KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 20

Ron Jacobs: No one in the business is unfamiliar with Robert W. Morgan’s deejay work. Know that he was just as meticulous as a production man. When it came to monitoring KHJ (aside from the morning-drive show, obviously) I trusted only his ears. He was the funniest fucking devil’s advocate I ever knew. We would spend days planning “ad libs” to top another.

Frank Terry: If there was anybody who thought I was getting any kind of special treatment from Ron Jacobs because we were very close friends, they were way off. Yeah, we had been roommates and I just love him like a brother. But I think when the other jocks saw the way he treated me at work they realized I wasn’t getting any special treatment! (Laughs.) He was on my ass probably as much if not more than anybody else’s.

Shelley Gordon: This was a very diverse group of jocks. All very committed. They had to be or they wouldn’t last. Ron took the “director” part of his PD title seriously. It was like he saw a big movie and had to put all the pieces together to produce a film where the group of actors performed as an ensemble rather than as individual stars. When it came to Morgan and Steele that wasn’t always possible. Their personalities were such that they always stood out. I think Ron was harder on Robert and Don because they were “bigger than life” and out of control a lot. Someone had to put a governor on them. It was hard. They were the “drive-time guys” and did get more attention than some of the other jocks. Sam Riddle did, also, because he was a TV star.

Bill Wade fights off "gunslingers" out for his Boss Jock spot

Bill Wade: At the first KHJ jock meeting I attended, Ron Jacobs brought in a cardboard box full of tapes. It was full of air checks from deejays all over America wanting to work at Boss Radio. Jacobs dumped the contents of the box on the table. Tapes of all sizes and in a variety of colors with all kinds of logos rolled all over the place. Then Jacobs proceeded to describe them as coming from “Gunslingers out to get your job.” At that point it dawned on me that I was at the best damn radio station in the country. As I had no special talent I was going to have to work my ass off to stay there. I decided to approach the format like a football player does the playbook. I wanted to be perfect at executing the Boss Radio format. My impression of the Boss Jocks when I first arrived at KHJ was that two guys there wanted my ass out of there for whatever reason. Guess who? Robert W. Morgan and The Real Don Steele. They didn’t speak to me for the first six months. When they saw I wasn’t gonna get down behind their ego stuff we all became friends while drinking “winky-poos” at Nickodell’s.

Shelley Gordon: Bill Wade was very funny, very likeable and very volatile as I recall. Therefore, he seemed to fit in just right and very easily.

Charlie Tuna: There are so many misconceptions about KHJ and what we did. You could do a separate book on all the stories people have told me about how we did the format at KHJ. The biggest thing is that we had a system, but at the same time, I had more freedom to do my own show than any other station I’ve ever worked at in L.A. and that currently numbers 16 sets of call letters. Each one of us was really our own Program Director. We had our current Boss 30 list, six-to-ten hitbounds and a book of oldies titles. It was up to the jock to play them in any order he wanted, but balance the ballads and fast songs, play the #1 song at least once in your show and don’t play an oldie if it’s been played recently. We checked them off in that book as we played them.

There were no hotline calls by Drake or Jacobs. I never got a call from Drake while I was on the air at KHJ. Oh, a couple of times I got a second-hand message Drake had passed on to me that I was sounding great, but he never wanted to bother you on the air. Jacobs would usually check in with you on the phone during your show if he wasn’t in the building but it was usually just a quick, “Hey man, how’s it goin’? What do you hear on the street about the station, anything happenin’ we should be on or aware of, any problems in the studio, etc.?” We were treated like pros and in turn, you elevated your performance level to become even better.

Bill Wade: One thing that always amazed me is that Ron Jacobs never ever chewed my ass during my entire time at KHJ. He always treated me with respect. I don’t think there will ever be another team like Jacobs, Drake and Watson — radio guys all the way. What was going on at KHJ was so over the top that students at my radio schools couldn’t understand it. Many of them became top deejays at stations all over the country, stations that imitated KHJ. One graduate of the Bill Wade School of Broadcasting, Danny Martinez, actually was hired at KHJ as I was leaving the station.

Gary Mack: The noon-to-three shift on KHJ was intense. We all tried to do a flawless execution of this format. And probably it was the result of the deep conversations we would have with Ron Jacobs on the hotline, which usually went something like:

Ring

Jacobs: “How’s the phone, man?”

Mack: “Fine.”

Jacobs: “Tighten it up.”

Click!

