i just changed the moderators and i hope to get the Original KDAY Mix Master's on as moderators so i am sorry but that's why i changed the moderators i hope everyone understands... Mix Master Ace 4-30-2009 3:57 P.S.T.
i created this group in memory of a old hip hop radio station in the Los Angeles area that was called KDAY it was 1580 on the am dial in the am stereo era back in the days here is a little history...
KDAY was the first radio station in the world to play rap/hip hop 24/7. It was Greg Mack that started it in July 1983. To understand how he did that you have to understand where he started...KTSA/KTFM, San Antonio, Tx. is where his career began in 1975 as an intern...Radio was exciting even though his initial job was to answer phones for popular djs' Robert Lopez, Charlie Brown, and his mentor, Lee Randall...He was even the mascot for the FM station dressed in a big bird outfit...Greg wanted to do whatever it took to be successful...A new PD came in and told him that he would do whatever it took to get my black ass out of the station, you n---a! True story! Luckily his mentor, Lee Randall, had moved on to Program KEYS/KZFM in Corpus Christi, so when he told him what happened, he said I can't give you a full time gig but weekends and help you get a part time gig, which he did, Greg Mack worked as a dj at a club called the Windjammer and a VTR operator at KIII-TV in Corpus Christi...
It was his first on air gig and he had so much success that he gave him a full time air shift on KEYS after a short time. He sharpened his skills by assembling the top 1000 rock songs of all time. That's right, rock, was his roots and he still love "classic rock" to this day... A radio consultant named Jerry Clifton heard Greg Macks show and had one of his clients, Majic 102 in Houston, Tx. offer him a job. PD Bill Travis gave Greg Mack his first gig at an Urban Radio Station, it was 1980...his friend there, Snowman and Greg were always turning Houston out! In 1983, he was offered a gig at KDAY-L.A., his dream market. Jack Patterson gave him a shot...He couldn't believe it...working w/Ed Kerby, JJ Johnson, Russ Parr, Lisa Canning, Don Tracy, Steve Woods...they had so much talent there. They got a kick out of him pulling up to the station in his pickup wearing cowboy boots...
Jack and Ed asked him if he could create a sound that could compete and with everything that he had learned from everyone, he created a new format...It was never intended to be an all rap station, it was intended to be an all hit station, a reflection of the streets, truly a station for the people...Greg Mack was the first to use phrases like "the traffic jam", "the high five countdown", and others...he never knew at the time how many lives we were changing and the whole new genre they were creating... Imagine if your "street team" consisted of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Battlecat, Tony G, DJ M Walk, Julio G, Ice-T, Kid Frost, Egyptian Lover, Rodney O & Joe Cooley, M.C. Hammer, Tone Loc, L.A. Dream Team, Young M.C.,and the list goes on and on...Anyone he omitted, you know the story...
Greg Mack surrounded himself w/only the best talent...assembling one of the hottest group of djs ever, the Mixmasters...playing at "World on Wheels", "Dootos'", Skateland U.S.A., "the 321 Club", "The Casa Camino Real", they played the different areas because they wanted to show the Crips, the Bloods, and all gangs that they were down w/everyone and no one in particular...they had "street respect for everyone"...he did understand their struggle, He don't approve of it, but heunderstand it... What does Greg Mack do now? He is part owner of a group of radio stations in Spokane and one in Fresno w/more on the way...hey, if you want to control, own your own, right!
if there is anyone who would like to contribute to this group in any way please hit me up on here or email me at... mixmasterace@hotmail.com or mixmasterace2@hotmail.com thank you in advance...
1580 KDAY and the Beat Goes On
By Brian Coleman
If you want to take part in an amusing informal sociological study, do this: walk up to someone who was hip and/or young in Los Angeles in the ‘80s and say “K-DAY.” As you stand back and observe, you’ll see a large smile spread across their face and their eyes might just glaze over a bit. You’ll hear the gears of their mind working back into retro la-la land, with visions of rap’s golden past – Ice T’s purple Porsche from the cover of the “Somebody Gotta Do It” single; LL Cool J’s shirtless b-boy stance; N.W.A.’s posed, collective scowl – dancing through their heads. Few other phrases can make entire demographics swoon.
