December 1963 Playlist (NYC Train Trip, approx. 6-8 DEC)
Mark Connelly - South Yarmouth, MA, USA
It was two weeks after the JFK assassination and the country was in a depressed mood even as the Christmas season was approaching.
Maybe to bring a bit of joy back, my dad had arranged a little weekend get-away trip with my brother and me. We took a NYNH&H (New York, New Haven, and Hartford) train from South Station in Boston to Grand Central Station in New York City. The coastal route was through Providence and Westerly (RI) followed by New London and New Haven (CT). In New York there would be Christmas shopping stops at Macy's, Gimbel's, and Woolworth's as well as my dad's favorite bookstores (Brentano's et al.). The Hayden Planetarium and Guggenheim Museum were also in the sightseeing plan and I remember having great Italian food somewhere.
Equally memorable to me, already a dedicated radio "junkie" at age 14, was the "buffet table" of music that I enjoyed through the headphones connected to my transistor radio while riding on the train and while relaxing in the hotel room at the end of the day. Beyond the songs was just as varied an assortment of on-air personalities. As a DX (long distance receiving) listener, I was already familiar with a lot of the NYC radio action both from what I could hear at night at home in Arlington, MA and on family vacations to Cape Cod where many of the New York metro AM stations came in all day long.
At the time, top 40 playlists were not as homogeneous city-to-city as they would later become. In particular, black artists got much more airplay on New York's mainstream top 40's WMCA, WABC, and WINS than they did on Boston's two main hits stations WBZ and WMEX. Boston had a daytime low-power soul station (WILD) but New York had three around-the-clock R&B blasters: WLIB, WNJR, and WWRL. Boston radio was indeed "lily white" compared to New York. Interestingly, in neither market did country cross over into Top-40-land to any great degree. You had to go south and west of Washington, DC for that. Another feature of music surveys then would be that songs could reach a peak position in one market two or more months before peaking somewhere else a relatively short distance away. Add in the local hits 'endemic' to a particular region (and generally unknown elsewhere) and the result was that sampling a half dozen or so Top 40 stations spread out over a couple of hundred miles could have easily presented you with 60 or more unique songs being considered as current hits.
Of all the great DJ's in New York then, Murray-the-K on WINS was tops. His show was the stuff of legend. WINS also had Mad Daddy whose rhyming delivery, like the ringside utterings of (then) Cassius Clay and beatnik-talk albums by Lord Buckley, gave a foretaste of rapping that would be popularized 16 years later by the Sugarhill Gang. WABC had DJ's like Scott Muni and 'Cousin' Bruce Morrow - no slouches either. Third-place WMCA was entertaining as well. Of course, all rock and no other music makes "a dull boy" so sometimes I'd spin up classical on my dad's favorite NY station WQXR "The Station of the New York Times" and check out swing, show, and jazz music over on WNEW. 'NEW was a first class operation in both announcer intelligence and technical quality. Long after WNEW's '50s/'60s jocks had passed on to the great turntable in the sky, names such as Jazzbo Collins and William B. Williams are still held in high esteem.
Part of the train trip was closer to the Boston metro, so WMEX DJ's such as Arnie Ginsburg and WBZ's Dick Summer and Bruce Bradley factored into the listening mix. I also remember giving Providence stations WPRO and WICE a quick listen as the train rolled through there in a swirling burst of snow. Along the Connecticut shore, WAVZ New Haven was noted with punched-up audio that made it sound much more than 1 kilowatt. The Sunday night return trip allowed me to hear a lot of other stations via "skip" if I kept the radio near the window. WKBW Buffalo (with Joey Reynolds and Dan Neaverth) kept blasting in mile after mile as the train rumbled through a cold night that showed Christmas and other lights popping in and out of thick fog.
This time period was interesting musically as it was right at the border of the old regime and something new - the British Invasion. December 1963 was the month when Beatles tunes started creeping in on stations in Boston, New York, Washington, and Chicago (as well as in some Canadian cities). People, including teens, had been stressed out by the Kennedy assassination and horrible stories from civil rights struggles. Just a year earlier the Cuban Missile Crisis had put us on the edge of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, not the Alfred E. Neuman magazine. There was a need for escapism, something new, as 1964 approached.
I'll thank the following stations for the huge cumulative lasting contribution the music of that long-ago trip made on me:
Below is a playlist derived from a "road trip" CD I put together quite a while ago to showcase the period.
Of course, as it was the Christmas season, these older and current holiday hits (along with many others) were well represented on the radio that weekend.