In late 1981 it occurred to me that our little country station in regional-artist-rich Richmond VA might make a few bucks by producing a record of the best local music. This was non-traditional revenue to be collected before there was non-traditional revenue to collect.
I'd been overwhelmed by tapes and records from local artists once the format broke on the station and we even played a few of them; my thought was that there were enough Richmond-based artists out there to populate a format all by themselves, let alone a 12-cut record.
I began by moving things around, plugging aspects of the project into the station's remaining 1981 promotion budget. I worked with night clubs to produce a series of remote "Live From..." shows featuring their bands (we plugged a Shure mixer into the output of their PA with an ambience mic in the ceiling for audience reaction and fed the whole thing down a 5k balanced phone line back to the station). WRNL's country music club remotes quickly became the place to be on Saturday nights.
Back then, dedicated balanced phone lines were incredibly cheap, when subscribed on an annual basis...this whole club thing cost us pennies per event and sounded surprisingly good.
I developed a series of outdoor talent competitions to run thru seasonable weather in 1982, with multiple commercial sponsors, to stir up interest in local talent and maintained the club remotes.
Concurrently with the talent competitions and the remotes, players were invited to submit demo tapes of their original work, to be judged and perhaps found worthy of re-recording in a professional environment and included on a 12-cut LP celebrating the market's musical heritage.
Winners of the competition would also be required to make a musical appearance at station events over the next 12 months.
That "re-recording in a professional environment" was an issue, of course...there were plenty of studios in and around Richmond but while I had a fair-sized wad of cash in the promotional budget, it would never cover the cost of mastering, mixing, additional musicians, pressing LP's, dubbing cassettes and printing labels. In the pre-digital days, before you could knock out a CD with a jewel case and a full-color j-card insert for a buck and change, this was a major problem.
But there was good news...a small but feisty studio in Petersburg was willing to take on the project at their expense for a share of the profits that would reimburse their investment. I signed the deal with DRC the afternoon they called.
Cover art is (or was) an important element in selling an LP. That 12"-square billboard alone could drive a record up the charts. I was determined to get the best art we could and assigned a portion of the cash budget to a competition. Entries ranged, literally, from stick figure drawings to an entry from a professional cartoonist, who eventually won.
Gary Brookins, whose work you see at the top of this page, was a cartoonist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and a station fan and his entry was clearly the best. Of course, it didn't hurt our effort at all that the newspaper's wunderkind, a protege of previous T-D cartoonist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff MacNelly was the top dog in our competition. That the paper's radio columnist was a friend of mine and that Jeff had won, well, maybe the paper would get behind the project. That could only help sales.
I continued to plan the LP project, scheduled in my head for culmination at a huge Independence Day celebration planned by WRNL and our sister station, rocker WRXL 102.1FM, at the Virginia State Fairgrounds on July 4th, 1983. We'd have copies of the LP and cassette available for sale on the 4th, followed by a performance by bands sponsored by each station, then the Richmond Symphony would perform (for $4500) choreographed to a $10k (mid-'80's dollars) fireworks display. We had also planned to have Paul Harvey speak at the event, but his $15k fee put us off a bit. That would have included Paul flying in in his personal Lear Jet, but, still...CANCELLED!
Yes, it was an expensive way to sell records, but my hopes rested mostly on retail sales in stores following the event. I had faith in the project right up until the morning of the 4th, when the weather forecast came in with a predicted high well over 100º and maybe some big-time thunderstorms.
Remember I told you this was a joint effort between WRNL, the AM country station, and WRXL, the FM rock station? That was the good news. The ONLY good news. Because the FM PD was basically a music guy, the Promotion Director we shared was inclined to ignore the AM because she hated country music, and because we were in the middle of a GM change, I got stuck with managing the entire 4th of July event. I knew all the honchos involved, so that helped a little bit.
My last two acts on the 3rd were to borrow from a client a travel trailer that we could use as air-conditioned hq and to borrow a half-dozen headset radios for commo over the fairgrounds. The FM PD and the Promo Director spent most of the 100º+ day in the trailer drinking beer and insisted on wearing a headset so they would look "in charge" for the new GM.
I spent most of the day running from exhibit to exhibit and event to event. Then evening came. My AM dJ's nicely intro'd both the AM and FM music acts and then there came a break. I sat at the very top of the Richmond Racetrack grandstands with my kids as darkness fell and my dj's introduced the Symphony. As they played, I watched the sky to the West above them and saw, off in the distance, powerful lightning and serious clouds and I grew concerned.
Beyond the Symphony's stage, in the Racetrack infield, I had more than a dozen of the firework's guys ready to blow up $10k worth of explosives, and there was a serious lightning- and thunderstorm moving directly on top of them.
The orchestra was nowhere near the point where we could begin the fireworks to synch up with their music but if we didn't get the fireworks off right now, we'd have poured our $10k down the toilet, soaked in the coming rainstorm.
I nailed the "SPEAK" button on my 2-way and yelled to "Blow 'em off now!" They did, the fireworks went off as the Symphony played through, and then the rains came.
HOW IT ENDED: The Symphony concluded its performance. The fireworks finale finished just before the rain came down. We all got soaked getting to our cars. WRNL sold maybe a dozen copies of the Home Cookin' collection. Even though the FM PD and our jointly-shared Promotions Director did nothing all day long but drink beer in air-conditioned comfort, I caught all the heat. The following budget year I had most of my promotional money stripped away and given to WRXL; a year thereafter I moved to STL. And you wonder why I want nothing to do with day-to-day radio anymore?
The songs on the album, presented below, are representative of the country music of the 1980's. Typically, the biggest hits were most often slow or medium tempo and only occasionally were there songs (maybe one in ten) by females. Usually, the Top Songs also included a "novelty" record, as presented a couple times here. There were too many females and too many novelty tunes to accurately represent a mid-'80's playlist, but I felt, as the final judge, that these were the best of the bunch (about 200 songs were entered in the competition) back then, most representative of the format. Hope you enjoy them!
This is still my favorite song from the LP, even after all the years.
