Brian Lord : An Appreciation
By Glen Livingstone
Legendary Vancouver disc jockey Brian Lord passed away last month at age 77.
His 47 year-long career took him from Vancouver to San Bernadino, California, back to B.C. and finally, to Hong Kong until his retirement in 2001 after which he moved to the Phillipines.
It was a wild ride for the one-time divinity student who chucked it all in for the rock 'n roll lifestyle of a Top Forty dj in the late fifties.
Brian spent 1959 - his first full year in radio - working the midnight to six shift at Vancouver's CFUN spinning the MOR platters that mattered by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and others.
So Lord was half past ready when the station decided to flip formats to Top 40 in the summer of 1960 and Brian - now going by the on-air sobriquet 'Baby Blue' - came into his own.
Brian did mid-days, 10am to 2pm; 'Big Daddy' Dave McCormick handled afternoon drive; Brian 'Frosty' Forst held down the 6pm to midnight slot and Jerry 'Lee' Landa took care of overnights. They dubbed themselves 'The Swingin' men at 1410,' a.k.a. 'The CFUN Good Guys' and proceeded to rock sleepy little Vancouver 'til Hell wouldn't have it.
They quite liked the PAMS jingle package that Seattle Top 40 blowtorch KJR was using, so they contacted the Texas-based company to do a re-sing on the set and began kicking rival CKWX's ass.
As the Swingin' Men at 1410 spun the hits and created musical meyhem for Vancouver's teen set, big changes were on the horizon, one that would see Brian and fellow CFUN Good Guy Dave McCormick pull up stakes and head down the coast to California at the invitation of radio programmer Ron Jacobs.
Jacobs had himself recently relocated from Hawaii to San Bernadino where he was putting together a crew for a sleepy Inland Empire radio station called KMEN. Brian became one of the first of the original K/MEN ON March 10, 1962, pumping out little symphonies for the kids evenings from six 'til nine.
KMEN's signal covered an area of medium sized towns on the eastern edge of L.A. commonly referred to as "The Inland Empire".
The radio station sat in the middle of a cow pasture on the outskirts of town on an unpaved road that ran a quarter mile from the main East-West road in town, Baseline Avenue.
None of that made a damn bit of difference to the station's rabid listeners however, who remained in a state of permanent enchantment thanks to the 24 hour offerings of Brian and his cohorts whose daily 'theatre of the mind' antics proved that - at least back in those days - you could apparently put lipstick on a pig.
One of KMEN's many promotional stunts involved the brightly-colored hot air balloon that hovered above the city. The balloon made an impression on a young San Bernadino Valley College student named Jimmy Webb - yes, that Jimmy Webb - who was inspired to write "Up, Up and Away," a song that became a 1967 top ten hit for The Fifth Dimension in the U.S. and Canada.
Brian's KMEN run lasted five years, from 1962 to '65 - and, after a brief stint at San Jose's KLIV - it was back to KMEN in 1966.
As a popular jock on a smokin' hot Top 40 station, Brian got to know and befriend many of the artists whose records he spun on his daily radio show.
Sonny Bono, the Beach Boys to name just two, and Phil Spector - who phoned Brian live on air at 6:30 pm on the last Friday of every month for two years to talk about what was happening in the world of music.
Brian even became a recording 'artiste' himself in 1963 when Frank Zappa phoned him out of the blue to ask if he'd be interested in supplying the voicetrack for a record that Zappa wanted to record.
Brian had been occasionally doing bang-on impressions of President Kennedy on his radio show; Zappa had heard them and came up with an idea for a record called "The Big Surfer" which would feature the voice of Brian as the President judging a surf contest.
Brian was interested, and Zappa invited him to drop by his hole-in-the-wall studio in nearby Cucamonga. The track was cut in two takes, Frank added a basic quasi-surf backing track and the record, billed as Brian Lord and the Midnighters was released on Zappa's own Vigah label. Zappa leased the track to Capitol Records (#4981) which released it, pressed four hundred copies and recalled it almost immediately.
