"KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO" RETURNS!

Boss Jock Charlie Tuna adapts to Boss Angeles traffic. This is one of the dozens of unpublished photos by Henry Diltz, lensman for 93/KHJ publicity pictures before he became one of the world's foremost photographers of rock stars for the past 40 years.

In response to the many requests for the book KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO since it went out of print in 2002, we are reissuing the 445-page volume. For more info--and a one-hour collage of 93/KHJ promos--please go to: http://www.93khj.com/ Thanks to Don McCoy, Dave Sebastian Williams, Kevin Gershan, Carol Williams, Brian von Ahsen, Ed Kanoi and the others who have worked diligently to Bring Back The Book! Below is a portion of one page of quotes; the book is full of hundreds of these, based on dozens of interviews conducted exclusively for KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO.

Ron Jacobs: I was hired at $15,000. We all were — are you kidding? $15,000, man? When I was fairly certain that I’d be around a while, I bought a new house at the top of Laurel Canyon, I was driving a new Cadillac. When I left KHJ I was making like 50 grand or something like that. But when I got there, money wasn’t the issue. Remember, two weeks before, I was in jail eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And that wasn’t peanut butter or jelly. It was peanut butter and jelly all mushed together, take it or leave it.

Casey Kasem: Ron Jacobs and I became friends when he had asked to have a meeting concerning the possibility of my moving from KRLA to KHJ. As a matter of fact I think there were two or three meetings. We had a mutual respect for one another’s talent and hit it off. The only reason I didn’t go to KHJ was because the money I was asking for was much more than the salaries of the KHJ air staff — at the time I was enjoying success and making big money with my daily TV show and weekly dances. Ron couldn’t risk doing anything that might disrupt the great morale at KHJ or upset the DJs who were responsible for making his station #1. A few short years later, I called Ron and asked him if he would be interested in producing a countdown show, the Top 40 Hits in America. His immediate reply was, “Sounds great! Let’s get together and do it!” And with our associates, we did. And I’ve been counting down the hits ever since.

Gary Mack: As the rest of the crew was hired: Robert W. Morgan, Roger Christian, The Real Don Steele, Dave Diamond, Sam Riddle and Johnny Williams. We set about the business of getting organized. Ron Jacobs was brought in as Program Director--the best I’ve ever met.

Charlie Tuna: The Real Don Steele was the rock star leader of the Boss Jocks. Very mysterious, said very little off the air, but when he did, people listened. Sam Riddle was the businessman, always had a million outside deals going on in addition to his KHJ-TV show. It all paid off down the road; one of Sam’s productions was “Star Search” with Ed McMahon. Johnny Williams was the perfect all-night man, soothing voice, relaxed presentation and always right there with the quips and perfect feel for the format. No one could sound like he was having a ball during the really slow and lonely times any more than Williams.

Sam Riddle: When the time came to get ready for the new Boss format, I’ll never forget practicing on KHJ-FM so no one would hear me. Ron Jacobs said, “OK, you’ve got seven seconds to say what you used to say on KFWB and KRLA in forty-five seconds.” We had an engineer running the board. Dexter Young was my engineer and he took care of me. I thought: that’s fantastic. I’ll have more time to be on the phone to book Bobby Sherman concerts.

Gary Mack: It was grueling. Jacobs and Drake stood in the control room with an engineer while the future Boss Jocks practiced this new format. Every word and every nuance was critiqued on the fly. “More up! More energy! End up! Faster!” I remember the distinct odor of flop sweat. But every day got better, and we made our mistakes off the air.

Claude Hall: Bill Drake assembled a good staff. One of the smartest things he did was hire Ron Jacobs because Jacobs was a very, very hard-working guy. He’s extremely bright. Drake may not be that bright, but he thinks. He just sits back and thinks a lot. His major role, I think, in RKO during his time as consultant, was a thinker--as a brain to figure things out. A lot of people think Drake invented the tight play list, that he invented this and invented that. He didn’t. But like a genius (and the role of a genius takes in many different facets) what he was able to do was synthesize. Einstein didn’t “invent” E=mc², he synthesized it. And this is what Drake did with Top 40 radio.