(General Sales Manager) Art Astor: The whole thing came together for me when I heard the Johnny Mann jingles. I was getting aroused, getting goose bumps — I mean, my God, this was going to be a killer! I knew it was going to be great by listening to some of the things that Ron Jacobs, Bill Mouzis and Robert W. Morgan were putting together. It was like poetry in motion. I’ll never forget being in there when they were making a promo. Jacobs was slamming the damn steel cabinet because he wanted it just right and Mouzis was doing his thing, cutting and editing and stuff, and Morgan’s great voice.

When they finished the promo they cut a spec spot for a Beverly Hills retailer. I thought, man, this sounds like J. Walter Thompson did it in New York. When I took it to the guy, he was only going to buy two weeks. I said, “You either buy 26 or I’m not going to give you this spot.” The guy went ape when he heard it and bought 26 weeks right away. KHJ Radio turned out to be RKO General’s money machine. We started with a basic open rate of 40 bucks but the frequency packages worked out as low as 28 bucks a spot. In fact the Mayfair Markets paid $17.

Bill Mouzis: We thought about things pretty damn meticulously in those days. Morgan and I came up with the word “Strassman.” I’ll never know how, frankly. But we had to identify an anticipatory unit of measurement of when to come in with a production element, how a voice would come in and when it would come in. It had to be right on the money. If it was off you may not notice it, but we would notice it. “You’re off a Strassman on that, Morgan, we’re going to have to redo it.” That’s how that was born. People asked, “What the hell is a Strassman?” It’s not an ohm, it’s not a volt, it’s not an ampere — but that’s what the thing was, the immeasurable amount of how far it was off. Could a Strassman only be handled with a razor blade? Oh, today I’m sure you could do an electronic Strassman, yeah.

Bill Drake: We lucked out with Bill Mouzis, I’ll tell you. He was a damn good man and he was always prepared. He was dedicated and he really took care of business and cared about what he did. Not only that, he had the ability that counted. He understood what you were talking about. Most of the guys as far as engineering — nothing derogatory at all — but they had been there so long they had never dealt with this kind of radio and had no interest in it.

Jon Badeaux: When KHJ debuted, I was living in San Bernardino. I was such a radio groupie that I had to get close enough to L.A. to hear it. I listened one morning to Robert W. Morgan and thought this was one of the best “radio announcers” I’d ever heard. A friend of mine was doing production in Burbank for KBLA, the little station that always thought they could compete with KHJ. My friend had met KHJ’s chief engineer, somehow. Ed Dela Pena called my friend one day to say he had an opening for a board op. My friend gave Ed my name and number.

When Ed called me, I was terrified. I had to say “no thanks” because I was in shock that I would be considered good enough at anything to work at KHJ. But a couple months later, Ed called again and asked me to at least come in for an interview. So I drove to L.A. one morning, stood in the frightening KHJ lobby and waited for Ed to come down. For those who never knew Ed Dela Pena, he is one of the kindest, gentlest people you could ever hope to meet. He instantly put me at ease. We went to his office and talked for a few minutes, then he offered me a tour. Tour? Surely he was kidding. You can’t get in there for just a tour can you?

Sam Riddle was on the air. The board op was a fellow by the name of Don Brown. Both Sam and Don were really laid back, just doing their daily thing. The KHJ setup was everything I expected — and nothing like I expected. When I actually saw it, I had to be a part of it. I figured I could somehow get beyond being intimidated because everyone was so nice.

Dexter Young: Before he arrived at KHJ someone told me a story about Ron Jacobs. In Hawaii he had interviewed Elvis Presley for his station. To show how competitive Jacobs was, they said that after he fed his piece to the studio he took the mike unit out of the telephone and threw it into the ocean so none of the other reporters could feed their stuff. And that was the only phone available. I could picture all of the other reporters lined up waiting their turn.

Bill Mouzis: The first time I saw Bill Drake — I didn’t know that he was in fact, Bill Drake. I saw this big, tall guy walk through the recording department. Gene Chenault was with him, although then I had no idea who he was either. They just looked at the recording department, nodded to me, you know, and kept on walking. They just wanted to see the facility. I don’t think they spent more than five seconds in that recording room or in any of the studios. They just walked right down the hall, looked in the studio and walked on. That was it.

Ed Dela Pena: I remember when Ron Jacobs showed up for the first time in jeans and a sweatshirt. (Laughs.) And very fast talking — a lot faster than he talks now. He first asked if we could set up the disc jockey studio differently. There were certain things that he had in mind. I had to tell him no, because we were rather restricted from a physical standpoint. There was just so much room in the building that could be changed without major, major construction. We had laid it out when we moved back in there from Vine Street so that we had two studios, one for on-air with an adjoining news booth and what we called the production studio, which was an 8x10 little cracker box. Adjoining that was a recording area where we recorded the news from the news carts and edited incoming feeds. The newsroom was between the recording area and the production studio. It was a small, very small complex. There wasn’t much we could do as far as putting any more studios in at that point.

