KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 19

Humble Harve compares the other cat's whiskers

Humble Harve: Johnny Williams once said that when you go in the conference room for the jock meeting you check your ego at the door. Well, it better be that way because the whole idea was that if one spoke comes off the wheel, the wheel’s eventually going to fall apart and everything crashes. That was the whole idea that was generated. But if anybody else would have been there other than Jacobs, I don’t think we would have been one tenth as big as we were. We would have had a nice format but it would have gone the way that other formats go. It wouldn’t have lasted more than, I don’t know, a year. ’Cause it wouldn’t have been executed properly.

Don Berrigan: I remember with particular interest the talk that Tiny Tim’s handler gave us, prior to Tiny Tim’s entrance into a jock meeting, as we were building up to a big promotion centered around him. I have echoed to others over the years that Tiny Tim was not an act, but what you saw and heard was the real Tiny Tim. In working with him during the promotion, I was moved and refreshed by the sense I had of his total lack of guile and games. I have a vivid image of the expression of disbelief on the face of The Real Don Steele when Tiny Tim whipped his ukulele out of a shopping bag and began his “thank you” serenade. I found it interesting because I had the sense that, despite Don Steele’s vaunted super-double hipness, this was a new one to him.

Gary Mack: Every week at the jock meetings Jacobs was like George Allen exhorting the Rams in the locker room. There was some picking of nits but always a lot of positives. Jacobs did a lot of fine-tuning in these sessions. More adrenaline pumping than any radio meeting I’ve been to since. Then Jacobs would unveil the latest promotion. There was a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing when he’d roll out the latest promos he had written and Robert W. Morgan had recorded. What amazes me, listening to them now, is the quality of those spots. They’re still better today than anything you hear done on the new digital production consoles.

And all of it done on quarter-inch mono tape! I’ll bet we went through a ton of splicing tape and razor blades. And what is so unbelievable is that KHJ’s studio and production facilities were really rudimentary. But the meetings — they were good!

Shelley Gordon: There’s a perception of Ron coming down on the jocks all the time, probably based on the memos and some emotional jock meetings, but he complimented and encouraged them also. Those compliments didn’t come easily. They had to be earned. When they did come they carried a lot of weight.

Everyone bitched and moaned about jock meetings but Ron scheduled them anyway. He told me that having all the Boss Jocks together at the same time in the same place was as important as any operational details that had to be explained and it gave them a chance to interact. Radio is different, he said, in the sense that these guys were on the same team, but not really working together or even listening to each other because of their hours. Johnny Williams coming off the air at 6 a.m., Harvey just getting started at 6 p.m.

The meetings were a chance to connect, though sometimes they got pretty heated, a lot of egos in the same room. But they were effective in that everyone knew exactly what was expected of them in terms of performance — not just the mechanics of the new contest or promotion. The jocks knew Ron listened at all hours and they dreaded the red phone ringing when they screwed something up. But it could just as well be him calling to say something was great if he really dug something you did.

Charlie Tuna in radio's analog AM days

Charlie Tuna: Boss Jock Humble Harve was the designated “cool cat” — with the black shades, incense, peace-sign, love beads and the “hip” persona to go with all those props. Meanwhile, Jacobs was truly democratic and did not discriminate. He would put down anyone. All our jock meetings were behind closed doors. It was like Jacobs wanted someone to take him on. He started as a Gatling gun-tempo morning man in sleepy Honolulu. None of us knew he was also moonlighting as a Roller Derby announcer in the summers. His only chance to be “on” was during our jock meetings. They made Friar’s Club roasts look like a séance. Morgan and Jacobs had been going at it since back in Fresno in 1962.

But the funniest was when Jacobs got on Harve’s case, usually for no other reason than to get to play Don Rickles with Harve’s wonderful, but neurotic, personality. Supposedly when Jacobs met Harve for the first time he called him something like, “The most drab looking nebbish who has ever attempted to make it in show business, even as a ticket taker.” Harve was ordered to wear solid black shades at all times. Indoors, outdoors, day, night, always. “Then,” Jacobs supposedly told the bewildered Harve, “you got a shot, like maybe people will think you’re Ray Charles or Roy Orbison.”

