A WORD FROM THE OLD SCHOOL
Note to RADIO DAILY NEWS readers. Publisher Larry Shannon is excerpting the text of KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO twice weekly via link to my blog. These excerpts represent only the book's narrative chapters, verbatim.
NO ILLUSTRATED, DOCUMENT OR EXHBIT PAGES ARE INCLUDED IN THIS ONLINE SERIALIZATION. THANKS TO THOSE WHO HAVE ORDERED THE BOOK AND THE FREE CDs. PRINTING IN MID-JULY -- IT’S BIG, IT’S BOSS AND LOADED WITH BASICS
No one who has purchased this book for $93.00 has ever complained! Hundreds of inner pages are the guts of the book. They are not included here or anywhere online -- Goal is to teach first, and entertain to keep it cooking.
KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO IS THE BIBLE OF OLD SCHOOL TOP FORTY RADIO!
“F-C-F-G-F-C. Sounds Like It Doesn’t It”
Ed Dela Pena: In 1948 the Don Lee network started building a new facility at 1313 Vine Street (above.) So I was sent up there to supervise the new setup at the studio there. We moved KHJ into that facility in 1949.
Ken Orchard: When KHJ moved over to Vine Street from the old Melrose location, the building went vacant for a while. Capitol Records decided to rent it before they built their round Capitol Towers up on Vine Street in Hollywood. Everybody sees that landmark — the stack of 45 records — but Capitol actually operated out of 5515 Melrose for a while. A lot of the best Nat “King” Cole and Frank Sinatra records were recorded in the KHJ studios in the area that became the Boss Radio newsroom. If those walls could talk they’d be humming.
About six or seven years later, the O’Neil Group, who owned the Vine Street studios — four brothers from General Tire — got to fighting among themselves and the empire split. One guy got this, one guy got the tire company, another guy got something else. And Thomas O’Neil was left with the radio properties on the West Coast plus the interest they had in RKO’s film studios. At the parting of the roads, they sold the 1313 Vine Street building.
Bill Drake: Willet Brown was the Executive Vice President of RKO General and one of the biggest stockholders in General Tire, if not the biggest. He set up the deal for Tom O’Neil to buy RKO from Howard Hughes. I remember Tom O’Neil telling me stories about his meetings with Howard Hughes. O’Neil paid something like $31 million at the time for all of RKO. He parceled off the RKO Radio Pictures studios that became Desilu, but he kept all the movies for his TV stations, which is what he wanted in the first place. He had no network affiliation. He had WOR-TV in New York, KHJ-TV in L.A. and they were independents. He sold off all the other real estate and wound up making what, by today’s value, was peanuts, but at the time was good money.
Ken Orchard: They didn’t know what else to do with KHJ radio, so back to Melrose we went, along with TV, Channel 9. So it was sort of like taking ten pounds of crap and trying to put it into a five-pound bag. Believe me, we were crowded. Then a couple of years after being back at Melrose, the Boss Radio crew came in.
Bill Drake: KHJ had been losing three-quarters of a million dollars a year for something like seven years. KFRC in San Francisco was losing a half-million a year. But they would have been happy just to break even. So Willet told O’Neil about the success KGB in San Diego had with me as the consultant. Gene Chenault and I were invited to breakfast at the Hotel Bel Air with Willet and O’Neil. He was younger than I am now, but he seemed like an old guy at the time. I was 26. He seemed very nice and obviously smart. I asked Willet, “What do you think I should do? I don’t understand the situation.” Willet said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, I want to make a million dollars.” And he said “I’ll give you a million dollars if you sign over everything you ever do to me.” (Laughs.) I guess that’s the reason he said to me, “How much do you believe in yourself?” And I said, “Well, pretty much.” I don’t know if he and O’Neil talked about this before, or not. I have no idea.
My deal with RKO initially was for AFTRA union scale, $15,000 a year — same thing as the disc-jockey union scale was at the time, but it seemed fair to me — plus expenses and whatever, plus 50% of all the profits over a million dollars a year. I was flattered. It took only a matter of seconds to go for it. That was my deal. You aren’t going to find a whole lot of Willet Browns in your life.
Ken DeVaney: In early 1965, Gene Chenault visited the Crowell-Collier offices in L.A., ostensibly for a social visit. He knew I was working there and we had coffee. I thought it was just an idle chat but during the conversation I applauded his efforts at KYNO and told him, quite sincerely, I was relieved that KFWB didn’t have to deal with that level of programming competition in Los Angeles. We said our goodbyes and I thought no more about it.
A few months later Gene contacted me again and floated an offer to become General Manager of KHJ. The money was better, to be sure, but more than that was the opportunity to move to the head of the management line and have a chance to contribute some ideas I had for audience building. Not to mention getting out of KFWB’s stifling atmosphere.
Bill Mouzis: I don’t know what they called the KHJ format in early 1965. I think it was “The Personality Station.” Then it was going to be “The Entertainment Station.” That concept was dropped immediately when a guy by the name of Hathaway Watson flew into town. He was the president of RKO General. He called a hurried meeting, all the department heads together, in the conference room at KHJ on Melrose. When they were all there he said, “I have one simple announcement to make, then I’m going to leave. We are not going with the ‘Entertainment’ format. That will be canceled. In a very short time we are going rock ’n’ roll. There are no questions, that’s all I have to say.” Out the door he went. He got on a plane and flew back to New York. It was just that sudden. Everybody was in shock.
