The L.A. Times was explaining it to Californians 28 years ago. It's a pretty good explanation, too:
It's No Accident That SigAlert Is a Traffic Watchword
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What was middle of the road?
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
It's No Accident That SigAlert Is a Traffic Watchword
5515 has one heck of a history. It was NBC's West Coast studios before they built the new facility at Sunset and Vine.
KHJ moved in after that, then moved out again (to 1313 Vine). Capitol moved in, moved out when the tower was built and KHJ came back, after being sold to RKO General, which owned the soundstage next door (to the west).
By the time I had the chance to go in (1992 riots), it was administrative offices for KCAL-TV. It's now the Paramount Pictures Tour ticketing office.
Turns out I also have an aircheck from Gary in 1976, so let's see what evolved in those three(ish) years.
February 13, 1976 (this one's a weekday---a Friday)
3:00-3:30 pm
(News)
Carl Carlton: Everlasting Love (1974)
Anne Murray: The Call (current)
Four Seasons: December 1963 (Oh What A Night) (current)
3:30-4:00 pm
(News)
Jefferson Starship: Miracles (1975)
Doris Day: Everybody Loves A Lover (1958)
Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps: Baby Face (current)
Bobby Vinton: Please Love Me Forever (1967)
Perez Prado: Patricia (1958)
So, now---only pop hits. No instrumentals, no covers.
Ferlin Husky was one of the first country artists to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His came in 1960. It's located in the 6600 block of Hollywood Blvd. It's about 5 blocks away from the Capitol building on Vine.
projects.latimes.com
How long did KHJ stay in the Melrose building? RKO sold the production studios (facing Gower) to Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball for DesiLu in 1957. Then Lucy sold it to Gulf & Western (owner of Paramount) in 1968.
Ferlin Husky
Born Dec. 3, 1925 in Flat River, Mo.. Died March 17, 2011 in Hendersonville, TN
projects.latimes.com
How long did KHJ stay in the Melrose building? RKO sold the production studios (facing Gower) to Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball for DesiLu in 1957. Then Lucy sold it to Gulf & Western (owner of Paramount) in 1968.
I remember seeing a random taxi driver in NYC interviewed on one of the major networks one night: he was essentially blasting WHN country from his cab. The reporter asked what he though of it, he said "It's American music, I love it !"
But does anyone know how long would WHN remain country ?
Until 1987. They were owned by Mutual Broadcasting at the time. Mutual sold the station to Emmis who flipped the station to sports talk WFAN. The station already had play by play of The Mets. However, the day that happened, WYNY (owned by NBC) flipped from a mushy version of AC to country, and stayed with the format into the 90s.
WHN, like WOR or KFI, etc are legacy call letters, it's sad that nobody in the NYC market is using WHN
KHJ was at 5515 Melrose until 1985, I believe. Then they moved in with KRTH at 5901 Venice.
And the production studio at the corner of Melrose and Gower--the former RKO/Desilu---when Disney bought KHJ-TV and turned it into KCAL in 1989, it needed a news facility 5515 couldn't accommodate---so it built a working newsroom, news production and news studios in that soundstage, and used 5515 for non-news offices, with a small studio for commercial production.
Disney sold KCAL to Young Broadcasting in 1996, and in 2002 Young sold it to CBS, which moved it to Columbia Square to share space with KCBS-TV, and then, in 2007 to the Radford Studios.
An oddball thing that I had forgotten: CBS moved its radio stations around a bit as it got the Wilshire studios done. After KCAL-TV moved to Columbia Square, KRTH left Venice and moved into 5515 Melrose for a brief period---a year or less---before moving to the current Wilshire building. JACK and KROQ were in the Venice building until the move. This was roughly 2004/2005.
I'm guessing they re-purposed the small TV production studio at 5515 (which I believe was the original NBC and Capitol studio) . When I was working from KCAL in '92, covering the riots, the old KHJ air and production studios were long gone---converted to office space.
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WHN was dropped for the first time when the station was sold to the Loews theater chain in the 50s. It then became WMGM, because Loews also owned MGM. Loews sold the station to Storer in 1962, and they got permission to return the WHN letters. It had been Top 40 under Loews, and flipped to MOR by Storer. I think Storer flipped it to country when WWDJ went from country to rock.
There had been a consistent country presence in NYC from WWDJ in 1961. to WHN in the 70s and 80s, to WYNY in the 90s. Then WYNY was sold to become WKTU. A few years later, a small group of rimshot stations revived the WYNY letters & country format for a few years. Then country went away until Cumulus revived it on WNSH in 2014. Now it's gone, likely for good.