See, Morgan and Jacobs were one another’s greatest fans when it came to putting people down. So when Jacobs starting in on Harve he wouldn’t stop until Morgan was choking with laughter.

Jim Mitchell: Working at KHJ was like going back to Colgreene. At KGB in 1963 or at KCBQ in 1965-66, somebody would say, “Let’s have a contest” and we would kind of limp through it with formulaic routines and bored promos. With Jacobs, it was like everything rode on THIS promotion. There would be major brainstorming, hours in the production studio — usually with Jacobs, Morgan, and Mouzis — doing tracks over and over again, long after I thought it was perfect. I was doing news, but I couldn’t resist wandering in for those sessions. And the jocks kept up the enthusiasm as long as the event or promo ran. Over the years, we all had enough 3 a.m. calls to know that there was no hour when the boss might not be listening.

Steve Clark: Those hotline calls from Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs were always a threat. Bill would call late at night happy on "winky-poos" (booze), always in a good mood, never upset, usually asking for a song to be played “next.” Even if I just played it to impress some chick he was with, it was “You got it, Bill.” You always did what was necessary to keep Drake pleased, fuck the format that was the legendary Bill Drake. He was always nice, a real gentlemen. We got along, always joking around, and we had much in common — those California girls.

When Ron called on the hotline, you knew you fucked up, or some precise instructions were coming. No mistakes, no questions, just do it exactly as Ron told you. Nothing less than perfection was accepted from Ron Jacobs. Ron’s memos were verbal road maps with every detail covered, nothing overlooked. Sometimes you had to read them over and over to make sure you’re clear in your head what Ron wanted. He wasn’t tolerant of fuckups — not even a little tolerant. Boss Radio was perfect radio.

Charlie Tuna: I have Robert W. Morgan to thank for, among many other things, teaching me early on about working “outside the box.” Sure, KHJ had a format, but it really was just a guideline or a safety net to fall back on during one of those days when you were less than on top of your game. The rest of the time you could be as creative as you wanted to be. And no, there were no stopwatches clocking how long you talked. “If you have something to say, say it or do it,” was a simple enough rule. We all got the concept of what KHJ was supposed to be. We attempted to deliver seven different personalities with each of us using our own style of executing the format.

Humble Harve: And it wasn’t just format. It was constant promotion. The thing that I liked best of all was the brainpower put behind it by Jacobs because every day there was a new contest or promotion. There was a new shtick to promote — it was Jimi Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl, tie-ins like the “Laugh In” TV show, the world premiere of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” flick, the “Christmas Wish” giveaways — it was this, it was that.

Every day there was something else to hang your hat on so there was more than just you on the radio. The whole station backed you up with money, with contests, with this, with that, and this was unique and that was different. I’d never had that at any radio station. It was the first time that I recall a radio station that bent over backwards to promote everybody at the radio station in huge promotions, nonstop! When KHJ came on, KFWB didn’t know what hit ’em. And they couldn’t compete because they didn’t know how. It was a brand new way to do everything.

Ripped Ron Jacobs ruminates on Rams and radio

Robert W. Morgan: Jacobs would write all this great shit at night when he was ripped, and I’m half asleep. He’d call up with some off-the-wall deal, “You gotta dig this, man. Dig this, dig that.” And I’d think, ‘Wait a minute. Where did all this come from?’

It was one contest after another. A new one began before we had a chance to physically give the prizes away. KHJ started that. I don’t think any station ever did that before. Ours was an accident. I think we did a second one right away and Jacobs put up a liner, “Boss Radio, where the contests never stop,” or something like that. That really pissed him off after like the first 20, you know, having to segue entire contests.

2 B continued . . .

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KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 16

Ed Dela Pena (KHJ Chief Engineer): The State of California has a law that you cannot be in a sound ambiance that exceeds so many decibels for so much time. Of course, Don didn’t want to pay attention to that, so he was forced to sign a waiver because the state maintained that those volume levels would deteriorate his hearing. And it did, sort of, because when Don would come out of his show at night for about ten minutes, he couldn’t hear. (Laughs.) He wasn’t totally deaf, but you know, you had to speak a little bit louder than normal. After we cured his headphone problem, it was a bit better. He was actually a pretty good guy. We shared a couple of Scotches here and there, right afterwards. ’Cause he’d come out at six o’clock which was time to go to Nickodell’s, the watering hole next door, and he would come in and sit at the table and order up four Scotches and put them right in front of him. (Laughs.)

