Newsmen for local television stations came to WNEW to cover the story. Some, like CBS’s Tony Guida, came to express their sorrow on our airwaves. He was elegantly turned out in a stylish trench coat and suit, but he sat on the floor of the studio next to Martinez, listening and preparing to read a poem he thought might help to ameliorate the grief. Time seemed to move in slow motion and although we were mouthing the words on the air, we couldn’t accept the reality that John Lennon was dead.
The shooting cast a pall on the entire holiday season. There was no joy, no peace on earth. The following Sunday, the station went off the air for a moment of silence, followed by a specially commissioned live performance by a former E Street Band keyboardist, David Sancious, in a beautifully played outpouring of melancholy, a variation on “Across the Universe.” As the last note reverberated over the spare stage of the Capitol Theater, we told ourselves it was time to put away our grief and celebrate the man’s life and all the happiness he’d brought us, but we were unable to do so for many months thereafter. The senseless killing left a scar on our souls that still invokes pangs of anguish today whenever we relive the events of that cold winter’s night.
I Love L.A.
By 1980, things were changing at upper management at Metromedia. Owner John Kluge was sold on the idea that cellular telecommunications was going to be the cash cow of the future, and to that end took the company private so that he could have the freedom to maneuver his assets in that direction. As one of his right-hand men, George Duncan was shifted from radio to Metromedia Telecommunications, the newly formed division created to acquire cellular properties. Former WNEW news director and KRLD general manager Carl Brazell took over the radio division, along with Vicky Callahan, who’d worked under Duncan at corporate. Brazell soon made the move that Duncan had resisted for so many years—he hired a consultant. Lee Abrams was brought in to advise the entire group.
Sam Bellamy’s loose hold on KMET had allowed the station to sink into the nether regions—under a two share. The punk-rocker KROQ, run by Rick Carroll, and Tommy Hadges’s AOR outlet, KLOS, were beating it handily. Howard Bloom had ascended to the general manager’s chair at KMET replacing L. David Moorhead. He immediately sought to put his own stamp on the station.
Bloom had dark hair and intense green eyes, and was a touchy-feely sort. He wanted to be deeply involved in the psyche of all his players and worked very hard, the first to arrive and the last to leave every day. The short, slightly overweight Bloom believed strongly in group dynamics and spent hours locked in his office conferring with the jocks and salespeople. He’d always gotten along well with Michael Harrison, and quickly came to the conclusion that the station enjoyed its best days when Harrison had an active hand in programming.
Michael’s participation at KMET had pretty much dwindled to his hosting
Harrison’s Mike
on Saturday mornings. Although he still consulted, his advice was seldom heeded. His own life was going through some changes. His acrimonious breakup with partner Bob Wilson in 1978 had led him to exit
Radio and Records
and form his own tip sheet called
Goodphone Weekly,
as in “you give good phone.”
Goodphone
differed from the trade papers of the day in the way it charted album tracks. A traditional chart would list the top albums, but not address the priority each cut was given. Harrison charted the tracks as if they were singles, before they were released as such by the labels. Therefore, you might have three songs from
Exile on Main Street
in the top ten, even though only one was the actual Top-Forty hit single. He also came up with the term “JAZZZ,” or triple-Z jazz. This heralded the coming of Kenny G, Grover Washington, Enya, and the next phase of the melodic cool-jazz wave that the new-age crowd savors.
For his part, Wilson invented the term “CHR” to replace Top Forty. Contemporary hit radio more accurately reflected the genre—it had been decades since any station actually played forty current records. A cold war existed between Wilson and Harrison, as the two former friends became the bitterest of rivals. Wilson even fought Harrison over ownership of the term “AOR.”
By 1980, Harrison had sold
Goodphone Weekly
to
Billboard,
along with its systems and conventions. He gave that trade magazine a blueprint on restructuring for the eighties and consulted for several radio stations on the side. Harrison also hosted
The Great American Radio Show,
a countdown of AOR hits, one of Westwood One’s first syndicated programs. But the workaholic in him was not used to this somewhat lighter load, so when Bloom approached him to take over programming at KMET, he couldn’t resist one last shot at restoring the “Mighty MET” to its former glory. He didn’t relish working with a consultant—but he had no personal animosity toward Abrams, and their philosophies didn’t seem that far apart.
