Holiday, everyday!

May 26, 2007 04:30 AM

At the same time CHUM is flaunting its 50th birthday, other pop/rock radio stations in southern Ontario are also celebrating special anniversaries …

While CHUM beat Hamilton “new oldies” AM station 1150 CKOC to the Top 40 format change by three years, the Standard Radio-owned station known around Steeltown as “The Busy Bee” is running special programming and events to celebrate its 85th anniversary through 2007. Check for events and special program details at oldies1150.com.

And Toronto’s “Classic Rock” FM station Q107, credited among industry insiders as the station that put the nail in 1050 CHUM’s AM coffin in 1977 with a progressive rock format that embraced all the joy, creativity and mayhem of the most explosive era in rock history, is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

The crowning moment was Thursday night’s mighty bash at The Docks featuring ’70s and ’80s Canadian rock heroes Kim Mitchell & Friends, David Wilcox, Alannah Myles, Honeymoon Suite, Sass Jordan, Goddo and Max Webster.

Greg Quill

CHUM anniversary events rundown

May 26, 2007 04:30 AM

1050 CHUM celebrates its 50th anniversary today beginning with tours at the historic CHUM Radio building. Then there’s a free concert held at Nathan Phillips Square featuring veteran 1960s Toronto bands Little Caesar and the Consuls, Robbie Lane and the Disciples (with friends Keith Hampshire, George Olliver and John Finley assisting Lane, who was released from hospital Wednesday following surgery for a brain aneurysm), and a special appearance by Gordon Lightfoot.

CHUM deejays past and present will be on hand as well.

The celebration kicks off at the CHUM Radio building, 1331 Yonge Street (south of St. Clair), in conjunction with the 8th Annual Doors Open Toronto. Fans can also tour the new CHUM Museum.

GREG QUILL

As the venerable radio station celebrates its golden anniversary today, we cast an eye toward its future

May 26, 2007 04:30 AM

GREG QUILL
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

As Toronto’s once-formidable hit-making powerhouse, now the classic “oldies” Top 40 station, 1050 CHUM, gears up for its 50th anniversary bash today, a big question hangs over this key event and, indeed, over the station’s year-long celebration of its humble beginnings on May 27, 1957.

We’ll get it out of the way right off the top: Does boomer radio have a future, or is this its ecstatic terminal rush?

Common sense and radio ratings more or less prove that with the decline of the massive demographic force exerted on global culture by post-World War II children, now in their late 50s and early 60s and heading for shelter, vintage rock and pop ceases to have much meaning for subsequent generations of radio listeners.

Nor do such endearing domestic trappings as 1050 CHUM’s culture-defining, high-rotation Top 40 playlist, its once-omnipotent deejays, its career-making CHUM Chart, its traffic-stopping stunts and contests (now the trademark property of MuchMusic and the video age), and memories of the heady days of pre-FM rock beaming in on transistor-powered portable wireless receivers.

“There will always be an oldies format, but it won’t be music of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s,” veteran music journalist, radio consultant and Canadian editor of the North American music industry bible Billboard, Larry LeBlanc, told the Star.

“As listeners age, the more they want the music of their youth. As boomers decline, we’ll hear more and more ‘oldies’ from the 1980s and `90s.”

And that will happen on the stereo FM band, not on mono AM, which has long since ceased to be a factor in the marketing and dissemination of music, and, except for some holdouts in Canada, has been handed over entirely to talk, sports, news and to fringe religious and special interest operators, LeBlanc added.

In the Southern Ontario market several vintage music formats still thrive on old AM frequencies – notably Hamilton’s CKOC 1150 pop/rock station, and CHAM 820 classic country music outfit, as well as Toronto’s AM 740 pre-rock pop music station.

That so little music remains on AM is “lamentable, because the music that was made for AM radio still sounds so good on the AM band,” LeBlanc said.

“And it’s still viable territory. If radio hadn’t been so quick to abandon music on AM after the FM revolution in the 1970s, if it hadn’t got rid of its talent and burned out the repertoire by running the hits into the ground, it would still be an entertaining medium with a potential audience of eight to 10 million in this country.

