2+ Hours of 100.5 The Fox (2002-2004) digitally archived

[bmw]

I can't believe it has already been 20 years since 100.5's second attempt at "The Fox" before it ultimately got canned in 2004. I remember the station mostly getting negative comments in this forum at the time, in regards to both music selection and audio processing.

I was living in the dorms at SVSU at the time and I had a Sony minidisc recorder and a Pioneer receiver. Being relatively close to the broadcasting tower, I got immaculate reception, and I accumulated a lot of my music collection by recording music straight from the radio, and I chose The Fox as my source because it sounded so much better sound-quality-wise than did WIOG. WTCF had what I consider to this day to be some of the best audio processing I've ever heard on a Top 40 station.

So here's what they sounded like at the time, straight form my personal collection. There's nearly 50 songs here, mostly complete, many with the Fox jingles still in-tact. It may just be nostalgia or my age now, but the variety of music back then was so much better than what it is today. There's a few songs in this mix that I haven't heard since that era that don't get any airplay today, even on stations that do throwbacks to that time period.

Some quality was lost in the conversion from minidsic to .WAV and then again from .WAV to .mp3, but I kept the bitrate as high as I could without having a gigantic file size.

http://breakingnewsfeeds.com/media/fox.mp3

[Matt]

I can't believe it has already been 20 years since 100.5's second attempt at "The Fox" before it ultimately got canned in 2004. I remember the station mostly getting negative comments in this forum at the time, in regards to both music selection and audio processing.

I was living in the dorms at SVSU at the time and I had a Sony minidisc recorder and a Pioneer receiver. Being relatively close to the broadcasting tower, I got immaculate reception, and I accumulated a lot of my music collection by recording music straight from the radio, and I chose The Fox as my source because it sounded so much better sound-quality-wise than did WIOG. WTCF had what I consider to this day to be some of the best audio processing I've ever heard on a Top 40 station.

So here's what they sounded like at the time, straight form my personal collection. There's nearly 50 songs here, mostly complete, many with the Fox jingles still in-tact. It may just be nostalgia or my age now, but the variety of music back then was so much better than what it is today. There's a few songs in this mix that I haven't heard since that era that don't get any airplay today, even on stations that do throwbacks to that time period.

Some quality was lost in the conversion from minidsic to .WAV and then again from .WAV to .mp3, but I kept the bitrate as high as I could without having a gigantic file size.

http://breakingnewsfeeds.com/media/fox.mp3

Thanks for posting this BMW! I'll have to listen tomorrow. I think we just passed the 24 year anniversary of the original Fox switch in the last few days.

[bmw]

June 1999 definitely sounds right to me as the time when they switched to Pirate Radio since I remember listening to Pirate Radio over the summer of 99. Their second go at the Fox was not as good as the first time around, but recovering from the disaster that was WIlks buying the station and changing it to an automated Hot AC format was no small feat. I thought the Fox was headed in the right direction towards the end right before they pulled the plug and switched formats to Kool FM.

For as successful as the Fox was in the mid-late 90s, why did Liggett dump the Fox moniker and tweak its format in the first place? Were ratings crumbling in the original Fox's final months?

[Matt]

If I had to guess, the actual switch happened on 6/15/99.

June 17:

WTCF FM 100.5 Saginaw has tweaked its format from Mainstream CHR to Rhythmic CHR.
AM 1140 Grand Rapids has changed its call sign back to WKWM from WXBV.
WJRT-TV 12 Flint breaks ground on addition to its facility; extra room needed for digital TV equipment- Flint Journal
FCC Actions: The following LPTV stations have had their licenses cancelled and call signs deleted- W30AK, W35AK, W43AN, W47AF, W56BF, W59AQ, W63AW, W65BN, W67AO, K69BA. All of these stations were licensed to Bresnan Communications in Iron Mountain.
June 16:

As posted previously, WXBV AM 1140 Grand Rapids has now indeed dropped its talk format in favor of Westwood One's Rhythmic Oldies format known as "Groovin' Oldies".
Congratulations to Dick Purtan of WOMC-FM 104.3 Detroit on being honored as Oldies Air Personality of the Year by Radio & Records- Detroit Free Press
June 15:

WKPK-FM 106.7 Gaylord has added live web broadcasting to its web site.
WTCF-FM 100.5 Saginaw morning co-host and Program Director Mark McGill is leaving the station, along with consultant Mark Bolke- All Access

https://web.archive.org/web/19991012062 ... jun99.html

[teetoppz28]

June 1999 definitely sounds right to me as the time when they switched to Pirate Radio since I remember listening to Pirate Radio over the summer of 99. Their second go at the Fox was not as good as the first time around, but recovering from the disaster that was WIlks buying the station and changing it to an automated Hot AC format was no small feat. I thought the Fox was headed in the right direction towards the end right before they pulled the plug and switched formats to Kool FM.

