Well, my longtime friend since the mid-1960s, gentleman, radio scholar, journalist, author, rabid Texas Longhorn fan, Claude Hall (above) most recently posted (on May 22, 2011) a gloom’n’doom last hurrah—sort of—for radio broadcasting. It seems most folks write Claude to see their own name onscreen, (formerly “in print”) hopefully in boldfuckingface, just as they did when “Vox Jox” was the first-read feature in Billboard magazine. Claude diligently wrote this column (plus seemingly most all the other radio stories) each and every week. And that was back in the days of manual typewriters, no e-mail, and offset lithographic printing presses. I was fortunate to hang around the city room of the late Honolulu Advertiser when there was an actual daily newspaper here, and the sights, smells and sounds of that scene are lasered in my mind forever.
Typically, the first deejay in or around his (sorry, no wahine jocks, only jokes, in the Fifties) radio station’s front office would try to intercept the company’s human-delivered mail on the day that Billboard usually arrived. Major market stations with the big bucks shelled out extra fees for the “fastest” possible delivery time. At KHJ-Los Angeles our multiple copies arrived within 24 hours from New York. Three years earlier, in 1962, when I was programming KMEN-San Bernardino, we were thrilled if our “Bible” showed up within seven days of publication.
And that was wikiwiki compared with 1957 when I hosted the afternoon drive show on KHVH-Honolulu from the penthouse studios of the then-new Hawaiian Village Hotle. From 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. weekdays the Billboard “Honor Roll of Hits” Top 100 chart comprised the show’s play list, scrambled daily based on listener telephone and mail requests—and my own personal likes and loathings. No way could I imagine that thirteen years later I would close the deal with Billboard that contributed so much to the credibility of our new Watermark program, “American Top 40,” which was created by Casey Kasem, Tom Rounds and me.
Claude Hall was the person who arranged our first meetings with the magazine’s bigwigs. Casey, of course, was setting the bar for all future syndicated countdown shows. He hosted the first broadcast on the Fourth of July 1970 through the first Sunday of August 1988. Suave Shadoe Stevens took over the gig and remained the voice of AT40 through January 28, 1995. I was fortunate to be there for the recording of the first and last programs in the series. The original program popped out seven years before my daughter was born in 1977. Now, if exists at all, ain’t no big deal. But it’s always fun to be first.
Upon reflection (my FCC license was issued the day before Christmas 1953) over the too many years, I realize that me, Mister Program Director, would have fired Ron Jacobs, the disc jockey, many, many times; for a variety of causes, some of which were not included in the circumstances that forced me to axe a jock. I always took that as a failure on my part, not doing my "director" duties well enough to coach up and motivate talent. There were few things more nauseating, professionally, than looking a soon-to-be-ex-colleague straight in the eye and saying, “You’re fired,” long before Donald Trump became a household name/joke.
Andy West (known as “Jumpin’ George West” or “George & Mr. Bird” when we first met, in 1959) was a sweetheart of a guy—when sober. But he is in my personal list of MOFBM (Most Often Fired By Me) with a record of three dismissals, all for strange, preposterous reasons. At KPOI-Honolulu where we were both on the air and I was also Program Director, George chased me around the semi-jungle in back of the red and white tower hollering and waving a pistol about maniacally. Why did he do that? Never knew why, but it was Instant Aloha Time when my blood pressure and adrenaline levels returned to normal and I yelled at someone who was staring at me, but still employed in the building to escort the new deportee out of it.
When I arrived in LA in 1962 to assemble a crew for what was to become KMEN-San Bernardino, I allowed George—by then Andy West—to convince me that he had grown up. This says something about the both of us, since I was in my mid-20s and West was into his 30s, the oldest guy on the jock staff: the captivating “K/men.”