Ken Levine: I asked Bill Mouzis if he knew the origin of ‘Tina Delgado is alive.’ He reacted like I was asking for the secret formula of Coca-Cola, which if he did know, he would have to kill me if he told me. What cracked me up was his saying something like, “Actually, I don’t think too many people asked Steele, out of respect, you know?” The actual story I heard — and it may be bullshit — was that there was a tiny mention in a newspaper personal column that someone was trying to find a Tina Delgado. A few days later someone else wrote that Tina Delgado is dead. And a few days after that someone else wrote in that Tina Delgado is alive. At least that’s one of the legends.

Ron Jacobs: A key at KHJ was each guy having his own shtick that would sort of make him a personality image-wise, if not by performance. So Morgan’s the only guy that could put the phone on the air. Riddle would talk about the nighttime scene up on Sunset Strip and plug his TV dance show. Roger would talk about records. And so on. With Steele I asked him, “What is your thing, man?”

He said, “Well, there’s TINA DELGADO, you know.”

“What’s TINA DELGADO?”

“Well, there’s this liner.”

“All right, there’s a liner — but what’s your thing?”

He said, “Well, it’s this liner.”

I said, “I know but it’s a liner, man. But what do you do on the radio? Morgan told me that …"

He said, “You don’t get it, man, this thing really works. You just do it over and over again. It’s a liner. You do it over and over.”

“You do it over again?”

“No,” Steele says, “a woman screams it.”

“A woman screams this. Over and over. What does she scream?”

“TINA DELGADO is alive, alive.”

“OK. What kind of woman?”

“Shrieking.”

Bill Mouzis: One of the things people always ask us is, “Who the hell is Tina Delgado?” And I don’t know. That’s one I really don’t know. He just brought it in. Steele brought it in with him. I don’t know where he got it, I don’t know who that was. And I didn’t even want to ask him. I figured if he wasn’t about to volunteer I wasn’t going to ask. Remember Jimmy Durante? Remember what he said at the end of his TV show? “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Like, you’d go up to him and say, “Pardon me, Mr. Durante, but who is Mrs. Calabash?” Yeah, right.

Ron Jacobs: Now KHJ was a very unionized full-on Hollywood operation in 1965. The engineers were members of I.B.E.W. — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Anyone who spoke on the air had to be a member of A.F.T.R.A., the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. So I called them, trying to be cool, and said, “I need some women to come down and shriek.” The entire copy was “Tina Delgado is alive, alive.”

There were 25 actresses sitting in the KHJ lobby rehearsing. And Mouzis thought he’d seen everything, right? World War II, network radio, a show that Steve Allen and his wife did in bed, anything. He came into the production room. “Uh, Ronnn, there’s, ah, a bunch of women out there chanting ‘Morgado’ something. Uh, Ronnnn,” — that’s how he’d pronounce my name when he could see something really fucking weird coming — “what’s the deal, man?”

I said, “We bring ’em in one at a time, we say, ‘Sit down ma’am, please give us a level and scream this.’”

I mean, how do you direct a woman to scream that? Five words. I respect Johnny Mann because he knows that the shorter things are, the harder they are to do. I don’t know why exactly, but I saw John do more than 20 takes of our first jingle, “93/KHJ.”

And I’m in this room and I’ve been in Hollywood for like four minutes and these professional actresses who have done Hamlet on stage or Stella Dallas on network radio or national commercials for Oldsmobile, they sit down in the booth and all they have to do is belt out, “Tina Delgado is alive, alive!” And I don’t even know what it’s supposed to sound like, you know, except that it worked in San Francisco.

And Morgan had already gone home. Steele hadn’t come in yet and besides, anything would work as far as he’s concerned. But I was trying to think, “What, is it supposed to be fast? Is it supposed to sound like someone they just found in a flipped car after a train wreck?”

“Del-gah-doooooooooo!”

