My Top Forty RADIO Odyssey
(Continued)a slice of bygone top forty radio life from
Bob Whitney
Okay! So here we are in St. Louis at Wonderful WIL.
Dan Ingram (soon to be Program Director) is the morning mayor - just like at KBOX.
Dan Ingram HATES mornings!
WIL is another low signal - sparky challenge (1430 could almost be heard in much of St. Louis) - up against KWK and Storz KXOK (which could be heard in downtown Leningrad). Actually, WIL had been a ratings contender but was progressively slipping behind the top forty competition. It was not hard to see why.
Now here's a direct quote from TALK THAT TALK the Chess Record Co. promo newsletter, September 26, 1960: -
ST. LOUIS - From Gene Davis (KWK)... "We are the leader in radio game of "follow the leader" in St. Louis. "Our station needs some real competition."
I scotch-taped that clipping to the WIL studio wall with a note: "You're on Gene, Baby!"
But, what to do?? I had taken Big Dan Ingram with me to St. Louis and had made him morning man. It didn't take me long to figure out he should be Program Director also (...had to get myself the hell off that hot seat.) I would become....(reverb, please).... THE NATIONAL PEEDEE.
Not so fast here! Big problems with WIL! Popular and very talented old staff - Jack Carney, Dick Clayton, Bob Osborne, Ed Bonner - and get this, Ingram filling an air shift recently vacated by the irreplaceable Gary Owens - (off to better things in LA holding his ear all the way.) The remaining WIL personalities "ain't gonna do no vomit-mouth top forty, kid!" And these guys were GOOD, too!
TALENTED! RENOWNED! BLESSED! (Also in the Union.)
But the Top Forty Mission had come down from Balaban-Chicago.
...It had to do with money.
There was no stopping it.
John Box was up for it!
Stan Kaplan said he could sell it!
I was their program guy.
Simple as that!
It was frightening!
But it was a very exciting proposition!IBEW Union engineers were resisting any equipment use by us for production at WIL. (We did get a MacKenzie in the rack at 3 AM one night.) But the jocks couldn't touch anything technical so Dan and I flew down to Dallas to cut bootleg promotion sounds for WIL (and for WRIT). We nearly got run out of St. Louis (if not murdered). But we overcame !!! - even took one of WIL's staunchest union guys to Mars Broadcasting a couple years later - at last a free man (broke, but free!) Well, that's another story. But to make it short, Chuck James went on to become a very big deal at CBS and wound up as a station owner.
I wore a groove between St. Louis and Dallas for several weeks. Then I got smart enough to make Chuck Benson PD of KBOX, and the Big D sound just got uniquely better and better. Early on we were very close to a Hooper tie with KLIF. I was now...(with reverb, please)...THE NATIONAL PEEDEE ...of BALABAN.
My dear brother, Don Bruce from the old Salt Lake staff, had recently passed on to KOMA in Oklahoma. I talked him out of the big OKIE signal and made him PD of our other problem, WRIT, Milwaukee (up against Bartell's WOKY). I've always believed in a little creative nepotism.
But I wasn't doing him any favors. WRIT was steeped in tradition (older ideas, people and production) worse than WIL.
And what kind of a signal? Right! Lousy! I told Don what he was up against and - after months of having given polite advice to WRIT - I wrote a straight-from-the-gut memo to the manager of the station telling him what he just plain had to do.
Months passed as I flew - station to station - on Central Airlines - DC-3's - and (dear God) on Ozark Airways. (It was a trade deal! Thanks so much, Stan !)
Old jalopy DC-3's!! ------Dallas to Tulsa to Oklahoma City to St.Louis to Chicago to Milwaukee (scraping treetops with ice on the wings) - shivering, scared, barfing - listening to airchecks - chain smoking, drinking lotsa scotch from those little bottles. Most of the airchecks also made me barf!
WIL...now there was a real barfer (top-forty-wise, at least). BIG DAN was doing a great morning show for a guy who wasn't allowed to touch, turn or click anything, and he was a wonderfully inventive program guy. But how could we make the whole clunkey, bureaucratic thing swing like KBOX?
