What a unique station! For years, WNAP innovated for Indy with their broad mix of AOR (or Hot-AOR) and Rock/Pop hits. I was lucky to be an intern there and at their big brother station down the hall, WIBC-AM, in summer 1974.

Fairbanks Broadcasting was a creative station group that loved to break the rules, and they created a hip image for WNAP that lasted for years. One of the unique methods that marked their stations were segues from music directly into stopsets, with no jock talk. Their thinking was that it created flow, especially if you start the stopset with a singing-jingle commercial, or -- better yet -- a record spot or a concert spot having a station promo to reinforce a hip image. The listener, just maybe, wouldn't mind the interruption. These segues drove other PD's nuts, but it worked just fine with the listeners! It also reduced jock patter, yet the jocks were allowed to be personalities when the mikes were on. WNAP and other Fairbanks stations (including WIBC/Indianapolis, WVBF/Boston and KVIL/Dallas) also made heavy use of custom, expensive Hugh Heller jingles. Sometimes these were long, strange rambling things that ran on and on. They were cool! and drove other programmers nuts, too.

Over the years there were other creative ideas. At times there was heavy reverb on the mike, which sounded unique then on FM. WNAP played the long versions of rock hits. They played one "live" cut per hour, usually a hit song that sounded more hip if it was a live concert version. And they sometimes faded in weird sounds to bridge one record to another. Even though most of the album music was dayparted to the evenings, you could hear "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando, "Reflections" by the Supremes, and album cuts by Rush or Hawkwind all within minutes of each other. It was a very different radio station, and "The Buzzard made it all work. One of their jocks once told me how cool it felt to be on WNAP because "you know that all the freaks are listening!" Hey, this was the early 1970's.