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March 7, 2020 1:21 pm  #1


Crack Of Dawn

I posted this on my Facebook page but I thought I'd throw it out here as well. So I'm on a machine at the gym this morning, and the guy on the machine beside me is wearing headphones and he starts singing 'Everything I Own' like a bird. He was so good that I just had to say something to him, and it turns out he used to be the lead singer with a 70's Toronto band called Crack Of Dawn. While the name sounds familiar I looked them up and couldn't place any of their singles. Anybody know 'em?

 

March 7, 2020 1:51 pm  #2


Re: Crack Of Dawn

Yes, I remember that at least a couple of their songs were played on CHUM: It's Alright (This Feeling) and Keep The Faith. I especially liked It's Alright and I think it got the most airplay of the two, but neither song charted on CHUM. However, that was the case with a lot of the Canadian songs that CHUM played in the 1970s to meet Canadian content requirements. In my view, it was unfortunate that in 1968 they had gone from having 50 songs on their chart to only having 30, and I thought that they should have at least gone to a 40-song chart in the 1970s so that songs like that would have been more likely to chart. I also remember that Glen Ricketts was the group's lead singer, so it sounds like you were probably talking with him. But your post prompted me to look them up on Wikipedia, and they have some good info about them there ... among other things, I didn't know that they were the first Black Canadian band to sign with a major record label.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_of_Dawn

 

March 9, 2020 7:16 am  #3


Re: Crack Of Dawn

there was a band from pittsburgh, pa, usa, which encountered a similar fate, called crack the sky. while i doubt the  bands have much in common, how they may have been viewed perhaps may be of some relevant inerest..

if this is seen as a clown post, so be it.

 

March 9, 2020 9:33 am  #4


Re: Crack Of Dawn

One thing I'll add re the chart issue, is that it would help sales for a record to be on the CHUM Chart since record stores would be more likely to have those records available and make them available at a lower price. I think the songs I heard by Crack of Dawn on CHUM would have made a 40-song chart, and then that would have probably helped them to move up the chart because of the factors I mentioned. Unfortunately in my view,CHUM had become a very tightly formatted radio station starting in the late 1960s, and that was why they went to a 30-chart and wouldn't depart from it. 

 

March 9, 2020 12:30 pm  #5


Re: Crack Of Dawn

gopher wrote:

there was a band from pittsburgh, pa, usa, which encountered a similar fate, called crack the sky. while i doubt the  bands have much in common, how they may have been viewed perhaps may be of some relevant inerest..

if this is seen as a clown post, so be it.

What are the odds...I actually have a copy of Crack The Sky's second album 'Animal Notes' which, interestingly, came out in 1976, the same year as Crack Of Dawn's debut album. I don't know why I bought it because it certainly didn't get any airplay here. I figure it was because a) Rolling Stone led me down the garden path by giving it a five-star rating or b)  it was in a cut-out bin and I liked the album artwork. I'm leaning toward b because the album cover is kind of cool.

     Thread Starter
 

March 10, 2020 10:20 am  #6


Re: Crack Of Dawn

Lorne wrote:

One thing I'll add re the chart issue, is that it would help sales for a record to be on the CHUM Chart since record stores would be more likely to have those records available and make them available at a lower price. I think the songs I heard by Crack of Dawn on CHUM would have made a 40-song chart, and then that would have probably helped them to move up the chart because of the factors I mentioned. Unfortunately in my view,CHUM had become a very tightly formatted radio station starting in the late 1960s, and that was why they went to a 30-chart and wouldn't depart from it. 

Yeah, I've often wondered why CHUM scaled back their chart but I guess it's as you say...lesser number, more rotation and to heck with the rest. I remember being in Europe when the chart change took place. I found coming back to 20 less songs and no CHUM Dinger to be fairly traumatic.
 

     Thread Starter
 

March 10, 2020 10:59 am  #7


Re: Crack Of Dawn

I have the very last Top 50 CHUM Chart - and the following week's scaled down version. What I remember best about them is there was no word at all that it was coming.

One week you went to the record store and there was the old faithful that had been issued every week since 1957. It even had a rare color insert about the Canadian National Exhibition inside of it.

Seven days later, this much smaller issue both in size and listings appeared - and there was nothing on it to explain the change - including why there were no placements from last week, as if they were starting over. (They later reverted to the old number, hitting chart #1,000 in Aug. 1976.) 

I thought they at least owed their faithful listeners an explanation about the sudden shift. But it never came.



 

March 10, 2020 11:10 am  #8


Re: Crack Of Dawn

By the way, without meaning to "spam" the board, here's that rare insert from the final Top 50 chart. in case anyone's curious what it looked like. You'll note that the still relatively unknown "Guess Who" were among those making an appearance at the CNE that year. 


 

March 13, 2020 2:53 pm  #9


Re: Crack Of Dawn

I was only eight when this change occurred and so I didn't really know about what happened. But because my mother listened to CHUM a lot, I had some awareness of what it had been like -- and as I got older, I became aware of how tightly formatted they were and felt that it wasn't as good as it had been when I was younger. Eventually, and largely via the internet, I found out that this was because they had made a significant format change in 1968. Dale Patterson, who has posted a couple of times here, has an explanation of what happened at http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/chumchart.html

In August, 1968, the old on-air CHUM disappeared with the introduction of a modified Drake format. The station was never the same again, and neither was the CHUM chart. Beginning with the chart of August 9, the Top 50 was reduced to a Top 30, and list of five "Hot New Hits" was replaced by a list of five CHUM chargers. Also, the album chart returned with a top five listing. The front cover had a psychedelic look, usually with the picture of a deejay.

 

March 13, 2020 4:15 pm  #10


Re: Crack Of Dawn

Lorne wrote:

I was only eight when this change occurred and so I didn't really know about what happened. But because my mother listened to CHUM a lot, I had some awareness of what it had been like -- and as I got older, I became aware of how tightly formatted they were and felt that it wasn't as good as it had been when I was younger. Eventually, and largely via the internet, I found out that this was because they had made a significant format change in 1968. Dale Patterson, who has posted a couple of times here, has an explanation of what happened at http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/chumchart.html

In August, 1968, the old on-air CHUM disappeared with the introduction of a modified Drake format. The station was never the same again, and neither was the CHUM chart. Beginning with the chart of August 9, the Top 50 was reduced to a Top 30, and list of five "Hot New Hits" was replaced by a list of five CHUM chargers. Also, the album chart returned with a top five listing. The front cover had a psychedelic look, usually with the picture of a deejay.

One other thing that resulted from the format change was less talk from the jocks. I have a couple of audio interviews with Jack Armstrong, who was CHUM's loosest cannon at the time in terms of his on-air assault. In the interviews he reflects back and complains bitterly about the fact that the Drake format "muzzled the DJ's". He and Bob McAdorey fought hard against the format change but they lost the battle and Jack was toast within six months. Luckily he landed in Buffalo at WKBW, a station that let him continue to do his thing, at least for a couple of years.   
 

     Thread Starter
 

March 13, 2020 4:57 pm  #11


Re: Crack Of Dawn

Yes, I was thinking about Jack earlier and how he was adversely affected by this. Again, although I was too young to really remember what he and the other announcers were like back then, as I got older I had the impression that the announcers weren't able to do as much as they had in the past. When I finally found out about what had happened, it confirmed all the feelings that I had about these things. And I felt that as the 70s went on, their format became even tighter and less appealing to me. 

 

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