As 1963 rolled into 1964, the surf music craze of Southern California gave way to the British Invasion spearheaded by the Beatles. Brian, as well as his announcer duties was also KMEN's music director. When he couldn't obtain hot new Beatle releases from the group's American record label Capitol, he contacted a record store in London, England and had them airmail copies of the first two albums to him at KMEN.
Brian was one of the very first jocks in North America to sense that the Beatles phenomenom was about to explode, and he wanted to make sure that he and his station weren't about to be caught short.
When the much anticipated lp's arrived from the U.K. Brian didn't just add one or two songs to the KMEN playlist - he added all of the tracks, every song on both albums.
When music directors and dj's at other stations in L.A. began frantically calling Brian to find out where he was getting all of these previously unavailable Beatles' recordings he helpfully provided them with the phone number of his record store source in London.
"Hey, we've upped our percentage of Beatles' airplay, up yours!," laughed Brian as he fielded phone calls in between swigs from the bottle of Early Times bourbon whiskey that balanced precariously on top of his rickety desk.
KMEN's love affair with British bands continued that year when the station started giving heavy airplay to "Not Fade Away," a cover of a Buddy Holly song that had peaked at #3 on the British music charts by The Rolling Stones.
KMEN's PD Bill Watson brokered a deal to bring the Stones to San Bernadino on their first U.S. tour to perform at the 17,000 seat Swing Auditorium.
Brian and two other KMEN dj's made the fifty-five mile drive into L.A. to greet the Stones at the airport. Amidst a gaggle of hysterical (mostly) teenage girls, Decca Records promo people herded Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts into a waiting limousine and drove off.
Keith Richards piled into a car with Brian and the others so that they could interview him on the way to the hotel.
The boys got lost in traffic as a nervous, jet-lagged Keef chain-smoked one cigarette after another, tossing butts out the window that lit up the warm L.A. night like so many fireflies. Nothing that a handful of mother's little helpers wouldn't cure.
In 1966 Brian took a 15 month sabbatical from KMEN to relocate to KLIV in San Jose 35 miles south of San Francisco.
During one of Brian's many sock hop appearances he met a band who called themselves Count Five. Like many other of the Garage bands of the day, the group played mostly cover versions of current Top 40 hits.
Brian liked the group and allowed them to rehearse in the garage at the house he was renting. They had one original song that they were working on called "Psychotic Reaction."
Brian thought it had hit written all over it, tossed in a few suggestions, made some calls and finally hooked the band up with independent L.A. promotion man Irving Zucker who agreed to record the song and release it on his own Double Shot label.
In a matter of weeks Psychotic Reaction was an international hit that eventually
peaked at Number 5 on the Billboard charts and became a radio staple during the Vietnam War era. Years later, Psychotic Reaction was also listed among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll. The song's enduring popularity was assured when Tom Petty and the heartbreakers covered it on their Playback box set in 1995.
Brian left KLIV in 1967 and returned to KMEN as Program Director. Holding down Brian's old 6 to 9 PM shift was John Ravoncroft, a British citizen who had been working on air in Texas. Brian and John became friends and frequently socialized together after work.
That all came to a screeching halt when a couple of underage groupies concocted a story that ended both Brian and John's radio careers, at least in Southern California. The perceived malfeasance caused KMEN's management to fire the pair of them and hand them airline tickets home.
John flew home to London, changed his surname from Ravencroft to Peel and went to work for pirate station Radio London and later the BBC. His timing couldn't have been better, arriving as he did just at the moment that England's version of the 'Summer of Love' was getting underway. John went on to enjoy a stellar career in Britain and became the longest-serving BBC Radio 1 dj until his death in 2004.
Brian wound up back in Vancouver, B.C. where he was hired by CJOR, a rather dull MOR station that was the complete opposite to what he had been used to in California. After only a few months he returned to San Bernadino and went to work for a record distributor in Central L.A.
