Imus in the Morning, 66 WNBC New York: The Early Days - 1972

Courtesy of longtime contributor Steven Green, this goes way back to just about the beginning of the Imus in the Morning program on WNBC. This is a fascinating aircheck from the standpoint that Imus was using much different sound effects, and doing much of his schtick live, as opposed to a lot of produced bits. His recognizable “quack quack” at time checks is notably absent. Tones were used instead.

This proves that his longtime newsman Charles McCord was there right from the start. You can hear the station using NBC Network News at the top of the hour, then McCord does local news.

This isn’t the best quality aircheck. Much of it is chopped up, as the person recording took out most of the national and local news stories, the two songs were chopped out (I just cleaned them up) but most of the commercials remained.

I cleaned up the audio and performed some light eq processing to try to restore some of the higher audio frequencies. Nobody wants to hear mud. Aside from that and taking out the ‘clunk’ sounds when the recording started and stopped, I pretty much left this aircheck alone.

[andyb]

Imus worked mornings; Soupy was mid-days and Stern was afternoons.

[Grundig]

Remember that knock at John Gambling poem

[wmbrown]

Sounded more like a staccato cuckoo rather than tones. NBC's hourly tone at that time was ~750 Hz; alas, this aircheck sounds a tad sped-up.

[x-rockfmhd]

WNBC 66 GREAT DJs NORM N NIGHT SOUPY SALES THEN IMUS/HOWARD STERN SREWED 66 WFAN😪