KHJ; INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 5

Boss Radio Smiles: Bill Drake and KHJ Music Director Betty Brenneman.

“I immediately apologized to this pregnant lady for swearing.”

I tried to sort out priorities. The main thing: Get Steele rolling, that would buy three hours. Then I realized I had forgotten something — music, shit, that was it — music! We hadn’t gotten around to stocking up on the current hits. I met Drake in the second floor conference room. We knew we’d be playing a “Boss 30.” But which 30 songs? We hadn’t started any music research. “We’ll play what KRLA’s playing,” said Drake. The Pasadena station was still the #1 rocker, if only by default. Back down the stairs to the music library on the ground floor and Betty Breneman, our Music Director.

“Can you run over to Wallichs Music City and pick up a KRLA song list and two copies of all the records on it?”

“Sure,” she answered, quizzically.

“We’re going to start with a 30-title current rotation based on what KRLA’s doing, that’s the way Bill wants to go.”

“Uh, huh,” she nodded slowly. “And when is this going to happen?”

“Not until three. Three o’clock. Today.” We’d only met a few days earlier but I knew then that she appreciated my sense of irony.

“Oh, shit, what about oldies?” I immediately apologized to this pregnant lady for swearing. She gave me a look that said, “I’ve been in the music business in Hollywood before you ever snorted smog, like I’ve never heard that before.”

“No problem,” said Mrs. Breneman, reminding me we had been playing lots of old stuff on our interim programming, the bland “Cavalcade of Hits.” The pregnant lady marched off to Drake’s chauffeur-driven Cadillac and headed for Music City at Sunset and Vine.

Bill Mouzis’ Secret Vault

The “93/KHJ Boss Golden” jingle popped into my brain. Jesus, we need jingles.

It was high noon. The Melrose building had been laid out to accommodate giant studios for network shows with large orchestras. The cement walls were nearly one foot thick; to get to Bill Mouzis, a few feet away, I had to trot about 75 yards through a maze of studios and offices.

Bill Mouzis, thick hair, glossy as black Greek olives, was on the AM engineering staff; one of over 20 men on the technical crew, all members of the IBEW union. It was instant rapport with Mouzis and me the first time we met. He wasn’t skeptical or cynical. And he was tired of doing breakfast remotes from Steve Allen’s house, “riding the board” for Michael Jackson or Geoff Edwards, dubbing news carts, etc. It was obvious to me that Mouzis could cook. In production, he would become the master chef.

At our original Johnny Mann jingle sessions the week before, Mouzis was right there with Drake and me, keeping an ear on things. He was assigned to production full time. The engineering on virtually every Boss Radio promo was done by Bill Mouzis. I wrote ’em, Morgan read ’em and Mouzis mixed ’em.

The KHJ “Production Room” was a tiny announce booth with the board and other equipment in an adjacent hallway. It always blew my mind that, from outside, the place resembled a large municipal building, but inside the quarters were tighter than on a submarine. The entire, original “History of Rock and Roll” was produced in this same hallway.

KHJ-AM Facilities, 5515 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA; 1965.

I rushed up to Mouzis frantically advising that we needed all our jingles dubbed in less than three hours. We had worked hours just getting the sound equalization perfected. Mouzis smiled and nodded, “Follow me.” He unlocked his special cabinet, which he guarded like Fort Knox. There, neatly stacked, were all the unplayed 93/KHJ Boss Radio jingles on 40-second tape carts, timed and labeled. “Just tell me what else goes on the labels,” he said. “Thanks, Billy, I’ll let you know.” It was becoming obvious why they called ’em “pros” in Hollywood.

An ambulance arrives at 2 p.m.

Upstairs, Ken DeVaney burned up phone lines with lawyers in New York and Beverly Hills, discussing restraining orders and lawsuits against KFWB. Bill Drake was designing logs with the precise stop sets and commercial limits we had planned in long sessions at Nickodell’s. For the record, we allowed for a maximum of 13 minutes, 40 seconds of commercial time per hour, maximum. No break would exceed 70 seconds. There were specific stop times, e.g. :03, :07, :11, :15, etc. Remember, in 1965 the average record length was 2 minutes, 20 seconds.

