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