“San Berdoo” was not the Hollywood I imagined I was headed for. Me, naive native from the South Pacific, not knowing north from south or how to pronounce anything in Spanish, I found myself sentenced to function in a stark one-story cement blockhouse situated in the middle of a large cow pasture. This field of bullshit—how appropriate—became Insta-Muck the moment the first raindrop hit Baseline Avenue causing us to abandon vehicles, remove shoes, roll up pant legs and slog through the muddy gulch that appeared so benign when dry. Oh yeah, KMEN had more than one tower, which totally threw me off since there was no such reason for more than one stick out here because the closest station at the same frequency and dial position was more than 2500 miles away.
Several months after KMEN came on strong with our new rock format in March of '62, a man, considerably older than any station employee, right out of Grant Wood’s classic "American Gothic" portrait, stormed into the KMEN office (the joint was too small for anything resembling a lobby) and, shotgun in hand, demanded to see the, “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard who’s been messin’ ‘round with my daughter?!?!” Fortunately for West his okole was west or east or somewhere other than on the premises when the Farmer’s Daughter’s Father enraged onto the scene, locked and loaded. Another hair-raising live gun scene, another Termination With (Insane) Cause.
Good training for later, when a loaded revolver was jammed into my left temple in West LA in the early-Eighties. Or when an ex-Marine on speed pulled out a Beretta M92F and pointed it between my horrified eyes, flat black matte point blank, until I told him to fucking shoot me or I'd call the HPD. He took off burning rubber down Paleka Road. Earlier this year.
When I landed at LAX in April 1965 I had had been jailed for a month in the midst of mucho guns and ammo. Several days after my release with five parole years hanging on my head I was given a second chance by Tom O’Neil (the head of RKO, headquartered in NYC), consultant Gene Chenault and his partner, the One & Only Big Bill Drake plus General Manager Ken Devaney.
It has been written that the KHJ gig was my only offer, but such was not the case. The soulful, veteran station owner and philanthropist Egmont Sonderling asked me to move to Oakland and program his stations, most of which were in big markets and ran what are now called “urban” formats: media code for significant black demographics. They would have had a Jewaiian calling the R&B shots. One of my better contemplations: “What would have happened if I had taken that job?”
I shall be forever grateful to the gentleman of RKO General and KHJ-AM-FM-TV who had little concern for my criminal record while they had no problem at all with my track record: batting 1.000 at taking stations from worst to first. No, it was the fact that I, a convicted felon, had been released the previous week from Halawa Jail on Oahu after serving thirty days of a one-year Federal sentence (and paying a $1000 fine; $7,139 in 2011 Obama bucks) for possession of three milligrams of marihuana [sic].
Mahalo also to Honolulu attorney Hyman Greenstein who, twenty years later (and pro bono at his insistence) facilitated my Presidential Pardon from Jimmy Carter. I appreciate being among the 566 people President Carter pardoned, commuted or whose convictions he rescinded during his term, 1977-1981. Included among us are: G. Gordon Liddy (various crimes), Peter Yarrow (sex with a minor), Jefferson Davis, posthumously (treason), Patty Hearst (bank robbery), a trio convicted of machine-gunning the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954, and a group of hundreds thousands of Viet Nam war draft dodgers.
My formally framed in bureaucratic black, ersatz-parchment Pardon, is glorious to behold, nice. The document with its gothic lettering, “gold” embossed Presidential seal and red, white and blue ribbons looks pompously impressive until and if one puts their face in it and reads the smallest print that reveals the instrument is not a distinguished award, honorary commendation, certificate of meritorious service and so on, but rather it spells out the law of the United States on which I so severely trampled.
Book Pitch WARNING
The following is from my book KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO. “My first day at KHJ I discovered two newsmen working there who I knew from Honolulu. One was, you guessed it: twice-canned Andy West. I never worked with the other guy. But, when I was hired he thought he’d be fired on the spot. Actually, the News Department was the last thing on my mind, there being so much to do. Anyway, this sleazy newsman ran to KFWB and offered to divulge KHJ’s game plan if they’d hire him.”
