RADIO FOR DUMMIES ~ 2011

During my dutiful scan of Radio Daily News I checked out the story about a Chicago radio station’s stunt to jump-start a new format.

The full details, thanks to Texas Larry Shannon’ must-check site for broadcast pros, are at http://www.radiodailynews.com/

As I slip deeper into the ravages of what I think is called Eisenhower’s Disease, it amazes me that I can even remember any of the stuff in my previous blog, below, about KPOI-AM, Honolulu in 1959.

After reading Robert Feder’s report on WLIV-FM‘s “cleverly disguised” gimmick I can’t help but think of the myriad manifestations of our eponymous “Circus Radio,” when we shot that genre with steroids 52 years ago on our little 5 KW coffee-pot in Waikiki.

Later, many of these activities were the basis of legendary KHJ promotions, like “The Big Kahuna” and many more. As Chuck Blore one-linered in 1958, his great stuff at KFWB-AM in Los Angeles, was, “Often imitated, Never duplicated.” Same might be claimed of the old Poi Boy shticks.

An early commenter on Feder’s blog calls the Chicago scam, “Tricks…lame. The station is a bore,” I decided --- since HAWAII 5-0 is coming on and my DVR is busted! ---to document one of the “marketing tools” we pulled off more than a half century ago.

It hastened our going from worst to first in the only Honolulu radio ratings at the time: those conducted and sold to stations, agencies and sponsors by the C. E. Hooper company.

Their technique was called “Aided Recall.” Ahe daily sample size was lower than the IQ of five-foot, five-inch Steve Spagnuolo, head coach of the St. Louis Rams. Nonetheless, we were accepted as #1 “in the Hooper” and all major local and national ad agencies in 180 days.

The day the FCC granted the license transfer (from KHON-AM, see below) we created the SOURCE Rating Bureau. No less scientific than calling houses at random, the source of our data was based on station employees, family members and senior gophers hit the streets. Both of them.

The crew was stationed at just one intersection, Kapiolani & Kalakaua, during a.m. and p.m. drive times. (This corner was then Kau-Kau Korner Drive-Inn, later Coco’s Coffee House and, finally, The Hard Rock Café.) The appropriately uniformed, officially credentialed “survey team” asked drivers stopped at red lights, “What station are you listening to? Mahalo.”

Results were calculated by abacus by our bookkeeper, Lin Hon Au, a first generation Chinese-American. Lin dropped out of high school when his math teacher accused him of cheating in a battle of t abacus versus hand-cranked “adding machine,” at which Lin could not be beat. He quit school and went to work at the International Business Machine Company in the 1940s.

But he was known to legions of KPOI listeners as Coolidge Nakamura, my “board operator.” I invented fictitious engineers to make us sound like the huge Mainland stations with IBEW members twirling the dials while the deejays yapped in another studio. Coolidge’s shining moment was when he went into global orbit, chasing Russian cosmonauts in The Flying Burguesa, a new sausage product to be launched at the 1959 Forty-Ninth State Fair.

Commander Nakamura’s ground controller was that week’s headliner, Danny Kaye. Forget the details, OK? It was all botched bloody nuts. But, the thing got into the Honolulu Advertiser, which had a photo of the thing just as it crashed into the center pole of E. K. Fernandez three-ring circus tent, spewing its industrial tank loads of helium over the midway.

This was just after smoke signals and The Coconut Wireless Network, long before faxes, email or digital anything. Even niggardly General Manager, T. Finlay “Fin” Hollinger went crazy on this baby, spending like $500 on the entire SOURCE scam, uh, operation. The Finster phoned in overnight telegrams to the key agencies showing the rocketing “ratings.”

This yet again proved what Colonel Thomas A. Parker taught me in 1957: The bigger you do it, the more they’ll believe it, sir!” Well, duh, you might say. All aphorisms must pass the test of time and veracity. All Colonel’s did.

Certainly before US commercial radio signed on tin 1922 there were all manner of clever hoaxes perpetuated on the public. Orson Welles’ Mars fantasy is the post-1922 classic. But, duh, there really ain’t nothin’ new under the sun.

As an Elder Statesman (Yuch!) of Radio Programming with a resume of note, I am getting pissy about . . . .

Most “broadcasters” who feel that that they can, indeed must, write for print although they can barely type, “Open Thursday Night ‘Til Nine! Free Balloons For The Kiddies!” is the style of their ubiquitous, insipid blogs. Not all, however, are insipid. Ken Levine, Scott St. James and others are great. They were also smart and talented to get out of disc jockeying. Which, as my friend, actor Reni Santoni, blurted out one night in 1972: “Radio is one notch above juggling.”

Woody Goulartt has spent decades building his site “Boss Radio Forever” by expanding on his doctoral thesis. This is good as it gets, in both style and content: http://woodygoulart.com/wg/rock-and-roll-radio-history/ Woody was the first person to convince me anything done at 93/KHJ deserved to be studied, researched and documented in an historical academic context.

