Joe O'Brien, WMCA New York March 1965 (15:48)

. . . and Soupy Sales, biggest man of the moment in our town . . .

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Joe O'Brien (1915-2005) may have over-estimated Soupy's success with The Mouse, but this aircheck of WMCA from March 1965 is a winner in every other way.

In addition to one classic Four Seasons for Coca-Cola jingle, there are the Johnny Mann WMCA jingles, lots of drops, and great sweatshirt contest production. Plus: four reportable musical performances!

Not all commercial announcements are complete, but the editing includes all of O'Brien's live elements. His warm, polished delivery was just the thing to make radio and rock 'n' roll OK around the breakfast table.

Joe promotes the arrival of a "nice, good-lookin' young guy" with the "Wooly Burger", Gary Stevens. Stevens was the "new" Good Guy, later the President of Doubleday Broadcasting (1977), and as of the end of the century, a big-time station broker in NYC. O'Brien also details most of the WMCA lineup at the time, truly an Honor Roll of New York Top 40 Vets: Harry Harrison, Jack/Jake Spector, and Dandy Dan.

Since the debut of this exhibit on February 8, 2004, we have learned more about its origins: Rob Frankel writes: "This aircheck came from Joe O'Brien's personal collection. It was loaned to me on reel back in 1988, and had been recorded straight off the board, without reverb. I added the 'verb myself to better approximate the on-air sound of the station as I remembered it. I later found out that WMCA didn't actually start using reverb until the summer of '65. I became a listener myself sometime around November of that year." Joe O'Brien died in an automobile accident in Lenox, Massachusetts on July 24, 2005. He was 90 years old. His career at WMCA began in 1935.