Solid Gold Time Machine

     RADIO GHOSTS: Think of 1960s radio. Top 40. Hear the jingle singers chirp, Seventy-seven--WABC? Or maybe, CHUM, Ten-Fif-ty, Toronto? Do the names Joey Reynolds, Dan Ingram, Barney Pip, Larry Lujack, Dick Biondi mean anything to you? 
     "Radio today sucks so bad, compared to the way it was," barks Richard Kaufman, a Dallas radio fanatic who -- as alter-ego Ricky the K -- recreates mid-'60s Top 40 radio as an Internet business. "I was too young to be a part of it the first time around. But once a week, when the local station went off the air to do transmitter tests, we could hear CHUM. I'd listen from midnight Sunday nights to Monday morning, just to hear it." 
     Thirty years later, he's one of the Internet's one-man niche broadcasters. Kaufman's three hour mock-'60s jukebox is posted daily at www.60s radio.com. Listeners hit the site anytime in the next 24 hours to hear that day's show. "Originally, it was supposed to be a satellite format. But companies give away downlink equipment for nothing to jerkwater radio stations to run their automated satellite feeds." 
     Oldies stations do it wrong, he claims. "They play the same 800 songs over and over again. You hear Satisfaction or Baby Love every eight hours. It's programmed for people who don't like oldies, who only hit the third button on the car radio for a quick fix. Stations figure listeners who want those tunes will stay -- they'd rather hear it done badly than not at all. They take 'em for granted. And they play songs well into the '70s and early '80s. When you get past 1972 --a song like American Pie --the era is over." His playlist has 3,000 charted songs from 1955 to 1971. "We're not talking obscure tunes. I'm talking about Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport and the greatest Canadian record of all time, #1 in 1964: Ringo by Lorne Greene!" 
     "We have all the original jingle tracks for CHUM and the big Top 40 stations," he says. "What you heard on CHUM and CKEY, was also on WABC New York, WMEX Boston, KFWB Los Angeles. We've re-sung the original jingles with the original charts." His feed also includes 500 vintage '60s radio commercials. And carts of one-liners from ... Tonto. Kaufman's goal: authentic '60s big-personality radio pop. 
     So is Ricky the K's Solid Gold Time Machine making money? 
     "I sent out one mass e-mail in December," Kaufman says, offering the '60s radio hook. "A week before we started, we were in the black. And we hadn't even done a show yet."