Together Dan and I went looking for talent - gutsy, blind, idiot talent - and we found it. I clearly remember listening to a tape (I almost didn't open) from a guy out of Baton Rouge - as succulent a sound as the sweet taste of crawfish pie. And that's how Ron Lundy became Dan Ingram's "best friend".
I made Lundy the W-I-L WIL' CHILE! ...to cover KWK's Wild Child Promotion...made 'em mad enough to complain on the air and get us some more points... Dan and Ron told the excruciating story about that momentous radio event on Dan's 20th anniversary show on WABC.
We found Bob Dayton somewhere and called him Rockin' Robin Scott - a guy just crazy enough to work for us.
We got WIL sounding almost as good as KBOX. We ran shows and contests and crazy promotions up the kazoo. WIL was getting to be a fun place and the sound was too good to be true. Even the engineers got to clowning around. We were constant-flow top-forty - even did a classic marathon without breaking format. And Stan Kaplan was selling the hell out of it - big accounts. And the advertising was getting results.
WIL did VERY well thanks to air promotion spawned right out of Big D's KBOX, thank you very much. We couldn't change everybody at WIL, but we created sounds that were hard to resist. Talented Jack Carney never did do "vomit mouth" radio, but he got behind some of the excitement and appeared at our promotions.
After a while there really wasn't a lot more to do. WIL was smasho numero uno.
Hey, Gene! Sell yer spots in Leningrad!Stan Kaplan and I were somewhat stimulated by all this, so we tiptoed past John Box and deserted Balaban. We flew east and started Mars Broadcasting (syndicated top forty programming and production). We moved to Stamford, Connecticut where Stan had found venture capital from a quiet, conservative outfit called Fox, Wells and Rogers. We set up shop in a nice little neighborhood on Hope Street.
Mars was the only company with two CEO's. Our meetings got top ratings from the Hope Street neighbors; the rock music was pretty loud for that part of town. Our money people couldn't believe what they saw and heard - but - they had financed us for a reason.
FWR had somehow recently bought WSAI, Cinncinati. (Even they were smitten by the Top Forty gravy train.) I think FW&R thought Stan and I could help deal with the cultural revolution. Then they realized we were the cultural revolution. So in the next couple of years they hired attentive experts like Gene Nelson who was a terrific jock and an imaginative PeeDee.
Things went nicely. They went to Atlanta and bought WQXI and that got them manager Kent Burkhart who knew how to make ratings out of station teamwork. Kent got them people like George Burns and Charlie Murdock for both stations. That whole thing became Pacific and Southern with Kent as president and he went on to buy bunches of more stations.
But my main problem in 62 was producing Mars productions that Kaplan could sell to lots of stations. Did I send up desparate smoke signals for Big Dan back in St. Louis? Guess! (I did a Stan Kaplan on Dan.) It worked: 'Git'em up, Scout.' Ingram rode east toward his east coast home. Stamford was just 25 miles from where Big Dan was a coin collector on the toll road (Yes, he was!).
We built a great top forty style facility, hired a bunch of really wonderful people and started turning out top forty magic on tape. Stan ran everywhere a plane could fly and sold our sounds as fast as we could splice 'em together. Mars was a sensational success for over three years on over 200 stations.
But after a fantastic contribution, Dan Ingram was headed for bigger things. Mars was real close to home - only a stone's throw from Manhattan. He began to itch bigtime to get back on the air. I began to have bad dreams about losing him. It didn't help that his great voice was already blaring on WABC. Stan was selling Mars Funtests to our new friend, Hal Neal. Funtests radiated from all the ABC O&O's, but nowhere as big and loud as from WABC, New York.
You may have heard the fabulous story about how Dan spliced himself into a WABC aircheck and brazenly sneaked into ABC after hours and dropped the tape on Neal's desk. If it's true, that was the biggest favor anybody ever did for Hal Neal. I tried to make a contribution. I called Neal personally and told him how great Dan was and that he should hire him. Later, Neal thanked me. (Dan didn't need my support. But I needed to give it!)
That was the nearest I ever came to absolute self destruction. Losing Ingram was big trouble for the Martians. But, all the Keemosabees at Mars were really happy for the guy.