In 1968, Brian returned to Canada and became the Program Director at country music station CJJC in Langley, a Vancouver area bedroom community. It was a gig that lasted for several years.
Then, after a brief hiatus from radio, Brian took a job as an Administrative Assistant to a Cabinet Minister in Victoria, B.C.
Stints at CKDA in Victoria and CKWX and CHRX in Vancouver followed, and in 1995 he accepted a job as a news anchor at Metro Broadcasting in Hong Kong where he worked until his retirement in 2001.
One more move saw him settling in the Philippines where he lived until his death at the age of 77 in January of this year.
Brian was one of the pied pipers of rock 'n roll, flying by the seat of his bell bottom trousers and making it up as he went along because there was no instruction book on how to be an on air entertainer on Top Forty radio in the sixties.
The chance encounter that saw him leave Vancouver for San Bernadino in 1960 was fortuitous - not to mention timely - Who knew then that Southern California would turn out to be Ground Zero for all that was to follow.
Brian was there when the world turned from black and white into a kaleidoscope of colors, all in the flash of a Kodak Instamatic camera, whose short lifespan (1963 to 1970) neatly paralleled that glorious decade while similtaneously chronicling its turbulent times.
And it was easy-to-load, some would say, "Just like Brian."
A fast-talking wisecracking jokerman, Brian was an ace wordsmith, because, after all - it was those words that paid the bills, Jack.
Besides,there had to be something to fill in the spaces between all of that incredible music blasting out of the monitors from inside the tiny studio of the cinderblock shrine in the middle of a Southern Californian cow pasture. A gatekeeper was required. Brian was that gatekeeper.
Those were heady days. Things moved quickly. New records arriving in the mail, sometimes a hundred of them a week. Sock hops. Concerts. drugs. Alcohol. Groupies.
In Brian's words: "When I started it (radio) was not a job - it was fun and remained so all my life largely due to the friends I made in the Industry."
Thanks for everything Brian "Lord of the Skies," what an incredible ride it was.
By Glen Livingstone
Legendary Vancouver disc jockey Brian Lord passed away last month at age 77.
His 47 year-long career took him from Vancouver to San Bernadino, California, back to B.C. and finally, to Hong Kong until his retirement in 2001 after which he moved to the Phillipines.
It was a wild ride for the one-time divinity student who chucked it all in for the rock 'n roll lifestyle of a Top Forty dj in the late fifties.
Brian spent 1959 - his first full year in radio - working the midnight to six shift at Vancouver's CFUN spinning the MOR platters that mattered by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and others.
So Lord was half past ready when the station decided to flip formats to Top 40 in the summer of 1960 and Brian - now going by the on-air sobriquet 'Baby Blue' - came into his own.
Brian did mid-days, 10am to 2pm; 'Big Daddy' Dave McCormick handled afternoon drive; Brian 'Frosty' Forst held down the 6pm to midnight slot and Jerry 'Lee' Landa took care of overnights. They dubbed themselves 'The Swingin' men at 1410,' a.k.a. 'The CFUN Good Guys' and proceeded to rock sleepy little Vancouver 'til Hell wouldn't have it.
They quite liked the PAMS jingle package that Seattle Top 40 blowtorch KJR was using, so they contacted the Texas-based company to do a re-sing on the set and began kicking rival CKWX's ass.
As the Swingin' Men at 1410 spun the hits and created musical meyhem for Vancouver's teen set, big changes were on the horizon, one that would see Brian and fellow CFUN Good Guy Dave McCormick pull up stakes and head down the coast to California at the invitation of radio programmer Ron Jacobs.
Jacobs had himself recently relocated from Hawaii to San Bernadino where he was putting together a crew for a sleepy Inland Empire radio station called KMEN. Brian became one of the first of the original K/MEN ON March 10, 1962, pumping out little symphonies for the kids evenings from six 'til nine.
KMEN's signal covered an area of medium sized towns on the eastern edge of L.A. commonly referred to as "The Inland Empire".
