WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998

THe Top 99.1 of 1998 aired on New Year's Day 1999. Gina Crash -- a rather over-partied version of her usual energetic self -- started things off and carried us through song number 54, complaining at times about the horns being a bit loud. Paula Sangeleer took over then and finished out the program.

1998 was a challenging year for the Top 99.1. The atmosphere was atrocious, with a major thermal inversion that challenged WHFS's usually clear signal in Columbia, MD. I had recently moved and did not yet have the outdoor antenna installed yet. These two factors contributed to a lower quality recording than the earlier ones -- fortunately these effects cleared up later in the day when the best songs were being aired. The program was further challenged by some noticeable tape degradation. Some of it cleaned up with selective restarts and tape alignment shifts. To recover the Top 99.1th song I actually spliced bits of the song from three source recordings to render a reasonably clean version of the song. Other parts were just beyond salvage though. Fifteen years too late, I have learned that TDK made a better tape from an archival perspective, than SONY did. Viewed as blemishes in a piece of fine leather -- as the Woodstock liner notes once described such things -- they're not too bad, all things considered.

And it is an important historical document, as the times, they were a-changin'. The Top 99.1 of 1998 sounded more different from the one before of any issue in the set. The Top 99.1th song, that had featured creative acts from within the station itself during the 1992-94 period when Duchossis Communications owned WHFS, was now a political work: a spoof of the Marcy Playground Sex and Candy song, that rode a big wave of musical parodies of President Clinton and his various and sundry scandalous affairs. The song was titled Sex is Dandy. It featured a Bill Clinton sound-alike who poked mischievous fun at Clinton for his Monica Lewinsky affair and also on Ken Starr, whose four years of investigating turned up only this sexual liaison -- that had been front page news for months by the time Starr started investigating it.

The station's style had evolved to a more glitzy set of jingles and a "louder" sound. Three years in the CBS fold were beginning to show their effect.  The production included something new that year: an electronic voice announcing the number of each song. I personally didn't care for it, and it was not repeated the following year. There was also, to my knowledge, no other retrospective programming of the kind seen in the Duchossis years.

WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -1- Top 99.1 to 89.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -2- Top 88 to 74.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -3- Top 73 to 55.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -4- Top 54 to 41.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -5- Top 40 to 28.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -6- Top 27 to 14.mp3
WHFS Top 99.1 of 1998 -7- Top 13 to Number One.mp3

If you enjoy these recordings. please take a moment to leave a comment. Think of it as signing a guest book

Thanks and happy listening,

--jkw