click to enlarge Courtesy of Mike Love

Bad Boy Radio hosts Victor “the Dizz” Blackful (far left) and Mike Love (in blue) with T.I. and Kanye West in 2003

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max volume The Bad Boy Smack on Bad Boy Radio Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin

click to enlarge Courtesy of the Dizz

Mike Love and the Dizz with Destiny’s Child

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max volume A 20-Second Workout on Bad Boy Radio Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin

Via the YouTube channel mastersellers

The Dizz and Mike Love in the WGCI studio in 1997

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max volume All Eyes on Me on Bad Boy Radio Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin

The caller in this segment impersonates Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th.





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max volume The Birthday Line on Bad Boy Radio in August 1999 Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin

click to enlarge Courtesy of the Dizz

The Dizz and Mike Love with Busta Rhymes

In 1997 Mike Love and the Dizz, who'd begun hosting Bad Boy Radio on WGCI earlier that year, launched a segment where they asked any listeners who were celebrating a birthday to call in. It was the sort of thing DJs often did before corporate consolidation made community-oriented commercial radio an endangered species—the two men had no idea they were on the cusp of creating a pop-cultural phenomenon.It's been ten years since the original Bad Boy Radio went off the air, but Mike Love and the Dizz's famous question to their callers—"Who's this on the birthday line?"—remains a defining artifact in the history of Chicago radio. Love has kept the Birthday Line alive, if only barely, with the occasional segment on the stations where he's worked since—first V100.7 in Milwaukee, then Soul 106.3 in Chicago, where he has a different show called Bad Boy Radio With Mike Love. (The Dizz, aka Victor Blackful, no longer works in radio and lives in Chicago only part-time.) But back in the day, the Birthday Line ran every Monday through Friday night, often enough to become the kind of fixture that people get nostalgic about. Chance the Rapper crystallized this nostalgia on Sunday, April 16, when he called WGCI and persuaded on-air personality Trey White to do the Birthday Line for his 24th Chano's rendition was missing two important things, though: the original hosts. When Mike Love and the Dizz left the station in 2007, their classic call-in segments went with them, including the Birthday Line, All Eyes on Me (where listeners shout out their neighborhoods and area codes), and the Bad Boy Smack (where the hosts deliver sound-effect "smacks" to the no-good people, lousy traffic, and other annoyances that listeners call to complain about). The two haven't spoken since.Chicago is notoriously segregated by race, but even within its black community sharp lines can exist between fans of dusties, house, ghetto house, and juke music. Bad Boy Radio found ways to bridge gaps between genres and generations, and the Birthday Line became one of many common denominators in black Chicago.For this oral history of Bad Boy Radio, I interviewed Mike Love and the Dizz separately, hoping to learn what brought them to WGCI and how their show came to be.I didn't know anyone at 'GCI. I sent in a tape, and I remember they liked it and called me. I interviewed and ended up getting the job. They had an opening for a Saturday-night show called. I did the show with a guy they paired me with. We changed the name to, where we basically programmed the hottest songs and acted like every song was a request.Rocky Jones, the owner of D.J. International Records, was doing a video show at the time. He was trying to make his own version of the Box. It was called, a hip-hop video show. Whoever was hosting the show at the time got sick or didn't show up. Rocky came in and said, "I have to do this interview with [radio personality] Rick Party and 'GCI. Would you be willing to go there and do this interview?" So Rocky took me up to WGCI, and I interviewed Rick Party.All Request PartyThey just threw us in the studio together, and we made it work.Old School SundayI knew something was special about them when they were doing theshow. They knew music and Chicago so well. They really gave that show a strong connection to Chicago.When we took over, we made it more of a Chicago-centric, disco, house kind of show. In the past, it had been more funk. The Dizz had been raised in the Chicagoland area and knew a lot more about the ins and outs of Chicago house music. We really built our name—Mike Love & the Dizz—and popularity on that Sunday show.I've always been a house head. I've always been a disco connoisseur.We played a lot of songs that people weren't hearing on the radio. We played the full-length versions of records you only heard in mixes or samples: "Sing, Sing, Sing" by the Charlie Calello Orchestra, "I Can't Turn Around" by Isaac Hayes, "Funkanova" by Wood Brass & Steel, "Baby I'm Scared of You" by Womack & Womack, "I'll Stay" by Funkadelic, and "Running Away" by Roy Ayers.The songs were not as far back as what Herb Kent was doing on V103. Many of the songs were from the 1980s, up-tempo party records with a mixture of house music. Butbecame a huge success for 'GCI.Rick Party [who had the 6-10 PM slot on weeknights] decided to take a full-time position in Atlanta. We eventually auditioned for the 6-10 PM spot. I don't know if Elroy told you, but we weren't exactly his first choice.Back in those days, managers in radio would always look outside of the market for big-name professionals to bring in. So they brought in two other people to try out for the job.We were not Rick Party. We came in with all radical ideas, real street stuff.That's when we started doing the 20-Second Workout. I wanted to have something that set us apart from everyone else. When we were in the clubs, we would play the ghetto-house records like "The Freaks" by DJ Deeon. The club would go up. They would lose their mind. But nobody played these records on the radio.Chicago is full of haters. "Freaks" was already being played on the radio in Detroit, like, nine months before that. How am I getting play in Detroit but no play here? I thought it made us look bad.Ninety-nine point nine percent of [ghetto house] was dirty. It was full of curse words. All we did was take the curse words out of it.One day, we were going to commercial and I just played a 20-second snippet of "Freaks." The phones lit up. People would start calling in, asking for a 20-second workout. If WGCI brought in [those outside personalities], their show wasn't going to be Chicago-centric because they knew nothing about Chicago.I appreciate