Morgan would voice the new station IDs. We marched down to Mouzis’ hallway. After batting copy ideas around, I scribbled, “(Tymp roll, fades to Morgan:) Ladies and gentlemen, you’re listening to the much more music station...” At that point the Johnny Mann singers, in one of the more memorable jingle melodies ever written, sang “KHJ — Los Angeles.” Anyone who has ever heard that jingle more than once can still sing it to this day.

Approaching 1 p.m., things were coming together. Mimeographed playlists would soon be ready. Songs played were to be checked off with a lo-tech grease pencil. Betty Breneman had all the oldies on hand, she just had to “borrow” the current chart numbers from KRLA. Mouzis only had ten or so IDs to dub to cart.

News Director Art Kevin was switching format sheets to the KHJ “20/20” News configuration. This was the handle for the then revolutionary news slots at 20 minutes before and after the hour.

Not everyone was as calm as Mouzis and Kevin. Clancy Imislund, KHJ Promotion Director, was pulling out his wispy hair. Our campaign, to blanket Los Angeles streets with “93/KHJ Boss Radio” billboards was scheduled to start May 10th. The same with bus bench ads. Clancy thrashed about, cursing KFWB, trying to get things moved up.

At approximately 2 p.m. an ambulance arrived and carried out a lady on a stretcher. She came from the traffic department. To this day I don’t know who she was or what happened to her. With an hour to go, things were getting quite exciting.

“Ladies and gentlemen, presenting The Real Don Steele.”

“The Cavalcade of Hits,” the transitional feature we ran to bridge between the old programming and the new KHJ, was now in its last hour.

What an hour in L.A. radio history. At that moment, KFWB was “Boss Radio” and KHJ was readying to use KRLA’s playlist. Drake said one way or another there’d be a program log by 3 p.m. I wondered when the next stretcher case would be hauled down from upstairs.

As a radio programmer, when the curtain goes up, things are out of your hands, and there’s nothing to do but pace and listen. Should I cruise around in my Caddy convertible, go home and stare at the radio, lurk in the office, what?

2:59 p.m.

I had to see this. Steele sat in the drab announce booth, chain smoking, his monitor turned up above normal human range. The announce booth contained a funky mike, VU meter, earphone-jack plug and one switch. Period. I’d had a Plexiglas bulletin-board-type thing made, and the jocks faced that. 5x7 inch cards were plastered all over that. The news announce booth was off to the right, about the size of a modest aquarium, and the engineer was 90 degrees to port.

I stood behind crew-cut Ken Orchard, the board operator on duty. Orchard recalls, “There was a natural high you could feel throughout the building. Everyone was charged up.” The final “Cavalcade of Hits” song was fading.

3:00 p.m.

“BOOM ... Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the Real Don Steele Show ... with a Sneak Preview of the all new Boss Radio, on ... KHJ, Los Angeles.” The Motown sound crashes in over the fading tympani. Steele jumps on in, “It’s 3 o’clock in Los Angeles!”

2 B continued . . .

http://www.93khj.com/

KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 2

Contra trips across the Pacific meant inspiration by powerhouse KFWB

Upon my official arrival, the guard at the gate was expecting me. No more guards posted to keep me in. The KHJ AM & TV parking lot had few spaces, all reserved for executives. Spotting the space with "Ron Jacobs" freshly painted on it, my emotions soared. I experienced the first of a series of mental orgasms that I would enjoy during the next four and a half years.

The three-story fortress contained the profit-making, high-profile KHJ-TV Channel 9, always in contention as L.A.’s top independent television station. In 1965, TV meant just about everything. The radio station had gone through a succession of vapid formats, none of which caught on. The radio-side was not a “profit center.” RKO General owned both stations, TV and radio. The radio station was AM. (This may seem superfluous, but KHJ-FM, to which none of our group paid any attention, broadcast from the KHJ-AM transmitter building at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway. Later it would be renovated to also house FM studios, to be known as KRTH.)

