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Radio

He is alive, but he will still be missed!!

On the Radio: Casey Kasem made the top 40 really count
Casey Kasem wasn’t on the radio for quite as long as Paul Harvey. But when Kasem didn’t have a new countdown show on the radio this weekend, for the first time since 1970, it felt almost as strange as it felt when Harvey died.
Casey Kasem is still alive, happily. He turned 77 in April. But he has stepped away from his two remaining countdown shows – “American Top 20” and “American Top 10” – to “pursue other projects.”
That familiar phrase doesn’t completely explain why the countdowns ended. As Tom Taylor noted in the newsletter T-R-I, Kasem always seemed like Harvey in the sense that you didn’t imagine him ever voluntarily stepping down.
“He still sounds great,” says Rob Durkee, author of the 1999 book “American Top 40: Countdown of the Century” (Schirmer). “His voice is as good as ever.”
Durkee, who has stayed in periodic touch with Kasem, says he doesn’t have any inside information on why the shows ended. But he notes that radio, like all media, has an inevitable pull toward youth.
Kasem’s own career underscores that evolution. Seventeen years ago, in 1992, he began supplementing his long-running top-40 pop countdown with the two “adult contemporary” countdowns.
“With those shows, he could keep appealing to the older audience that had grown up with him,” says Durkee.
When Kasem turned over the top-40 countdown to Ryan Seacrest in 2004, says Durkee, “that was a natural transition. The younger audience that listens to top 40 could all relate to Seacrest because of ‘American Idol.'”
By the way, Durkee doesn’t hear much of Kasem when he listens to Seacrest. “I hear a lot of Casey in Bob Kingsley, but not much in Ryan,” he says. “Ryan’s a great air talent, he just has a different style.”
But then, he adds, so does almost everyone.
“Casey was one in a trillion,” says Durkee. “What made him so great was the way he talked to the listeners. When he told a story, you’d swear he was sitting right next to you. It takes years to understand how to do that, and no one does it like Casey.”
The one thing Kasem couldn’t do, however, was make himself 30 again. So although his ’70s and ’80s shows continue in syndication, last weekend he quietly stepped away.
At the end, he talked briefly about his radio years, played “Thank You for Being a Friend” by Andrew Gold, and told everyone “to keep reaching for the stars.”