Meet the New Boss
An unwitting contributor to this cataclysmic shift away from AM was WABC radio king Rick Sklar, whose tight format and unrelenting promotions were starting to be out of step with the changing times. With the Beatles leading the British Invasion, America was liberated from the pop confections of the early sixties. The movement spawned an awareness of challenging musical innovations that couldn’t be heard on conventional radio. Scott Muni saw this happening and was increasingly at odds with Sklar on how to better serve the still substantial WABC following.
Scottso had always been a big fan of music. At age fifteen, he had wangled his way into a Fats Domino recording session. He watched in awe as the producer explained to Domino how the song went, since no one there read music. He hummed the melody and patiently mapped out the phrasing.
“You made . . . me cry . . . when you said . . . good-bye . . .”
He then talked to the sax player about how to play the instrumental bridge. Take after take, they rehearsed until they were able to perform the song flawlessly. There were no multitrack recorders in studios then; the musicians all sang and played into one central microphone. The slightest mistake by any of the players meant the whole song had to be rerecorded, unless it happened at a spot where an undetectable tape splice could be made. There was a bottle on the floor that the musicians passed around occasionally, a fringe benefit to the twenty-dollar session fee they each received. “Ain’t That a Shame” became a huge hit, and Muni felt that he’d witnessed history.
In any case, he was hooked on rock and roll music, quite unlike the sentiment he attributed to his boss. Muni thought that if polka music suddenly became fashionable, Sklar would be equally comfortable programming it.
Tensions escalated between the two men, and things came to a head when Sklar accused Muni, in front of his peers, of receiving payola. On that Tuesday in the spring of 1964, Muni came to the now pro forma music meeting excited by a new record. It was the latest single from his friend Frankie Valli, whose group was one of the few American bands to stay on top through the British onslaught. The Four Seasons, led by Valli’s soaring falsetto leads, retained the flavor of the old doo-wops, while incorporating more inventive production techniques. But this one was a little different: plodding, almost dirgelike, and very slow getting to the hook. It was called “Rag Doll.”
Only Muni realized that the song was special and submitted it for approval at the music meeting. But now his boss was implying that the only people who would appreciate “Rag Doll” were those who had a financial stake in it. His fellow jocks stood by silently, leaving Muni to twist in the wind.
His integrity sullied, Muni marched into Sklar’s office and was summarily fired for his defiant attitude. The move was not without risk to WABC. Rick Sklar had been at the helm for less than a year, and WMCA and WINS were still tough competitors. If Muni defected to one of them, it could hurt WABC in the long run. But Sklar had such an aversion to the mere hint of payola, plus a distrust of Muni’s easy relationship with record promoters, that he reasoned he could use those arguments to justify the move to his superiors. Certainly, it made sense to move the popular and more teen-oriented Morrow into Muni’s early-evening slot. He believed that his staff was still the strongest and could weather any desertion. It also told the other jocks who was boss, much like a football coach might send a message to his team by punishing a star player. So he went about the business of restructuring the all-American team, sans Muni.
The Federal Communications Commission was coincidentally passing the duopoly rule, by a 5–2 margin, that would radically change the face of broadcasting. Although rejected by many as a bureaucratic proposal that would never take root, a few forward-thinking proprietors of commercial FMs weighed their options. Chief among them was RKO, a conglomerate encompassing the famed motion picture company, General Tire and Rubber, and a string of radio and television stations, among them WOR and WOR-FM in New York, where free-form radio was born on commercial airwaves.
WOR-FM began the day on July 30, 1966, with the Troggs’ raucous anthem “Wild Thing,” not with the dulcet tones of longtime WOR morning host John Gambling. The station was automated temporarily until new jocks could be signed under a revised AFTRA (American Federation of Radio and Television Artists) contract. “Temporarily” turned out to be almost three months.
