WAIF’s rock-and-roll-oldies program is itself old, or at least it’s approaching middle age.
Time Machine, a weekly two-hour set of 1950s rock and R&B, will mark its 40th anniversary on June 16. The show airs at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on the public radio station (88.3 FM).
WAIF went on the air in 1975, and Steve Percy hosted the first Time Machine show on June 17, 1981. On air he's known as the Prince of Harmony and still fills in as a host sometimes. The program is the second-oldest show on WAIF, according to Bob Reilly, one of the DJs rotating as a host of the show. Reilly, whose radio name is Captain Bobby Paul, has been one of the hosts of Time Machine since 1997, typically handling the first Wednesday of the month.
"I’m 74, so I was there when rock and roll started in 1955, '56, and I thought it’d be cool to get on the radio and play the music I like," Reilly says.
It’s an informed, yet somewhat controversial, observation to mark 1955 as the start of rock and roll. There was certainly music that would qualify as rock made prior to that year – much of it landing on the R&B charts – but '55 was the year that "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets hit the top of the pop chart, the first rock song to accomplish that feat.
Reilly primarily sticks with the 1950s on the show, though he will occasionally dip into the '30s and '40s for a song by Louis Jordan or the Andrews Sisters, something that hints of the forthcoming rock-and-roll sound. He also might play a song from the '60s, such as Randy & the Rainbows’ "Denise," which echoes with the influence of '50s doo-wop.
Time Machine brings it all back home for Reilly. A Cincinnati native, he grew up in Evanston, having no idea that some of the music he would later come to love and play on the radio was being made in his neighborhood on Brewster Avenue.
King Records was the place, recording and releasing music by pre-Elvis rock heroes like Wynonie Harris and Roy Brown, and most famously serving as the label for the greatest R&B artist of them all, James Brown.
"I could have walked over there," Reilly says of the old King headquarters. "I didn’t know a thing about it, but I was living pretty close to it. When I started doing the Time Machine, I did a lot of research and found out about the artists, so I had something to talk about, some content on the air. If you go to Michigan you have Motown. If you go down to Memphis, you’ve got Stax Records and Sun Records. At the time King Records was every bit as viable as those."
Reilly met James Brown in 1994 and had his picture taken with him.
In the photo, James Brown is looking his best, smiling widely, standing in front of a soft-top sedan and wearing a black turtleneck shirt, gold necklace and blue sport coat. Reilly’s casual look is highlighted by a Tide racing t-shirt, which combines one of his interests, motorsports, with his former vocation, soap making.
Reilly worked a manufacturing job at Procter & Gamble’s St. Bernard plant, where he processed raw materials into powered soap for brands such as Tide, Cheer and Bold. He retired 21 years ago and went into radio, working in promotions for Cumulus Media’s Cincinnati stations such as WARM 98, 92.5 the Fox, Cat Country 94.1 and 96 Rock.
"When I retired from P&G, they pay you $5,000 to retrain on something, so I took $5,000 and went to broadcasting school, and then I got an internship with WGRR," Reilly says. "I did a few overnight shifts there. I thought, you know what? At my age I’m not gonna really go anywhere in radio. I’m not working second, third shift again. I’ll do my shift at WAIF, have fun doing it, play what I want, nobody can tell me what I got to play, what I got to say. I just do it as a hobby for fun."
Reilly says that the popularity of Time Machine, whose other rotating hosts include Big Mike and the Pittsburgh Kid, can be measured in dollars. The show ranks near the top at the station for raising money during WAIF’s fund drives, he says. He sees no reason to stop at 40 years. People like 1950s music, and he lists why: "A lot of good harmony, a lot of good stories to them, a lot of nice beats."
But when he compares 1950s rock to the music of today, Reilly ends up repeating what an adult in the '50s probably said about Elvis and the like: "People actually sing instead of yelling and screaming. I’m probably aging myself."
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