Music Sucked, And Radio Sucked, And Then Music Didn’t Suck But Radio Still Sucked, And Then What Happened

You know how it works with the media. Something new, and maybe good, comes along and those damned programming executives replicate it, duplicate it and constipate it until what was new is now so everywhere that you get sick of it. Look at “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” ABC was at the bottom of the television ratings charts when they found a British show that might be successful over here, and would cost hardly anything to produce. So they got Regis Philbin, some fact researchers and some stage and lighting designers, and they put it on the air. It became an instant smash success, so they put it on several times a week until everyone got sick of it and the ratings crashed. Or look at so-called “Reality Television.” Let’s look at “Survivor.” Again, a British import and again very inexpensive to produce. There were no actors or writers to pay, no sets to build, no soundstages to pay for, and they tried it out and BAM! Instant success- which led to numerous instant clones until all those derivatives clogged all the channels. Every time someone found a successful formula, someone else cloned it or ratcheted-it up a notch to make it more sensational. Reality shows became ratings bonanzas for the networks, and then even the cable channels started producing their own reality shows. Again, they were inexpensive and therefore within the budgets of the cable channels, and soon almost every channel had its own reality series. Some of them, admittedly, were actually sort of good, and the best thing for the broadcasters was that once a viewer got hooked on their show, they were locked in for the run of the show. Advertisers loved it, and that is always the bottom line. That’s how it works in media, and music and radio are part of the system. How far back should we go? To the Big Bands when Frank Sinatra was cloned to front other bands? How about back to the ‘50’s, and a visit with Sam Phillips, a ‘til-then unremarkable owner of a small recording service, a producer of records, both sung and spoken-word, in Memphis Tennessee. Black, or “race” music was exciting, but this was before Integration, and there was no way that black-originated-and-performed music was going to make its way onto mainstream radio and into record stores. His Sun Records was a nondescript studio that had had no impact on the music scene, but Phillips was not without ambition. One day he’d remarked to his secretary, Marion Keisker, that if he could find a white boy who could sing like a black boy, he could make a million dollars. He came close. Eventually. There came the day when Phillips needed a singer for a demo that he wanted to cut, but the singer he had booked was a no-show. They were stuck until Ms. Keisker remembered a shy kid who came in to cut a song for his mother’s birthday several months back, and she recommended that Phillips call this kid, this Presley kid, and let him cut the track. You know the rest, except to say that Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA and the infamous Colonel Tom Parker for $35,000. He wouldn’t recoup the other $965,000 until decades later, and that would be in memories of those days with the nascent King of Rock ‘n Roll. We all know that Elvis Presley was a sensation and an instant success, which of course meant that he had a slew of imitators and would-be Kings. Pretty soon, the market was flooded with the imitators and pretty soon after that, Elvis was his own also-ran. The market was flooded with watered-down imitators like Bobby Rydell and Fabian and Frankie Avalon and on and on. In fact, Fabian was a kid sitting on a stoop in Philadelphia when a record producer saw him and liked his looks. That he couldn’t sing, the producer believed, could be overcome. The important thing was that he looked the part. The new music, like the old, had became a product. That the floodgates also opened for black artists benefited us all, no doubt, but there, too, the market created imitators and look-alikes. You know all this, right? Well, that’s what happened to radio, too. After the Second World War, the Big Bands of the 30’s and 40’s had run their course. They were too big and too expensive. New, stripped-down bands were making inroads into popular culture, and this opened the door for the fusion of country, R & B, Blues and Gospel that became known as Rock ‘n Roll. At first, in 1955, when rock music became a big thing, radio stations that played it called their format “Top Forty,” which was all about the hits. They had a very limited playlist, certainly less than fifty songs, played over and over. This formula was discovered when a radio station owner noticed, while waiting in a diner for a friend, that the patrons played the same songs over and over, ignoring all the other songs on the jukebox. Then he watched as their waitress got off work and put some coins from her tip money into the jukebox, and what song did she choose? Did she choose any other song than the one played most regularly during her shift? No, she chose the very song that had been played all night by her customers. The station owner asked her why she played that song, and she answered, “because I like it.” He thereupon dedicated his station to the playing of the top twenty songs, and that format was an instant success. Then others expanded the Top Twenty format into the Top Forty, and the success continued. The famous Top Forty format was born in that diner, and spread via radios across the American landscape.