Back in my radio days in the 1990s we programmed a weekend of “The Top 500 dance songs of all time”. It turned out to be very popular and we received a lot of positive feedback from listeners on the promotion, but it wasn’t very easy to pull off in the small studio. We were playing music off CD at the time and a lot of the tracks were were looking for hadn’t been released on CD yet. Record company reps thought we were a little crazy for a Top 40 Rhythmic/Dance station to focus on “oldies” for an entire weekend, but ultimately it was a lot of fun. We ended up downloading a handful of tracks over Napster (and subsequently burned them to CD) and playing a bunch of vinyl I had found in the basement of the gay bar I DJ’d at at the time. I borrowed a couple of Technics MK1200 turntables from a DJ friend and wired them into the studio for the weekend. We ended up using a list from a now long-gone Los Angeles radio station (I think it was called Groove 100?) that we found on the a Geocities site; we took their top list and just played the 500 songs we could muster together in order. It took quite a few weeks to put this all together. I wish I had kept the list and I wish I had recorded the weekend because it was a lot of fun playing tracks outside of the usual music rotation. It was 1999 and I had modeled our station after “103.5 The New KTU” in New York, which improved ratings enough to garner enough revenue to make the station financials strong enough for the owners to sell the station for a hefty profit.
Anyway, one of the songs we had a really hard time finding but ultimately ended up being played from a vinyl copy was from 1981. “Make That Move” by Shalamar came after “Second Time Around” and has a similar vibe.
Here’s an abbreviated version from their appearance on “Dance Fever” with Denny Terio.