For as successful as the Fox was in the mid-late 90s, why did Liggett dump the Fox moniker and tweak its format in the first place? Were ratings crumbling in the original Fox's final months?

Ah, good ol' Pirate radio! They had a H*** 5 song playlist, I swear. Wanna Be a Baller, Genie in a Bottle, etc... A bunch of my fellow classmates had that station blasting when we were moving into the dorms in August 1999. LOL!

[tvbobn]

June 1999 definitely sounds right to me as the time when they switched to Pirate Radio since I remember listening to Pirate Radio over the summer of 99. Their second go at the Fox was not as good as the first time around, but recovering from the disaster that was WIlks buying the station and changing it to an automated Hot AC format was no small feat. I thought the Fox was headed in the right direction towards the end right before they pulled the plug and switched formats to Kool FM.

For as successful as the Fox was in the mid-late 90s, why did Liggett dump the Fox moniker and tweak its format in the first place? Were ratings crumbling in the original Fox's final months?

Bob Liggett never had anything to do with the 100.5 The Fox.

[bmw]

Bob Liggett never had anything to do with the 100.5 The Fox.

I was only going off information on an archived version of Michiguide.

2/17/2000: FCC approves sale of 7 stations from Liggett Broadcasting to Citadel.

6/1999: Format tweak from Mainstream CHR 'The Tri-Cities Fox' to Rhythmic CHR as 'The Pirate Station'

10/19/1998: FCC approves transfer of license from Mid-America Broadcasting to Liggett Broadcasting.

[bmw]

Ah, good ol' Pirate radio! They had a H*** 5 song playlist, I swear. Wanna Be a Baller, Genie in a Bottle, etc... A bunch of my fellow classmates had that station blasting when we were moving into the dorms in August 1999. LOL!

Or the Insane Clown Posse's "The Dating Game"

[MWmetalhead]

Liggett Broadcasting owned WTCF-FM from October 1998 until February 2000, when Liggett sold most of its stations to Citadel. In turn, due to FCC caps, Citadel divested WTCF-FM to Wilks Broadcasting, who was responsible for the disaster known as Mix 100.

Liggett owned the station when the original incarnation of The Fox was dropped in favor of Pirate Radio. Jerry Clifton was the consultant behind Pirate Radio. I do recall Pirate generated quite respectable 12+ share, but it was very heavy in teens and young adults. I never understood why the original iteration of The Fox was scrapped, unless Liggett Broadcasting had inside info that WIOG was planning to return to CHR/Pop and felt 100.5 had to make a preemptive move to remain compelling. Pirate sounded like a "teen" station more so than The Fox.

The second iteration of the Fox was disappointing; station for a while sounded low budget compared to the original iteration and was not as engaging. I don't believe any DJs involved with the original incarnation were part of the second incarnation, but I could be mistaken.

I do agree with bmw that The Fox v2.0 sounded much better here than its first year. The first year the music sounded too much like Mix 100 and the stationality was terribly bland (the David Kaye voiceovers sucked). I'd argue the station at the time sounded every bit as bad as Mix 100.

In stark contrast, in the excellent recording bmw uploaded here, the music sounds excellent. There is a surprising number of dry segues for a CHR, though. Too many of those for my liking. The jingles (albeit used sparingly) sound good. Harry Legg, not David Kaye, was the V/O artist used when bmw's recording was made. Certainly not my favorite choice for CHR, but he was an improvement over Kaye.

Fox v2.0 got started on the wrong foot and arrived right around the time Club 93-7 launched with Rhythmic CHR (they sounded GREAT from launch) and after WIOG had already reestablished itself as a CHR/Pop powerhouse with a monster signal. Had the Mix 100 fiasco never occurred, and if Fox had been brought back in 2000 or 2001 with a sound similar to that featured here, it might've survived!

https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&facid=41842

[bmw]

Thanks for the extra info, MW.

Also, some of the later jingles were from the original Fox run. I spoke to Dylan (from their morning show) several times over AOL instant Messenger a short time after the final Fox variant was canned, and I remember him saying (or claiming anyways) that he was the one behind bringing back some of the original jingles and also that he had a large say in the direction of the station in its final year; and he didn't hold back on criticizing their decision to can the format. I remember him saying the station was primarily targeted to women, but that they played just enough rock product to get some men listening too but without alienating the female audience.

