Carson Interview Transcript
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Carson Interview 1 Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project Interviewee: David A. Carson Relationship to Cass Corridor: Detroit music historian, deejay Interviewer: Jared Natzke Date of Interview: April 7, 2011 Location: Purdy-Kresge Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (by phone) Natzke: This is Jared Natzke. I’m interviewing Mr. David Carson on April 7, 2011. He is the author of a few books about Detroit rock history: Grit, Noise, and Revolution is about Detroit rock and roll and Rockin’ [Down] the Dial is his earlier book about rock deejays in Detroit. So David, could you tell me a little bit about your background, about where you grew up? Carson: Sure. I was born in the city, in the city of Detroit, over on the east side, over by Chryslers, and I kind of got moved to suburban Royal Oak as a child. But I kept ties with the east side. My grandmother continued to live over there in the flat that we had lived in. I always had ties to that part of town. [I] grew up in Royal Oak, went to Helen Keller Junior High School, Dondero High School out there. Carson Interview 2 Natzke: So you eventually got into radio. When you were growing up were there certain deejays that you listened to a lot, that you looked up to, that you kind of wanted to emulate? Carson: Well, Detroit was always a really great radio town and it’s had some terrific stations and personalities, people who were on before I was listening to them whose reputations I was aware of. People like Ed McKenzie, who I had sort of flickering memories of from his television show. In the middle 1950s he had been the original “Jack the Bellboy.” He was the first big disc jockey to be followed by teenagers because he did a lot of rebellious things on the air, and that type of thing. Later on there were people like Mickey Shorr, who was a bigger than life, very flamboyant guy on the radio. And of course Robin Seymour, you want to give Robin credit because he was probably one of the very first of the white deejays to program R&B records, which morphed into what was starting to be called “rock and roll” in 1954-55, that era. Then Mickey Shorr, who was on WJBK and then WXYZ, and was a big top showman kind of thing, did a lot of controversial things, drew a lot of attention to himself. Huge reputation. Some of the other big people, other folks that my era would remember are Bud Davies from the early days of CKLW radio and television, Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan, these were the big names in the early 1960s. “Lee Alan on the Horn,” he was another guy who knew how to get people listening to his radio show. Tom Clay, who was on WJBK in the late ‘50s and later at several other stations in the area, he sort of brought a more confidential tone to Top Forty radio rather than the “Hi guys and gals!” He was more speaking to the other person across the dial and that was something you noticed. He really communicated well, really sold the music. Joel Sebastian, Lee Alan kind of picked up on that and it’s the kind of thing where if they were playing a slow rock and roll ballad, rather than introduce it in a big way they would get very mellow on the air and would be Carson Interview 3 introducing that record as if they were tuned in to what it was all about and communicating that to you. It would be very interesting. So radio went on like that through the ‘60s. We had a station, WKMH, that changed formats at the very end of 1963 and became WKNR, “Keener Radio,” and it had a shorter play list and a livelier, faster moving sound. They became the big station in the mid-‘60s. That’s probably when station image replaced individual personalities as the more dominant thing. Rather than somebody saying, “Yeah I listen to Lee Alan” somebody would probably say, “I listen to Keener [WKNR].” “Keener” may have some great deejays on it, which it did, like Dick Purtan, Bob Green, but the station itself had a more cohesive sound twenty-four hours a day. Kids said these were the rock stations but in reality they were pop music stations that played the songs that were the best sellers. So you had the Motown hits and you had the Beatles and the Rolling Stones all being played alongside Petula Clark or Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. If they had hit records that were at the Top Ten, it was all played together. So it was sort of a galvanizing effect and everybody was aware of all of the music. So that’s kind of where radio was up until 1968. Natzke: That was my impression from your books, that especially AM radio became much more polished and formulaic going on. I know some of the FM stations had started to come along such as WABX, they kind of tried to mix things up and they were very different than the radio – Carson: Well there was nowhere to go but up on FM in those days. Nobody listened to FM radio (laughs) back – Carson Interview 4 Natzke: You mentioned it was mostly elevator music, that’s what was being played – Carson: Correct! Because people listening to it were either listening in doctors offices, in the elevators, or they were elderly people who wanted soft, quiet, Montovani type music and that type of thing. In fact, if you looked at a rating sheet of the stations being rated for listenership in Detroit in 1965 there was one FM station that even showed up at the bottom (laughs). You could put all the rest of them together and they barely added up to a couple of percent of listeners. So stations didn’t even stay on the air, you could do anything on them. They were doing what AM radio had done years earlier. They might have a jazz show on for a couple of hours and then a classical music show and then a discussion program, just sort of a hodgepodge mishmash of things. So in ‘68 a station called WABX, which had been on the air in town for about seven or eight years, had tried their hand at classical and played pop music, light jazz, they did have an excellent jazz show in the evening with a guy named Jim Rockwell who was well known. But aside from that they were going nowhere. Believe it or not, they didn’t even sign on the air until nine o’clock in the morning. Natzke: (laughs) Yeah, nobody was listening. Carson: Yeah (laughs). Why bother competing with the other stations? So that was the attitude. They started fooling around, playing some of the music that you couldn’t hear on the AM Top Forty stations. Because now you had people, not only the Beatles but other artists, putting out albums and putting more effort into the albums. Before that you had Bobby Rydell having a hit Carson Interview 5 record and then the record label would rush out a Bobby Rydell album that would indeed include the hit record and twelve or eleven other cover versions: him doing a Bobby Vinton song and a Dion song (laughs). So there wasn’t much into it. But now you had people producing albums with original material or material that they had put a lot of thought into. But this music wasn’t available. You couldn’t hear it anywhere except over on your friend’s hi-fi or something. So WABX started to program a little of this and it was a mix of blues and folk music and some of the more mature rock on a show called “Troubadour.” And the response was terrific so “why don’t we play some more?” I had done a little work over there myself, a little fill-in work, so I remember what the atmosphere was like at that time at and it was just ripe for a change. I think it was around February ‘68 they went full blast with that and there was this whole maturing audience of people who had grown up listening to the AM Top Forty rock stations that now were embracing this. “Wow, what is this music and all these album cuts?” And there didn’t have to be a jingle and a commercial between every record. There was still a big mass audience for AM Top Forty radio. It was fast, it was exciting, they played the hits. But now there was something to serve a different audience, and that’s where that came along. And WABX, besides the music, they started to reflect more of the interests of that growing Woodstock era, sort of the community of people, the political views and such. Natzke: One of my favorite stories that you related in Grit, Noise, and Revolution was when WABX got an advance copy of the [Beatles] “White Album” before anyone had heard it and were playing it live on the air. They received a call from the record company from England to stop immediately. I thought that was very indicative of what kind of station WABX was. Carson Interview 6 Carson: Yeah, that was an exciting time for them because before that, as one of my old friends who was working there at the time said, it was always one of the big AMs that got maybe an advance acetate of a new [Rolling] Stones single or something but here was an album they had their hands on.