Keep your feet on the ground...

Wow, my head is spinning with delight this weekend as I relive my past listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 reruns on XM7 (the 70s channel). Apparently XM is going to start carrying the "old" shows once or twice a week, and all weekend they're playing old shows: 1978, 1973, 1970, randomized for my absolute pleasure.

I could rave for hours about what it was like to listen to Casey each week while being the "board op" for the show on Sunday evenings during high school and college working at KOKO...at some point, we started carrying Dick Clark's countdown instead, which absolutely sucked. Casey's the only real deal, always was, always will be!

Each show came in a box with 4 albums, each containing an hour-long show split across two album sides, labeled 1A, 1B, 2A, and so on. We got a blue cue sheet with the rundown for each show. It was easy to run and lots of fun to listen to -- and hearing some of the "lost" songs that appeared on the countdown at #38 and never returned is half the fun...and hearing his stories about the KGB Chicken or how the Bee Gees came up with the "rhythmic train track sound" at the beginning of Jive Talkin' is so much fun.

Update: I've been chatting with Shannon at CharisMusicGroup.com who is doing restorations of the original vinyl for XM. What a fun project! Way to go, Shannon...they sound great!

Casey Kasem is now 74 and doesn't sound like he used to. I'm just glad he doesn't have to do any more "death dedications..."