Jon Nelson had an idea:

What if you took EVERY DJ break ​Howard Hesseman ever made, as Dr. Johnny Fever (WKRP in Cincinnati), and just ...followed his lead?

Would it be possible to construct a 3 hour show, with Fever as host?

He followed it up with three more hours inspired by Tim Reid’s Venus Flytrap. The resulting “show” is a fantastic collection of classic cuts from (mostly) the 1970s.

I never paid attention to the music played on WKRP in Cincinnati when I watched it as a kid. It was mostly incidental—there to add verisimilitude to the fictional radio station or punctuate a joke—and was otherwise unremarkable to me. I wouldn’t have recognized most of the music back then, but virtually every one is a veritable classic today—and much of it was picked by Hesseman and Reid themselves in later seasons. (Imagine my shock at suddenly hearing what sounded like Daft Punk an hour into Venus’ set—it was actually Edwin Birdsong’s “Cola Bottle Baby,” which was sampled for “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”)

(Worth noting: not every song in this set is from WKRP. Nelson augments it—especially the Venus set—with his own selections (like “Cola Bottle Baby”) to match the spirit of the original music. I think he does a great job, but if you want to hear only the songs played on the show, there’s an Apple (and YouTube) playlist for that.)

(Via Dr. Fortyseven, by way of Dave Rahardja.)