“There were no casual listeners to KDAY,” Wherehouse Music’s influential Director of Urban Music Violet Brown emails to me, in bold-face type. “If you were near a radio and you liked rap back then, your dial was on KDAY. Nothing was more important to rap.” Hen-Gee, an influential producer and former Mixmaster, says: “KDAY was a station that you could call home. It’s tattooed within people who lived and breathed it.” Three decades in the game, LA’s Kid Frost says, simply: “KDAY was bigger than life.”
“Can’t Live Without My Radio”
If there was ever a single representative voice of KDAY, it is indisputably Greg Mack. He didn’t start the station, but he sure as hell made it what it was, starting the day he arrived as Music Director in July 1983, a year or two after they had switched formats. Jack Patterson was his boss, the station’s Program Director. “When I arrived at KDAY, they were doing what I’d call an ill-fated attempt at an Urban Contemporary format. But what was going on in the streets of LA back then was hip-hop.” He continues: “At that time all the radio people in LA hated rap. Program Directors hated it, the big record stores wouldn’t carry it. They thought it was just a novelty and would go away in a year or so.”
KDAY wasn’t the first radio station in LA to play hip-hop – KGFJ 1230 AM regularly broadcasted live feeds and mixes by the area’s first superstar DJ crew, Uncle Jamm’s Army (Bobcat, Egyptian Lover and Roger Clayton). But KDAY brought rap to the forefront. Mixmaster Ralph M states: “When Greg Mack came in, he just changed the whole game. KGFJ couldn’t hang after that, they couldn’t compete.” Mixmaster M-Walk, who started his tenure in 1985, agrees: “KDAY was just a huge hit, right away. Because there was nothing else to compete with it.”
Aside from consistently charismatic, long-standing on-air talent like Mack, morning jock Russ Parr (and his trouble-making, rapping alter-ego, Bobby Jimmy), JJ Johnson and Lisa Canning, one of the most distinctive things about KDAY was an incredibly skilled crew of cut-n-scratch innovators who would be called The Mixmasters. This clique was Greg Mack’s DJ army, and he oversaw all their activities. The first Mixmaster, who began taping sets in early 1984 to be broadcast on Saturday nights, was the legendary Dr. Dre, who threw down with his then-musical-partner (from the World Class Wreckin Cru), DJ Yella. Dre remained a hugely popular and innovative DJ throughout the ‘80s, of course, but his tenure at KDAY was a relatively short one, lasting only about a year.
The next Mixmasters were the station’s most important and longest lasting – Jammin’ Gemini and the man Julio G calls “the Kool Herc of the West Coast”: Tony G. Julio continues: “In Los Angeles, Tony is the entire basis of what radio is today. Everything came from him.” Tony’s influence and importance played a big part in KDAY’s overall power and appeal, almost if not as much as the daytime jocks. Raised in New York and Florida, he didn’t have a typical DJs pedigree, in no small part because he played drums in a heavy metal band called Warlock (he did this concurrently, while mixing on KDAY).
Tony beams: “The Mixmasters definitely made KDAY. Without them there wouldn’t have been no KDAY. All of us were from a different part of town and we all brought our own listeners.” The Mixmasters could most certainly take up their own article, but suffice it to say that the most important DJs in LA history from that era passed thru the KDAY doors under Tony’s and Greg Mack’s watch: Julio G, Joe Cooley, M-Walk, Aladdin, Battlecat, Ralph M, Henry G (Hen-Gee), DJ Romeo, TraySki, The Mixstress and more.
Aside from Tony’s Mixmaster duties, another important movement he started was the “High Energy” show, which Tony and Julio helmed starting around 1987. It singlehandedly brought Latino dance music to the station. Tony recalls: “When that started, everything got mixed in, black and brown. The more we mixed our listening audiences together, the more the station grew. Hispanics would have never started listening to the station unless they started hearing themselves on there.”
