Rocking-America-Skla
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ROCKING AMERICA ROCKING Anwaca An Insider's Story BY RICK SKLAR How the All -Hit Radio Stations Took Over St. Martin's Press New York ROCKING AMERICA. Copyright © 1984 by Rick Sklar. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sklar, Rick. Rocking America. Includes index. 1. Radio and music. 2. Radio broadcasting. 3. Radio broadcasters. 4. Rock music. I. Title. ML68.S55 1984 384.54'43'0973 83-26850 ISBN 0-312-68798-2 Rocking America could not have been completed without my wife, Sydelle, whose perceptive and sen- sitive suggestions, rewriting, and editing gave form and perspective to years of notes, clippings, and reminiscences. Her loving encouragement kept the idea of this book alive and gave me the inspiration and determination to write it. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1. The Magic of the Music 1 2. From the Boonies to the Big Time 7 3. One Hundred Records, Fifty Kilowatts, and Alan Freed 14 4. Assault on the Marketplace 24 5. Vive de Gaulle 32 6. Riding the Rocket with Murray the K 41 7. Stakeout at Stampler's 56 8. Air into Money 64 9. Changing Stations 74 10. Beating the Drums with Salvador Dali 80 11. Genesis of the Giant 89 12. Tales of the Early Morning and Halftime at Big Shea 101 13. WABeatleC 111 14. Happy Birthday, Baby 120 15. Fail -Safe 125 16. The Money Machine 136 17. Give Elton a Shot 147 18. The Singing Monk 153 19. John Lennon Meets Howard Cosell 159 20. Jocks, the Extra Ingredients 167 21. The Super Promotions 180 Epilogue 184 The Songs That Got the Ratings 188 Index 215 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the many people who relived with me those mo- ments when they were a part of the story. They include Harold "Hap" Anderson, Murri Barber, Ralph Beaudin, Jeff Berman, Sid Bernstein, Julian Breen, Stan Z. Burns, Joe Cook, Bob Crewe, Dan Crewe, Ray Dariano, Paul Ehrlich, H.G. "Jock" Fearnhead, Calvin Fox, John A. Gambling, Rupert Hitzig, Dan Ingram, Steve Labunski, Jack Lacy, Chuck Leonard, Ron Lundy, Ed McMullen, Herb Mendelsohn, Ruth Meyer, Bruce Morrow, Brad Phillips, Steve Riddleberger, Herb Rosen, Ruben Rodriguez, Tom Rounds, Kal Rudman, State Senator Bob Ryan (Nev.), Allen Shaw, Walter A. Schwartz, Bob Smith, Bill Stewart, Mickey Wallach, Jim West, Bruce Wendell, George H. Williams, and Larry Wynn. I am also indebted to Tom O'Brien for additional information on the phantom General Charles de Gaulle. My thanks to Henry Kavett, who spurred this project along, and to Mortimer Matz for his keen memory and his photographs. And a special thanks to Jonathan and Mary Lyn Wolfert for the use of their collection of WABC memorabilia, and to my literary agent, Arthur Pine. The songs that run across the bottom of each page represent a sampling of the top songs for each year, as determined by the ranking systems at the stations where I worked. For more complete lists, and a fuller explanation of the ranking system, please see the Appendix, "The Songs That Got the Ratings." PREFACE When radio people talk about ratings, the benchmark they use is WABC, New York. For an incredible decade roughly paralleling the Beatle era, WABC was the highest -rated radio station in Amer- ica, achieving audience sizes never before reached and never since surpassed. Weekly audiences of five to six million listeners were common. WABC's programming worked as nothing that preceded it or followed has worked. For almost a dozen years, WABC's share, or percentage, of the total radio audience in the New York metropolitan area was measured in double digits. The Saturday night "Cousin Brucie Dance Party" alone reached 25 percent of all listeners regularly-an astonishing feat when you consider that today's top market radio programmers often scramble to bring their share of the audience from 5 percent up to 5.5, fighting for each tenth of a point. I came to WABC before it climbed to market dominance and built it into the highest -rated radio station in the Western hemi- sphere, holding it in first place against all competitors during an unprecedented ten-year onslaught that saw company after company bring one program director after another into the largest and most lucrative radio battleground in the country to try to unseat us. During those years, hundreds of other program directors and ra- dio station managers made the pilgrimage to the Big Apple, where they listened to WABC, taped its music programming, and then returned to clone local versions of it back home. As a result, the sound spread. WABC became the most widely imitated radio sta- tion in the nation. Listeners