Tom Barnard is the 100,000 pound gorilla of Twin Cities radio. He has hosted the KQ92 Morning Show for over three decades! It is one of the highest-rated local morning shows in the United States.
Many people don’t know that Tom was on the radio long before he began his impressive run on KQRS. In May, 1975, he was doing evenings on Top 40 outlet WDGY-AM 1130 as “The Catman.” There are many “Catman” airchecks floating around on the Internet. Here’s one you haven’t heard before. I know this because I recorded it myself when I was 10 years old. In 1995, I dubbed a cassette copy and sent it to Dave Hamilton (KQRS Program Director) for airplay during Tom’s annual “Conclave Friday” show. If you listened, you heard parts of this on the KQ Morning Show. Otherwise, it has not been previously released.
The audio quality of this is also better than most other “Catman” airchecks in existence. Original source is an 8-track tape. Seriously! But it was recorded direct off of a receiver, rather than the usual “microphone next to the speaker” method that was used on many surviving airchecks of this era. I transferred the original Certron 80 minute tape cartridge to CD-R using a Tascam Pro CD recorder, then made the file conversion to 128k .mp3. WDGY’s daytime signal was extremely strong at my location in Apple Valley. This is as good as it gets for AM radio in 1975.