Ron Jacobs: When I got to KHJ I felt a rapport with Bill Mouzis. He was a pro who sensed what we would be doing in production, which was totally different from KHJ’s old-school sound. I asked Chief Engineer Ed Dela Pena if he could assign Mouzis to production. It was Mouzis who did all of the tedious razor splices. Mouzis sat there unconcerned when Morgan and I got into one of our screaming sessions about how he was ruining my copy — or how I was writing crap that a cave man couldn’t work with. Both of us running back to the “production library,” which was, at best, maybe 30 movie sound-track albums in a room where it was legal for us to touch turntables and argue some more. Morgan and I started our love/hate relationship in Fresno in 1962 and each of us knew that the other would be looking for any reason to provoke a confrontation. That was wonderful fun. It made us feel like we were “creative.” After a while, we were bringing in tons of money for RKO, more even than the mighty Channel 9. We could carry on, bellowing and slamming around and the suits just had to put up with it. (Laughs.)

Carol Morgan: I remember how important it was to Robert; he wanted Ron Jacobs there. He also got them to hire Don Steele. There weren’t too many people in radio that he really connected with. He loved people who were really bright and quick. Ron fulfilled something for him that he and I had always had between us up to that point.

Dexter Young: I worked mainly with Sam Riddle. I used to see Sam in the hallways. He was doing his TV show on Channel 9, KHJ-TV, but working for our competitor, KFWB, as a disc jockey. I used to ask Sam, “Since you have your TV show here, why don’t you have your radio show here too?” There had been a rumor that he was coming to KHJ and he finally did come with us. He and I became very good friends while working together. My wife and I were invited to his wedding.

The estimated shipping date is June 20, 2002.

Kindly order now to receive a first copy--and to receive your two complimentary CDs of killer KHJ promos.

JACOBS AGE-ADJUSTED CALENDAR

My first time in the door at KGB, superjock and cartoonist, BOBBY OCEAN,

ran up to me, spouting quotations from KHJ memos from the 1960s.

In my opinion, KGB-AM-AM in San Diego was the most underrated station that I programmed (1972-1976). When I left our company, Watermark, in ’72, AMERICAN TOP 40 had become as tedious and repetitive as the KHJ Boss Radio format and all my other gigs that, when perfected, ended up being boring. (Implicit in the word "format" is that things will repeat over and over and over again.)

The most scientific study and application of music programming theory I was involved with was at KGB. Computers were in a primitive stage, mostly found on campuses and only the biggest public and private operations utilized them. It was 1972, the time of the “Do Not Punch, Staple or Mutilate” cards, full of tiny holes that meant something—a zero or a one—to the sensor, which began the process that resulted in those giant, perforated, accordion-folded printouts.

My goal in San Diego was to set the AM straight and then plunge into the interesting stuff: Coming up with a “hip” new FM format. At my side from day one was Rick Leibert, the best assistant I ever worked with, and big Art Schroeder, the music librarian. He was even bigger than Bill Drake, who was 6' 5". Schroeder brought not only the brains to comprehend our crazy new approach—he was also very, very tall. This proved to be a huge assist when eventually we plastered every wall in the music library with charts, formats, codes, dummy logs, newly devised printed material and the other stuff posted from floor to ceiling that made it a rock and roll war room.

Not only were we fired up to pick off not one, but two Top 40 stations with a KGB that had fallen into the ratings toilet, but, KGB's offices and studios (at 4141 Pacific Coast Highway) were directly opposite the MCRD—Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. To the program staff our gig was to win the radio “war” we had stirred up.

The AM format changed—it was actually “Recycled” according to our pitch—on Easter Day, 1972. It was number one in the San Diego County radio ratings by mid-summer. Now we could play with the FM! Our staff conducted something almost unheard of at the time: a massive research project tasked to reveal what folks listened to on the radio and many ancillary questions about their habits.

