Regular readers of this blog know the significance of KFJC Radio, as it was the location where a 63 hour marathon entitled “Maximum LOUIE LOUIE” took place in 1983, providing the radio airwaves with over 800 unique versions of the song, and what became a major turning point in the career of Richard Berry, songwriter of the song. It was at this event where Richard Berry received a lot of media attention, and it also turned out to be the place where he would meet Jack Ely, the original singer of the Kingsmen.
During that period, KFJC radio had become quite an active nurturing ground for very exciting non-commercial radio programming. Approximately a year and a half before the LOUIE marathon took place, an elaborate radio prank took place on April Fools Day – April 1, 1982.
For 24 hours, KFJC Radio became two separate radio stations, using the left and the right channels for two unique broadcasting signals. This special type of broadcast was called a “DuoCast.”
DJ Dave Glovin, who came up with this concept, was put in charge of running KFJC for this very unique broadcast. I recently asked Dave about this event, and here’s what he wrote about this experience:
You know Eric, I think there are actually only a few people that know, DuoCasting was my idea! I think Marty Preece, Jeff Cloninger (I think but I don’t remember if Jeff was there) and I were in the lobby kicking ideas around. I suddenly said to Marty something like “what about running to separate programs at the same time, one of the left channel and one on the right channel at the same time. I actually thought Marty woulld reject it because it wasn’t possible. Fortunately Marty explained to me that the Production Studio was fully capable of being on the air at the same time Master Studio was on the air. He then explained we could split them and run different programs on each at the same time hence DuoCasting was born. I remember that I did do an on air announcement as General Manager plugging that DuoCasting was the wave of the future. The reality was that as long as you could control the balance left and right on your radio you could enjoy DuoCasting. If you only had a one speaker radio you got both at the same time and it obviously didn’t sound good. Personally I think DuoCasting was one of the best actual it could work April Fool’s pranks we every pulled.
We had some where we did a foreign language for a day or we all used the same air name or we played outdated commercials. I figure a lot of people just tuned out of those for the day. DuoCasting actually gave them a true choice of programming for the day. Anyway whenever I think of April Fool’s pranks I always remember that day.
It was very unique 24 hour period at the station. It was all very chaotic, but also extremely entertaining in a weird way.
Years later, I remember asking around the station if there was any kind of recording of this event, but nobody seemed to have any documentation of what happened.
It appeared that all evidence of this event seemed to have disappeared without a trace.. or so I thought.
A few years ago, at an anniversary party for the station, I ran into my old friend Alex Pantages, and it turned out he actually recorded an hour’s worth of this event on a cassette tape.
Today, on Friday the 13th of July 2012, I’m sharing this recording with the world, to allow to others to finally hear this absurdity again… 30 years later!
Click on these links to hear this stuff!
HEAR PART ONE OF KFJC DuoCast APRIL FOOLS DAY 1982
HEAR PART TWO OF KFJC DuoCast APRIL FOOLS DAY 1982
(Control-click on Mac / Right-click on Windows to download these files, which are approximately 55 MB each)
I tried listening to it on my laptop and of course it sounded terrible because you hear both KFJC 1 & KFJC 2 together. I really hadn’t thought much about that when the idea came out of my mouth. I also will admit that I never thought Marty would allow us to do this. It goes to show you that no idea is impossible regardless of how stupid it sounded at the time. You probably won’t find a commercial FM station every trying this too. If you do let me know because I want the credit for the idea.
great job.
I remember listening to that one – I wasn’t with the station then. We have done a bunch of really good ones over the years, and a few that just didn’t work very well.
My favorite April 1st productions are “Homeland Security Radio” and “All Dave Radio,” but I think the most subtle one was “Deja Vu” – I recorded the March 31st 24 hours on VHS Hi-Fi (four cassettes) and at Midnight started the playback. We fooled a hella lot of people – they even called in for the ticket giveaways.
At the end of the 24 hours I started over again for a few minutes… I am pretty sure this was before the Groundhogs Day movie (1993.)