Loud and Proud
From The Top Top Top Of The World Trade Center
By
Rick Allen
There are only a handful of radio ID’s that can be
classified as “legendary.” High on that list is WQHT’s Top of the Hour ID
that aired from the late 80’s and well into the 90’s. After the senseless
destruction and loss of life that occurred on September 11th, 2001
when the World Trade Center’s twin towers collapsed, it also became a reminder
of more innocent times. The creator of the “top top top” ID was
Rick Allen. He was the Production Director at Hot 103 and Hot 97 from
1986 through 1994. Rick reveals the story behind the now classic piece of
production and shares his thoughts about the memories it invokes for him after
9-11.
First the innocent and happy thoughts: Even though I’ve tried and tried, I
can’t for the life of me remember the exact date but for some strange reason I
can still remember almost every detail of the night I put that ID
together. I think it was somewhere around the summer of 1987. We had
just finished a recording session with Chuck Riley who, along with Eric
Edwards, was the voice of Hot 103. Joel Salkowitz was WQHT’s Program
Director and he wanted a new top of the hour ID produced from the new voice
tracks. He wanted something special.
I remember taking the raw voice tape home to my project studio back in my home
in Douglaston, Queens. I had this little first floor apartment that also
had stairs that led down to a small basement room. I had set up studio in
that windowless damp basement room. It was cutting edge at the time, but
when you consider the gear we work on now you have to laugh at what was
considered state of the art. I had a Commodore 64 computer with this huge
5 inch floppy drive that ran a crude MIDI sequencing program. It
controlled my Prophet 2000 sampler. I used an old analog ARP Odyssey
synthesizer, Juno 106 and Mini-Moog to create the effects. It was
all recorded onto a quarter inch eight track tape recorder and mixed to quarter
inch at 15ips without the benefit of noise reduction.
I sat down that night and felt that creative pressure of trying to produce
something that would stand out in a radio market that included guys like Scott
Shannon and JR Nelson over at Z100 and Gene Wooten at WPLJ. I remember I
found a little bit of help from a couple of Bacardi and Cokes. Then I
looked at the script for the ID. It was the line “top of the World Trade
Center” that caught my attention. I focused on the mental image of the
broadcast signal rising up the enormous height of the twin towers. I just
needed an effect to create that image through sound. I loaded the voice
tracks into the sampler’s memory and started playing around. I programmed
the sample of Chuck saying “Top of the World Trade Center” over a long span of
notes on the keyboard. I thought about that visual of the signal rising
up the buildings to the tower and started hitting notes on the keyboard, one
after another, rising up the scale. This caused Chuck’s voice to rise in pitch
with each note. That was the beginning of the whole idea. In the
final version, the word “top” keeps rising in pitch as it repeats. As the
pitch rises the volume fades out. Underneath it is also repeating at the
original pitch on another track. It is this track that finishes the
phrase “top of the World Trade Center.”
The next morning I took the master mix into the station. Joel came in the
production studio to listen and it just so happened that Terry Geiger, Emmis’
corporate chief engineer was also in town from LA. Terry was working on
some gear in my studio that morning. After I played the ID, before Joel
could say a word, Terry blurted out, “That is way too over-produced.
It’ll burnout in a day.” Fortunately Joel loved it and it made it on the
air. To this day, whenever I talk to Terry, he’ll jokingly start the
conversation with “what are you up to?” And I always answer, “Just
over-producing.”
I don’t remember how many years that ID ran but it was
somewhere around 6 years in various forms. When Emmis switched Hot’s
format from 103.5 to 97.1 the transmitter site changed from World Trade to the
Empire State Building, but the thing that inspired me to create the ID that
night was definitely the height and visibility of those twin towers downtown.
For years it was also fun to hear it copied on stations all over the
country. Up until 9-11, one of my favorite variations came from Citadel’s
Scott Mahalick in the early 90’s. He had me produce one for a station out
west that read, “From the top top top of a really tall tower with red blinking
lights on top so planes don’t crash into it.” The humor was ripped from
that script the morning of September 11th. Both of the
original “towers” that inspired the whole thing were destroyed, all those
innocent lives lost and I was angry that hatred and misguided religious
fanatics had the power to reach inside my head and steal the smile that version
used to invoke. It just wasn’t funny to me anymore.
I had moved my studios to Scottsdale, Arizona in 1996, so I
watched in horror like most of the nation as the events of September 11th
unfolded on TV. I stared like a zomby as my disbelief turned to anger,
then to worry about my friends in New York. It wasn’t until many days had
past that I was looking at that picture of the American flag defiantly flying
from the antenna that used to broadcast radio and television signals to
millions and millions of Americans from the top of the World Trade
Center. That antenna was now a lonely twisted tale of survival rising out
of the rubble of all the destruction and I thought about that old ID. It
suddenly struck me that no radio signal would ever beam out over New York from
the “top top top of the World Trade Center.” I grieve for the loss of
life. I grieve for those who lost loved ones. But I also take
solace in the fact that when I now think of the twin towers; I no longer think
only of the loss. I can now remind myself that those buildings had been
an inspiration to millions of New Yorkers and one night back around 1987 I was
one of them.
.
Rick is currently
running Rick Allen Creative Services, Inc (RACS) in Arizona but his work can
still be heard in New York City. He recently produced the sweepers and
ID’s that launched Power 105-1. Check out his web site at http://www.racs-inc.com/
Rick Allen - Rick Allen
Creative Services, Inc.
rick@racs-inc.com 480-473-8318