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Another Hot Oklahoma Night - History of Rock & Roll In Oklahoma

This is the news release I handed out yesterday at the State Capitol when the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize??" was named the official Rock n Roll song of Oklahoma. You all are really goining to enjoy the radio part of the exhibit. If any of you have ideas, suggestions or broadcast related objects to donate, please call me at (405) 522-5241. Michael


Opening on March 2, 2009, the Oklahoma History Center will host a special exhibit entitled Another Hot Oklahoma Night: A Rock & roll Exhibit. The exhibit will explore the Rock and Roll artists, radio stations, personalities, venues, and fans that have called Oklahoma home. Beyond the facts of each story, the exhibit will show how growing up in Oklahoma affected the music. These stories will be displayed in an innovative style to encourage visitor participation and ensure our visitors will take away a new perspective on the history of Rock and Roll in Oklahoma.

Many artists and bands have called Oklahoma. In the 1950’s, performers such as Wanda Jackson, who toured with Elvis Presley from 1956 to 1960, Eddie Cochran, and the Collins Kids were vanguards in the Rockabilly movement that inspired the Beatles and eventually the British Punk movement of the late 1970’s.

The 1960’s were a period when Rock and Roll expanded beyond its Country, Blues, and Jazz roots. The sound of the Ventures displayed this experimentation, featuring Oklahomans Bob Bogle on bass and Nokie Edwards on guitar.

Tulsa may rival other international cities as home to some of the most accomplished Rock and Roll music artists in the world. Artists including among other Leon Russell, Jim Keltner, Carl Radle, and J. J. Cale called Tulsa home.

Rock and Roll radio is represented by Oklahoma City radio stations KOCY, WKY and KOMA, while Tulsa claimed KTUL radio, KAKC and KELI … all major influences in Rock and Roll radio. Many teenagers who grew up in the Midwest, and every state West of Oklahoma listened to KOMA at night. In the 1960’s the Oklahoma City powerhouse had the second largest measured radio audience on the North American Continent.

Another Hot Oklahoma Night will be featured in the special exhibits gallery, and in three of the major exhibit galleries as well. A recording studio, radio station control room, fashions and hair styles of the Rock and Roll eras, a teenagers bedroom, and record store front are all part of the exhibit.

The history center staff is planning monthly concerts in which the artist will discuss their particular part of Rock and Roll, and then demonstrate it by playing some songs.

The exhibit will remain open for approximately two years.
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Good to see KAKC and KELi represented, but when was KTUL playing rock? Mid-Late 50's? I've always heard it was MOR before new owners bought it in the early 60's and rechristened it as KELi.

BTW I would have picked the Dwight Twilley Band's classic "I'm On Fire" as Oklahoma's official Rock n Roll song of Oklahoma.
 
I always saw KTUL as a pretty conservative operation, too, but I recently saw a weekly chart from '58 that put Little Richard's Good Golly Miss Molly in the top 5!

I'm shocked ANYBODY in town was playing that song back then... holy crud... a race record, and it appeals to the prurient interests?

GOOD GOLLY! :eek:

(Andy Williams was towards the bottom of the chart, so they weren't flame-throwing 24/7 obviously...)

Dragging us off-topic, it's trivia time! Anybody remember what frequency KTUL was previously on, & why they moved?
 
My freshman year at TU (1958), KTUL was attempting to move in on some of KAKC's top 40 audience. Didn't hear 'em all that much, but seems I remember they were much more sedate in their news presentation than what Clayton Vaughan, Bud Curry, Harry Wilson et al were doing "Live at 55" on The New KAKC. One thing that does stick in my mind (like this piece of cashew I'm getting a cramp in my tongue, trying to dig out of a hole between two teeth): After each newscast, KTUL had a stager that went "And now, back to fourteen-three-oh...and the fine five-oh," followed by a sing that sounded like Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians or The Norman Luboff Choir, "Fill your life with muuuuuusic." Have no idea what "the fine five-oh" related to, since they published a chart that included reference to "The 14-30 survey"-- top 14 LPs and top 30 singles, or maybe vice versa. A note on their staff:-- don't remember if he did mornings, but one of their jocks was ("Doctor") Don Rose, later the legendary wake-up man for San Francisco's 610/KFRC. Another was Terrell Metheny a/k/a "Ron Terrell," a pretty fair jock and programmer in his own right, and also the father of still-legending Kevin Metheny.
 
Hey Scoot, and others....

How many of you guys had the fun (and I mean it, FUN!) of working at a small market station like KOKL in Okmulgee; KMUS/KBIX Muskogee, or a similar station. One of those jewels that "signed on" at 6am (usually for a Farm Report) and Signed Off at 10pm (you should be in BED by 10!!).