* After the initial blast of Presley energy, the hits got diluted into increasingly useless pap, and the music on the radio stagnated from the late ‘50’s through the early ‘60’s. There were some highlights and innovations, like the Beach Boys, a few others, and their inevitable clones and imitators. Then the Beatles came to America and blew away the cobwebs of American musical complacency. Of course, knowing as we do of what to expect from any infusion of new energy, we are not surprised to find the field was suddenly inundated with English Beatles imitators and wannabes. A few stuck around and made music for years. But most couldn’t sustain either their novelty or their ability to produce valuable music. New band after new band fell by the wayside after a hit or two, and music seemed to be readying itself to fall into another fallow period. But the Beatles and the Stones and Bob Dylan were writing their own music, and it turned out to be music that mattered. For the Beatles, the music mattered more after Bob Dylan, hearing their “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” and listening to them sing “I can’t hide, I can’t hide,” but hearing “I get high, I get high,” got them stoned on pot for their first time, and the doors to musical complacency were blown open. “Rubber Soul” led to “Revolver” which led to “Sgt. Pepper’s” and… but I digress. The music coming from the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones and a new cast of musicians was hot, innovative, and exciting. But where could it be heard? Bob Dylan’s entire “Like A Rolling Stone” was unplayable on AM radio due to its unprecedented six-minute length. Songs on AM pop radio were two- to three-minutes in length. That was how it was done. Living on Long Island in those days, I remember hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” for the first time on New York radio, and all they played were the first two verses of the four that were on the record, then they faded out the last two verses of the song and went on to the next hit by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons or Leslie Gore or whoever. I was amazed, living in San Francisco during the summer of 1966, when I heard the song come on the radio and they played the whole song. What station was this? What was going on? I was amazed and intrigued. It was KFRC, 610 AM. In cars and homes in America in 1966, anyone listening to radio was tuned to the AM band. FM was an unused, unknown entity. Back then, I don’t think I or any of my friends knew that FM existed, much less what was on it. And I KNOW none of us had an FM radio in our cars. Why would we? What would we have listened to back then if we’d had a radio with an FM receiver? FM was the home of classical music, news, talk shows and obscure weirdness. That I was so surprised when the station in San Francisco played the whole song was but a brief flash for me, as the rest of the playlist was the standard fare: Beatles, Stones, Monkees, Beach Boys and Petula Clark, etc. But music on the radio had reached a state of commercial stagnation and there were winds of change already in the air, and in San Francisco, a man named Tom Donahue felt them clearer than most. Tom Donahue was a Top Forty DJ who’d had a successful career in radio in Philadelphia and San Francisco, but he was bored, bored, bored with the vapid pap that he was forced to play and the commercial crap that went with it. He got out of radio in 1965, using his skills and connections in his other endeavors- all perimeter stuff to the music. He did concert promotions and had a radio tipsheet (which recommended songs for stations to add to their playlists) and even had his own record label. But he was touched by radio, he loved it, and he could never let it go. If only there was something on radio that he could relate to… AM radio was stagnant, almost irrelevant, and Tom Donahue and his friends knew it, and he was glad he’d left it behind. But in his heart he was still a radio guy, and he’d be at home at night, getting high with his friends and playing records that couldn’t be heard anywhere on the dial. Not on AM, not on FM. Then one night, stoned on pot, it hit him: Why doesn’t someone play THIS stuff on the radio? Then it hit him again: Why don’t I play this stuff on the radio? So he went looking for a home for his idea. KMPX was a lost radio station, selling blocks of time to whoever paid the money to get their program on the air. It was an unknown and unheard entity among all the possible radio stations in the Bay Area, and as an FM outlet, it was a minor island somewhere off in the uncharted regions. Donahue knew that there was music out there that was new and exciting. The Beatles were getting stoned, and had left their hit-making pap behind them with increasingly sophisticated, self-penned music, starting with