N
number one fan
Guest
No, probably WXYZ (now WXYT) in Detroit. Top 40 from 1955 to 1967, the first ABC station to go top 40.
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
trusty said:
Actually, WQXI was NOT the inspiration for the show, but WQXI's manager was the story consultant. Blum was a good manager, in fact.
>Jerry Blum, the GM of WQXI, was a paid story consultant for WKRP. He was the
>one who gathered the radio lore, truth and not so true, and suggested ideas
>to the writers. Among the stories Jerry suggested was the KENR Houston
>turkey drop, one of the best episodes and totally based on fact... the
>promotion, done by PD Jay Blackburn, lasted through two turkeys... first one
>knocked an awning off a store, second went through the roof of a car.
You have to understand the purpose behind the Drake Format. Circa 1966, there were about 1000 personality top forty stations which meant about 5000 fulltime djs. The personality formats of stations like WABC, WCFL, WQAM and WKNR required djs who had quick minds and much talent and humor. Unfortunately, of the 5000 djs, maybe 20 to 50 had the ability to pull the format off. The other 4950 to 4980 tried to do it without the talent and offended the audience while they were stroking their own egos. The Drake Format made radio like McDonalds, limited choices on the menu. The Drake format limited what the djs could say because they could only talk over the intros up to the vocal. This did two things. It made really bad djs sound mediocre but, it made really good djs sound mediocre too. In the case of Detroit, CKLW did well mostly based on the signal. If WKNR and CKLW had switched signals, WKNR would have been the dominant station. In New York City, while WABC was pulling a 23 share, the Drake station, WOR-FM was pulling a 2 share and was fourth among the top forty stations in New York in 1972. WPIX-FM and WWDJ were also beating Drake in New York. If there had been 5000 Dan Ingrams, Barney Pips and Jack Armstrongs, Drake never would have existed.
O
OldiesCat
Guest
CKLW
Disagree with you. Where most of the population was centered, both stations had strong signals. Just because you could get CKLW at night in Tulsa or Providence, that has no impact on local listening. Keener was a great station in it's day but CK was better for a longer period of time.
Disagree with you. Where most of the population was centered, both stations had strong signals. Just because you could get CKLW at night in Tulsa or Providence, that has no impact on local listening. Keener was a great station in it's day but CK was better for a longer period of time.
RADIO TRUTH said:
In the mid-60's, there were around 2400 AM stations in the US (FMs had insignificant audience, so not counted). Of these, very few smaller market stations were Top 40 as the format was a tough sale outside of larger markets. So, considering that there were maybe a couple of hundred markets that could sustain a full Top 40, we are talking more like 400 or so Top 40 stations.
In fact, there were so few Top 40's in many places that stations like KOMA announced movie openings as far away as New Mexico and Colorado. Entire states, like Arizona, had 4 or 5 Top 40 stations, not dozens.
And there were plenty of Top 40s in smaller markets with incredible talent... stations WABB in Mobile, WHHY in Montgomery, WKGN in Knoxville, KSJB in Jamestown (ND), KENO in Las Vegas, KMEN in Riverside, KQEO in Albuquerque, KRIG in Midland / Odessa, KDES in Palm Springs, WILS in Lansing, etc., etc. where the jocks who made it to the bigger markets started.
Not ttrue. Read Ron Jacobs' book on KHJ... talent was trained to be brief, not to say nothing. The talent on KHJ was incredibly entertaining, yet not overbearing and repetitive.
No kidding. Morgan was mediocre on KHJ? Steele? Humble Harve? Please...
Not true. The Detroit market was really one county then, and the fact that you could hear CKLW in the Bahamas did not matter. Sales were based on Detroit Arbitron ratings, and CKLW was better than Keener, that's all.
FM Top 40's did not really start to work until later... WOR was not a pure Drake Top 40 play, anyway. The first "dedicated" FM Top 40's were WMYQ, KSLQ and WDRQ, followed by WERC-FM in Birmingham.
A few years later, with greater FM use, it would have been different. From KAKC and WHBQ to KFRC and KHJ and CKLW and WRKO, the Drake Top 40's won in every case.
