I figured I would give them a listen and thought they would do something special if they're really going off the air. First song I hear is Disturbed. That listening experience ended real quickly for me. Can't they abandon the playlist for the last couple days and just do what they want?

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I would hope so. I still remember the day the Blaze changed over, and they were playing all sorts of weird shit.

I'll give it as much a listen as I usually do (when I go out to lunch, it's the only music station that I don't seem to get bombarded with commercials on). Maybe listen a little for old times sake on Thursday night.

The rumor is that the Loop is going to change formats to an 80's metal and pop station, although I guess nothing has been decided on that front yet.

I saw an article on SHARK's buddy Larz' site yesterday morning that seemed to hint there would be a lot of familier talk voices returning to the airwaves on Friday.

I read that to mean Mancow. The thought of that makes me vomit in my mouth.

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I don't think Mancow is among those returning to the new Q101, even though his "Morning Madhouse" has NOT found a local radio home since he and WKQX parted company many years ago. At last check, Mancow was still originating his syndicated "Madhouse" from an unused studio in the ABC building at State & Lake, even before his brief cup of coffee hosting a local show middays on 890 WLS AM.

i remember when manblow got into his "radio war" with stern and how stern was too old and married, didn't relate to the target audience like a young manblow did. while stern signed a $500 mil. deal with satellite, manblow decided to copy rush limbaugh. once again he has to copy somebody. give him a couple years and he will be a tv preacher begging for $$$$ in rural Missouri or Kansas.

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

When Howard Stern went to Sirius Satellite Radio, long before the disaster that was Shane "Rover" French in morning drive, there was talk about the long since defunct 105.9 WCKG mulling over replacing Stern with Mancow. The folks at parent company CBS Radio didn't seem interested and the Hollander boys, who ran corporate in New York at the time, decided to have a no-name replace Stern circa 2006. Needless to say, "Rover's" ratings rolled over and died upon his arrival and didn't last long.

i forgot about that pile of shit. his big bit was having his sidekick copy jackass. is this shitstain still stealing money in Cleveland?

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

Oh hell yeah he is, he's holding it down like he's drowning the bitch out in Cleveland. It seems that there's more that's HOT IN CLEVELAND aside from the hot-flashes of Valerie Bertinelli, Wendy Nalick, Jane Leeves, and Betty White.

I remember the equally-short-lived Opie and Anthony experience after Rover was kicked to the curb... they were kind of... something. Definitely gayer than Rover, but better at radio.

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How has the Chicago market evaded the awfulness that is Bob and Tom?

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

Yes, thankfully.

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I thought they were on 103.9

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What the hell is 103.9? That must be an Indiana thing.

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Oh yeah, and I'd be remiss if I didn't chime in on the proper topic.

For me, thinking about Q101 reminds me of 1994 or thereabouts... that's when I first entered high school and was subject to them being "the popular station" out in suburbia back then. I know that one of the great functions of pop music as a whole is to remind you of a time and place in your life when you had more hope/youth/variance/etc and you then put on the rosy colored glasses and look back like OMFG IT'S THE HALCYON DAYS OF LEGEND AND LORE, and literally, Q101 would eventually play Halcyon and on and on and on and other songs back when they delved into electronic music with their... sunday night show "the electronic trip" which was a precursor to the early-mid 00s period where they'd get some shit-ass local "techno" people like DJ PSYCHO BITCH and have them mix crap on the airwaves on saturday nights, altho it was never even close to as good as the old house show on 'GCI =D

But yeah, that ~94-97 epoch of q101 is a hallowed place in my memory... I remember nine inch nails' closer dominating the airwaves... all those damn offspring songs, the lump song, and other goofy 90s things like that. My favorite thing on the station was the old late night saturday night show, the alternative beat (later it became THE INDUSTRIAL ZONE *dramatic DUH-DUH-DUH sound*) when they had this dude Zoltar, the Brother from Another Planet (and literally, he was a big tall black dude who used to wear saiyajin-looking-shoulderpads and knee high spaceboots at old industrial/ebm/machinerock/coldwave/whatever shows when he was there) playing the industrial musics, and as the night went on he'd foray deeper into odd groups that you'd otherwise never hear on the radio, especially one as big and popular as q101.

I used to toss on that show and dialup to 708 bulletin boards on saturday nights when I was like 14-15... I think 9pm or 10pm was when I was allowed to tie up the phone lines, so I'd put on that radio show and do my thing until about 1-2am.... and then there was some music video show on channel 26 at like 1am on sunday mornings... maybe it was JBTV? but yeah, those were my saturday nights before I got a car and started being out.