albums like “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver.” They were stretching their limits and others followed. The Rolling Stones, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix were leading the charge into uncharted musical territories, and none of it fit into the format of the pop charts as played on AM radio. Where would Jimi’s “Are You Experienced?” have found a home with its revolutionary, drug- fueled sound and imagery? The Doors’ “The End” was an eleven-minute Oedipal psychedelic meandering rage that had no precedent. No one knew what to make of Pink Floyd, but people were listening. Eric Clapton had left the pop charts behind when he left the Brit-beat band The Yardbirds in search of more real, more meaningful blues with John Mayall and then with Delaney & Bonnie, and finally, looking to stretch his chops as well as indulge his interests, he formed his own band, Cream. There was revolution in the air, and it was led by the music. Dylan went electric and thus electrified a generation of fans and musicians, and then in 1967, the Beatles put out their opus, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and all the remaining rules went out the window. Of course, who else could keep up with the artistry of Dylan or the Beatles? Many tried, and that was a good thing. You know about philosophy majors debating that famous tree falling in the forest, and asking, if there was no one there to hear it fall, would there be a noise? That was fine as a philosophical debate, but in the real world, the question soon occurred to Tom Donahue: if great music is recorded and there is no radio station to play it, will it still be heard? He was still considering that question when a friend told Donahue that FM, unlike AM, could be heard in stereo. At that time, Donahue didn’t even own an FM radio, but his passions for the music and for good sound collided and he was ready to act. He called several FM stations to test the waters for their willingness to allow his experiment to be heard, and when he called KMPX, he found that their phone had been disconnected. Perhaps he thought: Huzzah!- A station that couldn’t pay its phone bill must surely have too little to lose to say no to him. Donahue’s answer to that philosophical question- and a new direction in American radio-turned out to be that lost, forlorn radio station KMPX, whose owner sold blocks of time to whoever would pay something for it. KMPX had a decent signal, but was virtually unlistened-to, an unknown and unheard atoll among the archipelago of radio stations in the Bay Area. Donahue approached the owner and told him that he had the records and the staff to play them. At the time, the station was running Chinese and Filipino programs from six a.m. until midnight. But from midnight until six, a DJ was playing a mix of “blues, folk, folk-rock and casual banter.” This was just what Donahue wanted to expand upon, and he asked the owner to let him have the evening shift. The owner went for it, and on April 7th, 1967, KMPX started broadcasting the new music to eager ears. With Donahue’s connections, his ready-made following, and the need for this sort of programming that becomes obvious with hindsight, it instantly became a well-known underground success. Word spread like wildfire among the hip in San Francisco, and soon the word spread around the country. Soon after that, the template created by Tom Donahue spread, first into the major cities, and then into the suburbs and colleges. Things had changed. A brief digression, if you’ll allow me. It’s important. Donahue and his people at KMPX were an instant success. But success means different things to different people. For the owner of KMPX, for instance, success meant that he now had a popular, highly rated station on his hands, and that meant more money coming in from advertising than he had ever seen before. He saw that as profit. To the people who ran the station- Donahue and his crew, it meant that now perhaps they could get paid. They took this point to the owner, who refused to cave in and share the largesse, and the staff of KMPX went on strike. The strike lasted three months and resulted in the staff of KMPX moving across town to KSAN, which was dying a slow death with their format of classical music. With little to lose, the owners of KSAN had a place for the new sound. They offered their station to Donahue, who gladly took it, and KSAN became the hugely influential home of progressive rock radio for many years, owning the air for all who were hip in northern California. KSAN became a cultural force as well as a musical influence in San Francisco for years, until it was purchased by the Metromedia Corporation and joined the ranks of the heavily formatted rock stations, signaling the decline of the free-form format in the late 70’s. Soon KSAN would tire of competing in the heavily populated rock market, give up the rock ghost, and the famous and formerly innovative rocker, KSAN, turned to country music. KSAN, by the way, plied it’s sound at 94.9 on the FM dial. When purchased, KSND (soon to be KFAT) was at 94.3, but if Jeremy Lansman could convince the FCC to allow him to move the transmitter and boost its power, his new