From those results we began to sort and qualify songs. Easier said than done. In the beginning of Top 40 radio, playlists were short. There were just a few “categories” from which music programmers chose, forming the basis of at what frequency a given hit would be played on the air.

This went from the relatively small selection of songs in the pioneering playlists of the 1950s (like categories A, B and C) into a mathematical maze in 1972. Leibert, Schroeder and I poured over song and group preferences indicated in our survey results—and we came up with a huge list of categories. The absurd grouping featured as its most esoteric title a song by San Diego native, Frank Zappa, which was listed as a “Double 9,” meaning that it was scheduled to play two or three times a year. After 9 p.m.

Then we attacked the “problem” of past hits, where and when to play them. From our own survey we had a good idea of the demographic range of the audience and its taste in music and selection of radio stations. Old records were often known as “oldies.” The word was made popular when Los Angeles deejay released the first OLDIES BUT GOODIES albums in the ‘50s. And songs were referred to by the year they hit the charts and not how old they were.

One night it came to me: People, and records, move forward in time at the same pace. Therefore, we no longer referred to “a 1962 record,” but rather “a ten-year-old record.” Eureka! We could easily calculate the ages of various listeners in a given year, and determine that person's age at that time, when the song became a hit.

This singular revelation proved “perpetual.” Today, for instance, a hit from the year 2000 is ten years old. It follows that someone 25-years-old was 15 when the record came out (and therefore a probable teen then has now heard the record for a decade. This jumps out when one considers a 1960 hit. It is 50-years-old. To anyone 35, the song predates their very existence. It was already an “oldie” when the person was a teenager.

Try this out with any hit, any year and a person’s age. Hey, I remember playing “Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing,” a chart smash by the Four Aces, on KGU, where I did a record show on New Year’s Eve 1955. By now, the majority of people now alive may not have even ever heard that song (although that particular tune was one of the first movie themes to become a radio hit.)

Put simply, based on our thinking at KGB in 1972, that year’s 10-year-old record would have been around for twenty years by 1982. And there is little that tweaks the human memory more than hearing “our song” from high school, the theme of the senior prom and so on.

At the turn of the century I found it necessary to pull out my chart, now christened the JACOBS AGE-ADJUSTED CALENDAR (below). Before the anti-climactic Y2K arrived, I could calculated dates in the twentieth century with ease; it was no more that subtracting the smaller number from the larger, i.e. KHJ debuted in 1965, ten years after I was supposed to graduate from high school, which was 1955. Ba-da-boom—simple subtraction.

But now these calculations involve four digits. It takes a moment to subtract 1965 from 2010, at least for yours truly. This “formula” has served me well in writing nostalgic or historic pieces. My first car, a 1932 Plymouth sedan, was a mere 23-years-old when I bought it. Today, that model has been around for 78 years. The Los Angeles Rams won their first NFL championship in 1951, now, wow: that’s 59 years ago.

I hope the following table helps you re-think more than just the ticking clog counting the age of hit records fading into the past, year by year. Chart expires on December 31, 2010. Time to add ONE year.

(For more information and audio from KGB-AM-FM go to http://www.reelradio.com/ and search for THE 1972 KGB RECYCLE DOCUMENTARY.)

2000

TEN years ago

1995

FIFTEEN years ago

1990

TWENTY years ago

1985

TWENTY-FIVE years ago

1980

THIRTY years ago

1975

THIRTY -FIVE years ago

1970

FORTY years ago

1965

FORTY-FIVE years ago

1960

FIFTY years ago

For details about the book KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO, with many pages of music programming information, plus one hour of original 93/KHJ promos, go to http://www.93khj.com/

© 2010 RON JACOBS

David Maraniss on "The KHJ Book"

"Where to start with Ron Jacobs? I spent ten days with him in Hawaii in May 2009, and I still hear his voice in my head and will forever. You could say that he is one of a kind, sui generis, inimitable, but those are all clichés and RJ is way over on the far side of cliché. The first time my wife Linda and I got in his convertible, he called back to her to root around all the junk in the backseat and hand him his teeth. That gets a little closer.