Aside from just breaking new music, KDAY was innovative in keeping their name and their faces out in the communities of Los Angeles, the kids who were the station’s core. But these weren’t friendly meet-and-greets at malls and industry gatherings. These were concerts and events in the deepest gang ‘hoods in LA, at the height of the city’s blood/crip warfare. The station’s head of public relations, Rory Kaufman, oversaw and attended these events, no matter where they were. Hen-Gee recalls these gigs, at places like Washington High School: “We performed at live remotes, recreation parks, schools and ‘hoods that no other rapper or DJ dared to enter. They were the killing fields.”
Kid Frost, the pioneering MC who stretches back to KDAY’s earliest days, also has plenty of memories of these community outreach events. He looks back, with a chuckle: “The funnest ones were for Church’s Chicken, at spots in Inglewood, Compton, Watts. There were times when me and Ice T would be up there rapping, and he’d have the car running, so as soon as we’d finish we’d run off stage, jump into the car and get the hell out of there.” He adds: “Tony G used to have the screws on his speakers really loose, ready to pop out, and he’d keep shotguns inside the speakers for the crazy shows. Just in case he needed to grab ‘em.”
K-Pook, owner of the KDAY-LA clothing line and lifetime KDAY fanatic, says: “Gangs were at their peak at that time, but people would still go out to see the Mixmasters, no matter where they were. If they were spinning you had to be there, even if it wasn’t the safest place to be.”
“They Reminisce Over You”
Throughout the ‘80s, KDAY reigned supreme and played the most important rap music being made, whether it was East Coast, West Coast, South, indie or major label. As long as it was hot, it got spins. Mack says: “Artists back then knew that if they wanted to break out, they would have to be on KDAY, no matter where they were from, New York or otherwise.” Julio G agrees: “Artists from the East knew they needed to get on KDAY to get anywhere else in the country. It was always the biggest stepping stone.”
Sadly, as innovative as it was, KDAY was undone by technology. With the rise of FM radio signal popularity in the ‘80s, and it’s clearer and more powerful signal range, Frequency Modulation simply beat the station at its own game. “FM didn’t really kick in until the late ‘80s in LA,” Mack recalls. “Until then, AM still had a chance. But when FM places like Power 106 started doing hip-hop, it was more like ‘If you can hear it on FM, then why listen on AM?’” After 1989, the station’s profit margin shrank, and by 1991 the station was sold and converted to a news talk format.
Many people today, especially those involved with KDAY back then, have very strong opinions about the importance of the station and what it represented. Tony G states: “The biggest thing that KDAY did in the ‘80s was to bring unity to Hispanics and blacks in LA through music. Before that, nobody crossed nobody’s lines. Afterwards there was a lot of unity. It was incredible to see.” Julio G says: “KDAY created a lot of revenue and made West Coast hip-hop what it is today. We believed in up-and-coming artists like Dr. Dre, King Tee, Ice T. We led the whole blueprint of what rap radio is, even today. People are still copying that format.”
The Poetess, community director and DJ for LA’s The Beat, says: “The nostalgia for KDAY is still around because those songs are just amazing, and they were important to people back then. Radio stations sleep on the 30-plus demographic who grew up with and went to high school hearing those records. KDAY was the ultimate reflection of the young black and latino community back in the ‘80s.”
“Guess Who’s Back?”
Luckily for hip-hop fans in southern California, KDAY actually isn’t dead. In the fall of 2004 (in the midst of doing research for this article), a station popped up in LA out of nowhere that turned many heads: “93.5 KDAY.” At first it was all classic hip-hop mixes and no on-air talent. Just music. Ears were open and curious. Soon enough, by October, Julio G was on the air. Cel phones buzzed and email messages were dispatched to old-schoolers all throughout Southern Cali: KDAY IS BACK!
Julio says: “The people who owned the station did research in LA and asked people what they wanted to see come back. The answer was KDAY.” Julio is currently a programming consultant. But he has strong feelings about people judging this version of KDAY (which, aside from Julio, has no ties to the original KDAY, it should be noted) against the original one: “Because of the name, the station has been under a microscope, which isn’t shocking. It shows how serious KDAY is to people. But it’s not really fair to judge what is going on just yet, because we’re just starting. We all love the old-school, because that’s bomb music. But we’re also trying to break Defari. We’re not all about sitting in the past.”