I disagree with just about everything David Eduardo just wrote. There were very few talented jocks outside of some of the major markets and the talent was so thin overall, that many personality top forty stations in major markets did it very poorly too. Since we are comparing Drake to big personality non-Drake stations, let's talk about the few markets that had both. Los Angeles-KFWB was a classic example of a major market top forty station that was so cluttered sounding that KHJ's sparse Drake personality format had no trouble beating it. KFWB didn't have the talent or programming to pull off personality, top forty radio, when done correctly requires alot of talent on-the-air, in programming, promotions and even in engineering. KRLA was not much better with the exception of the time Dick Biondi was on KRLA. Bob Eubanks and Casey Kasem were extremely bland sounding on KRLA. You mentioned Robert W. Morgan, Humble Harv and Don Steele, in comparison to Dan
Ingram, Gary Stevens, Harry Harrison and most all of the WABC and WMCA jocks, they sounded bland by comparison. The only Drake jock who really sounded good was Charlie Tuna and he sounded better on KOMA
before he ever got to L. A. because he had more freedom. New York City is a different story. If you use the excuse that Drake didn't do well in New York because it was too early for FM, WWDJ on AM did a format that was very Drake sounding and it did just as badly as WOR-FM. If the Drake format was on a 50000 watt AM in New York, it still would have failed against WABC who were still the number one station in New York until the winter book of 1978. WABC had the big personalities, the jingles, the audio processing and the format moved. A bunch of unknown Drake jocks would have failed against that no matter what broadcast band they were on. In Boston, signal was a huge issue, WMEX was directional into the water with a very narrow pattern. WRKO had a much better signal. Again, switch the stations and the outcome would be different. San Francisco was another issue of signal between KYA and KFRC and Doctor Don Rose had much more freedom than other Drake jocks but, Doctor Don Rose sounded better on WFIL and WQXI before he ever got involved with Drake.
As far as Ron Jacobs book, it is self serving. I owned a radio station and knowing that I could not get the talent that I needed, I used the Drake Format and we sounded great because it was easy to teach and didn't require alot of talent to execute it. Another advantage of the Drake Format is that you can pay the jocks next to nothing and they are interchangeable parts. I do like the Drake Format for those reasons.
Ingram, Gary Stevens, Harry Harrison and most all of the WABC and WMCA jocks, they sounded bland by comparison. The only Drake jock who really sounded good was Charlie Tuna and he sounded better on KOMA
before he ever got to L. A. because he had more freedom. New York City is a different story. If you use the excuse that Drake didn't do well in New York because it was too early for FM, WWDJ on AM did a format that was very Drake sounding and it did just as badly as WOR-FM. If the Drake format was on a 50000 watt AM in New York, it still would have failed against WABC who were still the number one station in New York until the winter book of 1978. WABC had the big personalities, the jingles, the audio processing and the format moved. A bunch of unknown Drake jocks would have failed against that no matter what broadcast band they were on. In Boston, signal was a huge issue, WMEX was directional into the water with a very narrow pattern. WRKO had a much better signal. Again, switch the stations and the outcome would be different. San Francisco was another issue of signal between KYA and KFRC and Doctor Don Rose had much more freedom than other Drake jocks but, Doctor Don Rose sounded better on WFIL and WQXI before he ever got involved with Drake.
As far as Ron Jacobs book, it is self serving. I owned a radio station and knowing that I could not get the talent that I needed, I used the Drake Format and we sounded great because it was easy to teach and didn't require alot of talent to execute it. Another advantage of the Drake Format is that you can pay the jocks next to nothing and they are interchangeable parts. I do like the Drake Format for those reasons.
Re: CKLW - Detroit's BEST Top 40 Station
New York is not a good market to use as an example. WWDJ used the Kent Burkhart template, which was not as disciplined, and didn't come near the coverage of WABC (5kw at 970, directional). WOR-FM was closer to what you'd call Hot AC today. When it became 99X in the mid 70s, they actually beat WABC in teen and 18-24 demos for a time...and that format was even tighter than Drake.
WABC won mostly because of their huge signal advantage. You could hear it all the way to Montauk and Atlantic City like a local, and all the way to Pennsylvania, Albany and Massachusetts. In many parts of the metro, they were the only local Top 40 you could hear at night. WMCA, WWDJ, and earlier competitors WINS, WADO and WMGM, and all of the FMs had coverage problems in comparison.
