With a voice that sounds like God’s cooler brother and an encyclopedic grasp of songs and artists, Frost has delivered an estimated 120,000 tunes into the ears of eager listeners over three decades.
Sundays, with additional hours in the morning and early evening hosted by other Q107 deejays.Īlways commencing with Alice Cooper’s triumphal 1973 tune “Hello Hooray,” the show was a combination of hits and deep album tracks, along with a regular feature called Riffer Madness, where listeners could win prizes by guessing a song’s title from its opening guitar salvo. The show’s free-flowing format has been largely unchanged all that time, running mainly from noon to 6 p.m. He’s hosted it for most of the 33 years since then, with a few years off in the early 1990s when he pursued gigs in record sales and concert promotion. They’ve grown up with it, you know?”įrost, a Winnipeg native, started Psychedelic Sunday in 1985 at the age of 29, shortly after moving to Toronto. I’m also hearing from people who tell me they used to listen to the show in the back seat of their parents’ car, and now their parents have died. I knew it was a popular show, but one thing that really sticks out to me is a tweet from a guy who says he starting listening to the show when he was 17, and he’s now 50.
“I’m hearing from a lot of different people. “It blows my mind,” he said in an interview. Seated before his microphone for the last time at Q107’s Corus Quay offices near Toronto Harbour, comfortably attired in a sports shirt and shorts, Frost seemed dazed and confused by all the listener affection coming his way. Mayor Tory tweeted “we will miss you” to Frost: “It was all Riffer Madness, reminder of fun days and great tunes! We miss your voice at the ACC, too!” Thompson posted a photo of his vehicle, accompanied by the tweet, “Washing the truck with the small washer today, just so I can enjoy the final airing of Psychedelic Sunday.” It’s going to be hard to get things done around the house without Psychedelic Sunday.”Ī long-haul trucker named R.J. Many people used similar phrases to describe the loss they’re about to feel: They took to Twitter en masse, using the hashtag #ThankYouAndy, to express their dismay over the shuttering of Psychedelic Sunday and the imminent departure of Frost, 62, who is also known to hockey fans as a former public address announcer for the Maple Leafs. But judging from the reaction of shocked and dismayed listeners, Toronto Mayor John Tory among them, the news was a colossal bummer, man. Sunday’s show was the genial Frost’s last, as Q107 pursues a corporate plan to expand from its Baby Boomer base towards a more youthful audience. The show lasted three times longer than the decade it celebrates. That’s because Psychedelic Sunday, the popular Q107 classic rock program hosted by Andy Frost, has abruptly signed off after 33 years of exciting ears and expanding minds with Sunday-long servings of album tracks by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Supertramp, Yes, Neil Young and other artists from rock’s headiest era, 1965-75. Rock ’n’ roll will never die - but as far as generations of Toronto radio listeners are concerned, it’s suddenly become a whole lot less psychedelic.