Funny that the WHN call letters were used in one of the Three Stooges comedies, when one of the boys turned on a radio. The Stooges shorts were generally filmed at Columbia ranch in Burbank.
Too bad. More historic recording studios gone to office space. Earlier in this thread, we talked about country music on MOR radio. The Nashville studio building where Patsy Cline recorded all of her hits was sold to CBS/Columbia in the early 60s. They added a building that contained a bigger Studio A (mainly to keep up with RCA, that did the same thing one block away). Columbia studio A is where Bob Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline and Simon & Garfunkel recorded The Boxer. Columbia shut down the studios in the 80s, and it was all turned into office space. The studio where Patsy Cline recorded Crazy and Roger Miller recorded King Of The Road became the offices for the label's publicity department. It stayed that way until CBS sold Columbia Records to Sony. The building is still there, owned by Mike Curb, and used by Mike's charitable foundation and Belmont University.
This is an absolutely fascinating thread, one of the best every. Thank you so very much to everyone. 
For non-Anglenos: A "Sig-Alert" is the notice of a traffic jam or a road closure which ties up traffic. The term was coined by Lloyd Sigmon, who invented a machine that received reports from the L.A. Police Dept. and later on the California Highway Patrol and Cal-Trans.
I don't think any station still uses the term "Sig-Alert", except maybe KFI. ( maybe). JMO. -- Daryl Lynn
❤️
For non-Anglenos: A "Sig-Alert" is the notice of a traffic jam or a road closure which ties up traffic. The term was coined by Lloyd Sigmon, who invented a machine that received reports from the L.A. Police Dept. and later on the California Highway Patrol and Cal-Trans.
I don't think any station still uses the term "Sig-Alert", except maybe KFI. ( maybe). JMO. -- Daryl Lynn
❤️I think one thing to keep in mind is that even into the early '60s, many of the big full-service 50,000-watt stations that would have considered themselves "MOR" - WJR Detroit, WLW Cincinnati, WCCO Minneapolis, for example - were really programming hodgepodges. Talk, news, even farm programming got as much airtime as music if not more. Music could vary by time of day. If you listen to the WLW aircheck from 11/22/63, you'll notice the music played during the morning drive show fit the "traditional MOR" mold - mostly album cuts (the one country number played being an Anita Bryant cover), a few vintage big-band favorites, with only Frank Sinatra's "Pocketful of Miracles" and Henry Mancini's "Charade" being recognizable to me as singles that reached Billboard's Top 40. However, the station also played hymns (George Beverly Shea, renditions of spirituals by Tennessee Ernie Ford and Nat "King" Cole) during morning religious programming, and ARSA suggests Bob Braun had an after-school-hours Top 40 show on "The Nation's Station" as well at that time. While many of these stations were skittish at best about rock and roll, they didn't exactly have one unifying sound - they were almost throwbacks to pre-rock radio, having a little something for everyone.
J.P. McCarthy at WJR picked his own music, but it was likely little if anything that would stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the station. The excellent Detroit radio tome "Rockin' Down the Dial" cites Frank Sinatra and the Four Freshmen as his two favorite artists, and there's a photo of him at the mike with an array of album covers on the wall behind him - Sinatra, Connie Francis, Jane Morgan, soundtracks to "Pal Joey" and "Pepe." He would later describe his approach to music as "the Top Ten Thousand" in an interview with one of the local papers, saying he played some of the same stuff as the Top 40 stations were playing but aimed for broader appeal.
At the same time, you had non-network stations like Detroit's WCAR that were a lot more strictly defined in terms of their music policy. WCAR under H.Y. Levinson's ownership for much of the '60s was strictly traditional MOR. I read a story about a DJ who got fired for playing a song by The Association, which was hardly "hard rock." These were the type of stations that might even stop playing a song by one of their core artists if it got picked up by the Top 40s as a hit single. WCAR would later relax that policy and move into a proto-AC format by 1970 (which evolved a year later into full Top 40).
1968-69 seemed to be when the shift to a more contemporary sound for MOR in general really started happening in earnest. Maybe it was because mellower music was gaining more popularity on Top 40 stations as FM prog-rockers became the preferred outlet for harder and acid rock, maybe it was because listeners wanted something soothing to ease the traumas of Vietnam, Kent State, assassinations and other assorted tragedies, maybe it was because MOR stations were more interested in reaching the young adult audiences who had grown up on Elvis instead of Vic Damone. Probably a combination of all three and other factors I haven't considered. I wasn't there at the time so I'll leave it to those who were to put in their two cents. But that seemed to be when the seed that became what we now call AC started to germinate.