The radio station sat in the middle of a cow pasture on the outskirts of town on an unpaved road that ran a quarter mile from the main East-West road in town, Baseline Avenue.
None of that made a damn bit of difference to the station's rabid listeners however, who remained in a state of permanent enchantment thanks to the 24 hour offerings of Brian and his cohorts whose daily 'theatre of the mind' antics proved that - at least back in those days - you could apparently put lipstick on a pig.
One of KMEN's many promotional stunts involved the brightly-colored hot air balloon that hovered above the city. The balloon made an impression on a young San Bernadino Valley College student named Jimmy Webb - yes, that Jimmy Webb - who was inspired to write "Up, Up and Away," a song that became a 1967 top ten hit for The Fifth Dimension in the U.S. and Canada.
Brian's KMEN run lasted five years, from 1962 to '65 - and, after a brief stint at San Jose's KLIV - it was back to KMEN in 1966.
As a popular jock on a smokin' hot Top 40 station, Brian got to know and befriend many of the artists whose records he spun on his daily radio show.
Sonny Bono, the Beach Boys to name just two, and Phil Spector - who phoned Brian live on air at 6:30 pm on the last Friday of every month for two years to talk about what was happening in the world of music.
Brian even became a recording 'artiste' himself in 1963 when Frank Zappa phoned him out of the blue to ask if he'd be interested in supplying the voicetrack for a record that Zappa wanted to record.
Brian had been occasionally doing bang-on impressions of President Kennedy on his radio show; Zappa had heard them and came up with an idea for a record called "The Big Surfer" which would feature the voice of Brian as the President judging a surf contest.
Brian was interested, and Zappa invited him to drop by his hole-in-the-wall studio in nearby Cucamonga. The track was cut in two takes, Frank added a basic quasi-surf backing track and the record, billed as Brian Lord and the Midnighters was released on Zappa's own Vigah label. Zappa leased the track to Capitol Records (#4981) which released it, pressed four hundred copies and recalled it almost immediately.
As 1963 rolled into 1964, the surf music craze of Southern California gave way to the British Invasion spearheaded by the Beatles. Brian, as well as his announcer duties was also KMEN's music director. When he couldn't obtain hot new Beatle releases from the group's American record label Capitol, he contacted a record store in London, England and had them airmail copies of the first two albums to him at KMEN.
Brian was one of the very first jocks in North America to sense that the Beatles phenomenom was about to explode, and he wanted to make sure that he and his station weren't about to be caught short.
When the much anticipated lp's arrived from the U.K. Brian didn't just add one or two songs to the KMEN playlist - he added all of the tracks, every song on both albums.
When music directors and dj's at other stations in L.A. began frantically calling Brian to find out where he was getting all of these previously unavailable Beatles' recordings he helpfully provided them with the phone number of his record store source in London.
"Hey, we've upped our percentage of Beatles' airplay, up yours!," laughed Brian as he fielded phone calls in between swigs from the bottle of Early Times bourbon whiskey that balanced precariously on top of his rickety desk.
KMEN's love affair with British bands continued that year when the station started giving heavy airplay to "Not Fade Away," a cover of a Buddy Holly song that had peaked at #3 on the British music charts by The Rolling Stones.
KMEN's PD Bill Watson brokered a deal to bring the Stones to San Bernadino on their first U.S. tour to perform at the 17,000 seat Swing Auditorium.
Brian and two other KMEN dj's made the fifty-five mile drive into L.A. to greet the Stones at the airport. Amidst a gaggle of hysterical (mostly) teenage girls, Decca Records promo people herded Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts into a waiting limousine and drove off.
Keith Richards piled into a car with Brian and the others so that they could interview him on the way to the hotel.
The boys got lost in traffic as a nervous, jet-lagged Keef chain-smoked one cigarette after another, tossing butts out the window that lit up the warm L.A. night like so many fireflies. Nothing that a handful of mother's little helpers wouldn't cure.