Steve Clark: There I was on the air in Los Angeles on KHJ with a board op. This was a first for me: A room with just a mike and a cough button. This was big time radio?

I was doing weekends and filling in for the rest of the air staff during their vacations and sick days. I was always on call. Robert W. Morgan, Don Steele, Sam Riddle, Gary Mack. These were great guys. Talented, wild, fun. I was the kid of the group but treated with respect and accepted as one of the Boss Jocks, a rare honor back in the glory days. I was on top with the big boys of radio. This was living a legend and we all knew it.

Ron Jacobs: There was a very brief period at the start when Morgan and Steele, who when teamed up were accomplished agitators, tried to revise KHJ’s tried-and-true method of cueing the board engineers. Since the 1920s KHJ announcers signaled engineers with hand cues. And here come Morgan and Steele who wanted to install buzzers or something. Before this hand cues had always been used. The engineers were grumbling, “We’re not trained animals, etc.” The jocks thought that since they were in “Hollywood” they were some kind of hot-shit stars. This ended quickly after the first few times the IBEW union engineers walked out exactly at the end of their shift. The jock would look into the control room and find nobody on the other side of the glass and then the record would run out. I mean out — you know, click, click, click. That shut up the jocks who actually weren’t the Boss of much of anything.

Mitch Fisher: Well, I think that both Morgan and Steele had a great deal of respect for Jacobs as a program director. Nonetheless they both, I think, liked to test him on occasion. They got off on doing stuff like that. But at the same time my impression is that they would buckle down and do what Jacobs said.

Johnny Williams: The first time I went inside the building at Melrose it was a bit of a letdown. I mean, what happened to, “Hooray for Hollywood?” I never worked in a giant market before. But some of the stations that I had been at were, to tell you the truth, a whole lot flashier. Frankly, KHJ made you feel that you were inside some sort of a government building. So I just assumed that we’d be running our own board as I always did. Walking into the KHJ studio for the first time and seeing no turntables, you suddenly realized that you were in the hands of some person on the other side of double glass windows. That was really strange. It was like giving up control. So much of a disc jockey’s technique back in those days was how you did the actual production, your own on-air production, starting records and handling your own fades. Switching over to working with a board operator was really tough, that took some getting used to.

Ron Jacobs: On the board-operator side of things a very key player throughout my time at KHJ, the Chief Engineer, Ed Dela Pena, cooled the situation out. He was one of the few in the building, which included most of the KHJ-TV staff, who gave us a chance when we started. No matter how crazy my ideas, Ed would at least listen. As a result, we got into some primitive audio processing. We had a four-track tape machine in the production room probably before any radio station in America. It was Ed’s attitude that set the tone for the engineers.

Ed Dela Pena: The basic thing Ron and I talked about was how we were going to approach the audio part of this thing because, at that time, we were playing strictly from 45s. Cassettes weren’t here yet and the other tape cartridges were not very dependable, so we started playing from the 45s that the record pushers dropped off every week. Ron was interested in getting a better sound than the competition, so we kinda got our heads together and engineering came up with a special equalizer which sort of pre-emphasized certain areas of the audio spectrum to make the music print a little bit better.

Bill Mouzis: I was a firm believer in one thing: That is, you had to have one individual that knew what the hell he was doing, someone who could keep a consistent sound on that radio station. You didn’t need that Black Box. Sure, put a limiter on the line and put a clipper on the line where you could increase your average level by doing that, but don’t mess around with the — you know, start equalizing all these separate frequencies. I was doing that in the studio, that’s what I did to make the sound so consistent. Now Ed Dela Pena is right, they tried to do a lot of things out at the transmitter. I didn’t always agree with it, OK? I said, “That’s not the sound I’m processing back at the studio, Ed.” And sometimes they backed off.

Ed Dela Pena: We played around with the midrange and a little more with the top end. It turned out very, very successfully, to the point where later on everybody talked about “The KHJ Sound” and everybody wanted to know what we were doing. Of course I think our publicity department took a hold of that and decided to push “The KHJ Sound” and how special it was and la dee dah. I also went over to the transmitter and did a few things that got the maximum performance out of it by changing a little bit of the modulation setup so we could get a louder signal. The whole package came out sounding pretty good.

