I was 16 living in Nova Scotia, Canada when I discovered WABC and Don Ingram. I could only get the am signal at night on my father's side band radio. This station and Dan's style got me through some tough times coming to terms with my sexuality in a very small town. I remember wishing so much at 18 wanting to live in New York because of the energy I would feel listening to traffic reports and the news from this station. In a small way this station saved my life until I moved to a bigger city at 19 and was able to live as a proud and out gay man.
Excellent selection of songs! These classic hits take me back to my youth; I was 17 and a junior in high school. Even on the South Shore of Boston WABC was the best music on the best station that aired every night.
Obviously, SiriusXM got their inspiration from stations like this and thus, created 70’s on 7. The jingle sounds exactly like WABC 770AM. Imagine that!
This show was aired around that time, WKTU’s “Disco 92” which was a new format where it took a stab on disco dance music where it reached #1 in the ratings and the station was slowly went down due to its competition from WXLO’s “99X”. This recording was made six months before I was born.
99X was never a viable competitor to WABC. 99X never even beat WPLJ in the ratings, they may have barely made the top 10 once or twice. Now WBLS the ratings before KTU Disco 92 was only .2 behind WABC and had won 18-49 adults which was a big reason why WKTU went disco and beat WABC in it's first full ratings period. Prior to that, only WOR with a talk full service format would occasionally be #1. 98.7 Fm would eventually find ratings success as Urban Kiss fm. Kiss found a solid niche right between BLS and KTU.
99X stole a lot of WABC’s thunder in the late ‘70s by presenting an “edgier” version of the Top 40 (they had a DJ called Steve Smokin’ Weed). That appealed to kids who felt like they had outgrown the “warm dads” approach of WABC, but still weren’t quite ready for WNEW and WPLJ. They also happened to hit their stride at a time when portable FM radios became affordable - so they took over some of WABC’s beach-and-barbecue real estate. Radio historians are always quick to say Disco 92 KTU killed Musicradio, but the 99X factor gets overlooked.
Disco would die a slow death in 1980, but by 1982, the writing was already on the wall; WABC switched to talk and there was only one AM music station left in New York: 660 WNBC (they too fell in 1988 and WFAN moved in from 1050)!
8 years old for me. I was still in school when it was broadcasted. It was THE station to go to for the latest sounds. Not like that talk-radio joke that it is now. I know they couldn’t compete with the FM stations with the superior sound, but I still think it’s lame that they did that!
Glad to hear this tape of the Dan Ingram show from 1978! But the title is misleading. This is NOT WABC's brief experiment with disco music. Most of the songs on this tape are simply what's on the Top 20 of March 1978. The Disco Experiment was a few months in early 1979 when WABC played 50% disco and 50% other hits after WKTU Disco 92 took away a chunk of WABC's audience.
I was 17 when this aired too! This takes me back; I always listened to WABC at night in Scituate, Mass. And yes, it's regular top 40 music but if the songs segue into each other it's a disco mix (mix for a disco).
Thank you for this opportunity to hear the master of New York radio at work again. This late in the station’s run, you could hear the magic starting to slip away - Ingram talked less, the music mix was less dynamic, and the commercials started to be pushed together into blocks (rather than being woven into the songs and jingles and becoming just another part of the tapestry). But Ingram was still hitting the rapid-fire quips with expert timing, and the jingles were still punctuating everything like no station’s jingles have done before or since. (I’m actually wondering if part of the reason for the station’s demise was that Top 40 music itself had gotten stale - what’s on display here is a mix of late stage disco and yacht rock. By the time Michael Jackson, Prince and the New Wave movement revitalized Top 40 in the ‘80s. WABC had given up).
The style of the broadcast doesn't sound like it was recorded 45 years ago.... It sounds so great that sometimes I forget this was recorded in 1978, thought it was recorded today becauseof the style!
![[WABC] 770 Khz, 77WABC (1978-03-09) Top 20 with Dan Ingram](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