Finding disc jockey talent wasn’t a problem. Scott Muni, after trying his hand for a year at running a hip music nightclub, was a star player and a radio free agent. Murray the K had been dislodged from his
Swinging Soiree
as WINS decided to go all news. And there was an interesting chap named Bill Mercer, aka Rosko, who’d knocked around several stations on both coasts. By October of 1966, the labor issues were settled and Scott Muni was doing afternoons with Murray the K ruling the early evening hours on WOR-FM.
Some dispute that WOR-FM was free form at all, citing restrictions that the jocks were under and the preponderance of Top Forty music played. But in 1966, musicians had yet to break free of the yoke of three-minute singles. Albums were just becoming the dominant form of record sales, but they were still mainly a collection of potential singles with B-sides that were not considered “commercial” enough to hit the AM airwaves. At the very beginning, no one could just play whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The payola scandals were not so distant a memory as to allow that kind of freedom for DJs. But there were listening sessions where a programmer would sit in with the jocks and approve a stack of records that had been brought in. As the days went by, management began to trust the jocks, convinced that their reasons for airing the songs were altruistic, not because they were being paid to do so. Within weeks, the station
was
totally free form.
When WOR-FM started playing “Society’s Child” by Janis Ian, many musicians and record executives took notice. AM radio wouldn’t touch the record for a number of reasons, chief among them that the subject matter was about a teenage interracial love affair. At over five minutes, it was longer than conventional singles, and who was Janis Ian anyway? She didn’t even record for a major label. The song garnered so much reaction that Ian was invited to the studio for a lengthy interview, another no-no on AM radio.
More and more, WOR-FM looked to differentiate itself from Top Forty. They still had jingles, although their production was much more subtle and understated than the exciting PAMS packages that WABC was still using. They merely acted as a buffer between songs that didn’t sound compatible, or as a gentle reminder of the call letters. Since commercial announcements were few and far between, jocks weren’t compelled to speak between every record: They could program lengthy sets of music. This led to another dilemma. If each song wasn’t a separate entity but more a component of a greater whole, there needed to be some tangible reason for linking them together. Thus came about the art of the segue.
The simplest reason to group songs came from Scottso. He called them “miniconcerts” or “Muni-concerts.” He would select three or more recordings from the same artist, often from the same album, and bunch them together. Muni could go fifteen to twenty minutes before announcing what he’d played. This created an added, perhaps unintentional benefit. Since listeners at the time were used to having songs identified immediately before or after they were played, they were now forced to listen longer to discover what they’d just heard. Since ratings are based on not only the number of individuals tuned in at a given time but how long they listen, WOR-FM might garner higher ratings as a result.
Obviously, the miniconcert had its limitations. If one disliked the Rolling Stones and knew that Muni would be playing not just one song but five, the temptation to turn the dial would be great. You also needed bands that had a wide selection of good songs. If you anticipated that every time Scottso played a set of Beatles, the same five songs would be aired, audiences would soon tire of the repetition. Other reasons to segue were needed.
Thematic sets provided one answer. These were songs that dealt with the same subject and/or shared common words in the title—the overused “rain” sets born of that era, simply stringing together a brace of tunes about the weather. One could play the same songs by different artists, like Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” segued with Bob Dylan’s original. Another set might consist of Dylan material performed by others. Later in the decade, musical family trees could be examined, like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Hollies, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Broadcasters with good ears found musical cues: songs in the same key, or with similar chord structures. There are also songs that mesh well together—the closing drumbeats of one song flow seamlessly into the opening percussion of another. These became the most prevalent segues because the opportunities were so extensive.
In the summer of 1967, the Beatles released
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
giving birth to the concept album. On many a night, the Fifth Beatle, Murray the K, would play an entire side of the masterwork. Uninterrupted album sides became popular programming, especially as more artists began to link their songs together in the manner of FM DJs.