from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Miami to Seattle, Dallas to Chicago, and everywhere in between began to hear a new kind of radio. In Tulsa and Detroit, in Boise and Kan- sas City, and in Denver and Boston, Americans found themselves listening to popular music in a different way. The new sound featured far fewer songs. Instead of hundreds of "hits," a few dozen records were played over and over again until they became so popular that both young people and their parents 1953 "Song from Moulin Rouge" I Percy Faith "Vaya con xii / ROCKING AMERICA knew them. Everybody who grew up at that time, regardless of their color, their sex, or their wealth-whether they watched the sun come up over a wheatfield, a mountain, or a skyline of sky- scrapers-can hum those songs to this day. They also remember the incessant jingles that tied the songs together while drumming the station's call letters into the listener's head. If a station was a close copy of WABC, its disc jockeys' voices were enhanced by an echo chamber, and at least one jock, usually the evening teen - appeal air personality, had a delivery that was so rapid-fire the words tumbled on top of one another. WABC became so well known that at night when the skywave spread its signal across half the nation, radio groupies would pull it in, listen, tape it, and send copies of the tapes to their friends. Eventually broadcasters from England, France, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Japan visited WABC and began duplicating its sound overseas. Those were fascinating times for American radio and fabulous years for the lucky few who shared the experience at WABC. The sense of exultation when those gigantic quarterly ratings came in was overwhelming. It was like crossing the finish line of a mar- athon. You go a mile into the air and don't come down for two weeks. It was an incredible high, and it came four times a year. When I left WABC to move up in the American Broadcasting Company, it was the way I wanted to leave, with the station still on top. It stayed there for another year. The WABC story is a record that stands alone, unbroken, in a field where success is elu- sive to most and usually brief for the few who make it. In the years that followed the WABC era, the idea of playing all mass -appeal hit songs on one radio station (the essence of true Top Forty) became anathema. With the growth of FM, the number of stations in America had doubled, and still more stations were being licensed. In each city, what had been a grove of transmitter towers became a small forest. As competition grew, individual stations' audiences became smaller, and many broadcasters began to offer more specialized programming and commercials aimed at specific groups of listeners who used the same products and services. Some stations appealed to upscale adults, while others went after blue- collar workers, Hispanics, urban teens, or other audiences. But as the mid -eighties approached, most of the music -radio lis- teners had accumulated on the FM dial and were no longer dis - Dios" / Les Paul and Mary Ford "Doggie in the Window" / Patti PREFACE / xiii persed over AM and FM, again providing a mass -audience potential. A few believers tried once more playing the top hits over and over, and were gratified to find a new generation of listeners responding to Top Forty with the enthusiasm of a child discovering ice cream. The format is again producing dominant radio stations. The extent of its success will depend on programmers who under- stand it and advertisers who appreciate its multiple demographic potential. Understanding begins at the beginning. The WABC story began at a station called WINS. I learned radio programming as an apprentice copywriter and producer at WINS, the first New York station to program rock & roll music, sharing my office there with big beat's first champion, disc jockey Alan Freed. I eventually took over the programming of the station, after some of the staff and talent fled under a cloud of indictments during the payola investigations that brought the fifties to an end. In tracing my personal remembrances of the rise of rock & roll radio in New York-the people, the stories, the stations, and par- ticularly the drama of WABC-I have tried to offer glimpses of the inner workings of the radio business from some unusually re- vealing perspectives. Viewed from within, the most powerful sta- tions seem like fragile giants-intricately structured money machines capable of pumping millions of dollars in after-tax profit into a company year after year, but also capable, with the slightest mishandling, of suddenly drowning their owners in red ink.