J.P. McCarthy at WJR picked his own music, but it was likely little if anything that would stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the station. The excellent Detroit radio tome "Rockin' Down the Dial" cites Frank Sinatra and the Four Freshmen as his two favorite artists, and there's a photo of him at the mike with an array of album covers on the wall behind him - Sinatra, Connie Francis, Jane Morgan, soundtracks to "Pal Joey" and "Pepe." He would later describe his approach to music as "the Top Ten Thousand" in an interview with one of the local papers, saying he played some of the same stuff as the Top 40 stations were playing but aimed for broader appeal.
At the same time, you had non-network stations like Detroit's WCAR that were a lot more strictly defined in terms of their music policy. WCAR under H.Y. Levinson's ownership for much of the '60s was strictly traditional MOR. I read a story about a DJ who got fired for playing a song by The Association, which was hardly "hard rock." These were the type of stations that might even stop playing a song by one of their core artists if it got picked up by the Top 40s as a hit single. WCAR would later relax that policy and move into a proto-AC format by 1970 (which evolved a year later into full Top 40).
1968-69 seemed to be when the shift to a more contemporary sound for MOR in general really started happening in earnest. Maybe it was because mellower music was gaining more popularity on Top 40 stations as FM prog-rockers became the preferred outlet for harder and acid rock, maybe it was because listeners wanted something soothing to ease the traumas of Vietnam, Kent State, assassinations and other assorted tragedies, maybe it was because MOR stations were more interested in reaching the young adult audiences who had grown up on Elvis instead of Vic Damone. Probably a combination of all three and other factors I haven't considered. I wasn't there at the time so I'll leave it to those who were to put in their two cents. But that seemed to be when the seed that became what we now call AC started to germinate.
Same here
KFI in Los Angeles was one of these stations, really, until 1968. They attempted to leap from that straight to AC, with a Drake PD (Mark Denis from KGB) at the helm and Top 40 stalwart Ted Randal consulting.
It scared off the old audience before it could attract the new. and in less than a year, KFI was back to playing it fairly safe musically---including giving Chuck Cecil's "The Swingin' Years" a daily time slot and hiring 1950s-era Today Show host Dave Garroway to do afternoons. There was also a period (1971-73) where they called themselves "Total Spectrum Radio) that included a midday celebrity chat show with Robert Q. Lewis and a country music show in the late evening.
They didn't fully modernize as an AC until 1974, and morphed from that to Top 40 in 1977.
That WLW aircheck is a treasure trove of what kind of radio our parents or grandparents listened to in the early 60s. It of course has what is probably the only full-length episode of Ruth Lyons' 50-50 Club in existence. Right after delayed NBC News, the afternoon music feature was set to be The Lil' Abner Suite but that was interrupted by breaking news obviously. I don't remember much about WLW's music in the 70s....mostly listened for Reds games. I remember hearing the extended version of "Rock Your Baby" by George McCrae in the late 70s. When Randy Michaels took over, the music that was played was thought of as Male A/C (the harder side of A/C leaning AOR, classic and current).
It's a medium market but was a big signal, of course I'm talking about WOWO in Fort Wayne, that was always top 40, rather than MOR, musically among all the news, weather, personality, features and farm. I barely knew any other station existed until I was 10. The earliest ARSA playlist for WOWO was 1958, topped by the Chordettes, but including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash ("Teenage Queen"), Rick Nelson, The Cricketts and Danny and the Juniors. WOWO was where I heard The Beatles, the Dave Clark 5, The Beach Boys, The Drifters, even the Doors, though my family had moved to Ohio from Indiana, still within the booming WOWO signal but also CKLW.
The next available WOWO playlist is July 1966, with "Hanky Panky" at #1, and...
2. Dirty Water – Standells
3. Sweet Pea – Tommy Roe
4. Paperback Writer – Beatles
5. Red Rubber Ball – The Cyrkle
6. Strangers In The Night – Frank Sinatra
7. Popsicle – Jan And Dean
8. You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me – Dusty Springfield
9. Little Girl – Syndicate Of Sound
10. Pied Piper – Crispian St. Peters rounding out the top 10.
Compare upstart top 40 WLYV, which was Mike Joseph's laboratory for Hot Hits;
WOWO kept rocking in 1967 but tried to mellow out in 1968, as you can hear in this aircheck:
http://historyofwowo.com/audio/WOWO-Don Chevillett_02-14-1968.mp3. 500-watt WLYV beat them in the ratings in the fall of 1968. It was back to a top 40 approach in the 70s (musically anyway). An exception was always The Little Red Barn, with Country and the Song of Inspiration.