It became incumbent upon the jock to have vast knowledge of music, something that Top Forty DJs didn’t need or didn’t have. It was like homework for the schoolchild—every day, a jock would take new releases home to sample and select songs for upcoming shows. In 1966, this was a large but not Herculean task, since the number of albums by rock artists was still at a manageable level. The success of FM changed that, as more record companies sought performers who could turn out quality album tracks that might not qualify as singles.
Unlike AM radio, where morning drive was where the money was, evenings were the place to be on FM. Baby boomers were now reaching college age, and dorm rooms in early 1967 acted as huge amplifiers echoing Murray’s show. His taste was almost unerring on undiscovered performers, and students looked forward to the introduction of fresh new talent. Rating services gave Murray the K audience shares ranging between 3 and 4 percent during his stint at WOR, which was unheard of for FM, and competitive with most AM stations.
But all was not quiet on the management front. RKO was still uneasy with disc jockeys holding so much power. They also pointed to uneven ratings and felt that although the programming could be uplifting at times, it bogged down at others. As the station began to gain revenue, the star jocks wanted their piece of the action: The low pay scale AFTRA had negotiated was already beginning to chafe. Even though FM was making money for the first time, it still was dwarfed by what its AM sisters were pulling in. And RKO General was having even more success with its West Coast FM outlets doing BOSS (a hip expression of the time, the equivalent of “fab” or “gear,” meaning the greatest or coolest) radio, and eventually decided to allow the man responsible for that format to control the programming at WOR.
His name was Bill Drake. Drake was born Philip T. Yarborough and like most programmers began as a disc jockey. He worked at several stations around the country before becoming program director of KYA in San Francisco. He dreamed of running a chain of radio stations, and to this end partnered with Gene Chenault. They acquired several California stations as clients, but it was the success of KGB in San Diego that captured RKO’s attention.
Drake-Chenault were able to convince RKO to put them in charge of KHJ (which originally stood for kindness, happiness, and joy) in Los Angeles. Today, the idea that a station in such a major market could be experimental is absurd, but Drake perfected his BOSS radio formula there, working with Ron Jacobs, the hands-on program director. With legendary jocks Robert W. Morgan and the “Real” Don Steele leading the way, KHJ was an instant success.
Drake’s talent was not so much in inventing a format, but in taking the best of what others had done before and distilling it into his own formula, insisting on precise execution. Drake saw himself as a master architect who hired other top craftsmen to execute his plans. Chenault also helped him foster an image that was to serve him well, that of a powerful, reclusive figure shrouded in mystery. Many of the programmers who worked with him never met him in person, and carried on few telephone conversations with him. He insisted on absolute control of any property he consulted, although he used his dictatorial powers sparingly.
He lived in posh Bel Air in a luxurious Spanish-style mansion reputed to have twenty-four telephone lines. He rarely granted interviews or appeared in public. Much like Howard Hughes, he traded on the image of the all powerful Oz, one who could make or break careers on his slightest whim. He arranged to be able to monitor any of his stations from his villa, and had a direct line to the control room of each. Disc jockeys lived in fear of a “hotline” call from the mysterious Drake. One could picture him—tall and lanky, relaxing by his pool, surrounded by tanned California beauties, arbitrarily dialing up a station in Boston or New York and exorcising something or someone he didn’t like. This was largely an image he took advantage of, not the reality. By all accounts, Drake is a soft-spoken, modest Southerner by nature.
Chenault, however, fueled his legend. Many employees left the company frustrated at how Drake had received credit for their hard work and innovation. Indeed, within Drake’s framework, individual program directors had wide authority over music and promotions, as long as they stuck to the basic formula. It wasn’t hard to identify a Drake-formatted station. The sound was uniform and clean, with smooth DJs who could have been from Anywhere, U.S.A. The jingle packages were spare, merely the frequency, call letters, and occasionally the jock’s name. When Drake approached a major jingle company about fashioning such simple fare, they refused, telling him it would never be effective. So Drake contacted the Johnny Mann Singers, brought them into a studio, and produced jingles for KHJ himself.