Dan was gone but it soon seemed like the Mars studios became a day-off hangout for every radio guy I ever knew. Whenever a visiting jock pulled into Mars, we made him voice at least one of our promos. It was fantastic. Listen to Mars tapes and hear Dayton, Lohman, Barkley, and people like Gene Nelson. Rick Sklar came around before Neal hired him at WABC. Dick Clark was there for our syndication of his radio show and so was Mike Wallace, of all people. (We were turning his old TV tapes into radio shows.)
Ron Lundy and Bob Dayton flew in on a several weekends. Needless to say it wasn't Mars they wanted to land on. They wanted WABC. At one point, both seemed to be calling Big Dan on the hour and half hour. It took awhile but Dan did it. Dayton went to WABC in 63 and Lundy in 65.
Anyhow, we sold Mars to Pepper in '64 and I went on to other pursuits:
GM of WWTC, Minneapolis (1964)
National Radio PD of Westinghouse Group W (1965-66)
GM of Westinghouse all-news KYW, Philadelphia. (1966-'67)
KYW - at last: 50,000 WATTS. But no jingles, no contests, no hits, no jocks, no fun. GM for Group W was somber...very respectable! Good money.Very VIP...but Down on the Farm where I should probably not be.
A separate chronicle will reveal the crimes and misdemeanors of the next decade which were many and varied........
There's the crazy thing that happened in Atlanta when some guys and I attempted to move top forty radio to TV in 1970. It was non-stop music video for hours on end.
Ted Turner got into the act after they locked us out of our studio and we escaped to Florida where we put the crazy show on stations all over the country including WPIX in NYC - ten years before MTV. Bob Todd, and Skinny Bobby Harper were the first TV DeeJays and RT Williams was the first video special effects genius. It was top forty on TV. We called it The Now Explosion. That story is something else...you'll see it here...so don't go 'way!
......BUT there was one more top forty adventure - perhaps the most bizarre. It was a short but crazy tour at Avco's desperate KYA San Francisco (Christmastime, 1973) - 14 years after KBOX.
KYA had been illustrious, but not in recent years. AVCO Broadcasting had taken over the hole under the Mark Hopkins Hotel where KYA had been crammed for years. (Gawd, almighty - the Bottom of the Mark.) The big poobah boss man in Cinncinati was none other than Charlie Murdock - now all suited up at AVCO.
I moved in just like the old days. My Gawd, look here! It's KBOXer Bill Holley hiding under the console. (Man, was I glad to see that guy!) and - get this: I had a tape from Ken Levine. Yup! Beaver Cleaver! Heard him in Detroit. Had to have him...and...wow, was he fresh air for San Francisco.
And Brian Roberts: HE COULD COOK!!! (still cookin' even now at Westwood One in LA) and Jimmy Jet: HE COULD FLY!!! Where are ya Jimmy Courant? We hardly knew ya!
And there were Chris Edwards, Steve Jordan, Mark Taylor, Dean Goss, John Hardy. Tough crew in a rough radio town. We named it The Rock of the Bay ! (Where does it say you can't turn a pebble into a rock?)
Here we go, folks! It's PEOPLE POWER RADIO! Tight list. Bright jingles. Hot promos. Cablecar Clusters (top five every hour.) Reverb. Happy jocks - clever stuff over music!! AND - ladies and gentlemen - The News You Can Dance To.
It was a nutty time altogether with secret tapes from the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army delivered late at night to Beaver (on duty all alone). Those scary people were listening to us when they weren't robbing banks and kidnapping Patty Hearst. It was wild!
We hired all the ferries on the bay and put tons of fans and very loud rock bands on all the decks. We really did rock that Bay. Ya we did!
Then Jimmy Jet flew a balloon -- and crashed -- on the air. I'm still cringing.
We were loud! We were full of (unplanned) surprises. It was destined to be my last big blowout with the roarin' top forty juggernaut... No signal - but if you couldn't hear us, Man, you could feel our vibrations. (At least that's what we said in the promos.)
Ofcourse, we were up against KFRC and people like Don Rose!