But yeah, when the alternative beat/industrial zone used to end circa... ~1-2am or whatever it was, i could remember legitimately feeling depressed once I started hearing the standard-fare-alternashit.. and I reckon a twinge of that depressed feeling is what i'm experiencing now reminiscing over the corpse of q101.

So for me, the quintessential time for q101 is in the 90s... a couple'a years after the format change once it sunk in and people knew what it was and what to expect... by the time the 90s ended and the 2000s came I was far, far away from it all and I could give a shit about "modern rock" but like, back then even tho it was "the establishment" it will always have a special place in my heart for being what it was back then. I think it just goes to show that "modern rock" or whatever the hell music they put out there for the superwhite people who are immune to the charms of the increasingly electronic digital manipulations of pop music with its innate rap sensibilities just wasn't palatable in the long term.

I SAY, THURSDAY IS A VICTORY FOR LADY GAGA, KATY PERRY, WHOEVER THE HELL B.O.B. IS, AND PEOPLE WHO NEVER WANTED TO GROW THEIR HAIR LONG AND SCREAM WHILE STROKING A GUITAR!!! GODSPEED, Q101, BRING IN LONG-DEAD RADIO HACKS TO SAVE YOUR NEW STATION!!

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One of the highlights of coming up to Chicago way back when was tuning in Q101 as soon as it would come in on 55. That was an awesome station. Hopefully some other station will pick up the torch.

Do you really think there is a station out there willing to play Bush every hour of every day?

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

Factually speaking, Bob & Tom used to be on in Chicago, albeit briefly on the long since defunct Rock 103.5 right after Mancow bolted for Q101 in the mid '90s. The Indianapolis-based morning show was dropped when the former WRCX dropped hard rock for "Jammin' Oldies". WRCX then became WUBT legally and was known as "The Beat" before dropping that format a few years ago to become what's now known as KISS-FM.

The two had a short-lived TV show on WGN America, DIRECTV 307, that had aired for about 6 months in latenight before getting cancelled. Like Howard Stern's former E! show, "Bob & Tom" was an hour of highlights from the radio show edited for television.

Well, like anything you remember it with those rosy colored glasses... I've found articles in the chicago reader written in 1995 by peopel bitching about how the station has the same ~20-25 song playlist all day long and then "when they're not in town, you have to listen saturday nights @ 2am to hear KMFDM on the station"

i do remember fondly the days of hearing juke joint jezebel on proper daytime q101. there was this polish girl annie with a total ethnic face but a sublime rack, and man, i had absolutely no balls spine or resolve to talk to her back then... but i remember back in advanced writing or whatever one day she saw me rockin my KMFDM money shirt and she's like "ugh, jim, do you GET OFF to wearing shirts of bands that nobody heard of?"

she was one of those average suburban girls who thought she was the shit cuz she'd go to clark and belmont on the weekends and spend like $100 at the alley... hell i had a spanish teacher who was weirdly enamored with her and her friend (who used to be OMFG-SO-FUCKING-HOT but has since had a few kids and... yeah. wow) and they used to boast clark and belmont as if it were badge of honor, like it was the american express black card of relative esoteria to all of us dumbass suburbanites.

soo yeah, that was my in, that was my chance to make ground and show this bitch that despite being some sort of an underconfident goof i was truly the most brilliant specimen of humanity she had ever encountered, and that running away with me but if for an evening would provide memories that would last a lifetime. i had the proverbial ball in my hands, it was my time to run with it.

alls i could muster was a sarcastic "uhhh, annie, they're playing a song called "juke joint jezebel" in regular rotation on q101. perhaps if you paid attention to the radio you might actually have a clue as to what you're talking about.

i didn't get any pussy, but my realness was maintained. i guess i can tell that to my nonexistant grandkids someday, eh?

oh and incidentally, KMFDM is playing chicago in the 2nd week of august... who's in?

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I think that was the biggest issue with their format. They relied too heavily on the old alternative standards (Bush, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc..), while ignoring a good chunk of music from that decade that they used to play. The new music they did play mostly didn't mix with the older songs they played. Do people that want to hear old Nirvana, Bush, or Pearl Jam songs really want to hear new songs by Seether, Papa Roach, Disturbed, or Switchfoot. I doubt it. It was a station I grew up on, but it's really a frustrating station to listen to now. Whoever has been programming it, is just terrible. But that's par for the course for radio in this city.