While I was a fan of many WABC and WMCA jocks, there is no denying that guys like Walt "Baby" Love, Sebastian Stone, and Mark Driscoll did great work at WOR-FM. And, for my money, Scott Regen sounded better on CK than he did on WKNR because of the added discipline. CK had a great lineup over the years...Pat Holiday, Bill Gable, Big Jim Edwards, CVD, Ted Richards, Max Kinkel, Gary Burbank, Bob Savage, Frank Brodie, Johnny Williams, all were inventive, content filled guys that worked the format to their advantage.
New York is not a good market to use as an example. WWDJ used the Kent Burkhart template, which was not as disciplined, and didn't come near the coverage of WABC (5kw at 970, directional). WOR-FM was closer to what you'd call Hot AC today. When it became 99X in the mid 70s, they actually beat WABC in teen and 18-24 demos for a time...and that format was even tighter than Drake.
WABC won mostly because of their huge signal advantage. You could hear it all the way to Montauk and Atlantic City like a local, and all the way to Pennsylvania, Albany and Massachusetts. In many parts of the metro, they were the only local Top 40 you could hear at night. WMCA, WWDJ, and earlier competitors WINS, WADO and WMGM, and all of the FMs had coverage problems in comparison.
While I was a fan of many WABC and WMCA jocks, there is no denying that guys like Walt "Baby" Love, Sebastian Stone, and Mark Driscoll did great work at WOR-FM. And, for my money, Scott Regen sounded better on CK than he did on WKNR because of the added discipline. CK had a great lineup over the years...Pat Holiday, Bill Gable, Big Jim Edwards, CVD, Ted Richards, Max Kinkel, Gary Burbank, Bob Savage, Frank Brodie, Johnny Williams, all were inventive, content filled guys that worked the format to their advantage.
RADIO TRUTH said:
Well, that pretty well blows your credibility when you say, "The Drake format limited what the djs could say because they could only talk over the intros up to the vocal. This did two things. It made really bad djs sound mediocre but, it made really good djs sound mediocre too." You just *thought* you knew enough about it "to teach." Just a guess but I'll bet you also didn't pay a dime to Drake/Chenault for their consulting services. If you had, you'd have a much better understanding of what was really involved.
Inventor989 made a good point when Scott Regen was used as an example. Another quickly comes to mind: Tom Shannon on CKLW before Drew and Drake, then after they arrived, when his evening ratings went through the roof. That was no fluke and it obviously had nothing to do with the signal.
mike marshall (Frank Brodie)
The Drake Format was so simplistic that it didn't need much teaching. None of the CKLW jocks could shine Dan Ingram's shoes. None of the CKLW jocks had enough talent to execute a format as complex as WABC's mid 60s format. All of CKLW's jocks would have had trouble surviving at WABC because the WABC format required the dj to be a personality and talk for more than ten seconds.
Re: CKLW - Detroit's Best Top 40 Station
Ingram talked for more than 10 seconds? I grew up listening to Ingram from 1962 on, and I can tell you that at no time (except, maybe, when WABC was covering The Beatles' NYC visit) did Dan Ingram talk that long unless he was reading a live commercial (something all NYC jocks did on a regular basis so that the stations could dodge paying AFTRA talent fees). He talked up vocals and backsold just like CK, KHJ and WRKO jocks did. His whole act was based on concentrating short bursts of creativity over intros of songs in a spontaneous way. This was a subject I was fortunate to have discussed at length with Mr. Ingram during a visit to WCBS-FM about ten years ago.
I would suggest to you that Tom Shannon, and all of the CK jocks I listed above, could hold their own with Big Dan had they been on WABC. And I believe Big Dan would agree. The Drake format simply provided a structure, a frame in which to paint. Not many "personalities" of the era did that, they just spewed words to hear themselves talk. Imagine an artist painting with no canvas or frame, just spewing paint everywhere. Format=framework.
Ingram provided a tight framework for himself. That's what made his work so effective. Other greats of his era did their work in tight bursts as well. Windy Craig, the famous voiceover talent, was a jock for many years in the late 50s-early 60s on WOLF in Syracuse before he moved into the voiceover world. I heard a WOLF aircheck of him in 1958 doing a format of his own concoction that was as tight as any I've heard...7 years before KHJ rolled out.