However, as a top forty sound, in the Spring of '74 - KYA was FIRST.
YES! WE WERE!!
Go on, fight me, Bobby Ocean! You know we nudged you guys aside for an instant in history. I tell everybody you bailed out for your '74 "Hawaiin vacation" because we moved into town. (That part's a lie - but everything else is true.) I've got airchecks!!! (You guys weren't paying a lot of attention to KYA over there at the big squirter.) Or maybe you just couldn't hear our signal downtown.
Did KYA do well with audience? Fair! - and briefly. AVCO was chickening out as top-forty waned and one depressing day they handed whatever little we had gained back to KFRC in the Fall of 1974.
Where was radio going? There were a lot of great jocks around and some fabulous sounds in places like LA, Boston, Toronto, Philly and NYC. (So. Okay, KFRC was tops in that group. But, their days were numbered, too.) FM was gaining numbers - and stations. Music was less well defined. Radio was fragmenting.
Personally, I wasn't having a lot of fun as '74 dragged on. What the hell! I might as well get a job!
Dan Ingram said on the air - then - that I had disappeared. (I just recently found what he said) "Must have fallen into a black hole!" he said on the air. Well, that's pretty close...
...there was some kind of new revolution underway. Something about Computers. I drove 50 miles from SF down to Silicon Valley. Got lost in cyberspace (Is that a Black Hole?) My next revolution: computers. Whole new deal. No reverb! I listened mostly to NPR for 25 years. Made enough money in the black hole to go back into radio if I want! (Wha'd he say?) How the hell could it be 25 years? Well, it was!
At the moment? Hey! I'm a little older - check that - a lot older (not necessarily wiser). NOT wise enough to avoid opening up a bunch of ancient boxes full of fermented top forty; I mean tons of supremely fragrant analog flux. If it's not ticking - I'll open it. (If it is ticking - you open it !)
I've got recordings of jock meetings which reveal in our own voices how nutsoid we really were. I've found clippings and pictures; embarrassing private notes; even death threats.
BUT - I've lost track of a lot of people and I know a lot of us have actually died (bunches of people).
Last year an awful coincidence occured. I was calling Roger Barkley in LA to say hello after 25 years when I found his obit - only a few days old - on the LA Times web site. I was looking for his whereabouts - not his obit.
I felt terrible. I started digging into those boxed memories and other old fandangles. One morning, I found a picture of Roger B. from way back in Salt Lake and sent it to Ricky at Reelradio. You can see it (and hear Rog) in the Jay Marks collection. I decided to look people up. I decided to do a web collection of my own since I've got stuff nobody has seen or heard for a very long time. I'm doing it.
I heard Ingram on WCBS-FM one weekend while I was riding in a cab in Manhattan (So good !), but I haven't seen Dan for nearly forty years. What a travesty! You better shape up the operation, Big Dan. Whitney's comin' to town.
Where is Stan Kaplan who went on to write top forty history as owner at Sis Radio's WAPE in Jax and BIG WAYS, Charlotte. (Whad'ya mean they sold the stations??) I was there when Stan met Sis Atlas in '63 in Chicago! She said, that day, she was looking for a roughneck like Stan. She married him! And they both got hitched to Top Forty all over again. What can I say?
They stole our stuff - ofcourse - just like Hal Neal did (sob, sob) - and all those guys had humongous signals. Gawd! How horribly unfair! What great stations you had! What champs you were! What happened to you guys??
Where did everybody go? Where's Chuckie Benson? Where's Don Shafer, Phil Nolan and June Griffin and Bob Oakes and Chuck James? Where's Pete Lund, Gene Nelson and Skinny Bobby Harper? Where did you people go?
Eventually I'll get the whole story straight about when the top forty gypsies blew in, blew out, grooved, and went mostly crazy for just a few more rating points and a free ticket to the next biggest town. (Well, something like that!)
Ofcourse, some of the big guys made it to New York, Chicago or LA. Where do you go from there? Others manned the legendary rock emporiums of the sixties and seventies and made history in Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto and you name it.
Wanna do it again?
Cheers!
Bob Whitney