“It was absurd to throw it away.”

In CHUM Radio’s main studio in its iconic 1950s-style building on Yonge St., the mood is understandably more optimistic, even as Bell Globemedia Inc. prepares to assert its recently approved ownership of CHUMCity Broadcasting.

It was a radio and television empire that began with the purchase by the late Allan Waters of a sunrise-to-sunset broadcast licence for a few thousand dollars in 1957, and was sold last year for nearly $2 billion.

“I really hope the format has a future on AM,” said Bob Laine, the station’s original overnight deejay and for 20 years one of the most powerful and likeable radio personalities in Toronto.

“The music will always appeal to young listeners who are discovering pop and rock for the first time, and it speaks to young listeners.

“It’s simple, uncomplicated and timeless.”

For Duff Roman, who for years was Laine’s opposite number at the edgier CKEY before jumping to CHUM in the late 1960s – the two men enjoyed a unique friendship, against the express orders of their corporate bosses, often getting together at shift’s end for a coffee, or hanging out in each other’s studios hidden behind baffles and blinds – 1050 CHUM will always be “a Toronto icon, a statement of the city’s sensibility in the years it dominated the radio market.

“I think that sensibility survives, and I hope, so will 1050 CHUM,” added Roman, who brushed aside a reminder the station hasn’t always been so sentimentally attached to the golden-era format. For a brief period in 2001, CHUM cavalierly dropped its long-established identity in favour of sports and talk, only to rethink its options a couple of ratings books later.

And while CHUM was indisputably the engine that powered the Canadian music machine in its heyday, it didn’t always have its finger so tightly on the city’s music pulse. It may have begun airing the Beatles a full year in advance of U.S. stations, thereby vaulting to the top of the Toronto radio pile, but its playlists, LeBlanc pointed out, were remarkably devoid of blues, soul and R&B in the years when Toronto’s more adventurous teenagers were tuning in after dark to black music from Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo and beyond.

Even Elvis and the Rolling Stones had a hard time breaking the CHUM family-music code, finding a Toronto home first on CKEY.

And the famous CHUM Chart, entrée to which guaranteed huge sales dividends, was compiled from information no more reliable than a handful of Toronto record store sales estimates.

A hundred thousand copies of each of the 900 weekly CHUM Charts were printed between May 27, 1957, and April 26, 1975, and delivered, mostly by CHUM deejays and staffers in the early years, to every record store in the city, as well as convenience stores, concert venues, clubs and large public events, such as the CNE, where CHUM had a presence in the form of a broadcast trailer.

“It wasn’t exactly scientific, and it was vulnerable to unscrupulous record companies with access to our key retailers,” admitted Roman, who enjoys the fabulous distinction of having produced The Band after their split from Ronnie Hawkins and before they were taken under Bob Dylan’s wing.

“There were scandals and bent noses … but for more than 20 years, the CHUM Chart ruled. CHUM was an all-purpose radio station. There were no genre distinctions for radio in those days. On a given chart you could have artists as diverse as Marty Robbins, Hugo Winterhalter, the Everly Brothers and Elvis. Back then a hit was a hit, and the CHUM Chart was untouchable.”

And so are the memories that remain 1050 CHUM’s exclusive territory, at least for now. Many of them have been embellished and painstakingly resurrected over the past three years by Laine and longtime CHUM producer Doug Thompson in the CHUM Archives pages on the Rock Radio Scrapbook website (rockradioscrapbook.ca).

It includes detailed text as well as segments of actual broadcasts by former CHUM personalities Al Boliska, Dave Johnson, Laine, John Spragge, Donny Burns, Chuck McCoy, Tom Rivers, Scott Carpenter and “Jungle Jay” Nelson, among others.

The station’s own website (www.1050chum.com), also houses a Toronto-centric photo and text treasury of enormous size and complexity.

But for Laine and Roman, who will help launch and promote other special events during the remainder of CHUM’s 50th anniversary year, nothing compares to the memory of feeling the hair on the back of their necks rise when the Beatles played Maple Leaf Gardens in September 1964. They were radio rivals and CHUM clearly owned this city.