The first year the music sounded too much like Mix 100 and the stationality was terribly bland (the David Kaye voiceovers sucked). I'd argue the station at the time sounded every bit as bad as Mix 100.

I have one lone clip of whom I think you're referring to:

http://breakingnewsfeeds.com/media/kaye.mp3

[MWmetalhead]

That's the guy. His material sounds darn good on many of the stations he voices or has voiced, but he was a poor fit for WTCF at the time.

[Mike]

Liggett Broadcasting owned WTCF-FM from October 1998 until February 2000, when Liggett sold most of its stations to Citadel. In turn, due to FCC caps, Citadel divested WTCF-FM to Wilks Broadcasting, who was responsible for the disaster known as Mix 100.

Liggett owned the station when the original incarnation of The Fox was dropped in favor of Pirate Radio. Jerry Clifton was the consultant behind Pirate Radio. I do recall Pirate generated quite respectable 12+ share, but it was very heavy in teens and young adults. I never understood why the original iteration of The Fox was scrapped, unless Liggett Broadcasting had inside info that WIOG was planning to return to CHR/Pop and felt 100.5 had to make a preemptive move to remain compelling. Pirate sounded like a "teen" station more so than The Fox.

So, Radio & Records magazine - which, by then, is what the Pop countdowns relied on - would move WIOG from their Hot AC radio panel back to their CHR/Pop panel, effective with the July 9, 1999 issue. Good chance they'd been sounding like a Pop station rather than a Hot AC station for some time before that, but that summer is also when I started listening to them again reliably, so I can't really speak any further to how they'd have sounded before then. But it's not much of a stretch to think that perhaps Liggett saw the writing on the wall.

WTCF would remain on the CHR/Pop panel until the October 29, 1999 issue, when they were moved to CHR/Rhythmic. Why the delay, I have no idea. I only know that they remained on the Rhythmic panel through the August 11, 2000 issue, after which they were taken off and no longer radio-paneled. I...thought? They had remained Pirate at least into the Fall of 2000, but I've also seen the switch to Mix 100 given as August. But then, I also remember hearing the Hot AC version of the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 on 100.5 a few times, first was somewhere in the Fall (Fastball's "You're an Ocean" was in the countdown).

And can definitely confirm Pirate's teen appeal. 1999-2000 was freshman year at BCC, and I'd frequently hang out in the student-run store for lunch hours, where they'd have the radio going set to Pirate much more often than not. And, of course, the Rhythmic/hip-hop orientation of stations like Pirate would prove to be a harbinger, as CHR/Pop would itself turn in that direction come 2001.

[bmw]

There was literally pirate radio on 100.5 FM in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, for which some guy was fined $80,000 by the FCC a few months ago for broadcasting.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-16A1.pdf

According to Radio Locator, 99.7 through 101.1 are entirely vacant in that area. And even the stations on 99.7 and 101.1 are just 99 and 135-watt translators. I say leave the guy alone, though I get why he was fined since he repeatedly ignored notices to stop broadcasting.

[djb]

That period in time was a crazy time for Tri-Cities radio. Working for several of the Citadel stations (pre-Wilks), then one day had to choose which to stick with. Auditors bashing into the studio, jotting down serial numbers of equipment while on-air. Alot of confusion between what could be taken to "the new building" and what was to left alone. (WIOGs signature RE27N/D mics would stay put. Hundreds of carts had to be returned once they were done dumping to SS)

Over at "the new building", WTCF is doing "Pirate Radio" in a state-of-the-art, 100% digital facility put together by BobF. (Whom originally built WKFK 100.5 (prior to the original "The Fox)). Ironically, the station/building swap between Wilks and Citadel would put WTCF back into a facility that had ZERO automation. (Don't know this for sure - never got to see the facilities after Wilks took over).

MONTHS were spent dumping CD's (not ripping - but actually RECORDING them into the SS system), Carts, and Open Reels into SS prior to the "studio swaps". Music was kept. Carts went back to Wilks (if I remember correctly).

Several former WTCF'ers jumped ship to Citadel (with the hunch Wilks was going to trainwreck the entire cluster).

It was definitely an interesting chain of events to be a part of.

[Matt]

Several former WTCF'ers jumped ship to Citadel (with the hunch Wilks was going to trainwreck the entire cluster).

It was definitely an interesting chain of events to be a part of.

I don't know if a hunch has ever been more accurate, unfortunately.

Off the top of my head, I can think of Mason and Demas that ended up at Citadel. I'm not thinking of anyone else off the top of my head.