Their plans for KMET were in direct opposition, however. Harrison believed that new wave, heavy metal, and traditional AOR bands could all work on the same station. He was alone in this belief, since the consultants posited that each one of these subgenres had distinctly different fans. They believed that by mixing them together at one station, no one would be served. Harrison won out with Bloom on this point, but his neck was definitely in the guillotine if his instincts proved to be wrong. He needed results and he needed them fast. He assembled a staff, hiring his right-hand woman from
Goodphone,
Christine Brodie, as his assistant. He elevated Cynthia Fox, a beautiful blond protégée, to do mornings with hippie newsman Pat “Paraquat” Kelley. Jeff Gonzer hosted afternoons and Jim Ladd was on at night. They were all encouraged to be wacky and outrageous and play only the songs Harrison placed at their command.
Within one ratings book, KMET catapulted to a four-plus share and surpassed KROQ and KLOS. Harrison had given the audience credit for being broad-minded in their tastes and willing to accept all forms of rock, contrary to what the consultants believed. Harrison played much more heavy metal than anyone thought would work, devoting fully a quarter of the playlist to Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Ted Nugent, Scorpions, and the like. With this, he blended the Go-Go’s, Dave Edmunds, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Missing Persons, and the best of the new wavers. He added a healthy dollop of Journey, Kansas, the Rolling Stones, and the Eagles and came up with a musical stew unlike any other in the country. He never fell into the trap of eliminating subgenres as long as he featured the best and most accessible songs from each. He spent a lot of time hanging out in video-game parlors, and his informal research gleaned a firsthand look at what his audience wanted.
In an interesting programming tack, Harrison would commission his production department to design elaborate promos, sometimes lasting as long as three minutes, highlighting the premiere date of a greatly anticipated new album on KMET. Much as one would promote a motion picture with trailers, the highly produced announcements would feature snippets from songs and bill the individual musicians like movie stars. Abrams and Harrison did share their cinematic vision for what radio should be.
KMET was very publicity oriented and involved itself in television cross-promotions as the music-video era dawned. Their street billboards were innovative, sometimes deliberately placed upside down so that people would talk about them. Michael finally reached an uneasy rapprochement with Bob Wilson, who chronicled his success at KMET in a feature story in
Radio and Records.
The two men had seen too much water flow under the bridge to become friends again, but they were able to resume professional courtesies.
But despite the early and continued success, Carl Brazell at corporate headquarters was not content with just defeating his two rock competitors. He had his eye on Rick Dees and the Top Forty station KIIS. Dees, the creator of “Disco Duck,” was a huge phenomenon in Los Angeles in the early eighties and was pulling double-digit morning shares, leading his station to continual market dominance. When Brazell asked Harrison how to achieve Rick Dees’s numbers, he replied, “Simple. Hire Rick Dees.”
His answer was not meant to be sarcastic. He had realistically appraised the situation and knew that if KMET tinkered with what they were doing just to chase Dees, their current success would be lost and they’d only be another pale imitator.
The intense pressure to increase profits filtered downward—Brazell pushed Bloom, who pressed Harrison. Burkhardt/Abrams had been trying to convince the general manager that too much heavy metal was the main reason the station couldn’t achieve KIIS-type ratings. Bloom was very supportive of Harrison and was grateful for the growth the station had shown. He thought it unfair that management was exerting so much stress on KMET to carry the load for the other less successful stations in the chain. But Brazell was paying the consultants for their advice and they had his ear, with more frequency and persuasion than Harrison and Bloom could exert from three thousand miles away. So Abrams scheduled a meeting with Harrison to try to change the dynamic of the station so that it could challenge Dees’s Top Forty powerhouse. That meeting would decide the future of the radio station, one way or another.