"My favorite moment came when we drove up to a gate where it was clear that the guard was there to keep people from entering. The guard was an older woman, a native Hawaiian. Here come three white people in a convertible. No way she is going to let us in. Until. Ron Jacobs opens his mouth, the sound reverberates, she recognizes the magical voice of the legendary island deejay who called himself Whodaguy. A big smile works across her face. “Whodaguy? Whodaguy! I thought you were fucking haoles!” she screams with delight, laughing and waving us through. “Whodaguy!” For those of you who don’t know, haole is what native Hawaiians call white people, and the term is appropriately modified by fucking.

"In most ways I’m the wrong person to introduce a book about rock & roll and Boss Radio. I can’t do a Ben Fong-Torres on this one, like Ben Fong-Torres his ownself did. I love the music, most of it, but I was never into the rock culture. I never subscribed to Rolling Stone, never knew who all the drummers were. I was getting married on the day of Woodstock and had no idea it was going on. I never memorized the top 40, let alone the Boss 30. I didn’t’ even smoke dope. I listened to baseball games on the radio, mostly. Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, when I did listen to the radio it was on WISM in Madison and WLS in Chicago. I’m sure they had some stories, but they didn’t have Boss. But there are things about Ron Jacobs that make me admire him greatly, which is why I’m hacking away here.

"First, there’s nothing phony about him. He comes right at you, toothless mouth and all. Second, music is not a business for him so much as a true passion. I sat in his makeshift sound studio on the far side of Oahu, the side he prefers, over the mountain, away from the tourists and the rich people, and listened as he played the music of native Hawaiian musicians like Walter Keale, and I felt Ron’s heart beating and saw his eyes moisten and felt the melancholy beauty that overwhelmed the room. And finally, I knew that RJ had a creative mind (it takes only ten minutes with him to figure that out) but I didn’t know, until he gave me some magazine articles that he had written, that he was in fact a terrific writer.

"So that gets us to this book, KHJ: Inside Boss Radio. Some of it is writing, some of it is drawing, some of it is radio jargon. There are interviews, photos, oral histories, daily memos, calendars – but the totality is the brilliance of Ron Jacobs. It is a rare documentary history that takes you inside his mind as he transforms KHJ into the preeminent rock and roll station in the universe. He comes at you nonstop, one idea after another, relentless, always thinking, churning out ideas, challenging the norm. From start to finish, the book threatens to engulf you but always amazes you, just like RJ."

David Maraniss, Washington, D.C., May 2010

With an eye for bringing the mysteries of history to light and a knack for reportage that won him a Pulitzer for his work for The Washington Post, David Maraniss pens compelling works of nonfiction that give readers insights into larger-than-life figures, from Bill Clinton to Vince Lombardi, while illuminating major events in American history. When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, Maraniss began work on a "multigenerational biography…about the world that created Obama and then how he recreated himself." Tentatively titled "Out of This World: the Making of Obama," Maraniss says it "will be out in very late 2011 or more likely early spring 2012."

For details about the book KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO plus one hour of never-posted original 93/KHJ promos, go to http://www.93khj.com/

BILL MOUZIS ~ 45 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK

(L to R) Bill Mouzis, "The Big Kahuna" (Chris Varez), Ron Jacobs

Dodger Stadium, Summer 1966

When I arrived at KHJ Radio in March 1965 I wasn't ready for how huge the physical plant was. There we were in an anonymous pink bunker surrounded by the Desilu, Columbia and Paramount Studios. The address was 5515 Melrose Avenue--before that street got "hip." Of all the employees I dealt with as a member the new management team, the longhaired, grass smoking, rock and roll, Top 40 crew brought in to conquer Los Angeles Radio--no one was more driven than I to make it to the top. And then, much more difficult, to hold the #1 ratings we drove ourselves so hard to achieve during my watch as Program Director, through the summer of 1969.

As with all theatrical illusion, the radio that stirred people's imaginations in the 1920s through the end of the Second World War was something that hooked me as a kid. It blew my mind that I had a Big Time L.A. AM Radio to play with for the entertainment of Boss Angeles and all of Southern California—and the pride of leading a winning team.