I started at KOKL in Okmulgee in 1970 working for Bill Brauer, whose son, Bob, most of you may know. Bob's in California now. In the 60's KOKL really had a stellar line-up of talent that would be the envy of much larger stations today (and shows you how much our business has changed over the many years). In those days, the station signed on at 6 (yep, with a farm report!) starting the day with Danny Caywood, who played easy listening, i.e. Jerry Vale, Johnny Mathis, Eddy Arnold (his Nashville sound with strings), Vicki Carr, Johnny Mann Singers and so on. I remember hearing Ty Dixon in middays and later Ron Langley. You probably don't know these guys, but to my very young radio-hungry ears, they were the best. Really talented guys. At 6pm, the MOR went away and out comes the Beatles, Bobby Fuller Four, Gary Lewis and the Playboys and other great 60s rock. I can still remember Don Bishop playing "Day Tripper" on KOKL in 1965. Bishop is now at KRMG, where I am now, and when I see him, we share old stories about the great Bill Brauer! My God, those days were great. And they did it all with CARTS AND TURNTABLES, baby!!

Ok, back to the real world... there are bills to pay!
 
Hey Dick-
I worked with Ty Dixon in '73-'74 at The Rockin' 1050 KCCO in Lawton, Oklahoma. Ty was quite a guy and a had a beautiful voice for radio. Ty was confined to a wheelchair due to a childhood illness. There is no doubt in my mind that it's the only thing that held him back. In those days, companies could get away with discrimination far more than today. Yeah man, those were fun days, but still it was neat to finally come back home to T-Town. WLS was in Chicago but the Rockin' 97 KAKC was home! I loved that radio station! I was working for KBEZ at the time, but I actually got to do the last live radio broadcast from the Trade Winds West studio where KAKC had been all those years. Scooter B. Seagraves still the best that ever came down the pike!

Bob O'Shea
 
Hey Bob!

Yes, Ty was an exceptional talent. One memory from that time was when Ty stacked about 15 carts on top of each other then bumped the console and they all came tumbling down! I was still a kid parked outside the window of the Enterprise Bldg in Okmulgee where KOKL had their studio. Fantastic storefront location.
I was probably 10 or so. What fun. Is Ty still living? Do you know where he is?

I actually worked at KAKC too in the Trade Winds about '78... the glory days were long gone but I was able to work on the same console in the same studio as my heroes from the 60s. Lee Bayley, Scoot, Steve Suttle, Don Bishop, and so many others. It was during the time when they switched to MOR... that didn't last long, and they were shortly sold to the folks that own KCFO and are now doing very well as a religious talk station under Ken Staley, another great broadcaster.

We gotta get a coney someday Bobby!!
 
I found a typo...I wrote the release in a hurry, and didn't notice I put the wrong date in it. the exhibit opens MAY 2, 2009... not March.

A part of the story of radio, we will tell, is the impact of small market radio in Oklahoma from several perspectives. It provided many of us (me included) the opportunity to learn our craft. I started my junior year in high school at KBEL Idabel. I later worked for Ed Montray at KTMC McAlester. Unfortunately those small market opportunities have or are vanishing.

As far as the KTUL story goes, I'm only part way through the research. Here's what I've learned so far. In the late 1940's/early 1950's Raymond Ruff was a salesman at KOMA. In 1956 when John Griffin sold KOMA to a group of Washington lawyers, Raymond Ruff became a minority interest owner and was listed in directories as the manager. In 1958 when the Washington laywers and Raymond Ruff sold the station to Todd Storz Raymond Ruff was listed as a part owner. Sometime after that he moved to Tulsa and about the same time Griffin sold his other radio stations, including KTUL Radio. I think that was when Griffin decided to keep the call letters for KTVX, Channel 8 in Muskogee. That may have been when he (1) moved the call letters to the TV station and moved the TV station to Tulsa, (2) formed a partnership with Jimmy Leake, and (3) and Raymond Ruff thought KELI (Kelly Radio) sounded pretty snappy for a Top 40 Station.

Don Wallace was one of the early DJ's on KTUL and did some of the first commercial sock hops in Tulsa.