Badlands
The night of John Lennon’s death was symbolic in that it illustrated what WNEW-FM could still do as a progressive radio station, how we could galvanize a community in grief to warm itself around our fire. But it also signified the end of an era, and things were to go downhill from there in a fairly rapid fashion. Now that George Duncan had departed the radio division for Kluge’s new cellular company and Carl Brazell and Vicky Callahan were running things, neither seemed to be big fans of Mel Karmazin. By 1980, Mel was general manager of both WNEW-AM and FM, but was ready to take on more responsibility within the company. When the general manager job at Kluge’s WNEW-TV opened up, Mel was the logical candidate to ascend to the position. The company didn’t see it that way, and for Mel it was a clear signal, knowing that he’d gone as far as he could within the current political structure of Metromedia. He set about seeking other options, and soon found himself with an offer to become the president of Infinity, a small radio company that owned three stations at the time, founded by two ex-Kluge employees. Mel would be paid $125,000 plus stock and given a red Mercedes convertible to drive.
Rather than immediately name a successor in early 1981, Callahan took over the station in an attempt to understand how it worked on a day-to-day basis and why its ratings lagged behind some of the more successful stations in the chain. She also had to quell the chaos created with the departure of Karmazin, who had been a driving force behind the station for five years. The two main candidates for Mel’s job were Tom Chuisano, a young sales manager in from Chicago, and Mike Kakoyiannis, who had also served in sales.
After some initial feeling out, it became obvious that I could have the program director’s job on more than a de facto basis, and that Callahan was less worried about ruffling feathers than in giving the station a more conventional structure. Scott could be given an honorary title and his influence was always a factor in anything the station did, but he didn’t want the hands-on responsibility of doing some of the nasty work that had to be done—instituting some kind of music control.
With Vicky Callahan, I attended my first focus groups and met with Dwight Douglas, who was assigned as a consultant to our station by Burkhardt/Abrams. It was clear that the station wasn’t going to remain free form, and I could either take the job and try to formulate a structure that would allow us to stay true to our roots, or they could bring in an outsider who would likely trash the place. I never gave any thought to not taking the position, although I should have. Some members of the staff, who already regarded me as a scoundrel, would only grow to vilify me more as they resisted the changes I knew were inevitable.
Mike Kakoyiannis was given the GM job and I officially became program director in 1981. The first step was to adjust the music, and we came up with an unobtrusive way to do that. Similar to what KSAN had tried with their red-dot system, we designated sixteen songs for hot rotation by placing red stickers on the fronts of the records. They would go into the rack, and twice every hour, each jock would have to play one of these songs. After playing the record, they were to put the album in the back of the bin, and couldn’t use it again until it moved to the front. The DJs were not forced to play the first record—they could dig three or four deep if they didn’t like the selection. This only ensured that the top songs would be played three times a day, something we probably were doing already. But we also could track if certain jocks were avoiding certain records, and react accordingly.
However mild this system was, it effectively marked the end of commercial free-form radio in New York, and given the fact that KMET, KSAN, WBCN, WMMR, and all the other Metromedia outlets had instituted systems years before, we were considered the last holdout in major-market radio.
At the meeting announcing the system, most of the jocks sat ashen faced, knowing that they were witnessing the end of an era. We expected a negative reaction, but most were strangely passive, as if they had seen it coming and realized that they were powerless to stop it. Some were expecting a more draconian format, but I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
We knew that Scelsa would be the biggest objector but we were prepared to deal with whatever consequences the change inspired. Vin dismissively regarded Pete Larkin and Jim Monaghan (my music director) as “Neer’s pissants,” so I knew any attempt made to give the music stationality would not be taken lightly.
As the gathering broke up, Scelsa walked right by me without so much as a glance and asked to speak with Kakoyiannis alone. It was déjà vu for Vin, as the events of ten years earlier repeated themselves. While in the privacy of Mike’s corner office, Scelsa quit, using his terse WPLJ abdication speech, “I’m outta here.” But time had caught up with the boy who cried wolf and his resignation was accepted. The
Butch and the Brick Show
was over, although Morrera stayed on in the safety of the overnights. Vin reconsidered and attempted to rescind his resignation a week later, but still wasn’t willing to abide by the rules. If we were serious about competing, we couldn’t allow freedom for one and not the others, so Scelsa was irrevocably out.