“None of us had ever seen anything so exciting,” said Roman, for whom Fats Domino once cooked a steak on a hotplate in his Toronto hotel room, and to whom Louis Armstrong – for reasons he never made clear – gave a New Orleans constipation remedy.

“The noise of the screaming women was overwhelming, disorienting. Backstage, George Harrison was frightened.

“When Elvis performed at the Gardens in 1957, it was a polite, well-behaved country music concert. Something had happened to Toronto in the years between, and CHUM was part of that change.

“For the first time, the people who played the music were the same age as the people who made it. For the first time, Canadian musicians – The Band, David Clayton-Thomas, Luke Gibson and the Apostles, Ian & Sylvia, The Guess Who, Michel Pagliaro, Gordon Lightfoot – could hear their music on the radio, on Top 40 radio, alongside the Beatles and the Stones and Elvis.

“It was a magic moment.”

CHUM Chart

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The CHUM CHART was a ranking of Top 40 songs on CHUM 1050 AM, from 1957 to 1986, and was the longest-running Top 40 chart in the world. After it shut down, duties transferred to its sister station at 104.5 CHUM FM, which airs adult contemporary music.

The term CHUM Chart currently refers to a 60-minute music video program that airs on CityTv every Saturday at 2:00 p.m. The program airs a list of the most popular songs in the countdown, starting from #30, playing approximately half of them.

Chart Patterns

[This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.

Please help Wikipedia by adding references.]

The patterns that Countdown follows become very predictable to someone who regularly examines the weekly list. A few very obvious patterns are:

• When videos that have been progressing slowly stay at a position for two consecutive weeks (mostly #13), they often fall in the third week. If a video were to stay at #13 for two consecutive weeks, it would likely drop to somewhere in the late 10’s for the third week.

• Videos almost never jump from any position other than number one, two, three up to the number one spot. This means that a video that is at number four or five for a week will almost never jump to number one for the following week. This leads videos almost never failing to reach number one after reaching the top 3.

• Recently, videos rarely stay at number one for more than two weeks. This could be attributed to there being numerous popular videos being on the Countdown at a certain time. However, some of the most popular videos such as Nelly’s and Christina Aguleria’s Tilt Ya Head Back race up the chart at a very fast pace in a very short period of time, but then repeat at a postiton and descend when they reach their peak (30,21,17,13,9,9,8,7,7). Other videos that take a long time to climb to number one such as Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around” manage to hold onto number one after a long time at climbing the charts.

• Videos that fall from number one often drop a few the week after being at number one. Again, this could be attributed there being numerous popular videos being on the Countdown at a certain time.

• Videos almost never begin to ascend the Countdown after already being on the Countdown and falling off, or peaking and beginning to drop. Some videos that have accomplished this feat are Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten, Five for Fighting’s 100 Years, Dido’s White Flag, Alicia Keys’s If I Ain’t Got You, and Daniel Powter’s Bad Day.

Chart figures

Songs with most weeks at number one

• 8 weeks
• U2 — “Vertigo” (2004/2005)
• 6 weeks
• Hoobastank — “The Reason” (2004)
• Maroon 5 — “This Love” (2004)
• 5 weeks
• Nelly Furtado — “Say It Right” (2007)
• INXS — “Afterglow” (2006)
• The Counting Crows — “accidentally In Love” (2004)
• Dido — “White Flag” (2003)
• 4 weeks
• Snow Patrol — “Chasing Cars” (2006)
• INXS — “Pretty Vegas” (2005/2006)
• Sarah McLachlan — “World’s On Fire” (2004)
• Outkast — “Hey Ya!” (2004)
• Duran Duran — “Reach Up For The Sunrise” (2004)
• John Mayer — “Waiting On The World To Change” (2006)
• Avril Lavigne — “Girlfriend” (2007)

The most weeks at number one by a band is U2’s Vertigo in 2004.

The most weeks at number one by a solo artist is Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right, and Dido’s White Flag. However Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right held on to #1, 5 consecutive weeks while Dido’s White Flag held on to #1, 5 inconsecutive weeks.