To make things even more interesting, the two most important KDAYers of the past, Greg Mack and Tony G, have shown up on the right side of the dial. Starting on Sunday evenings in November, they countered with the soon-to-be-syndicated “Greg Mack’s Real KDAY Show” on Power 106. Julio and Tony remain the closest of friends, although neither is glad that they’re showing 2005 LA what KDAY was on two competing stations. Julio says: “It’s definitely a very weird situation and I’m not really all for it, because it’s just dividing people right now. We all deserve respect, end of story. It’s just like KDAY is in two places now, even if we’re competing a bit. At the end of the day, though, it’s good for LA because it makes for great radio.”
It’s all living proof that LA will indeed never let KDAY die. Add to all this a KDAY movie in the works, helmed by Greg Mack himself, and 1580 AM, the rap heart of LA, will be pumping for years to come.
posted by Gentle Jones
Re: KDAY is Back~
"A New KDAY
In another reverse of what had been an ongoing trend, another Spanish language radio station has actually flipped back to English.
KZAB 93.5 FM, which had been playing salsa music under the moniker "La Sabrosa", flipped at 12 noon today to an all-hip-hop format. (KZAB is licensed to Redondo Beach.)
The station is now referring to itself as KDAY -- call letters that will be familiar to Angeleno rap fans in the 1980s. The original 1580 AM KDAY has long been recognized as the nation's first all-hip-hop radio station.
The hip-hop format on KDAY, which launched in July 1983, is credited with breaking artists such as DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, LL Cool J and NWA. At the time, a 24-hour hip-hop station seemed ridiculous. A full time radio station dedicated to a tiny niche music format?
20 years later, of course, hip-hop KPWR "Power 106" dominates Los Angeles' radio wars. And another, KKBT "The Beat," has also been a market force for over a decade, thanks most recently to the strong Steve Harvey morning show.
It's too soon to tell whether this new 93.5 KDAY will live up to its famous namesake -- or if it will even get to keep the name (a radio station in Independence, Calif., actually operates under those call letters). I'm not even sure we need another all hip-hop station -- KPWR and KKBT do quite nicely, and on much more powerful signals. Perhaps a niche format would be better suited for the 93.5 frequency. Stay tuned.
Update: After listening to the station for a bit this evening, it appears the new 93.5 KDAY will focus (at least initially) primarily on classic hip-hop tracks. The majority of the playlist is comprised of classic tracks from the 80s and 90s. Perhaps that means the station has indeed carved out an interesting niche. But a station's sound also evolves in the days and weeks after a format switch, so we'll keep our ears out."
Greg Mack
/ artists (G)
Real Name: Greg Mack
Profile: Greg Mack is famous for is role as musical director at the Los-Angeles based radio station KDAY 1580 AM. KDAY was the first radio station to play hip-hop 24 hours a day back when it began in late 1983. A diverse range of music could be heard through the various mixes on the show, for example a listener could hear Kraftwerk, Run-DMC, and Stacey Q lined back-to-back. KDAY is also credited for putting many east coast releases in rotation longer than stations in New York would play them. Impressive and innovative cutting and scratching patterns were also featured from the station's various DJs. Many of the KDAY Mixmasters, the station's disc jockeys, would go on to make a name for themselves in hip-hop such as Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, Tony G, Julio G, DJ Battlecat, DJ Joe Cooley, and others. Greg Mack hosted his own show dubbed "The Mack Attack" every Saturday night from 8 - 11pm. Unlike corporate radio stations today, KDAY was also known for playing local independent releases on the air that normally wouldn't get heard elsewhere. West coast hip-hop wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for Greg Mack and KDAY. The rise in mainstream popularity of hip-hop eventually placed a financial strain on the underground station and it was eventually sold out at the start of the 1990's. Greg Mack briefly ran his own independent label called Mack Daddy Records and released a compilation album around 1990/91. Recently, Greg Mack works at a radio station in Northen California. Dawning on the station's 20 year anniversary, a documentary film and book are planned by Greg Mack in preserving the legacy of KDAY.
LASLIM'S VIDEO CLIP WITH KDAY JINGLE