station would broadcast at 94.5, which would prove to be a problem for KSAN. But that would take luck sneaking the move past the FCC, and a miracle to keep KSAN from protesting the move. But that comes later. Tom Donahue was a promoter by nature, and with his success at KSAN, he was quickly hired as a consultant, and sent to Los Angeles to set up a similar station at KPPC. Then he duplicated his success at WMMR in Philadelphia and WPLJ in New York, and the cat was, as they say, out of the bag. Underground FM radio was hot all over America. AM radio was almost instantly dead in the water, as irrelevant as short hair and hot rods. Soon, almost every city had to have a hip station or two or three, with its hip staff and its hip attitude. And almost everywhere the format was a success. They called it “free-form” radio, and many more things, but in the Industry, it was “Album Oriented Rock,” or AOR. And it soared. But by 1975, the revolution in radio and music had all but run its course. By 1969, the Beatles were broken up and Bob Dylan had become a recluse, recovering from a motorcycle accident, and when he came out of it with his soft, Nashville music, he wasn’t pushing any of the envelopes that most people wanted pushed. By 1975, the Rolling Stones were still writing some of the best music of their careers, but almost all of the other ‘60’s bands were gone or irrelevant. You might want to dispute that, and I encourage you to write your own damn book and do that. For those staying the course, read on. Most of the music in the mid ‘70’s could be played on any FM station out there, and it seemed that the experiment was over. Of course, there were still innovators, and they would be too numerous to mention, but they weren’t pushing the envelope that much. Elton John, Jackson Browne, David Bowie and Crosby, Stills & Nash were holding the banner now, but the charts were increasingly sterile. Then came Disco, which crushed all of the innovative spirit out of the music and turned the music into a product again. Where was the rush you got with discovering exciting new music? Where was the challenge? Where was the album you and your friends would sit down with, fire one up and listen to from start to finish? What album did you have to have? That you told your friends about? Perhaps this is a good time to be honest about something. After all we’ve been through, I feel like I can trust you with something. Can I trust you? I might be guilty of having made some generalizations in this chapter. I have painted a scene with broad strokes, and while I firmly believe everything that I’ve written, I feel compelled to let you know that there are exceptions to these generalizations, and that there are some artists who deserve more than a brief dismissal from a wiseguy like me. You could name some excellent, reference-worthy artist and I might agree with you, but for the most part, what I say here is true; and while I am telling you about what you might perceive as a failing on my part, and it is true that I wish to avoid going to hell if a sin as trivial as this might impel in that direction, I must also declaim that my motive was pure. Radio was the Revolutionary People’s Medium for so few years, and during that time it was exciting, innovative and influential. That this period lasted so briefly is a shame, but that underscores the need for a raucous, rowdy radio station that played real music and had jocks that you could relate to. A station where you knew the jocks, you knew they were from your circle of enthusiastic amateurs, and you knew you’d be surprised at every turn when a new song came on the air. A station that you listened to because it excited you, rather than something to put in the background to help you not notice that time was passing. A station where excitement and passion drove the jocks and the listeners alike. That would be a symbiosis that would inspire loyalty unlike you’d find at any other station in America. And that was KFAT, and that is why I wrote this book. I have always been passionate about contemporary music, and I paid close attention to what was on the charts as well as what was available off the charts. I lived through that time and I am proud to say that I couldn’t tell you the difference between Toto, Air Supply, REO Speedwagon and Def Leppard. So much of it was rock created by marketing departments to sell to a specific demographic. It was records for and by corporations, music designed, produced and marketed to sell, not to inspire. I am proud to have ignored so much of the crap that was on the radio in the 70’s, and my point is that a lot of what was out there on the radio and in the concert halls in 1975 was bullshit and that there were other people like me who knew that, and who were always on the lookout for something -anything- better. What a select few who lived in the southern environs of the Bay Area found was a font of new and exciting music at a tiny radio station in Gilroy, California.

*On behalf of this chapter, I would like to thank Ben Fong-Torres and his excellent book on the history of Top 40 Radio: The Hits Just Keep On Coming . Thanks, Ben. If you want more information on early radio in America, I recommend it.