Some with anything to say, such as Jerry Del Coliano, deem it necessary to tease and then charge for their wisdom. Worse is the selective, content of a thing called LA Radio People. To quote Groucho Marx: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Among this paid site’s errors and omissions is: ME.

I guess being original Program Director of KHJ-AM (Melrose Avenue) during its first (and most Boss) four years and then co-creating American Top 40 with friends Tom Rounds and Casey Kasem for our new company, Watermark (La Cienega Boulevard) does not qualify one to be an LA radio person. Those CRUISIN’ albums only included one LA jock, Bob Morgan, so that doesn’t count either (although I am proud to say one of the LPs starred my hero deejay B. Mitchell Reed before he moved to LA.) Neither does “The Elvis Presley Story,” narrated by Wink Martindale West LA, North Hollywood.

Although some San Diego gossip is allowed, the historic impact of KGB-FM (Billboard Station of the Year, The Famous San Diego Chicken) and the rating’s giant other promos do not merit mention

In the only place left for a deejay to see his name in bold print, online. At least in the eyes of its creator, whom to the best of my knowledge did nothing of note in LA radio other than be the top KFWB-AM goo-gash groupie.

I’ve been told that he is upset because I once called him a nasty name, something never done in Hollywood, so I am invisible on the Huff.n’Puff Post.

I attended grade school in Hawaii, same one as Obama. Most of us and my other peers have grown out of the pee-pee kaka stage, in which the LA Peep Creep is permanently frozen. Why else would my KHJ book have been mentioned only once, and that in a comment?

An erstwhile big time airman, KHJ Boss Jock Johnny Williams maintains the go-to site for what happened to deejays here, there and everywhere: http://www.440int.com/440sat.html The editor of the LA thing was on-air in Lompoc in 1965 when Boss Radio broke out, didn’t get to LA until 1972.

Another early web site (along with Williams, he started in the mid-1990s) is the one-of-a-kind spot

to LISTEN TO Top 40 Radio since virtually Day One. This costs like a buck a month. It is a not-for-profit archive created an updated weekly by another radio vet, Dr. Rick Irwin: http://www.reelradio.com/

Then there are others who can “print a book” easier than pulling a paper towel from the paper towel dispenser in a Shell station shitter are popping up with memoirs comprised mainly of name dropping, minor market miracles for which they were responsible, the same old drug, sex and rock and roll jock tales, but with little How-To content, at least that I can see.

Claude Hall’s “This Business of Radio Programming” is IMHO the best radio textbook ever writ. And it was published in the 1970s. Of course radio was about to enter its hideous dance of death soon after, for the many reasons we all know. Claude is an Old School Journalist: He updates his blog weekly.

My hero, Chuck Blore has not published his tres cool, “ Okay, Okay I Wrote The Book” in either hard copy or electronic form, that I know of. But hey, how many radio “pros” can write 94,500 words about anything? Methinks that a new radio book currently being hocked might not be as dense. From the excerpts I’ve seen, the writer ain’t no Blore.

My two-pound tome “KHJ: Inside Boss Radio” still brings in 93 bucks from the serious and literate folks interested in the dear, departed Top 40 format.

So, on behalf of we few surviving “pioneers” and those of us who care about the conservation of paper and broadband, please back off with tales of warmed-over copies of the Original Greats, Or enough of, “I was a tight buddy of Eddie Cochran-like” sites that seemingly change as often as Kohoutek flies overhead, why not back off and let the kosher content have some more oxygen before you suck up all the air? Leaving, of course, dead air.

Hana Koko Lele on those who list themselves as some sort of “contributors,” who last posted last year. Or before. You claim you once did a daily show?

If this pisses anybody off, as we say in Hawaiian, fuckin’ pupule! If I wanna curmudgeon, that’s my business. So sue me. Besides, Mr. Hip, Humble Harve, called the other night in a mad rant about how, “Someone has to set the muthafuckin’ record straight, man!”

Don Imua is the last Boss Deejay as well as being one of the very best interviewers on both radio and television. The old man, Art Laboe, is the original and best oldie but goodie still doing it. Sirius can’t be serious with its smorgasbord of muzak channels. Sometimes baseball and football on radio are so superior to the TV announcers it is worth it to kill the television audio and listen to the play-by-play crew streaming live online on one’s computer.

Dedicated to Frank Terry, deejay; Robert Nagaoka, loyal listener; and Norman Mailer, author of "Advertisements For Myself." And ongoing thanks to Michael Harrison, the only competitor I hung out with while doing battle for keeping posted http://www.podjockey.com/category/podjockeys/ron-jacobs/

Me ke aloha pumehana from Kaneohe, where the current temp is 74-degees at 0030 hours, Tuesday, March 2011.