Ingram talked for more than 10 seconds? I grew up listening to Ingram from 1962 on, and I can tell you that at no time (except, maybe, when WABC was covering The Beatles' NYC visit) did Dan Ingram talk that long unless he was reading a live commercial (something all NYC jocks did on a regular basis so that the stations could dodge paying AFTRA talent fees). He talked up vocals and backsold just like CK, KHJ and WRKO jocks did. His whole act was based on concentrating short bursts of creativity over intros of songs in a spontaneous way. This was a subject I was fortunate to have discussed at length with Mr. Ingram during a visit to WCBS-FM about ten years ago.
I would suggest to you that Tom Shannon, and all of the CK jocks I listed above, could hold their own with Big Dan had they been on WABC. And I believe Big Dan would agree. The Drake format simply provided a structure, a frame in which to paint. Not many "personalities" of the era did that, they just spewed words to hear themselves talk. Imagine an artist painting with no canvas or frame, just spewing paint everywhere. Format=framework.
Ingram provided a tight framework for himself. That's what made his work so effective. Other greats of his era did their work in tight bursts as well. Windy Craig, the famous voiceover talent, was a jock for many years in the late 50s-early 60s on WOLF in Syracuse before he moved into the voiceover world. I heard a WOLF aircheck of him in 1958 doing a format of his own concoction that was as tight as any I've heard...7 years before KHJ rolled out.
Ingram talked over :10 plenty. In fact, WABC had a jingle with a :25 doughnut that he used at the top of each hour and he talked live over all of it. He also talked over songs with longer intros and also talked between lyrics on many occasions. He also talked and made noises during, before and after many agency spots. He talked before and after Howard Cosell-Speaking Of Sports and made fun of the newsman before most newscasts. He also edited together a :56 bed of Tri-fi drums that he talked over all of it at the end of every show. There are many more examples of Ingram talking over :10 as well as other WABC and WMCA jocks. You would never hear any of these things on any Drake stations because the Drake Format limited how much a jock could say and when they could say it. If there had been a WABC in every market that had a Drake station and the signals were
equal, no Drake stations would have ever won but, again, there was not enough talent to staff enough competitive stations. Dan Ingram would have been greatly restricted on any Drake station. Drake gets credit for
recognizing a national lack of talent and developing a format where talent didn't matter that much.
equal, no Drake stations would have ever won but, again, there was not enough talent to staff enough competitive stations. Dan Ingram would have been greatly restricted on any Drake station. Drake gets credit for
recognizing a national lack of talent and developing a format where talent didn't matter that much.
Here's something that's often lost or never taken into account when it comes to discussion of "personalities" and "personality radio."
Why is talking a lot or for longer stretches so often equated with being a successful personality? It takes mere seconds to get the listener's attention. Good radio is comparable to good writing. Be direct and to the point. It's all about self-editing.
Earlier in the thread, I said, "Bill Drake always takes the rap for "liner-driven" radio devoid of personality but the blame really rests squarely on the shoulders of the copycats, the consultants and PDs who didn't quite grasp the concept and completely shut down their jocks."
In light of recent comments, I thought it ought to be mentioned again.
Why is talking a lot or for longer stretches so often equated with being a successful personality? It takes mere seconds to get the listener's attention. Good radio is comparable to good writing. Be direct and to the point. It's all about self-editing.
Earlier in the thread, I said, "Bill Drake always takes the rap for "liner-driven" radio devoid of personality but the blame really rests squarely on the shoulders of the copycats, the consultants and PDs who didn't quite grasp the concept and completely shut down their jocks."
In light of recent comments, I thought it ought to be mentioned again.
He did a show open and a show close...part of Ingram's "format". Like I said, he formatted himself. The rest of the time, he was tight. Even when he "broached the coach".
Just admit it...you like the jingles, the trappings, the reverb that made WABC and other non-Drake stations what they were. You want chime time and guys talking over jingles. That's okay...there are plenty of ways to make a successful radio station. Frankly, I thought that stuff really detracted from WABC, and I thought their music selection was too tight...a lot tighter than Drake stations were. If you wanted to hear something outside the Top 14, you were pretty much out of luck on WABC during most of their history. Drake stations played 33-35 songs each week. WABC played maybe 18 total.
Just like on the best Drake stations, talent carries the load. When Ingram was on WABC, it was mesmerizing. Conversely, when lesser talents got on the air at 77, it could get a bit yucky and sloppy.
