KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 12

The Birth of “Boss”

Bill Drake: Clancy Imislund, the KHJ Promotion Director was there before Jacobs was hired. I thought that Jacobs came up with “Boss.” But Clancy had some ads made up using the phrase, “Boss Radio.” Jacobs didn’t like it. Neither did I. I finally said okay because KYA was “The Boss of The Bay” when I was in San Francisco. However, I didn’t come up with it at KYA. They were “Boss of The Bay” before I got there.

Ron Jacobs: Clancy Imislund realized that something was going to happen because Steve Allen and Michael Jackson, the talk-show Michael Jackson, were being dumped. There was a definite vibe of change from what I heard later. Imislund started to put things together that would be ready for whomever was going to be arriving to do rock ’n’ roll. When I went up to meet him for the first time, he had these layouts of newspaper ads, very tasty ones, and the featured phrase was “Boss Radio 93 KHJ.” One of them showed the empty Hollywood Bowl with just a pair of kids sitting up near the back row sharing a transistor radio.

Ken DeVaney (Email dated February 18, 2002): For what it’s worth, it was I who initiated the name “Boss Radio,” the slogan that is now indelibly etched in the history of radio itself. In May 1990 the 25^th anniversary of Boss Radio generated a staff reunion. The event marked a sense of renewed nostalgia and history of the early, frantic days of the new KHJ format that debuted a quarter century before. At the time, Clancy Imislund was “officially” credited with coming up with the Boss Radio slogan. Well, for all of his considerable gifts, he did not coin that term — because he had no basis upon which to do it.

With my wife’s disability we had a great number of teenage mother’s helpers in and out of our home in the San Fernando Valley at the same time we were pulling together KHJ. I noticed that these girls, in the slang of the day, constantly used the term “boss” when referring to someone or something that was superior in all respects.

Before “Boss Radio” made its debut I was at one of our brainstorming sessions on Melrose awaiting the official signing of Drake-Chenault, and shortly thereafter, the hiring of Jacobs. I told the group of my experiences in a house full of teenagers day and night. The next thing I knew Clancy was developing ads based on a “boss” theme. Now, you may believe that or not, but that is the way of it.

Bob Shannon: Initially, Jacobs wanted to change KHJ’s call letters. Too much baggage, he thought, and he wasn’t even a little impressed that they originally stood for “Kindness, Happiness and Joy.” His stations had names you could get your arms around. K-POI (rhymes with ‘hey boy’), K-MEN (the deejays “K-mentioned” things), K-MAK (“K-making the hits in Fresno”). Easy to say, easy to remember. You get the drift. Jacobs was animated, going a million miles an hour trying to convince Bill Drake and Gene Chenault, who were trying to keep up. “We’ve gotta get rid of these call letters,” said Jacobs. Silence. Drake and Chenault glanced at each other. Then, very quietly, Drake said, “Ron, you can do almost anything you want. But trust me, you’ll never get RKO to change them. Never.”

Ron Jacobs: Well, we couldn’t play with the call letters in L.A. On the one hand, KHJ had huge recognition because three call-letter stations were around since 1922, the beginning of commercial radio in the United States. But KHJ had all this — not so much negativity but ambivalence — lack of constant identity. They just changed formats too many times. I couldn’t come up with something. And there was a lot of heat on to get copy locked in for ads in the L.A. Times.

Our first ad was all the original jocks standing behind an elephant. Colonel Parker always said, “You can always count on elephants or midgets to draw a crowd.” Another thing we had to do was to get with Johnny Mann and make jingles. I had to give John something, some words. I was desperate. Imislund, because of his hard work and our deadline, was the person who pushed the “Boss Radio” slogan. I couldn’t top it even though I thought it was passé. And I really didn’t want it. The worst thing to have with the kids, and that’s certainly how we defined the audience in those days, is something that’s already burned out, you know. But we always played around with call letters like at KMAK in Fresno, the disc jockeys were called the “K-makers.” I wanted something that we could apply to the deejays collectively. KFWB had a good one when they were cooking.

Chuck Blore: KFWB’s original jocks had a collective name that was born when we wrote a jingle calling them “The Seven Swinging Gentlemen.” That never really stuck, but a couple of years into it I did some traffic-safety bits, where a little girl (Don MacKinnon’s daughter) questioned the jocks about traffic safety and, of course, they always gave the right answers. So she proclaimed, “By the power invested in me, I declare you to be — one of them KFWB Good Guys.” That one stuck!

Ron Jacobs: The term “Boss Jocks” came up in the first meeting about call letters with Drake and Chenault. I said, “Well, if we do go with Boss we can call the guys Boss Jocks — or B.J.s.” And Chenault freaked. He got all embarrassed and asked, “Won’t people think we mean blow jobs?”

Robert W. Morgan (Email to Ron Jacobs, August 17, 1997): As I’m typing this there’s a Jack in the Box spot on TV using the phrase, “Man, that’s boss!” We’ll never live it down.

Ron Jacobs: The phrase, “Boss Angeles,” originated several weeks after we were on the air. I was standing in the booth and Dave Diamond was on one night when he said, “The time is such and such in Los Angeles.” Wow! The light bulb went on and I thought to myself, schmuck, you know this isn’t Los Angeles, this is Boss Angeles. And that’s how that happened. As it turned out, it worked out pretty good.

Ken DeVaney: As to my contribution to KHJ, I like to think that because there was very little interference from RKO in New York, I was in a position to loosen the purse strings and spend money like crazy to operate our promotion like a Barnum & Bailey Circus. Like Jacobs, who actually knew the man, I was a great admirer of Colonel Tom Parker.

I suggested and authorized the budget to tow KHJ banners over Southern California beaches and turn loose sky writers promoting the arrival of Boss Radio. The resident promotion manager, Clancy Imislund came up with the plan to buy up every “seven-sheet” billboard in the Los Angeles Megalopolis for Boss Radio’s debut month.

This floored Jacobs, not just because the size of the ad budgets but because billboards were illegal in his home state of Hawaii. When the broadsides appeared in early May of 1965, the two of us spent two days “riding the route,” verifying the presence of every billboard. The message jumped out because of its simple design, “93/KHJ, Boss Radio” in electric Day-Glow colors against a black background. But they were everywhere.

2 B continued . . .

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