In seven days, Toronto's 1050 CHUM will be re-christened "The Team" as it switches from an oldies station to an all-sports one. The listening fanbase, well aware of the inevitable for several months now, have been encouraged to call into the station and say what CHUM has meant to them. To be sure, I've heard some fascinating, funny and heartbreaking stories and memories. But even better, CHUM has been replaying music sets from classic DJ's of yesteryear. Decades before the onset of the point-and-click generation, this was pop radio for those lacking an attention span. Rapid-fire inter-song mini-monologues, circus atmosphere (Dick Clark, I'm talking to you, and I applaud it), the DJ as eclectic personality and party host. In other words, nothing like today's radio. But the most fun part of these flashbacks has been the literal time-machine aspect. Like any Canadian under the age of 50, I've heard Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" half a billion times, but I'd never heard it announced as a "new" Steppenwolf single, as I recently did during a 1969 flashback. It's a bizarre concept for me to hear that song and realize "oh yeah, this song was once "new", once upon a time, somebody heard this for the first time while listening to the exact show that I'm hearing right now". However, once a flashback show would end, I was left with a bitter aftertaste. You see, once the show was over, they would, of course, return to regular programming, and I struck by how IDENTICAL everything was. Songs from the same time period, outdated DJ delivery -- for God's sake, CHUM has been in cryogenic holding pattern ever since it switched to the oldies format back in 1986. And that's really sad. It's sad that they've spent fifteen years serving as a jukebox for baby boomers. Hearing the magic in the flashback shows -- and recalling that everything they did was actually new and exciting at that time -- makes it soberingly clear that the magic happened such a very long, long time ago.

Some of the great CHUM memories have been conveniently ignored. Since 1986, CHUM has rarely played a song that was released before I was born. Before 1986, it was still the most exciting pop radio station on the AM dial. I discovered it in 1983 and kept my ears glued to it pretty much up to the time of the switch to oldies. That's a good two or three years of my life, and when you're ten years old that's practically geologic. There was no internet, I had never heard of music papers and Much Music was something that we saw only one weekend every three months when the pay channels would offer free previews to promote their product. CHUM was my entire musical sphere. I can't imagine how many nights I spent glued to my radio, absorbing the music-that-we-now-know-as-retro-80's. I collected every CHUM chart (published in the Toronto Star every Saturday) and I used to study those charts all the time. When I went to camp during the summer, I didn't write my parents asking for food or extra clothes, I wrote them to remind them to collect my CHUM charts. One year my dad had a close call when he threw out the paper and forgot to keep the chart. Once he realized his mistake, he had to dig through the garbage to retrieve it for me. When he told me this story, boy was I stressed. Like you should be worrying so, ten years old, ack. I don't think I ever worried about my parents as much as I worried about whether or not they were remembering to collect those CHUM charts. Anyway, the charts were an endless source of entertainment. I loved tracking and memorizing the progress of my favourite songs. I think this prepared me for later in the decade, when I turned in my music stats for baseball stats. I could name the position of Van Halen's "Jump" during each of it's 18 weeks on the chart. I vividly remember Michael Jackson's "Thriller" debuting at #1, which made it (I believe) the only song ever to do so on the CHUM chart. It stayed there for five weeks (a "record" for consecutive weeks at #1 during the time I was collecting). I even documented the "freak stats". The Parachute Club's "The Feet of the Moon" was on the chart for 12 weeks, yet never made it higher than #15. Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You" was the only song, during the years I collected, to debut one week (#27) and drop off the chart the next. And I was proud of the fact that I correctly predicted the #1 song on the year end chart for two straight years. On the "Top 84 of '84" I correctly guessed "Jump", based on it's 18 week run and over ten weeks in the top 10 despite only one week spent at #1 (although it spent four weeks at #2). The next year, I felt I was going out on a limb by picking Corey Hart's "Never Surrender", mainly because I hated the song and was apprehensive about choosing a tune that I knew was such crap. It spent five weeks at #1, but it did so on the rebound, so to speak, in the wake of the "Help Africa" songs, which dominated the charts during the spring.

That probably sounded extremely eggheaded, but don't misunderstand me: I pored over the charts because I loved the music, and since we rarely bought records or taped off the radio, the charts were my personal nostalgia. That, and my dad's collection of music videos. Back then, videos were aired on programs like CityTV's "The New Music". All these programs were on after I'd gone to bed. Fortunately, my dad was not like the other dads. He wasn't stuck in the 70's. He greatly enjoyed 80's music, and once we got a VCR in 1983, he would stay up late to tape the videos. He would tape the songs that interested him, and we would confer during the day over what videos we needed to watch out for. Of course, the songs I heard on CHUM were the basis for those requests. He would tape the shows on Friday night and I couldn't wait to wake up the next day and watch the things he'd taped. I had the contents of those video collections nearly memorized too, a collection which grew to something like twelve six-hour cassettes.

Economics wise, CHUM probably made a wise decision in switching to oldies when they did. FM was becoming the only decently-fi option for radio. CHUM switched in June 1986. FM stood for "Fleetwood Mac" (although some adult contemporary was fine, it just wasn't "my" music). MuchMusic was still not on basic cable. There had been a lull in the music of the day, I didn't like the R&B styles of DeBarge and Ready For the World. Duran Duran and Tears For Fears were both on an extended hiatus. Plus, I hated the other major AM pop station 680 CFTR: their playlist was far narrower in scope than CHUM's and the DJ's couldn't compare. All these factors contributed to the reality (it was not so much a "decision", it just sorta .... happened) that I basically gave up listening to music for over two years. It took Much Music, Def Leppard, INXS, home taping and CFNY to resurrect me from the musical dead in late 1988-early 1989 (essentially in that order, too).

Thus, that June 1986 goodbye to CHUM was of tremendous importance in my musical growth (or lack thereof, considering the circumstances). This one can't compare. I enjoy the oldies tremendously. I wake up to CHUM nearly every morning. Henny in the Morning rocks my world (Humble and Fred only WISH they could be so funny). But for fifteen years, CHUM has been peddling decades-old memories. It hasn't meant anything in terms of musical trends or sales for fifteen years. It hasn't shaped anyone's musical tastes for fifteen years, because every on-air lament of the end of CHUM is mourning the loss of the CHUM that's being paid tribute with those flashback shows. That's not a knock on those people's warm memories, that's just the truthful facts. CHUM isn't dying now, it really died fifteen years ago.

Goodbye CHUM, from someone who's not a member of your core audience.