In 1965, L.A. radio was different than the radio I knew from hustling trips to Hollywood in
1959 just so I could cruise Hollywood listening to KFWB Channel Ninety-EIGHT. B. Mitchell Reed influenced me more than any disc jockey I had ever heard. KFWB’s Program Director and my hero, Chuck Blore, was right up there with Babe Ruth, Elvis and John Wayne.

In Hawaii, the Pidgin English phrase for “goose pimples” is “chicken skin.” That was the reaction coming on in waves as I realized that this time, I had made it to Hollywood. All I had to do was perform and I would remain there. I was 27 years old. I had little doubt that I would succeed and be there for a while. It wasn’t necessarily arrogance, which both Morgan and I could switch on instantly to mask our insecurities. It was that the situation seemed so logical.

• KFWB. It was not the same station that first captivated the town with PD Blore’s great format and crew on January 1, 1958. We would be competing against a shadow of the real KFWB. Their energy had withered. Blore was gone. I figured that, with a sufficient budget, either Bill Drake or I, singularly, could out-program them.

• KRLA. Pasadena’s KRLA felt hotter than ’WB. At first glance, KFWB and KRLA’s combined ratings indicated that Top 40 radio was dead in the nation’s second largest market. But I knew the listeners were there, just as they were all over America. These stations needed a grenade going off in their backyard — figuratively speaking — to grab their attention and, heh heh, make them wonder what was coming next.

• Bill Drake. I had little in common with Drake other than our love of radio and the ambition to succeed. We respected one another as combatants in the savage 1963 ratings-war known in radio as “The Battle of Fresno.” I trusted Drake’s instincts. Sometimes it was frustrating when he pondered something endlessly, changed the subject or headed to Nickodell’s, the KHJ hangout next-door. There, Drake held court and tossed down “winky-poos.” Born in a place about as southern as it gets, Waycross, Georgia, Drake also dreamed of making it in Top 40 radio. Otherwise our only cultural connection was a mutual appreciation of boiled peanuts. We’d argue about whether the best of these slimy, oozing things came from Hawaii or Georgia.

• Survival Instincts. I was born in Hawaii but conceived somewhere between Long Island and New Jersey. People on the mainland meeting me for the first time assumed I was a fast-talking Jew from New York. Not so. I did inherit speed genes that came from a long line of people who had to think on their feet in order to survive. At work I was always one notch below full manic mode.

• Signal. If in real estate, it is “location, location, location,” when AM ruled the radio dial, the key was signal, signal, signal. KHJ’s coverage ranged over Southern California and to all the ships at sea. At 930 kilohertz, its bandwidth was broad enough to grab a car radio’s “scan” button.

• Autonomy. There would be no “orders from headquarters.” By 1965, the Drake-Chenault consultancy had done well at KGB, San Diego. That market had three stations chasing each other like mice in a treadmill. KCBQ or KDEO or KGB would be on top briefly, only to be supplanted by one of the others. Drake cleaned up KGB, further formulating the ideas he first put into effect at KYNO in Fresno in 1963. That was the same KYNO whose ass we at KMAK kicked until owner Gene

Chenault brought in Bill Drake to program it. Then the leverage switched from us to them. Chenault had just that one station. Its failure would have grave financial consequences, perhaps taking him out of the ownership arena. In contrast, I was with a group of three stations. In those days regulations limited a group to control of seven AM licenses.

How things change. The Telcom Act of 1996 changed the rules of the radio game. Relaxation of prior license limits now allows mega-corporations to buy and sell stations by the hundreds. The side effects of this concentration of ownership drained radio of many essential elements that made the medium so exciting in the 1960s. Had I bought shares in these greed-driven corporations as they started gobbling up licenses, I could have made a bundle; the satisfaction would be financial. No amount of money will change my opinion that broadcast deregulation contributed in many ways to the diminishment of “our” kind of radio, both as programmers and listeners.

2 B continued . . . or buy the book, all 450 pages, profusely illustrated!

http://www.93khj.com/

KHJ Studio Area ~ 5515 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA ~ March 1965