Bill Drake: Willet had warned me about the corporate bullshit. He also didn’t like Hathaway Watson who was one of those guys who didn’t know anything about radio. Even later, while we were downstairs trying to get things going at KHJ, he was upstairs still trying to sabotage the thing.
When Hathaway Watson came into town, what O’Neil did, at Willet’s suggestion, was pull KHJ out of the RKO Broadcast Division. We didn’t have to answer to New York. That’s the reason we didn’t have any bullshit. Hathaway Watson hated that and tried to kill the whole thing. Upstairs he told the TV people that he was washing his hands of KHJ Radio.
Ed Dela Pena: After Willet Brown decided to bring Bill Drake to KHJ, Drake was around for several weeks just looking about. It was supposed to be confidential but you can’t miss Big Bill. The word leaked out that we were in the process of changing over. Compared to KHJ’s first attempt with Top 40, this had more reality to it because we knew that Drake-Chenault had been successful down south. Everybody hoped they’d do the same thing up here. At the time, KRLA and ’WB were sort of the kingpins of the rock world. So the RKO idea was, “Let’s do whatever we can to make these new guys successful.” But the mood was “here we go again.” And until the new crew came on the premises there really was no inkling of what they were going to do as far as the physical setup of the station. We knew it was a rock format. That was about all we knew until they moved in.
Clancy Imislund: The staff at KHJ, before Boss Radio, wasn’t very inspired, but they weren’t bad people. Then we heard that all of a sudden they’re going to change the format, they’re going to go to a different format, to rock ’n’ roll. Things started changing little by little. Heads were rolling all around and new people were coming in. It was a difficult time; it was like a company downsizing now. You look around to see who’s going to step on the land mine tomorrow.
The people coming in seemed reprehensible to me. I was a clean-cut sober guy who was trying to get straight after being kind of wild and these were kind of wild guys. I mean, they were nice — they weren’t really reprehensible — they were just kind of a young, lively bunch. And I remember their stock in trade was loudness and gregariousness and a lot of drinking and smoking, which is fine, you know, but it was something I couldn’t do anymore.
Johnny Mann: I heard rumors that KHJ was going to change formats — again. Don Otis called me to do a jingle package. Whatever he was called, he was the head guy. As far as he knew, this was news to me. I hadn’t done anything for them before. He said, “I want some jingles,” and I said OK. He said, “When can you record them?” I answered, “Well, right now the Musicians Union is on strike so we can’t use any musicians.” He said, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”
So I asked, “Wait a minute, how long do these things have to be?” He said, “Well, I want to do ‘93 KHJ,’ I want to do ‘KHJ, Los Angeles,’ I want to do ‘93 more music’.” Listening to whatever it was that he wanted, I said, “Why don’t you do ’em a cappella?” He said, “What’s a cappella?” I said, “If you’re sure this is what they want, you’re wasting money having an orchestra that takes up 40% of your track when you can do them a cappella where voices take 100% of the track for emphasis and for everything else that’s good.” He said, “Let’s go.”
Bill Mouzis: Drake was so smart in doing it that way. I’m so glad that he didn’t go the old Chuck Blore way, you know, “KFWB, Color Radio, Channel Ninety-Eight.” Remember Color Radio? Oh man, those long jingles. They were fine for the times. Those were advanced for the times. But now here was the next big advancement. More music, less interruption, short identification, things like that. The whole thing fit. It all worked.
Johnny Mann: The words — or the letters, whatever it is — that “93 KHJ,” you’ve got to do something that starts and ends and says the words properly with the right emphasis in the right place. You just compose it. You just do it — (Sings melody) 93 KHJ, Los Angeles — I wrote it to get the harmonics of what they gave me. “93 KHJ” — Now what’s a good key to put it in for Sue to sing top and be something we can live with? Sue Allen was the lead girl singer. Her sound was very identifiable and the people who came back year after year after year loved her sound. I wrote out vocal arrangements. It had to be brief and I wanted to do it in F so I had a nice bass note on the low F at the end of it. And I just wrote (Hums the theme) F-C-F-G-F-C. Sounds like it doesn’t it?
Dexter Young: My first memories of what was to turn into Boss Radio are when we had the interim format. I worked with Gary Mack. One evening Gary invited me to join him and Bill Drake and Bill Watson next door at Nickodell’s. I was full of questions since I was getting in on the ground floor so to speak. Gary introduced me as an engineer who did not pan Top 40 radio. So my first question to Bill Drake was, “How do we know the timing of the music sets will work out?” I came out of network radio — Mutual Don Lee Broadcasting System — where timing was everything. System cues had to go at :29, :30, or 59:30 depending on the length of the show. Bill told me that it did work out OK even in Top 40 format radio. Later in the conversation a person named Ron Jacobs was mentioned as coming over from Hawaii to be our new Program Director.
2 B continued . . .
http://www.93khj.com/