As I have said for the past 45 years, the person who convinced me that I had really arrived in Hollywood, the man who taught me so much about life while perfectly executing his role as the Old Pro was Bill Mouzis, Chief Production Engineer on our Production Team: Ron Jacobs, Writer/Director and Robert W. Morgan, Chief Announcer.

Mouzis, now past the meridian of octogenarianism, has adapted to 21st century technology as quickly as he learned to operate a telegraph key that transmitted and received Morse code. I have written elsewhere of my great respect for the man who, since his retirement and lack of golf, has assiduously issued email proclamations, historical reminiscences, radio anecdotes, forwarded Old School “humor,” political rants, war stories, tales of the tundra where he was born, all the obligatory Hallmark holidays and his (at least) monthly letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times.

And he remembers stuff, his hits keep coming. Below is an email I just received from Mouzis. He and Nancy still live in the same house he bought when he joined KHJ after serving in the United States Navy in the Atlantic Theater. It is a pleasure to post Bill Mouzis' thoughts about Boss Radio on its 45th anniversary this week.

The date May 5^th, 1965, the place Los Angeles, California, the time 3pm. Pioneer radio station KHJ, 930 on your AM radio dial since 1922 goes “rock and roll”. It is now “Boss Radio-93/KHJ.

Forty-five years ago today the biggest quake ever to hit Los Angeles was felt throughout the entire area when Boss Radio hit the airwaves with a thunderous presence, the likes of which never heard before. It all began with The Real Don Steele rock and rollin’ up a storm as the hits just kept on comin’. We soon learned that Tina Delgado was alive, alive, and that there were fractious Fridays with Anita O’Day and Francis Faye. Morning listeners were being entertained and Morganized by irascible Robert W. Morgan. Roger Christian followed with the aura of The Beach Boys enveloping his very soul. Then there was Gary Mack with that boyish grin and a peanut butter sandwich safely tucked in a brown paper bag. The volume was next turned up a few decibels as the Real Don Steele came at you like a hurricane with a handcrafted air product all his own for three solid hours. After-shocks came in the evening with professorial Dave Diamond continuing to play the hits for those on their way home. Channel Nine TV star and genial host Sam Riddle followed Dave with the sincerity and warmth of a real pro. Finally, Johnny Williams, who had a loft of his own and a heart of gold, kept us rock and rollin’ in our sleep all night long.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it was the new KHJ and listeners knew who we were once we hit the airwaves with the quickness of a panther. Under the brilliant leadership of genius Program Director Ron Jacobs and Consultant Bill Drake the station captured the hearts and minds of thousands of Angelinos, the sounds of which blanketed beaches, blasted through transistor and car radios and achieved market superiority in ratings within six months. It was not only phenomenal but fresh, exhilarating and entertaining. What a gas to hear that program directors from all over the country were flying into the city to air-check the station, intent on copying it. They never quite figured it out but nevertheless DJ monikers of Morgan and Steele soon popped up at stations all over the country.

As the production engineering supervisor for 93/KHJ and the RKO chain of stations nationwide I was fortunate enough to have filled a niche in the station’s ten year run as the top radio station in the country – probably the world. In these the golden years of my life, I remember it all so vividly and fondly and to a great extent sadly. Forty-five years cannot erase the inseparable bond that developed between all of us involved during this memorable period - a lifetime experience. The sadness I feel is shared with Ron Jacobs, who as a homey, born and raised in Hawaii, remains happily entrenched these days amid the beauty and sunshine of Paradise. He and I speak often of the very talented and dedicated people who played such a pivotal role in the success of Boss Radio, too many of whom have passed away over these 45 years. We all shared a friendship that went far beyond simply a working association and we miss them everyday of the year. I can’t help but think they are having a ball cavorting with our good Father in “rock and roll heaven”

To hear the 1965 intro by The Beach Boys

“It’s The New KHJ” go to www.93khj.com.