There's a full broadcast day of WOWO from Memorial Day, 1977 which is all-oldies with the Happy Days Weekend (also includes old jingles). This weekend also included Indianapolis 500 preview updates, and network news about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, KY.
The next available WOWO playlist is July 1966, with "Hanky Panky" at #1, and...
2. Dirty Water – Standells
3. Sweet Pea – Tommy Roe
4. Paperback Writer – Beatles
5. Red Rubber Ball – The Cyrkle
6. Strangers In The Night – Frank Sinatra
7. Popsicle – Jan And Dean
8. You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me – Dusty Springfield
9. Little Girl – Syndicate Of Sound
10. Pied Piper – Crispian St. Peters rounding out the top 10.
WOWO 1190 Fort Wayne Survey 1966-07-08
Fort Wayne radio station WOWO 1190 AM survey chart for the week of 1966-07-08.
www.las-solanas.com
WLYV 1450 Fort Wayne Survey 1966-07-22
Fort Wayne radio station WLYV 1450 AM survey chart for the week of 1966-07-22.
www.las-solanas.com
WOWO kept rocking in 1967 but tried to mellow out in 1968, as you can hear in this aircheck:
http://historyofwowo.com/audio/WOWO-Don Chevillett_02-14-1968.mp3. 500-watt WLYV beat them in the ratings in the fall of 1968. It was back to a top 40 approach in the 70s (musically anyway). An exception was always The Little Red Barn, with Country and the Song of Inspiration.
There's a full broadcast day of WOWO from Memorial Day, 1977 which is all-oldies with the Happy Days Weekend (also includes old jingles). This weekend also included Indianapolis 500 preview updates, and network news about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, KY.
Somewhere I have a short aircheck of WLW (made by a friend who once worked in Ann Arbor radio and has since passed away) with a clip of its Top 100 of 1971 countdown. The music was pretty solidly Adult Contemporary, as opposed to traditional MOR, by then - one song I remember from the aircheck is Bobby Sherman's "The Drum."
WHAS in Louisville was modernizing for young adult audiences at about the same time. Judging from airchecks, they had more or less evolved from traditional MOR to AC by the spring of 1970. An article on the WKLO tribute website cites "The Cuddly Giant" as the first station in the market to play cuts from "Jesus Christ Superstar," which was one of the hottest albums of 1971. By the time of the '74 tornado outbreak they were calling the music "Good 'n' Gold" and playing a healthy dose of rock and roll oldies. Later on, they would even become the Louisville outlet for American Top 40.
Mike did not develop and copyright "Hot Hits" until more than a decade later. He just did high energy, jingle filled traditional Top 40 before that.
The prototype for Hot Hits in the later 70's was WKAQ-FM, where he could experiment without anyone in the industry noticing it... except that it was noticed and I sent airchecks to a number of friends in other stations!
Even in the 1960s, there were different strains of MOR. Billboard used the terms pop-standard, standard and conservative to describe adult music stations. It appears that conservative is the term used to describe stations that would eventually be called beautiful music.
Seems like most markets had a MOR that was always a little more contemporary even if that meant Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Even before KMPC went to a more AC approach in 1973, I think they were always a little “heavier” than KFI (1968 maybe the exception). Same with WNEW vs. WHN or WIND vs. WMAQ or WIP vs, WPEN.
The full service stations that played even less music than the KMPCs of the world also seemed to have very easy listening overnight programming: WGN, KMOX, WJR, WCCO etc. Some carried shows like Dolly Holiday (WBAL) or Music Til Dawn (WLW, WCBS, WBBM) which mixed in semi classical selections.
While 1960s top 40 is well preserved especially the WLS and KHJs of the world, it is too bad that so few adult radio stations of the era exist on airchecks. Not to mention country and ethnic formats.
Seems like most markets had a MOR that was always a little more contemporary even if that meant Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Even before KMPC went to a more AC approach in 1973, I think they were always a little “heavier” than KFI (1968 maybe the exception). Same with WNEW vs. WHN or WIND vs. WMAQ or WIP vs, WPEN.
The full service stations that played even less music than the KMPCs of the world also seemed to have very easy listening overnight programming: WGN, KMOX, WJR, WCCO etc. Some carried shows like Dolly Holiday (WBAL) or Music Til Dawn (WLW, WCBS, WBBM) which mixed in semi classical selections.
While 1960s top 40 is well preserved especially the WLS and KHJs of the world, it is too bad that so few adult radio stations of the era exist on airchecks. Not to mention country and ethnic formats.
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