those guys. They helped us get [ghetto house] to the masses. Because 'GCI is not just a black station; it gave our sound a larger audience. It went from the streets to the clubs. And when it made it to the radio, that was the epitome.Elroy was like, "I guess they know what they're doing. Every time I look at their numbers, they're ridiculous, and every time I go somewhere, somebody's asking about them."Rick Party had to pass the torch to us. He called the radio station to congratulate us and said, "They're really getting ready to turn this shit over to some bad boys." The name stuck.Once we took over, we knew we had to have some features on our show that really stood out to people. I had an idea for a feature called All Eyes on Me. It was a flip of Tupac's "All Eyez on Me."I think that was something Mike was doing when he was at V100 in Milwaukee. It was a call-and-response type thing. That went on for a couple of months, and I was like, "OK. This is stupid. It's catchy and everybody wants to do it, but it's kind of dumb."Call-and-response was very big back in those days.I went in there and changed it. We made people do celebrity impersonations with it. That's when All Eyes on Me started going bananas. I remember someone did Michael Evans from. "And where you from?" "Cabrini-Green." "Are you a Bad Boy?" He said, "'Boy' is a white racist word."Another thing I came up with to have people listen to the show was the Birthday Line. I went in and reedited Uncle Luke's "It's Your Birthday."We got off work one night. We went to Bennigan's on Michigan Avenue with, I believe, a record executive. It seemed like everybody in freaking Bennigan's had a birthday that night. We got to thinking, "If this many people get this excited about doing a birthday jingle in Bennigan's, what would happen if we put this shit on the radio?"I came up with the concept. I wrote it all out, and I gave it to the Dizz. He really couldn't catch the rhythm of it because it was so fast. I remember doing it and him looking at me like I was crazy. We go on the air. I'm like, "Hey, if you're celebrating a birthday, we need you to call the Bad Boyz." For about two days, the Dizz wasn't with it. By the third or fourth day, he jumped in.I think they started to do it on their own and it became a hit. The feature was on at 6:45 every night, Monday through Friday. People were calling in well in advance to get on the Birthday Line.I literally remember being on hold and really being surprised that I got through. I called for my 18th birthday. I went to Proviso East [in Maywood], and everybody liked the Birthday Line. We had two phones in my house, so I was on one line, and while 'GCI had me on hold, I was calling my friends on the other line, like, "Turn to the radio. I'm about to be on!"I was either 13 or 14 when I first called in. It was just dope. I'd been hearing it for so long, but I knew I didn't want to be one of those people who called in and either forget how it goes or mess up what I wanted to say. Being from Joliet, I wanted to give a little bit of love to what peopled considered the suburbs.The first time I met Barack Obama, he said, "You know what? I always wanted to do that Birthday Line." And I was like, holy shit.We had people from Missy Elliott to Usher do it. When celebrities came up to the radio station and were celebrating a birthday, they would do it.I put one of my daughters on there one time. She had to be six or seven. She's 22 now. I figured, since they're playing my stuff, I could get her on the radio. I put her on and she choked up on me. I was kind of embarrassed a little bit.I was on Oprah Winfrey's show once. In the green room, Oprah came in there and told me how the show's going to go. After all of that, she's like, "I was wondering, can you do the Birthday Line back here for me so I can do it?" The fact that Oprah Winfrey knew all of the words to the Birthday Line was stunning.As I saw the response to it, I said, we're going to keep going with this.People always ask what happened to the Bad Boyz. Why did it end? I personally felt like we were good enough to do different shifts. After the afternoon shift opened up and we didn't get the opportunity, I couldn't do it anymore.Mike left in 2007. I was there for about a year after. I was not happy. We saw the vision of radio changing. I remember when they told us to stop doing [the Birthday Line]. The general manager was like, "You're playing three minutes of the Birthday Line when we could be playing another Beyoncé song."They made us change up the Birthday Line around 2004. It was around the time 50 Cent's "In da Club" was out. Our bosses were sick of the Birthday Line. [They] wanted us to change the tempo of the Birthday Line. You don't change the theme ofbecause it's 50 years old. That was my mind-set.[After Mike left] they partnered me with some girl. I was like, well, this is not Bad Boy Radio then. She doesn't know anything that we do. Her whole vibe was completely not what this show is.I left in 2007. I think the Birthday Line ended when the show expired. Sometimes it's hard for someone to come on after such a successful feature and try to keep it alive, because those two guys were synonymous with that feature.I remember when they let Elroy go. It was heartbreaking. We had a new management team telling us that our ways of radio are old. Syndication became a big deal. We went from "We play the hits" to "We're number one for hip-hop and R&B." That changed the dynamic.The Birthday Line has been absent from 'GCI from the time I left until Trey White did it with Chance the Rapper. They were 100 percent on point. The only thing they couldn't do is the beat. You could never do the Birthday Line today, because there's so much of a delay on cell phones. There was no delay on the house phone back then.I look at [the Birthday Line] as a hit record. It just never dies.I think it would suck [if WGCI brought it back]. It's like Derrick Rose leaves Chicago, and they go get somebody else and make him number one after everything Derrick Rose had done.The question people ask me more than anything in Chicago is, "Do you still talk to the Dizz?" I have not spoken to the Dizz since I left 'GCI. We had a very good relationship, but we also had a rocky relationship at times.I worked with him for 12 years and never had his home phone number. We were kind of like Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. You never see them hanging out together. But when it came time to win all the championships, it's time to roll.I think [shows like Bad Boy Radio] need to come back. The reason I got into house music was because the mixes were on the radio and that influenced me. Now, you change the stations and you hear the same songs three times in an hour. That's sad. There's so much music out here that could be played.