[loujosephs]

Big John Gillis dead at 64.
Indianapolis broadcasters are remembering longtime air personality Big John Gillis, who died Friday after a brief illness. He was 64. Gillis did airborne traffic reports on Emmis news-talk WIBC from 1980 until 2007.

John was also the 1st program director on WNAP..Stereo 93..then moved to Boston to be PD of WVBF Framingham Boston. Then to WNAP/WIBC.. then to Philly at WZZD..

John hired me to do weekends at WVBF and then to WRMF, where he brought me to Philly gave me a small cassette of some of the heller WZZD jingles which of course I just had to play..so that’s how I got to Philly.

If you have or can find this Heller jingle…we shall overwhelm in the realm of the good dr Asimov laying rock upon your brain stereo 105 wvbf… That was john’s jingle..written with Dick Hamilton.. The good DR A was at BU at the time and John was a big scfi fan..

[bobgreenradioMember]

just thinking; do you remember the “eeee-lectronic mama, stereo 105” cuts? they may have been kox. i dont remember which calls fairbanks had on that framingham property at the time.

[loujosephs]

wkox FM were VBF’s original calls. They were changed when Fairbanks closed on the station. WKOX remained as the AM calls..At the time the FM and AM sticks were on the same sight opposite the framingham dump on Mt Waite Avenue. The FM was moved in the summer of 71 I think to the Newton Candelabra antenna.

[Barras]

Found the Dr Asimov cut Lou, it even mentions a JAM package “positron”ic brain…

HELLER WVBF DR ASIMOV by DavidBarras

[IainJohnstonMember]

I think “positron” was around long before JAM used the name

Paul Dirac’s proposed anti-matter opposite of an electron if I remember my physics theory…?

Seriously though, as someone who collected jingles during the 1970s “weird Heller stuff” era but couldn’t hear them on-air (USA only…), did they ACTUALLY WORK as such with all the ultra-long LA-singers-Union-studiotime-rules cuts for chop-down and all the bizarre lyrics?
(The only aircheck I had of any that did seem workable on-air were short ones for WHN in New York – 1050 AM before it morphed through many further call-letter changes).

[loujosephs]

This is easy..the long image songs were hardly ever played..say once every four hours.
The short cuts, or mixouts was what the average jock used. The longest jingle I would play at either VBF, RMF, or ZZD was about 05 to 11 seconds..the longer one’s got mixed with the music..so yeah it worked..

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