97X Modern Rock 500 - Inhailer/WOXY Alum commentary

True confession: one of my first-ever weekend shifts at 97X was during the '89 MR500. And Killing Joke's "80s" was on a 12-inch, which I mistakenly played at 33 rpm. I had never heard the song before so I was clueless about the too-slow speed. Thankfully a caller put me on the right path (and the right RPM). My apologies to anyone who was taping that year's MR500.

Enough bathroom talk. I did want to note that we reached out to every former 97X/woxy.com DJ for whom we had contact info to ask them to participate. The response was overwhelmingly positive - as witnessed by the 30+ folks you're hearing on the MR500. But if one of your faves is missing, it's not from a lack of trying.

Another restroom break song from The The, courtesy of JJ!!!

I’d use Marquee Moon when nature called but that’s only because we didn’t have the live version of Green Grass and High Tides.

I did post this on Twitter: Today, the #2023ModernRock500 started with Fishbone at Lap 500 and ended with Seal at Lap 401. The station was progressive in many ways, but just seeing that simple fact makes me happy because this was not just a lily-white 'alt rock' affair. And I am sure there will be some comments about what did or didn't make the cut (trust me, there are several songs that are not my personal faves in the mix), but we had over 11,000 tracks in the automation system alone. Whittling down to the 500 "best" is subjective as hell. I didn't try to give too much input into the list that we ended up using for this broadcast because by and large, it was constructed by tweaking historical data and learning more heavily on the FM years. Looking back at the full station history, I think it represents us well. And we could have just used the data that has been collected at

@TrackbaseApp and run it "as is," but that wouldn't have been nearly as fun.

Or maybe ask questions here about songs on the countdown like...

Was there any public pushback in the past to the inclusion of "The Message" on the Modern Rock countdown?