We couldn’t afford to play games anymore. The company was serious about boosting ratings, as I knew directly from Harrison at KMET and as KSAN found out the hard way. After Bonnie Simmons left the San Francisco station, the promotions director, Abby Melamed, took over the programming and tried to instill some discipline. She didn’t last too long in the position. Tom Yates, a friend and disciple of Michael Harrison, tried to clean up the mess, but it was too late. Low ratings caused managementto blow it up and change it into a country station. Until the end, theystill retained a small cadre of intensely loyal listeners who remembered its grandeur. On the day they switched formats, a group of them erected a tombstone bearing the legend ksan—rip. At its base was a pile of cow manure.
The same factors that killed KSAN were at work at WNEW-FM and we were wary of suffering the same fate. Drugs were the most insidious. Jocks were doing coke while on the air on a regular basis, and even some of our major players were guilty of staying out all night on a binge, and taking quaaludes to come down. Muni was just drinking, and it never seemed to affect his air work. Pete and Dennis were straight arrows. But almost everyone else, at one time or another, let the grip of drugs distort their reality.
Why? Never having been part of the drug culture, I’ve never really understood it. Since drugs were so easily available from record promoters or just industry hangers-on at little or no cost, I guess the temptation was just too much to resist, with everyone in the immediate circle doing it.
Marty Martinez recalls a night at John Scher’s rock club, the Ritz, where Iggy Pop was performing. David Bowie entered the club, clad in a dark trench coat, long hair swept back from his pale face, looking like a young S.S. officer. He flitted around the room, kissing several of the male patrons on the lips before visiting Iggy in his backstage dressing room between sets. After spending several minutes alone with Pop, he emerged and pranced off with his entourage.
Iggy had done a dynamite opening set, but when he came out for the late show, he seemed transformed. Half of his face was grotesquely painted green, and he appeared to be on something powerful. He staggered to the mic and struggled through his opening number.
“Thas it,” he slurred. “Thas all I’m doing unless you pay me. You want more, you gotta pay me.”
The late-night clubgoers threw money at the stage—dollar bills, coins, whatever they had.
“Right,” he said, and stumbled through another song. “I need more money.” As the well-lubricated crowd reacted poorly to this appeal, his mind leapt to another subject. “How’d you like to see my dick?” he asked the shocked crowd. Raucous applause and catcalls broke out, as Pop lowered his leather pants to fulfill his promise in front of the astonished audience, many of whom were impressed by the size of his equipment. Jim Morrison had to flee the country for doing less.
Although this was a high point of outrageousness, the club scene became a staple with the jocks at WNEW. Their faces were their backstage passes, and they were glad-handed by promoters who were happy to cater to their every pharmaceutical whim. This led to ego problems, which had a hand in the station’s undoing.
Surrounded by sycophants, the jocks thought they were radio gods. They saw their every program as inviolable art that was beyond the reproach of these barbarians who only saw radio as a business and wanted to make money. When Dwight Douglas of Burkhardt/Abrams first addressed the group, he was met with resistance at first, and then open defiance.
Douglas began his speech with a premise that he believed rhetorical, and he assumed it would be accepted by acclamation without debate.
“Let’s face it, the reason we’re all here is to make money. For ourselves, for the company—that’s the bottom line. We’re in business to make money. And the way to make money is by getting ratings. That’s as simple as it gets, right?”
No one argued, but reading the faces of the staff I could tell they disagreed to varying extents. At one extreme there was Pete Larkin, who had given me his radio philosophy for the eighties in parable form shortly after he came aboard. He related a story he had heard about the program director of DC-101, the top AOR station in Washington. The man was being wooed by WHFS, the free-form station in nearby Maryland. Although they couldn’t pay him what he was making at DC-101, his suitor had avoided the subject of compensation scrupulously and was extolling the freedom his jocks had. He wasn’t impressed by the pitch and asked, “What’s the figure?”