Ok, he had a show open and a show close. The rest of what Ingram did could have been done in the Drake format. Did you ever hear Dale Dorman on WRKO doing his back-and-forth with newsman Bill Rossi on WRKO? Or Rick Dees doing "live reports" from Graceland on WHBQ Memphis the day when Jerry Lee Lewis was shooting his pistol at the gate? Hilarious. Just as funny as any comment about Lyle Dean, the world's thinnest newsman, sliding under the door. I didn't hear of anyone stopping Real Don Steele or Robert W. Morgan from doing a bit. Or any other guy that was funny.
A lot of talented guys did a lot of great radio under the evil clutches of Drake. Your passion against the format is simply not justified except by your own personal taste. And that's fine. But don't badmouth it just because you don't like it. You don't get to do revisionist history under the guise of truth in this country, at least not yet, without being called on it. Plenty of us out here who worked it and grew up enjoying the sound of CKLW and other Drake stations know what a brilliant concept it was.
Just admit it...you like the jingles, the trappings, the reverb that made WABC and other non-Drake stations what they were. You want chime time and guys talking over jingles. That's okay...there are plenty of ways to make a successful radio station. Frankly, I thought that stuff really detracted from WABC, and I thought their music selection was too tight...a lot tighter than Drake stations were. If you wanted to hear something outside the Top 14, you were pretty much out of luck on WABC during most of their history. Drake stations played 33-35 songs each week. WABC played maybe 18 total.
Just like on the best Drake stations, talent carries the load. When Ingram was on WABC, it was mesmerizing. Conversely, when lesser talents got on the air at 77, it could get a bit yucky and sloppy.
Ok, he had a show open and a show close. The rest of what Ingram did could have been done in the Drake format. Did you ever hear Dale Dorman on WRKO doing his back-and-forth with newsman Bill Rossi on WRKO? Or Rick Dees doing "live reports" from Graceland on WHBQ Memphis the day when Jerry Lee Lewis was shooting his pistol at the gate? Hilarious. Just as funny as any comment about Lyle Dean, the world's thinnest newsman, sliding under the door. I didn't hear of anyone stopping Real Don Steele or Robert W. Morgan from doing a bit. Or any other guy that was funny.
A lot of talented guys did a lot of great radio under the evil clutches of Drake. Your passion against the format is simply not justified except by your own personal taste. And that's fine. But don't badmouth it just because you don't like it. You don't get to do revisionist history under the guise of truth in this country, at least not yet, without being called on it. Plenty of us out here who worked it and grew up enjoying the sound of CKLW and other Drake stations know what a brilliant concept it was.
O
OldiesCat
Guest
Drake
And, I would say many of disagree with EVERYTHING from you, no offense intended. David knows of which he speaks. Statements like "I owned a station and couldn't get the talent I needed so I used Drake" and "Drake...you can pay the jocks next to nothing" tell us a lot about where you're coming from (that wasn't a compliment).
RADIO TRUTH said:
And, I would say many of disagree with EVERYTHING from you, no offense intended. David knows of which he speaks. Statements like "I owned a station and couldn't get the talent I needed so I used Drake" and "Drake...you can pay the jocks next to nothing" tell us a lot about where you're coming from (that wasn't a compliment).
RADIO TRUTH said:
That's pretty funny. I went to LA shortly after KHJ flipped under Jacobs and Drake, and listened for days. The format was simple to listen to, but very complex in execution. Like any programmer of the time who was concerned that the "yakky" jocks could sound so much better, I first tried to diagram the station format to see how it worked. That did not quite work, as you can not diagram talent. I realized that what had been done inclouded an enormous amount of work with amazingly talented jocks who learned how to be immensely more effective by making everything they did direct and energetic and focused.
Bad talent could not work for Jacobs or Tom Rounds or the other Drake PDs. There was a reason, too, why Drake took on only a couple of non-RKO staitons, like Scooter Seagrave's station in Oklahoma: most people, just like you today, don't get how amazingly talented the PD and the jocks had to be to work the format effectively.
And Ingram would have fallen as flat as a day-old mug of Carling's Black Label in Detroit; the Drake team very effectively picked jocks who sounded right for each market.
Actually, the WABC format was quite simple, based on a set of rules matched to the rotational patterns, just like gears in a clock. It was a lot easier to copy. But when many copied the station, they failed to realize the intent of many WABC things, like the "77" sung to the tune of "I've got Manhattan" and other nuances that were pure New York. Just as "Boss Radio" was pure California.