“IS alive!”

“Del-GAHHHHHH-do!”

“IS ALIIIIIIIIIVE!”

“DELLLLLL-gato!”

“Tanya Del —

(Click) “Sorry, it’s TINA.”

“Oops, can I do it again?”

(Click) “OK, rolling.”

“Teeeeena Delgado —

Each audition took about a minute. The actresses, operating on the incorrect assumption that we had any idea of what we were doing, asked, “Will there be a call back?” I’d seen my share of Hollywood movies about Hollywood. “We’ll call you. Leave the name of your agent.”

And just as quickly as it hit like a tropical typhoon, Hurricane Tina was gone. Mouzis and I were happy that the thing was all over. But it wasn’t. We had two dozen women on tape shrieking.

Mouzis, a wise and patient man, locked the recorders and nodded in the direction of Nickodell’s. The coffee arrived and I asked him, “Billy, you’ve been doing this since radio was invented. What the fuck did we just do?”

“Hey, man, don’t ask me, you’re the program director.” That breaks the tension. We howl like hyenas. No one notices. This is Hollywood, babe.

Later, Steele came in to do his show. I dragged him into the production room where Mouzis was sitting with a 10-inch reel of tape racked up on a big Ampex recorder.

I said, “Listen to this.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Just listen up and tell me which one of these works for you.”

And The Real Don Steele listened. These were the Delgado finalists who had been selected from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to audition for this and one was going to receive a residual payment every thirteen weeks for years. And he listened to the first one and said, “That’s got it,” and walked out the door. He picked the first one. Then I remember that Steele was born in Hollywood and he expected this to happen some day. Hollywood, man, no biggie.

The Real Don Steele: Why do they like “Tina Delgado is ALIVE, ALIVE!” You tell me. I used that in Portland, Oregon and soon it was all over town like “Kilroy was here.” Dumb thing. I don’t have any idea why. I know it was a hit. I could feel it was a hit. I don’t know if “Roberto Delgado is alive, alive” would have been as heavy, I just don’t know. Even if I think I am caught up in some kind of insanity it doesn’t depress me, because I kind of enjoy it, you know?

Sitting there suddenly saying, “It ain’t bad if you fry it,” looking through the glass and there is an engineer in his early forties — Valley community, Little League baseball coach, Mr. Legitimate — cueing in noises that’ll go wowee rather than chooo. And I think to myself: What is this? A world situation this, and we’re in here giggling like did dad doo! I don’t feel ashamed of that. What a wonderful thing to have fun working. Not many people get that break.

Humble Harve: Coming on after Steele you felt like you were already on a rocket and you had to pick it up. Anybody who followed The Real Don Steele — if they didn’t jump on that rocket, man, they were six feet under. I can’t imagine doing anything low key after him. I mean, how could you? It’s just like it’s following an explosion. I had to stand off in the control room and egg him on. Jacobs told me what to do. “Get in there and rile him up,” for his final set, you know, the Delgado thing. Yeah, I was in there egging him on. I mean not in the same room. I would never go in the room with him, no, no, that wouldn’t work. But to stand outside with the engineer, looking in, that was the whole thing.

And come on, Steele didn’t need me. But it added to Jacobs’ whole Boss Jock team idea. It also made me feel better. Shit man, it’s like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the Yankees. You follow with another home run. There’s no let up, like passing the baton. Yeah. I think that was the greatest one-two punch that ever happened on the radio. There was no let-up, there was no breathing room, man. It was boom, boom. Here comes a left, here comes a right, boom, bang!

Ed Dela Pena: Eventually, we turned the mike around, andput it right in front of the jock’s face and hung it with some chains. I had had an Altec 604E in there and they’d pound the announcer’s desk. The volume would just go to the point where sometimes the engineer would have to cue up a record a little bit ahead of the playtime. Steele played the speaker so loud in there that the vibrations coming through the glass would make the turntable-needle skip. So they had to watch out for that and make sure it hadn’t skipped on them because of the acoustic problems with that big window we had in there. It really vibrated.

