that led WNEW to plummet all the way down to dead last in the ratings by the end of 1999. RATING: 25 or 6 to 4 fossilized DJs
92.3 WXRK
Oh, K-Rock. You were skateboards and delinquency and cool older kids in my head, always showing up to give me something that was just beyond my reach. Mostly it was where you would go to hear Howard Stern, but it was way easier to catch his show later on cable so instead I know K-Rock for Sponge and Sublime and Tripping Daisy and Talking Heads. By the late 90s it felt like the radio equivalent of a dead mall, so of course they picked up Opie & Anthony after The Incident to replace a bunch of chuckleheads who loved to say racist and homophobic stuff on live mics. RATING: 8 out of 16 Candles Down the Drain
1560 AM WQEW
When I got the radio this station played jazz standards, and it was amazing to tune in and listen to Sinatra or Tony Bennett or if I was lucky some Glenn Miller. Not long after the station was sold and it became Radio Disney. My teenage pride said I should change this band over to something more appropriately hip--Hot 97, maybe?--but I realized quickly that no one would ever know what I had on here. I could still flip over and hear my main man Goofy giving continuity announcements. Besides, they were playing some international hits you just didn't hear on New York stations. 1560 was the first place I was exposed to B*witched, who remain a favorite of mine to this day. RATING: 15 out of 60 Mouse Ears
105.1 WDBZ
Changing hands more often than the Italian Prime-Ministership, 105.1 was at least three great radio stations during the course of my junior high experience. Mix 105 became The Buzz became Big 105 became Jammin' 105 eventually settled on Power 105.1, and as much as I love Ed Lover and Doctor Dre those first format changes really did it for me. The Buzz was the first last and only place I ever heard Odds' "Someone Who's Cool" on the radio, and I'm convinced that's one of the great rock songs of all time. Ditto Indigo Girls' "Shame on You", which led me down a rabbit hole on a band who would be prominent in my high school playlists. Like the poet said, sometimes it only has to run a minute. RATING: 4 out of 5 format changes
104.3 WAXQ
Oh hell yeah, you wanna hear some Hendrix? You want some stickers to slap on your guitar case? You wanna live in that 14-to-16 liminal space in your life where you decide whether you'd rather learn the guitar parts to "Stairway to Heaven" or "Run Like Hell"? Boy, do we have a radio station for you! Q104 was WNEW but good, or in a less reductionist way it's the station you and your dad could agree on while stuck in traffic on the approach to the GWB on Friday evening. I have a weirdly-specific memory of the first song I ever heard on Q104, and Aerosmith's "Amazing" is as close as you can get to the archetype of what this station played. RATING: Does anybody really know what rankings are?
103.5 WKTU
So what if my jeans were torn? They've been torn since Bros were cool! KTU advertised itself as the Beat of New York, and if you were fourteen and just wanted to dance around the house when no one was home there was no better option. Every band played on 103.5 had a music video where they went to space or where they danced in front of a giant disco ball, and there were no exceptions to this. There were also few surprises on KTU; I'd been introduced to nearly all of these bands on one of the Jock Jams compilations or through my hipper friends uptown. The stereotype of the glitzy neon carefree 90s lived and died on this station, and it was amazing to listen to. Sometimes it felt like it would give you a toothache, but is there any better time in your life for a sugar rush? RATING: 2 Unlimited out of No Limits
660 AM WFAN
Because I needed very much to know what Vinnie from Bayside thought about the fact that Bobby V was warming up Bobby Jay Jones for a closer role in a playoff game. The Fan was home to every mouthy sports journalism personality I liked, or even tolerated in the case of Mike Francesa. We were in a silver age of New York baseball, and even our football teams were kind of good. (Meanwhile, I was not too far away from finally getting to sit rinkside at the Garden to watch the Rangers play the single most godawful game of hockey I'd ever seen. January 29, 2001 against the Atlanta Thrashers, losing 7-2 in a game that was nowhere near that close.) There's every chance that the last thing I hear before I die in my rattled brain is "Let's Go, Mets! F-A-N!", so it must have been doing something right. RATING: 97-66, 2nd NL East
101.1 WCBS
Early childhood mornings more often than not meant that I would spend the minutes after waking up listening to Harry Harrison, the morning mayor. His intonation to unwrap each day like a precious gift was as constant as my father telling me to have a "great, safe day" before walking into school or seeing construction on the East Side. It wasn't just the Morning Mayor, as I could probably rattle off every DJ who worked on the station: Cousin Brucie, Don K. Reed in the Doo-Wop Shop, Dan Ingram, Dan Daniel, Bill Billiam, Phil Philson, and there's only a small possibility that I'm making some of those up. CBS-FM was one of the first-ever oldies stations, and this is where I got my love for and encyclopedic knowledge of pre-Beatles rock-n-roll. If you need someone to talk about how "Just Like Romeo & Juliet" and "Like Columbus Did" are the same song, well, just wait for a future installment of The Wooden Block Labyrinth. RATING: 3.75 out of 4 Tops
95.5 WPLJ
The all-timer, the legend, the now very extremely defunct PLJ. Now it's a Christian Pop station, but back then it was the place you'd go to hear the newest in everything. Well, almost everything. Their early-90s slogan of "no rap, no hard stuff, and no sleepy elevator music" struck me as weirdly exclusionary even back then. PLJ was the starting point, the place to pick up songs that I'd carry with me the rest of my life. If I didn't know what to do on any given day or if I was just looking to dance this mess around, I'd flip to 95.5 and move from there. It sounds like No Doubt, like Alanis, like Natalie Imbruglia, like silly parody songs and deep cuts at Christmas. Some of it was middle of the road, but I can't imagine my musical obsession starting without PLJ. RATING: 955 Grams out of One Rocky Allen Showgram
100.3 WHTZ
I was a high-schooler in New York in the 90s, I wasn't going to have Z100 on speed-dial? No matter what leanings you had I feel like all of us kind of wanted to go to Jingle Ball. (Just the idea of the day's one-hit wonders performing where the Knicks play was novel on its own.) It was as hip to today's music as PLJ but they played rap and electronic-influenced music. Their late-night Planet Z show was mind-exploding for this burgeoning pop fan; no talk, no commercials, just hours of mixes and remixes from NYC's club scene. Listening to a set now seems nearly quaint but the very possibility of doing something revolutionary with the sounds I heard every day set me on fire with a newfound love of this world. And then in the afternoons I could get my more than fill of stuff like "How Bizarre". My taste would go all over the place for the next few years, but I was still always a little bummed I never went to Jingle Ball. RATING: One Blue out of Dee-ba-da-bye