I'll take Morgan, Steele, Dr. Don Rose, and a number of others over Ingram any day.
RADIO TRUTH said:
I gave you a list of stations with good talent, well programmed, from Midland to Jamestown to Palm Springs. And if we get into larger markets, don't tell me the jocks on the Storz stations or McLendon's or Don Burden's (shudder) did not have great talent. KB in Buffalo. WPOP in Hartford. WEAM in DC, WGH in Norfolk, WLEE in Richmond, KIX in Raleigh, Quixie in Atlanta, WSGN in Birmingham, WBSR in Pensacola, WMAK in Nashville, the great Plough staitons like WCAO and WMPS... there were hundreds of stations with a thousand or more good jocks. Not all would come out of Nebraska like Morgan, but they were good and they had fun on the radio.
Chuck Blore's KFWB (And KEWB in the Bay Area, to an extent) was a great station. Great talent. Amazing promotion, great jingles. But it did not stay fresh, and Drake and Jacobs realized that the vulnerability of KFWB and of KRLA lay in the fact that they had been so good for so long. They attacked the strengths that KFWB and KRLA had nurtured too long without changing, and they won by virtue of being both good and new.
But to say Blore programmed badly is like saying the Pope is a closet Baptist.
Biondi sucked on KRLA. He sucked in Myrtle Beach. He belonged in multi-ethnic, diverse Chicago. What a horrible example of what you think is "good" because Biondi was not good for KRLA, for LA or for the 90% of the US that is not within 100 miles of Chicago.
No, they sounded like LA. Just as those you mentioned sounded like New York.
I think I will cut and paste that and send it too RJ in Hawai'i and maybe to TR, the other Poi Boy who joined Drake. I have to laugh...
Uh, 60's, WCOP? Nice signal when the metro was the city, not 4 counties. Plough had some good Top 40's, so they were not slouches.
For the metro at the time, the WCOP, WRKO and Max's station were about the same in coverage.
No, he did not. The morning jocks had about the same frameworks, just as one would expect. In SF, at the time, the KYA and KEWB and KFRC signals ALL covered the metro. The survey area was SF/Oakland. It was not San Jose and Fremont and Marin County. KFRC was just better... as you would expect with TR programming.
Then why were his shares better on KFRC? Why did he never move on after going to SF?
You think someone would write any other kind of book? Huh?
In what specific way is it self-serving? I suspect you have not read it, in fact.
Considering the way you misidentify what talent is, I have no doubt that this was true.
I owned a station or two, and did Top 40 when there was no other Top 40 station for 600 or 700 miles in any direction... so I trained my own. 40 years later, every one of my original Top 40 team is a TV show host, anchor or owner of a production company. You can train talented, motivated people if you can tell what to build on and help the person find their own strengths.
No. You did not. You copied the things you understood from the Drake consulted stations. Drake did not invent a format, he honed one that had existed since 1952, Top 40. You thought you understood that Drake's success was doing liner cards. Actually, that was the opposite of the truth. So you did not "use" the Drake "format." You abused it.
Further proof you did not understand what RJ, TR, Drake and the other PDs were doing.
[/quote] Another advantage of the Drake Format is that you can pay the jocks next to nothing and they are interchangeable parts. [/quote]
That's so absurd I won't even answer. I have got to call TR and read him some of this stuff.