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They should go back to str8up 90s cheese for the last few days here.... I'm sure you can get Zoltar to do another remote show, as he's down in Miami doing some "trance" show on sirius/XM radio.... I bet James Van Osden will go play some old local chicago shit, and invariably we'll end up listening to the smoking popes like "OMFG THEY'RE SO MUCH MORE THAN RUBELLA!"

Otherwise, I reckon it'll go out with a whimper... I have no idea what the fuck they really play now, but none of it has been relevant to my interests for a long time. My radio usage is like, 89.3, 88.7 on saturdays (score producer chris tannehill does the hip hop PROJECT yooo) and some of the sproadic 87-89 stations that have like, new trier highschool broadcasts and shit... i was fucked up with some highschool kid was playing blackalicious a2z like HOWS YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?!?!

ah well, q101 will go down in history as just about as beloved as the old 950AM rap station... who was a fan of that one? I know there was a stream of it on FM in stereo, but there was something so right about bumping the mono AM signal loud in the car with that shitty ghetto-oriented rap.

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They should honor the glorious top 10 at 10 night where they played the Limp Bizkit song 10 times in a row by playing Nookie all day long.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

Ever since I posted in this thread, I've had the smoking popes "rubella" stuck in my head all day long.

At this rate I'm going to have "need you around" join it and then I will have covered the two big smash hits for the post-alkaline-trio pride-n-joy of chicago, the smoking popes.

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Current Q101 is off the air as of midnight Thursday Night. I guess the new format is officially on air next Monday. I saw an article on Larz' site that is indicating that there is testing or some shit going on over the weekend.

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I really hope they go back and have a super-uber-mega-marathon of all of those early-mid 90s songs that forged their identity as "chicago's sound alternative" back in the day. They were HUGE with that "Chicago's Sound Alternative" tagline back in the day, and as I touched on earlier, far and away the most beloved memories of that station come from the mid-90s when they had a few years under their belt to find their direction and they ran with it like a champ... until they predictably cut down the song rotation to ~20-25 songs and just played them TIL DEATH DO US PART. and then most of us parted... and LOL PARTED RHYMES WITH FARTED! I FARTED! HEH HEH... I AM CORNHOLIO! I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!

god, i'm amazed that people used to find that trash funny. ah well, c'est la vie!

But yeah, they need to do what they were doing as recently as.... 2006 i wanna say, and have their "retro lunch" type programming be expanded to the last day. I'm sure there were big songs in teh late 90s / early-mid 2000s that the next generation of kids remember, bot for me, a 30 year old "man" in concept only (before you diss, hormonal treatments are NOT cheap. i had to spend a lot of money changing from Jamie to James) the height of Q101's power was attained circa 1994-1997, so that's the era they really need to focus on in order to make one last final ratings grab for no reason whatsoever. At least toss my generation a bone and give us the radio station that we grew up on for one last glorious day, eh?

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The final show on Q101 is a special edition of "Local 101", hosted by Chris Payne, airing tomorrow night at 10p. It'll be a rewind of Chicago's alternative rock music scene with performances & interviews from many of the bands that the show had introduced fans to over the years.

It'll leave just one similar show, "Local Anesthetic" with host Richard Milne, that airs at 7:30p Sundays on 93XRT. I wonder if WXRT picks up the slack and expands their playlist to feature even more of the kind of alternative rock WKQX soon leaves behind.

I wouldn't bet on it. XRT's niche is to be a hipper Drive. It's basically Music For People Who Consider Themselves To Have Good Taste In Music, and a lot of that '90s alternative doesn't really fit. I don't think Nine Inch Nails or Rage Against The Machine really fit alongside Wilco or Andrew Bird. What we consider "typical Q101 music" is probably going to end up on the Loop.

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Curious, it's up in the air what Merlin Media, the new owners of Q101, will do with 97.9 The LOOP come Friday. I read somewhere that Merlin might turn WLUP into an '80s-like hybrid of rock, metal, new wave and even pop, a far cry from what The LOOP calls itself now as "Chicago's Classic Rock Station" trying to cut into 97.1 The DRIVE's own classic rock playlist, sound and audience.

They already play Pumpkins Nirvana and Pearl jam

NIN and Rage are the exception for what was played on Q101 in their prime.

What ever happened to Brooke Hunter?

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Spada?

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Boy, "an '80s-like hybrid of rock, metal, new wave and even pop" sure is a far cry from the Loop I grew up with in 2000-2003, which helped me go through the government-mandated phase of Really Digging Led Zeppelin As A High School Boy. But even that's been gone for some time now, and my music tastes have evolved since the Loop's very important entry-level rock course, so I can let go, let go, 'cause there's beauty in the breakdown. See? I like Frou Frou now.

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