Milo Perichitch: I always had a weakness for The Real Don Steele because I felt he was really basically an honest person. And I liked Morgan too. Oh, yeah, Gary Mack. He was cool, he was a good guy. Humble Harve was fun. I didn’t know these guys that well; I was pretty busy with the TV show, “Boss City.” Really what I knew of the jocks off the air was whatever went down at our table at Nickodell’s. In 1966 it felt like KHJ was on top of the heap and it also sort of demanded responsible behavior and getting the tasks done. It was definitely a good feeling being with the #1 radio station.

Cyrus Faryar (KHJ's "Sitar The Pirate")

Cyrus Faryar: Radio guys at that time were always fascinating. Most of the jocks — there is probably a term, a medical term, for the personality of a Top 40 disc jockey — their radio persona was very vibrant. Out of the booth they could either be very modest and sort of conservative in their demeanor or off-the-charts crazy. But they found a common ground in radio as the name of the game and success was to have a distinct, immediately recognizable radio voice, personality and manner, so that people knew immediately who they were listening to. Whether it was The Real Don Steele or Robert W. Morgan or whoever. The first time I walked around the station in my full Sitar the Pirate outfit, Morgan’s demeanor was to be totally charged and quite urbane and he probably was just, you know, cool with the whole thing. Steele probably rolled his eyes.

Mitch Fisher: The Monkees concert at the Hollywood Bowl was their first major appearance in L.A., right? KHJ was presenting it. There were going to be 18,000 screaming 13-year-old girls there, right? So we decided that the disk jockeys should all wear different costumes from Western Costume. Really like bizarre outlandish stuff, fit right in with the Monkees, you know? I have one of Jacobs’ infamous memos. “Instead of coming on hip,” which is in quotes, “or anything formal, since the audience will be younger and because the Monkees are zany, you will be wearing grand costumes from Western Costume.” Then it says to check with Mitch Fisher. “These costumes are assignments and will only be changed if they don’t fit or with Mitch’s permission if you have a better idea.”

The jocks were supposed to dress like this:

Robert W. Morgan: Giant, muscle bound rooster from “The Danny Kaye TV Show.”

Johnny Williams: Caveman.

Bobby Tripp: Pancho Villa.

Real Don Steele: Lord High Executioner, as worn by Groucho Marx in the motion picture “The Mikado.” (Laughs.)

Humble Harve: Merlin The Magician.

Sam Riddle: Beau Brummel.

Gary Mack: Astronaut.

Robert W. Morgan and Monkee Davy Jones

Something happened between the memo and the show. Morgan and Steele switched costumes. Steele wanted to be the oversized rooster and Morgan wanted to be something else. So Morgan got a different costume and Steele became the giant rooster. He picked the rooster outfit.

The night of the concert when it came time before the show for everybody to get into their costumes, Steele put on the oversized stuffed rooster outfit, looked at himself in the mirror and said, “This is fucking ridiculous, I can’t go out there like this!”

To which I replied, “Don, you have to go out there like this. This is the way it’s all set up. This guy’s going to be Merlin, this guy’s going to be that, you gotta be — damnit, this is your costume! You picked it out.”

“No, I’m not doing it. I ain’t going on, sorry, man, that’s it. I ain’t doing it. I’m going on in my suit.” So he took off all the rooster costume stuff and he put on his blue serge suit with his tie and everything, right? While he’s doing this of course as soon as he said he’s not going on like that, I went out to find Jacobs and told him that Steele refused to go on wearing the rooster suit. And Jacobs said to me, “That’s your department. I got nothing to do with it, it’s up to you, deal with it.”

So I went back to the dressing room and I said, “Steele …” who was now in a blue serge suit with a tie and everything, right? And I said, “Steele, you’re not going on in that suit. You’re going on in the rooster suit or you’re not going on at all!”

Steele said, “Then I’m going to leave.”

I said, “Fine, we can do very well without you. Goodbye.”

So he stormed out the door. Probably went crying to find Jacobs. And Jacobs probably told Steele, “Hey, Mitch is running all of that.” So Steele came slinking back in, put on the rooster suit and went on. When you think about it, it was really ridiculous, a real scene. Steele or Morgan or both of them were always pulling shit. Those guys would’ve rolled over anyone but Jacobs.

2 B continued . . .

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