It is hard to know where to start in answering the various responses. Let's talk first about audio processing. I admit it. I like reverb. Many stations, including WABC, had an EMT 140 plate reverb but, these units have to be set right and the spring tension had to be maintained by an engineer. I thought that mid 60s WABC had the best audio processing of any top forty station ever. WABC sounded bigger than life. The Drake stations sounded kind of flat by comparison. The interesting part of this is that another ABC O & O, WLS had very flat dead audio as did WCFL in Chicago around 1967. As far as Dan Ingram and the Drake Format, he had the chance to do it on WCBS-FM. Their oldies format was strictly Drake with Joe McCoy, ex WOR-FM jock programming it. Ingram was never able to do all the things he did at WABC because the Drake Format was too restrictive. Ingram, on WABC,
could talk before and after every commercial, jingle and song and he couldn't do that under the Drake structure of WCBS-FM. While I have focused on WABC, there are other stations that I think were far superior to Drake, such as 1966, 67 WCFL with Ron Brittain, Barney Pip, Joel Sebastian and Jim Runyon. Also mid 60s WQAM with Rick Shaw and Roby Yonge, WIXY, Cleveland, especially when Jack Armstrong worked there, not to mention WMEX, Boston, WKBW, Buffalo and Joey Reynolds and that is a small sampling. I still think the Drake Format was a blessing for some of the new FM top forty stations in the 70s. The owners loved it because they could save money on the jocks and they were interchangeable parts. By the 70s, other than morning men, there were less personality jocks than 10 years earlier. I do have some positive things to say about Drake Radio. I always like Doctor Don Rose and Dale Dorman. After growing up around New York, all Los Angeles radio sounded bland. The thing I liked best was the 1966-67 era of CKLW 20-20 news. I thought it was the best, most dynamic, news delivery in the history of top forty radio. WABC's and WCFL's news were bland by comparison. Someone mentioned the playlist of WABC versus Drake. WABC did have a list of about 15 currents and was not the place to hear new music with the exception of the Beatles, Mac Arthur Park and a few others. The reason for this was because the average WABC listener listened for 5 minutes but, they had a 6,000,000 cume and it made them alot of money and gave them consistent number one ratings. I still think there was an overall national lack of talented jocks which is why the Drake Format was embraced by station owners. I have listened back to alot of tape of various 1960s top forty stations and I don't hear that much talent out there. The memory has a tendency to play tricks but, old tapes don't lie. One last thing, my own station used the Drake format with no liner cards. I understand the Drake Format better than you think. I just
don't like it very much and find it very restrictive.
could talk before and after every commercial, jingle and song and he couldn't do that under the Drake structure of WCBS-FM. While I have focused on WABC, there are other stations that I think were far superior to Drake, such as 1966, 67 WCFL with Ron Brittain, Barney Pip, Joel Sebastian and Jim Runyon. Also mid 60s WQAM with Rick Shaw and Roby Yonge, WIXY, Cleveland, especially when Jack Armstrong worked there, not to mention WMEX, Boston, WKBW, Buffalo and Joey Reynolds and that is a small sampling. I still think the Drake Format was a blessing for some of the new FM top forty stations in the 70s. The owners loved it because they could save money on the jocks and they were interchangeable parts. By the 70s, other than morning men, there were less personality jocks than 10 years earlier. I do have some positive things to say about Drake Radio. I always like Doctor Don Rose and Dale Dorman. After growing up around New York, all Los Angeles radio sounded bland. The thing I liked best was the 1966-67 era of CKLW 20-20 news. I thought it was the best, most dynamic, news delivery in the history of top forty radio. WABC's and WCFL's news were bland by comparison. Someone mentioned the playlist of WABC versus Drake. WABC did have a list of about 15 currents and was not the place to hear new music with the exception of the Beatles, Mac Arthur Park and a few others. The reason for this was because the average WABC listener listened for 5 minutes but, they had a 6,000,000 cume and it made them alot of money and gave them consistent number one ratings. I still think there was an overall national lack of talented jocks which is why the Drake Format was embraced by station owners. I have listened back to alot of tape of various 1960s top forty stations and I don't hear that much talent out there. The memory has a tendency to play tricks but, old tapes don't lie. One last thing, my own station used the Drake format with no liner cards. I understand the Drake Format better than you think. I just
don't like it very much and find it very restrictive.
RADIO TRUTH said:
Where did you get that malarkey? Whew!
Going back to Arbitron and Pulse ratings for NY (Arbitron started in 1965 and Pulse in the 50's) the WABC metro cume was considerably less than 6 million since the entire radio universe of NY then was just under 9 million. And the average listening span was loooooponger than today's hit based formats, and was on the order of 8 to 9 hours a week, not 5 minutes.
But, anyone who thinks that Drake did the things the way he did to save RKO money is off base.
And, as I said, Drake did not invent a format... he invented a way to package a format that was 13 years old when he got to KHJ.
Dan Ingram said that the average amount of daily WABC listening time was 5 minutes per day. He also said that WABC had a 6,000,000 cume audience at their height. WCBS-FM's maximum cume was 1,900,000 at their height.
One other thing, in the mid 60s, the entire New York market, including North Jersey, Long Island, Southern Connecticut and lower New York State was about 15,000,000.
- Status