In 1966 Brian took a 15 month sabbatical from KMEN to relocate to KLIV in San Jose 35 miles south of San Francisco.
During one of Brian's many sock hop appearances he met a band who called themselves Count Five. Like many other of the Garage bands of the day, the group played mostly cover versions of current Top 40 hits.
Brian liked the group and allowed them to rehearse in the garage at the house he was renting. They had one original song that they were working on called "Psychotic Reaction."
Brian thought it had hit written all over it, tossed in a few suggestions, made some calls and finally hooked the band up with independent L.A. promotion man Irving Zucker who agreed to record the song and release it on his own Double Shot label.
In a matter of weeks Psychotic Reaction was an international hit that eventually
peaked at Number 5 on the Billboard charts and became a radio staple during the Vietnam War era. Years later, Psychotic Reaction was also listed among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll. The song's enduring popularity was assured when Tom Petty and the heartbreakers covered it on their Playback box set in 1995.
Brian left KLIV in 1967 and returned to KMEN as Program Director. Holding down Brian's old 6 to 9 PM shift was John Ravoncroft, a British citizen who had been working on air in Texas. Brian and John became friends and frequently socialized together after work.
That all came to a screeching halt when a couple of underage groupies concocted a story that ended both Brian and John's radio careers, at least in Southern California. The perceived malfeasance caused KMEN's management to fire the pair of them and hand them airline tickets home.
John flew home to London, changed his surname from Ravencroft to Peel and went to work for pirate station Radio London and later the BBC. His timing couldn't have been better, arriving as he did just at the moment that England's version of the 'Summer of Love' was getting underway. John went on to enjoy a stellar career in Britain and became the longest-serving BBC Radio 1 dj until his death in 2004.
Brian wound up back in Vancouver, B.C. where he was hired by CJOR, a rather dull MOR station that was the complete opposite to what he had been used to in California. After only a few months he returned to San Bernadino and went to work for a record distributor in Central L.A.
In 1968, Brian returned to Canada and became the Program Director at country music station CJJC in Langley, a Vancouver area bedroom community. It was a gig that lasted for several years.
Then, after a brief hiatus from radio, Brian took a job as an Administrative Assistant to a Cabinet Minister in Victoria, B.C.
Stints at CKDA in Victoria and CKWX and CHRX in Vancouver followed, and in 1995 he accepted a job as a news anchor at Metro Broadcasting in Hong Kong where he worked until his retirement in 2001.
One more move saw him settling in the Philippines where he lived until his death at the age of 77 in January of this year.
Brian was one of the pied pipers of rock 'n roll, flying by the seat of his bell bottom trousers and making it up as he went along because there was no instruction book on how to be an on air entertainer on Top Forty radio in the sixties.
The chance encounter that saw him leave Vancouver for San Bernadino in 1960 was fortuitous - not to mention timely - Who knew then that Southern California would turn out to be Ground Zero for all that was to follow.
Brian was there when the world turned from black and white into a kaleidoscope of colors, all in the flash of a Kodak Instamatic camera, whose short lifespan (1963 to 1970) neatly paralleled that glorious decade while similtaneously chronicling its turbulent times.
And it was easy-to-load, some would say, "Just like Brian."
A fast-talking wisecracking jokerman, Brian was an ace wordsmith, because, after all - it was those words that paid the bills, Jack.
Besides,there had to be something to fill in the spaces between all of that incredible music blasting out of the monitors from inside the tiny studio of the cinderblock shrine in the middle of a Southern Californian cow pasture. A gatekeeper was required. Brian was that gatekeeper.
Those were heady days. Things moved quickly. New records arriving in the mail, sometimes a hundred of them a week. Sock hops. Concerts. drugs. Alcohol. Groupies.
In Brian's words: "When I started it (radio) was not a job - it was fun and remained so all my life largely due to the friends I made in the Industry."
Thanks for everything Brian "Lord of the Skies," what an incredible ride it was.