KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 1

Forward

by Ben Fong-Torres

When it comes to deciding on the best Top 40 radio station of all time, the one all the other stations’ deejays and programmers listened to, the one everyone wanted to work for, there’s no definitive answer. It depends on when and where you grew up, what stations you heard and came to love, which deejays became your own personal favorites.

In my book, The Hits Just Keep On Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio, I mentioned a few — just a few — contenders, including WABC in New York, KLIF in Dallas, KFWB in Los Angeles, and WLS in Chicago.

But here’s the thing: No matter where and when the debate takes place, there’s one station that’s gotta be in the, oh, Top Two. That station, of course, is KHJ, “Boss Radio” in Los Angeles.

Scott Shannon, whose career took him from Nashville to New York, offers strong nods to WLS, WABC, and KFRC in San Francisco, a younger sister-station of KHJ. But, he says, “KHJ was the most polished. It was an incredibly disciplined, tight-fisted, Top 40 station laced with high-profile personalities. Few understood how that worked; even fewer knew how to combine the two.”

Ron Jacobs was one of the few. He was RKO Programming Consultant Bill Drake’s first program director at KHJ. And here, abetted by ear- and eyewitnesses galore, along with the black-and-white documentation of the memos he cranked out day and night, he helps you to understand how it worked.

As dozens of Boss Radio copycats showed, KHJ could not be duplicated. Ah, if only The Real Don Steele, Robert W. Morgan, and rest of the Boss Jocks — and, of course, Jacobs himself — could be cloned. They couldn’t, and so we had Boss Radio — and all the others.

The library of Top 40 radio is criminally thin. Yes, there have been dissertations on Gordon McLendon and KLIF; memoirs from Rick Sklar of WABC, from Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack, and biographies of Alan Freed and Dick Clark, and surveys of pioneer deejays and stations.

But, 30-something years after KHJ blasted onto the scene in May of 1965, we hadn’t heard from the boss of Boss Radio.

Until now.

Ben Fong-Torres - Author of The Hits Just Keep On Coming, Backbeat Books; and Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock Roll, Backbeat Books.

Preface

We were like kids sneaking around. No one was about and it was too dark to see much. Aside from this unauthorized nocturnal prowling, a reconnaissance romp that Robert W. Morgan and I had taken several nights before, the first time I entered 5515 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles was a week after April Fools’ Day, 1965.

I was fresh out of Halawa Jail, outside of Honolulu. (Another story, nowhere near as exciting as riding the Boss Rocket.) My self-esteem was dragging until Bill Drake and Gene Chenault gave me the thumbs up on the gig as Program Director of KHJ.

That first morning on the job, I drove down the canyon and tried to absorb the reality of “Hollywood.” I was born in Hawaii and often played tour guide. I knew that the real action, whether Hawaii or Hollywood, wasn’t going to be instantly visible. It lay below the surface. But more than enough of the Hollywood that I grew up dreaming about, remained. The Chinese Theater was still called Grauman’s. There were two Brown Derby restaurants. And one look at the La Brea Tar Pits was enough, thank you.

People from L.A. rush off to Waikiki, the beach of their dreams. For me that was where old men sat and played dominoes at the Kuhio Beach picnic tables. It was where the Roller Derby skaters sat on the Merry-Go-Round bar drinking beer all day. Upstairs was the Waikiki Tavern where Lenny Bruce performed for baffled blue-haired ladies in the late ’50s. It was where kids threw soap in the fountain at the end of Kalakaua Avenue where it becomes Diamond Head Road. I knew it would be impossible to know Hollywood that well, but with the help of a few friends who grew up there, I didn’t have to buy a map of the movie stars’ homes.

2 B continued . . . or buy the book, all 450 pages! http://www.93khj.com/

Steele, Jacobs and Morgan - KHJ 25th Anniversary Reunion - 1990

One of the few advantages of old age is that old friends become older, wiser and cooler as we all survive for another twentieth-century day in the sunshine. If not for so many supportive folks who've stuck with me through the bi-polar bounces, there would be nothing here. You'd be on one of the other uncalcuable, imploding mass of blogs. Not just friends, but each a pro with his own bag of tricks. Carol Williams is the only "her" on this gig. Only she knows everything Boss Radio, tending as she does the Mother of All Archives ... from way back. Members of this crew know who they are. I try to thanks them often.

Starting today, June 5, 2010, the second incarnation of my second book up online--even no one knows where that goes--these tidily arranged neutrons would not be here without the core group that's had my back, front and both sides. Mahalo nui loa to publisher Don McCoy and Dave Sebastian Williams, Larry Shannon, Ed Kanoi, Brian von Ahsen and all involved in the righteous work of JCS Hawaii.