Ken Orchard: I was with KHJ for 21 years. During the 16 or 17 there at Melrose only once did the studio fail. It was a pretty good record for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I remember it failed once on the Morgan show. Something in the RCA equipment. The bosses were gone and I was able to patch the production studio in the back room directly to the transmitter. It was clever but it was also awkward with Morgan’s engineer, Walt Radtke. But Walt was gracious. He said, “Ken, you run the thing and I’ll just wait until we can restore it.” And I was able to get Morgan back on the air. We were off the air for like a minute. Later that day the maintenance department found the problem and solved it. It was a short. First time it failed in 17 years.

Dexter Young: One of my highlight memories was the night that KFWB had an English jock on the air and he was playing a Rolling Stones song that was yet to be released. Jacobs called me and asked me to air check KFWB and “get that song.” I had to wait for four or five plays of that song before I could edit a clean copy for us. But I did get it. To this day I have a copy of the letter Ron Jacobs sent to my boss, Ed Dela Pena, commending me on a job well done. Luckily the English jock clobbered the song at different places and I had three recording machines going to get us a copy without him on it. Later, when we got our commercial pressing of the record, I timed my edited version and compared it to the released version. Mine was within three seconds in length, so it worked out well.

Humble Harve: There was a map on the wall in the KHJ announce booth. One of those coverage maps that shows where the station can be heard, the signal strength. I drew a little circle approximately where 5515 Melrose was and I wrote, “You are here.” And then more circles, circles, circles, “And they are here” all the way out to the desert somewhere. It gave you a better reason to reach out, more of an intelligent look at what you were doing. You weren’t in some little fucking windowless room, talking to some over-the-hill dude who was used to Carmen Miranda records or whatever.

Johnny Williams: All the jocks worked with one basic board-operator unless it was his day off or he was on vacation. Dave Labby was my guy. I worked every week Monday through Thursday with him, year in and year out. People can say what they want about some deejays having egos that are out of control. Well, you better not pull any of that with your board operator. Of course the station was always trying to promote the image of the Boss Jocks as being larger than life. But it’s nothing like that when you’re on the air.

Between you and your engineer it’s like a pilot and copilot. They can make you or break you. If they’re really having a good night they can just make you sound like a million dollars. If they’re just a little behind the eight ball — and of course, a lot of it may be in your own imagination that they’re screwing you up and maybe you’re not having a good night so you put the blame on your engineer, that’s possible too — but I do know there were nights when Labby carried me, I just didn’t have to do much at all because I wasn’t really up. There were other nights when Labby wasn’t very up and I was just flying so I just picked him up and dragged him along. But most of the nights were somewhere in between.

Kevin Gershan: Robert W. Morgan claimed that his board operator, Walt “Fail Safe” Radtke, never made an error, even once. He would portray a symbiotic relationship where Morgan and “Fail Safe” were in some kind of Vulcan Mind Meld, anticipating each other’s moves better than those Chinese balancing acrobats on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” He described how “Fail Safe” would be cueing a record with one hand while riding mike levels with the other. Morgan said that as great a production engineer as Mouzis was, “Fail Safe” was all of that running the on-air control-room board. Mouzis filled-in for “Fail Safe” on occasion and was “perfectly adequate” but not “Fail Safe.”

Shelley Gordon: The rapport between Robert and his engineer, Walt Radtke, was well-established by the time I came on the scene. Robert really trusted him. Walt thought Robert was great despite the music. He was, in addition to being his engineer, sort of a father figure. He had a very dry sense of humor and was a great philosopher. Robert and Ron and the other guys were all so young. Robert always liked the “team-feel” as well. He liked to “play” off people.

Ron Jacobs: One of my favorite situations was when people came from all over the country to get inside KHJ. Radio people came looking for the magic. They’d want to see what kind of special equipment or EQ or microphones we used to make the station sound like it did. Yeah, right. We had a secret sauce like McDonald’s or a special formula like Coke. First we’d make these visitors sit around for an hour in the lobby. They might see the Byrds or Aretha Franklin or Johnny Rivers going in or out of the TV station. That really got their adrenaline pumping. Like they’d come all this way on a pilgrimage to Mecca and were ready for a life-changing experience.

Well, like Colonel Parker did with Elvis: Before Presley came out a really bad redneck comic and then some awful accordion band performed. The audience was bananas, ready to fucking explode. Visiting KHJ, a program director from somewhere, after waiting a long time in the lobby would be led down all the long drab corridors. They’d be brought into the control room where the engineer was running the board. They’d press their nose to the glass to see Where the Boss Jocks Ruled. Well except for a big Lucite bulletin board that I had them build to hang cards on with one-liners, it was the same dipshit room that had been there since 1960.