All the stations doing some version of ’60s/’70s oldies do it slightly differently. Part of what has distinguished KOAI (The Wow Factor) Phoenix has been its Classic Rock component. PD John Sebastian had heavily publicized tenures in multiple formats, but particularly in late-’70s/early-’80s Album Rock. The Wow Factor just celebrated its fifth anniversary, and it has remained a Ross on Radio readers’ favorite throughout.
WOXY/WNKR (97.7/106.7 The Oasis) Cincinnati rocks a little, too. (“What always makes Mondays better? A little Led Zeppelin,” said Ernie “The Fat Man” Brown before playing “Black Dog” that morning.) That’s appropriate for the market. It’s also appropriate for the station’s new frequency. If WOXY can no longer be the station that Rain Man made famous as the future of rock and roll, it’s doing a surprisingly good job with the past. It also has a Jammin’ Oldies component not usually found in this format.
Normally, I’m happy to see a new station in this format. I was disappointed that WNKR and the then-WNKN couldn’t make a go of it as Classic Country, especially after a surprising winning streak in summer 2020 when COVID disrupted listening patterns and boosted high-TSL specialty formats. But I was also sorry to see WNKN sold. And I was happy to see The Oasis regain a Cincinnati/Dayton signal as a result of WOXY’s sale to Randy Michaels.
I enjoyed The Oasis for a lot of the same reasons I liked the Classic Country format, and for a lot of the things I’m looking for from my radio listening: sense of place (particularly in the local spots); companionship (in mornings and afternoons); songs I rarely get to hear on the radio (“Expressway to Your Heart” by the Soul Survivors; “Catch Us if You Can” by Dave Clark Five).
I’m coming to realize that the personality isn’t quite the same on any two of our older Oldies stations, or maybe it’s because that the differences in the music mix make the alchemy with the hosts sound different. Both Brown and PM driver John “B-Man” Beaulieu are friendly and playful. The feel is more like hearing AM powerhouse WLW in its music days than any other station in the format. A lot of their breaks were about trying to teach listeners the new frequency. “Set a button, then ‘Do It Again,’” said B-Man, going into the Beach Boys.
The Wow Factor tweaked its mix a lot during the first year. Since then, it surprises more with breadth than depth. The Oasis has both. In one listen, I heard “Pied Piper” by Crispian St. Peters into “Take Me to the River” by Talking Heads. One positioner describes it as “the small station with the big playlist.” The ’60s gold on a lot of older Oldies stations are often the onetime safe-list hits that are now deep only by comparison to Classic Hits radio. The ’60s here often had a hipper (and sometimes garage/psych) edge.
Here’s The Oasis at 3:40 p.m., October 7:
- Cameo, “Word Up”
- Boston, “Foreplay/Long Time”
- Grateful Dead, “Truckin’”
- Ventures, “Hawaii Five-O” — actually timed to the 4 p.m. news, like instrumentals of old
- Pat Benatar, “Heartbreaker”
- Edgar Winter Band, “Free Ride”
- Motels, “Only the Lonely”
- Bread, “It Don’t Matter to Me”
- Outsiders, “Respectable”
- Billy Joel, “Piano Man”
- Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”
- Canned Heat, “On the Road Again”
- America, “I Need You”
- Beach Boys, “Kokomo”
- Spinners, “Working My Way Back to You/Forgive Me Girl” — B-Man tied that one into “working our way back to Dayton”
- Amboy Dukes, “Journey to the Center of the Mind”
- Looking Glass, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”
- Dave Clark Five, “Catch Us if You Can”
- Jackson Browne, “Doctor My Eyes”
- Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run”
- Simple Minds, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”
I did check out The Wow Factor again. Here it is just before 1 p.m., October 7:
- Linda Ronstadt, “Long Long Time”
- Foundations, “Build Me Up Buttercup”
- Electric Light Orchestra, “Livin’ Thing”
- Cher, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”
- Dion, “Runaround Sue”
- Carole King, “It’s Too Late”
- Cheap Trick, “I Want You to Want Me”
- Heart, “Dreamboat Annie”
- Four Seasons, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”
- Nilsson, “Without You”
- Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Love”
- Dan Fogelberg, “Longer”
- Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man”
- Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway”
- Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”
- Jim Croce, “Time in a Bottle”
- Four Tops, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”
- Elton John, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”
- Beatles, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/With a Little Help From My Friends”
- George Benson, “Breezin’”
You can also see what I wrote about the Wow Factor five years ago here.
Jimmy Young on BBC Radio 2 also used to play instrumentals up to the news; I’ve also heard airchecks of first-generation Independent Local Radio stations here doing that.
I may be looking at this from a Chicagoan who was witness to Michaels’ Power Pigging of Z95 (and the week of “Hell”), the attempt to make WGN sound like 1988 WLW 20 years after the fact and the Merlin fiasco, but I wonder if Michaels’ time has gone by. Of course, maybe I’m thinking that there are still people in Cincinnati who still see him as the man who turned Good Neighbor WLW into the home of hair metal and rightwing talk–or if they’re all dead now. (And there are people who probably blame Michaels for Clear Channel’s real and imagined sins more than Lowry Mays.)