Michael
 
Had the fun of working for both KMUS and KBIX. KMUS was a summer gig in 1960 or '61. Ron Kirby was the PD slash morning man. Dick's brother Tom (Loftin, not Smothers) brought one of the smoothest sets of pipes I've ever been horrified to have to follow, doing the midday slot. I'd get out of bed at 4AM to hit that xmtr first stage the mandated 30 minutes before anything else happened, to get us on the air at 5. First hour, I'd be segging like mad on (not country) pure-D gut-bucket hillbilly ... as I ripped and re-wrote the Muskogee Phoenix, so I could croak the news during Ron's show. I also came back for production and the afternoon-drive news, during the show run by a young (I recall) ministerial student from TU, Jim Ricks. Don't remember exactly what our music mix was...seemed like hybrid of lightest top 40 and least saccharine MOR. We saved the really syrupy stuff for night, when Dean Gilbert (later, KVOO's Dean Hall) waxed romantic between the songs (and between sweet-talking phone groupies, lol).

About a year later, I commuted (pre-turnpike) from a downtown Tulsa apartment, to do 4P-midnight at KBIX, in the bat-patrolled Barnes Building -- 4-6 news, 6-8 news and production, 8-10 smokin' hot top 40, then rein in the boogie, two hours of stuff that made Dean sound like an energy monster. The night I woke up on 33 out by Coweta just before going off that high-fill road into a ditch at 85MPH, was followed by the morning I took all my dresser drawers to TU with me, then to a rented "room" where I caught post-KBIX sleep until 6:30, when it was time to reverse the procedure and go get me some l'arnin' at the college. Quite a collection of talent (and CHARACTERS) at "Colorful K-Bix" -- sign-on hillbilly, crazy Jim Kizzia...mornings, Otie Hodd (Otis Eversole, later a successful attorney)...Sid Braden (Dick Ralston, not enough space to list all the CLs he's made better; also, quite influential to a whole generation, teaching 'real' radio at OSU)...Gary Clark, sticks, wheelchair and all, covering everything that happened for the news ... and Dewey Johnson holding the chair and the big whip, trying to keep all of us in line -- why he was never a major market GM, I'll never understand...unless, of course, it was because he had the good sense to realize, if that was the kind of craziness slash energy he had to contend with every minute in a Muskogee, WTF would it be like in Tulsa, OkCity, K-C or Dallas!!!!
 
Dick Loftin said:
Hey Bob!

Yes, Ty was an exceptional talent. One memory from that time was when Ty stacked about 15 carts on top of each other then bumped the console and they all came tumbling down! I was still a kid parked outside the window of the Enterprise Bldg in Okmulgee where KOKL had their studio. Fantastic storefront location.
I was probably 10 or so. What fun. Is Ty still living? Do you know where he is?

I actually worked at KAKC too in the Trade Winds about '78... the glory days were long gone but I was able to work on the same console in the same studio as my heroes from the 60s. Lee Bayley, Scoot, Steve Suttle, Don Bishop, and so many others. It was during the time when they switched to MOR... that didn't last long, and they were shortly sold to the folks that own KCFO and are now doing very well as a religious talk station under Ken Staley, another great broadcaster.

We gotta get a coney someday Bobby!!

Wow, talk about a time machine! Between you and Scoot my memory is coming back. When I worked in Lawton at KCCO, Ty was the 9a-noon guy and I took it from there. The station was a daytimer so depending on the time of year, I was the afternnoon guy or the pm driver. Ron Kirby was our morning guy and my boss, one funny son of a gun, Ty followed, I followed Ty and in the summer, Don Longfellow would do a 'mid-day' show and I would do the drive home. I'd go home and watch Tom (Loftin) Charles do the news. Scoots right, Tom had a set of Charlie Van Dyke pipes. Made the rest of us sound like the first women in broadcasting! Yeah, Ty still had that uncanny ability to drop a stack of carts a mile high all over the studio floor. I would pick them up without saying a word. Ty as you know was confined to that damned wheel chair. To answer your question Dick, Ty apparently had some kind of a seizure when he was 34. He was alone when it happened. Ty passed away alone in his apartment. His wife had left him with their only child. Later Ty was fired because of issues related to what I could only call a nervous breakdown over of the divorce. Then Ty passed away. I loved Ty. I always felt guilty because of what happened to him even though by then I had long since moved away from Lawton and was back in T-Town tryin' to be another Scooter B.! Weren't we all? Life sure has it's saddness. I loved those guys. Hell, I loved all the guys I worked with and for and listened to. What great fun it was! Coney's soon Dick. You're buy'n!

Bob O
 
michaeldean said:
Many teenagers who grew up in the Midwest, and every state West of Oklahoma listened to KOMA at night. In the 1960’s the Oklahoma City powerhouse had the second largest measured radio audience on the North American Continent.

Wasn't just west of Oklahoma. Where I went to college in Eastern Iowa in the 60s, KOMA was a regular nighttime listen. Same goes for a few years later when I lived in Northwestern Wisconsin. Although the station was protecting WKBW in Buffalo at night, there was still enough juice left over to put a very respectable signal into both locations.
 
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