The recruiter ignored him and proceeded to talk about how he would be free to play anything, a side of Frank Zappa if he wanted. He continued on about the cultural importance that WHFS held among the rock community until the PD finally burst out impatiently, “Look, what’s the figure? Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, I don’t care. What’s the figure?”
Although Larkin, Elsas, Fornatale, and Muni would much rather play Lynyrd Skynyrd than Leonard Bernstein, they knew that their jobs rested on making money for Metromedia. They saw their role as putting together a program that would attract and please listeners, even if they didn’t love every record they played. This was reality. The others on the staff wanted to create works of art, even if the numbers weren’t sufficient to justify their salaries.
So Dwight Douglas’s gambit was rejected out of hand by half his audience and it only got worse. When he stressed the value of preparation—making the point that Johnny Carson would never walk in five minutes before
The Tonight Show
was set to tape and wing it—he asked why radio should be viewed any differently. Every time the mic was opened, the jock should have a clear objective. If it was to tell a story, the story should have an ending. A joke should have a punch line. A music rap should have a point.
Dave Herman challenged him in front of the entire group. Dave’s argument was that this form of radio had thrived for fifteen years flying by the seat of its pants, and that Douglas obviously had no understanding of what made it great. Douglas replied that Dave was making several times what he had made fifteen years ago and that now there was a highly paid support staff at the station. There was also smart competition, who used extensive research to program their station to optimal advantage. Things were different now.
Dave said that to preplan everything would ruin the spontaneity that made the station come alive. Others chimed in their support and soon we had a full-fledged Boston Tea Party on our hands.
I stepped in and said, “I think what Dwight is saying is not that you have to script everything, but you should practice in your head where your rap is going before you actually say it. Just decide in advance if what you’re about to talk about is worthwhile so you can eliminate the bad stuff.”
“What’s wrong with scripting if that’s what’s necessary?” Douglas interjected.
He’d uttered the magic phrase. “To be continued. Just some food for thought,” I said, preempting any pelting with rotten vegetables, wrapping up the meeting. The idea of having the consultant address the group personally was a complete failure. Our objective was to show the staff that Burkhardt/Abrams didn’t have horns and weren’t responsible for personally destroying the medium. The meeting only served to strengthen that perception among the unconverted. Perhaps if we had heeded our own advice and rehearsed with Douglas, we could have headed off the revolution by phrasing things more diplomatically. It was as if the staff was still speaking Russian and the Abrams people had read the English translation and found it wanting.
The jocks who considered their judgments sacrosanct were guilty of the same hubris that KSAN’s staff suffered from—hanging out and drugging every night with their clubgoing peers was distorting their view of the general listening audience. Avant-garde hipsters might love Iggy Pop, but the majority of WNEW’s audience was not as impressed.
WBCN in Boston had similar fast times, but their ratings during this period thrived despite the pharmaceutical consumption. Mark Parenteau relates a story about John Belushi, who was a huge fan of the station, listening to it as he vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard. While in town, he would hang with Peter Wolf and David Kennedy, the late son of Robert. David was utterly charming and sweet but liked to party in the rock world, using his connections to get him backstage at all the major shows. He brought Belushi to Boston to make a presentation for the Kennedy Center’s Honor Society, at a time when John’s career was ablaze.
Animal House
had just been released and had swept the nation by storm.
Saturday Night Live
was creating brilliant satire with its original cast. Belushi was on top of the world but both he and David were hopelessly attracted to the worst combinations of drugs imaginable. Their tragic overdoses were no surprise to those who knew of their proclivities. Before the Honor Society event, Kennedy and Belushi visited Parenteau’s afternoon show on WBCN and snorted everything they could get their hands on, sharing their bounty with their on-air host. Belushi joined Mark for a four-hour radio free-for-all, taking calls, playing some unreleased Keith Richards tracks that John had gotten his hands on, and breaking every FCC rule in the book. Scattered throughout the festivities were many of the seven deadly words you can’t say on the radio. But since it involved a Kennedy in Boston, and since it was John Belushi, the biggest comic actor of his generation at the time, it was all right.