Billy Idol's "Hot in the City" Local City Single Edit?

If you are familiar with Billy Idol's single "Hot in the City" you may remember that there's a break in the song and Billy screams out "New York!".

I swear that I remember hearing different versions of the song a local city name dubbed in the spot that featured the "New York" line.

Does anyone else have any recollection of this oddity?

I was young at the time, but I remember thinking that it was actually Billy singing the various city names and not simply a DJ overdub.

I've done a few searches to try to answer this question, but haven't come up with anything.

Thanks for your help!

PS: I also remember my local DJs voicing over the DJ section of "We Built This City"...but that's another thread for another day.

 

I remember there was a "Cleveland!!" version of Hot in the City. It sounded like Billy.

 

They could have sent certain markets edits of the song. Country still does this - recently with a Zac Brown Band song...

 

Billy recorded a handful of versions for various big-city markets. I have a version with "Minneapolis" that I play on the air maybe once a year. I've heard that there's also a "Twin Cities", but I don't have that one.

These won't turn up on vinyl. My guess is that Chrysalis sent out reel-to-reel tapes of the various versions to radio stations at the time. Never seen one of those tapes, though.

While it wasn't really common in the '80s, there were other examples. I remember hearing "Z100 Luftballons" in the first verse of Nena's hit.

 

Locally, they still play a version of Huey Lewis and The News' "The Heart Of Rock & Roll" where Huey punched in "DC! Bal-ti-MORE!"

 

They did this type of thing for "We Built This City". I suppose what made it different is that each radio station did their own.

 

Yup, me too! In fact, I remember being really shocked the first time I heard the New York version!

 

Wikipedia is no help here, but I recall reading (in Trouser Press, way back in the day) that Idol shouted out around 100 city names for customized local versions of the song.

 

I do seem to recall hearing a Detroit version too...

 

I remember the Portland and Seattle versions. Interesting choice for the first single of his debut album (and rarely seen video), of course White Wedding became the huge hit, at least on MTV, but this was released first. I was a huge Generation X fan and really liked this album (though it was not quite as good as Gen X's last album Kiss Me Deadly).

 

Wikipedia mentions the other versions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_in_the_City

 

I can't imagine, as often as this was played, that the station was playing the track off of a reel-to-reel...would they have converted it to cassette for easier playback?

Has anyone ever seen these made available on ebay?

It seems like this would be the type of oddity that could make someone a few bucks if they were all released digitally.

 

There was a "Fresno!" version too.

 

It would have been played from a cart... as most songs were.. could have even been sent out on carts - who knows...

 

Yup - almost certainly played from a cart. (Short for "cartridge". Externally, they look just like an 8-track, but the guts are a little different. 2-track, broadcast quality endless loop, and automatically cues itself up when it's done.)

In 1990, the top 40 station I was working at was still using carts for all the music. At that point, the new adds would come in on promo CD singles, and the production guy would dub them onto carts. More reliable than the 1990-era CD players.

They also ran commercials, promos, IDs, music beds, sound effects, and anything else you can imagine from carts. If you watch episodes of Frasier, look for the giant racks of carts behind Roz. Those were literally everywhere in all the radio studios I'd seen up to that time.

In 1993, the other top 40 station I worked at used carts for all the non-music, and Denon cart-like CD players for the music. Each CD had its own housing, sort of like a jewel-box with a slidy door (like an old floppy disk). The CDs were stored in giant racks, like the carts.

Around 2000, my little community-run station went to a hard-drive-based system for its non-music stuff. And if *we* did it, then everybody else was running things off the hard drive by then.

Doubt that it was mailed as a cart, though. Those were kinda expensive, for what they were, and it's much more likely that they ran dubs onto 1/4-inch tape, probably 15 IPS, and mailed them out on little reels. We used to get in little tape reels (5" diameter? Don't remember what the standard size was) sent in square, white boxes all the time. All our pre-recorded PSAs showed up that way.

We old timers can tell you about the cart-winding machines. You only needed those when your production director was too cheap to order the carts pre-wound.

 

Would it have been acceptable for those at the radio station to dub themselves a copy for "home" use? I've spent some time looking under nearly every possible rock and have never seen any of the non NYC versions available.

I would assume that they have to be out there somewhere and that some huge Billy Idol fan has spent some time collecting as many as possible.

 

I never knew about different versions of "Hot In the City", but I am familiar with this practice. For example, George Thorogood had a song called "Willie & The Hand Jive" with a line that went "he did that hand jive on MTV". When I heard it on WDIZ in Orlando, it went "he did that hand jive on WDIZ". This one didn't require so many versions, but Billy Ocean had variations of "Caribbean Queen" such as "European Queen".

 

"San Diego!"

I remember thinking how awkward this sounded.

 

Here's a blog with a few mentions of this practice:

http://www.top40musiconcd.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4021&PN=36