When Saturday Nights Were Solid Gold

Longtime syndicated host Dick Bartley will cease production on “Dick Bartley’s Classic Hits” and “Rock & Roll’s Greatest Hits“.

Distributed by United Stations since 2009, affiliates were notified this week of the end of the two shows following the weekend of January 1 and 2, 2022.

As the Program Director of KCOW, I have always tried to schedule shows that our audience will enjoy. Frequently, I take into consideration my own likes and dislikes. This isn’t just me being self-serving. No, really! You see, I would listen to KCOW even if I didn’t work there. The music is peachy to me. I felt that way the first time I walked through the door in 1998.

However, after a spell, as our “Hot AC” satellite service started getting a little frisky with the likes of Ricky Martin and crossover country artists like Shania Twain, I started to think that our adult audience might be better served by a good oldies format. There was some inter-office discussion; a certain staffer (name withheld to protect the innocent) lobbied for what we would call “elevator music”. But I was convinced KCOW needed golden oldies–Beatles, Beach Boys, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Motown–songs that were for the most part recorded in mono and designed to sound great on AM radio (there was no KCOW-FM then).

As it happened, since we had just started using a new automation system for KCOW our then-GM Mike Garwood didn’t think we were ready to make the change. (He was right. Patience is a virtue; It happened another couple of years later.) But one day summer intern (who had been working at KCOW longer than I had at that point) Brandon Bell and I noticed an ad for “Dick Bartley’s Rock and Roll’s Greatest Hits”, a live Saturday night call-in oldies request show.

Dick Bartley had been hosting a show like this on one network or another for several years by now, and his “Solid Gold Saturday Night” and “Solid Gold Scrapbook” aired on KCOW before I arrived. I have physical evidence of this because our basement is filled with “Solid Gold Scrapbook” show discs. My Dad and I had enjoyed “Solid Gold Saturday Night” and shows like it on long road trips. Mike Garwood said yes to the new iteration of the Dick Bartley show. And we ran it on Saturday nights for several years.

There was some real magic in Dick Bartley spinning the oldies and taking phone calls on a Saturday night. I listened to the entire five hours more often than not (on weeks the show wasn’t at least partially pre-empted by sports, which could be rare). And yes I tried calling to get a request played. Always busy. But it was just fun to hear people all over the country getting their 9.2 seconds of fame, and of course the music was wonderful. Ironically, the wonderfulness of the music was what led to us dropping the show. We did eventually make the format change on KCOW to all-oldies. Now, when your dinner plate has steak and potatoes, a dish of ice cream is delightful and special. But when your entire dinner plate is ice cream, the little dish of ice cream to the side, as special as it is, doesn’t make the same impression. Also, the oldies format had become automated (no need for a human in the building) at a certain point, whereas Dick Bartley needed a board-op to sit and run the show for 8 hours (5-hour show and the first 3 hours repeat). Even at “2003 minimum wage” prices, that was an unnecessary expense. And so, we had to say goodbye to Mr. Saturday Night.

A few years later, we brought Dick Bartley back on Sundays. By this time he was basically doing the same show, but instead of taking calls and doing the show live, people would call and leave voicemails and the whole show was pre-recorded. Being pre-recorded meant we could slide the show into our automation system and not have to pay someone to sit there and run it. But it just wasn’t the same. I’ve said it a jillion times: There is an energy that comes with doing a live, real time broadcast that just can’t be completely duplicated by recording in advance. Live is better. Always.

And now Dick Bartley is…retiring? Well, he’s not doing his shows anymore. That could mean he’s shopping them around to a new network but the radio syndication business is not exactly a dynamo these days. I’d say he’s probably retiring. If that’s the case, he deserves a long happy retirement. I will never forget the day I was asked to pick up line 1, Dick Bartley was on hold for me. We had just signed the contract for his show and he was checking some pronunciations on the list of liners we sent for him to record. He sounded…well, like DIck Bartley. Right up there with Charlie Tuna and Davy Jones in the telephone call hall of fame.