The most weeks at number one by a solo male artist is John Mayer’s Waiting On The World To Change.

Daniel Powter’s Bad Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Dani California, and Dido’s White Flag hold the biggest fall on the CHUM CHART. The biggest fall from the #1 spot was 4 positions, to #5.

Songs with most weeks at number two

• 7 weeks
• Nickelback- If Everyone Cared (2007)
• 6 weeks
• Nelly Furtado — “Powerless (Say What You Want)” (2004)
• 5 weeks
• Christina Aguleria- Ain’t No Other Man” (2006)
• The Killers – When You Were Young (2006)

Nelly Furtado’s Powerless stalled at #2 starting 2003-01-03 through February 7, 2004. No Doubt’s “It’s My Life” (1,3,6,7,9,10), Evanescence’s “My Immortal” (5,1,1,4,4,4), and Outkast’s Hey Ya! (10,7,4,1,1,1) all held the number one spot while “Powerless” (2,2,2,2,2,2) stalled at number two. While Nelly Furtado’s single “Powerless” stalled at #2 for 6 weeks,hugely popular singles rising up the Chum Chart at high paces like P!NK’s God Is a DJ and Michelle Branch’s Breathe would not go any higher than #3 because of Powerless. Powerless never reached #1, but nonetheless was a huge single on the Chum Chart because it stayed on the chart for a huge 25 weeks. It has made a record for the longest stay at #2 that hasn’t been broken until 2007-05-12 when Nickelback’s “If Everyone Cared” stalled at #2 for 7 weeks. It is currently stalling at #2 from March 31 2007, through May 12, 2007. :Christina Aguleria’s – Candyman(7,1,1,3,5,9,14) and Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend (10,8,4,1,1,1,1), and Justin Timberlake’s What Goes Around (1,4,5,6,6,6,10) all went to the #1 slot while “If Everyone Cared” stalled at #2.

Songs with the most total weeks on the CHUM CHART

• 30 weeks – Kelly Clarkson — “Since U Been Gone” (2005)
• 29 weeks – Nickelback — “Far Away” (2006)
• 28 weeks – Natasha Bedingfield — “Unwritten” (2006)
• 28 weeks – Evanescence- “My Immortal” (2004)

Note there may be other songs from 2003-2006 present that have had 28 weeks or more on the Chum Chart. Feel free to find some songs and post it on. Thanks! It is predicted that Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around” will break a record in the song with the most weeks on the CHUM CHART as it has currently been on the chart for 21 weeks and is at #10. It is also predicted Daughtry’s It’s Not Over will break a record as well in the song with the most weeks on the CHUM CHART, as it has been on the chart for 20 weeks and is currently at #5.

Songs making the biggest single-week upward movement

• 17-4 (13 postions) — INXS — “Pretty Vegas“
• 23-12 (11 positions) — The Black Eyed Peas – “Don’t Lie“
• 25-14 (11 positions) — Bowling for Soup – 1985
• 21-10 (11 positions) — OutKast – Hey Ya!
• 21-10 (11 positions) — No Doubt- It’s My Life
• 20-9 (11 positions) — Goo Dolls- Give a Little Bit
• 16-5 (11 positions) — Nelly f. Tim McGraw- Over and Over

The biggest ascendent on the countdown by a group is INXS with Pretty Vegas.

The biggest ascendent on the countdown by a duet is Nelly and Tim McGraw’s Over and Over.

The biggest ascendent by a female solo artist is Nelly Furtado’s Maneater, Kylie Minogue’s I Believe In You, Madonna’s Hung Up, Mary J. Blige’s Be Without You, Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You, and P!NK’s God Is A DJ.

Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” reached #1 for one week and descended. It starting to ascend on the Countdown again. It reached #1 again three weeks later, which is the longest gap for the same song at the top position. This feat has also been achieved by “Dido”’s “White Flag which reached #1 for two weeks and descended. It started to ascend on the countdown again and reached #1 3 weeks later.

External links

• CHUM Chart Archives
• Current CHUM Charts

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHUM_Chart“

Categories: Articles which may contain original research | Canadian radio programs | Canadian record charts | Citytv network shows