KFWB indeed hired da dude. The erstwhile KHJ newsman spilled his guts as if he’d been pre-Cheney water-boarded. Within a 24 hours KFWB was on the air with their version of our stuff. Suddenly, their reports were called “KFWB 20/20 News.” They were adapting—brazenly ripping off—and spewing out everything this turncoast told 'WB. Yes, they were even calling their once-legendary station “Boss Radio,” if you can believe that.
How we—Drake, Devaney and myself—discovered this unpredicted attempt to preempt our ENTIRE FORMAT by way of an alert Robert W. Morgan and what followed inside KHJ’s three-story fortress on Melrose Avenue was for a frenzied, scary six hours, one of the most inconceivable events I experienced in all my years in the biz, before or since. To quote a fabulously funny comedy record from 1952, it’s all “In The Book (Grandma’s Lye Soap),” by Johnny Standley, ranked #22 for the year by Billboard, just behind the super suede stylings of the Mills Brothers on “Glow Worm.” Like, in the KHJ book. Nudge, wink, attempt subtlety.
The KHJ squad's superstar during the sneak B-Day attack, a direct metaphoric hit right into our glowing, pulsating giant high powered vacuum tubes was The Real Don Steele. His meticulous, turbocharged debut performance was first, before any bogus Boss Jock ever attempted to be Real on the airwaves. Our entire team leaped into action, winging it with the urgency some of us went through when Jack Kennedy was murdered. On that infamous day I found myself calling the shots for the news crews at our stations in Fresno and San Bernardino. I was 25-years-old and a corporate VP going where no broadcasters had gone before. During these epocal moments dozens of “backstage” staff members instantly drop everything except sandwiches, soda pop, cigarettes and the restroom to focus like fiends on the major crisis happening simultaneously with live reports from the scene.
All hands pitch in, running through the halls and climbing stairs because of what was called "Breaking News." Walter Cronkite would never utter those two words without going through what was judicially prudent, archly objective and double-checked, at a minimum. Sometimes with with weeks passing without the now-overdone-to-a-crisp, strobing, HiDef, Day-Glo headline BREAKING NEWS, like FOX crying wolf to numbed-out zombies. 'TV is the opiate of the masses," was a small classified ad that ran every week in LA's first "underground" paper.
On the day we raced the clocks hanging on the walls inside 5515 Melrose Avenue, counting down to air, Steele displayed nerves of steel, the kind that come with massive egos and huge chunks of self-confidence. Steele waits in the locker room for nine hours, having been chosen the Bosstronaut to pop the virgin format's cherry. I chanted the Team KHJ mantra, which I required everyone working with me to know like their mama's name: the three word power phrase, "Preparation! Moderation! Concentration!"
MAYDAY. FLASH. TELETYPE BELLS RINGING. MACHINES DISGORGING ENDLESS ROLLS OF PALE YELLOW PAPER, PILING UP ON THE FLOOR. Everyone on my 72-person Program Department staff dropped what they were doing like they had just poked a finger into the glowing imu rocks in a luau fire pit and morphed into our improvised triage option ballet. We kept connected by our three Old School switchboard ladies and the building's intercom system. Two nerdish guys usually found in the huge mail room exploded, running around corridors like training Navy Seals armed with red hot carbon copy, Gestetner-purple inter-office memos and large metal carts with small wheels.
When major shit hits the fan everything freezes solid. On-hold TFN. Plans, budgets, sales operations, talent rehearsals, advance advertising and promotion, designing and filling out new program logs, tweaking KHJ's audio chain connected by non-redundant teleophone lines to the transmitter (located at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway) and otherwise climbing a mountain of minutiae, including a limo run to Wallich's Music City at Sunset and Vine to BUY the hit records we would soon be spinning. All of that while counting down to the Moment of Creation. It was madness, ad lib vamping fluid plans.
