play tunes overnight and don’t bother with any newscasts or station breaks or anything like that’. Basically, it was just spin the tunes and shut up.” Now if you’ve ever met Dave
Watts, asking him to stay quiet when the topic is music or radio is like trying to plug a pool leak with a Kleenex. It didn’t take long for the words to start pouring out, and there was the kid on the mighty 580 “bumbling my way through it”. The fallout was nearly immediate.
Pascal’s nightly show “Best Sellers”. His job was to spin the records and make sure all the taped commercials ran on time, while Al laid down the “chatter that matters” from the announce booth. Near the end of one shift, the
studio phone rang. “It was Gord Atkinson, the
program director at the time”, remembers Dave. “He said ‘The overnight guy is sick and can’t do his show tonight. You just sit in there and
When the upcoming program schedule was posted a few days later, Dave Watts had a weekend overnight shift. Literally overnight he had joined a field of legendary local broadcasters of the time like Ken Grant, Dean Hagopian, John Pozer, Nelson Davis and Gary Michaels. The “50,000 Watts” nickname
was perfect in those days of Wolfman Jack, Ken “The General” Grant; Jungle Jay Nelson in Toronto; Cousin Brucie; Al “Pussycat” Pascal and the other big names of the day. The
name was thought up by Pascal and CFRA newsman Mike Duffy. Even today, some 45 years later, Dave says “People still stop me in the halls and say ‘Hey, 50, how’s it going?’ So that has really stuck”. These were halcyon days for
Ottawa Rock and Roll (as we’ve covered in our on-going series in Bounder, “Rockin’ on the Rideau”). There is no question the radio support these bands got was instrumental in their success and the growth of the Ottawa music scene. And Dave was part of that. “CFRA prided itself in playing
local music,” he says. “I have to hand it to Al Pascal for that. He had a program called ‘Best sellers local edition’. He would feature songs by the 5D, Eastern Passage, Eyes of Dawn, The Esquires, the Stacattos and other local favourites. Then in the 70s it was Octavian and The Cooper Brothers. A lot of those bands
contiinued on page 46
www.bounder.ca
BOUNDER MAGAZINE 17
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