Everything and everyone that followed the Day One Premature Introduction during my four years as Boss Radio’s original Program Director was finally pulled together in print to the extent possible in 2002, reliving those Jurassic analog days. This was accomplished with much more than a little help from my friends, to create the first edition of KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO.
The HARD SELL
So, what’s the point, RJ? Well folks, it is summed up by what I just posted on LinkedIn.com, the only online group of which I am a member:
This is your last chance to purchase a new, unused copy of KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO direct from the distributor. Originally published in 2002, this updated and upgraded edition has been perused throughout the worlds of radio, pop culture, broadcast engineering, communications / journalism study, rock-n-roll, Los Angeles as a major media market, Hall of Fame deejays (Robert W. Morgan, The Real Don Steele, Charlie Tuna, etc.) Price is US$93 -- as in 93/KHJ, Boss Radio: The hippest, hottest, hardest hitting, hit making radio station in history. THIS IS NOT A HYPE: Only FOUR copies left as of May 25, 2011.
So, dear blogee, if you have read this far and you wish to avail yourself of this opportunity, kindly check out: http://tinyurl.com/4292rzo or contact me at rj@hawaii.rr.com for any questions you have.
Meanwhile, I am at work on my fourth book, about the NFL and a team called the Rams, due out this September. Back in the 1980s I realized what Claude Hall is now kvetching on his keyboard: “I really hate to see radio, as I knew it, go. Hurts bad! Because I remember so many good times and so many good and fun people.” I became an aptly named “freelance writer.” Not satisfied to tell my stories in the stultified, similar style of the “radio guy” school of writing, i.e., “Open Thursday Night Till Nine … Free Balloons For The Kiddies…” I threw myself into writing for the eye rather than the ear and have since had hundreds of pieces published in magazines here and beyond.
My third book, OBAMALAND: WHO IS BARACK OBAMA?, published in 2008, has become the #1 best-selling non-fiction book in Hawaii this decade. But it obviously tells the story of someone other than myself although I researched and worked on it for close to a year.
If perhaps the KHJ book is of interest to you, please act now, OK? I must acknowledge Magic Don McCoy, who put up the Boss bucks to make the revised edition possible; Carol Williams (wife of original KHJ Boss Jock Johnny Williams), who has had a hand in editing all of my books and keeps me from drowning in the devilish details I love/hate; akamai Terri and Dave Sebastian Williams of Dave & Dave Recording Studios in LA, who have handled distribution of the KHJ book with extreme TLC; and the scores of others acknowledged within its pages.
Mahalo and Aloha from Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii. Especially to buddy Claude Hall, author with wife Barbara of the first, and arguably the best book on the subject, THIS BUSINESS OF RADIO PROGRAMMING, in 1977. Claude mentions Marshall McLuhan in his Obituary For Radio. But a half-century ago the good professor cast dire warnings beyond the future of merely radio when he wrote: "The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries."
So please, if you wish, buy my book while the Internet is still in operation.
POSTSCRIPTS
For my in-depth 2008 profile of Claude Hall, check out: http://whodaguyhawaiicom.blogspot.com/2008/07/claude-hall-1968.html
I fired Andy West for the third time when he drunkenly drove a KHJ 20/20 News mobile unit down Melrose with the right tires up on the sidewalk and the front bumper wiping out a row of parking meters.
Fan's note: The final Los Angeles Rams game was broadcast on KHJ ninety days before the station went and got bossy.
And ... God bless Rocky and Peter Gardiner, who introduced me to the radiant genius Jean Shepherd, first on WINS radio during a 1960 visit to NYC and six years later in person when The Man visited my Laurel Canyon home and we got stoned and rapped until sunrise. In my opinion, Shepherd was the greatest, most versatile radio performer ever. More so than even my other idols: Orson Welles, Steve Allen and Jack Benny on-air and Norman Corwin, Pat Weaver and Arch Oboler, they who orchestrated some of the best "Theater of the Mind."
So, to whom am I supposed to pass the tiny torch I have been carrying since I was 15-years-old?
