He was at WABC, then left for WMCA and then returned to WABC.
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Drake Vs. Sklar
- Thread starter MasterDJ
- Start date
There are some stories about Buzz and Y-100 that involve another kind of weirdness, eventually requiring "Cece" to bring in Bill Tanner from Pittsburgh to take over that station. I have to say that Tanner put together the greatest team I've ever worked closely with (I was GM of "the Spanish station" at the other side of the building). And Heftel always put programming first under the theory that "if we have good programming, we will have good numbers. And then it sells itself."
I even saw the PD slam the door in the GM's face. Then there was a call from Cecil; the manager went down the hall to apologize for annoying the PD!
(This is off track, but it relates to how some owners put the product first back in the good old days... jeesh, I'm gonna' start singing the "Those Were the Days" song from that TV show from back then!)
In Baltimore's Penn Station, at the entrance to the stairs that went down to the tracks where the Metroliner to New York ran was a WABC ad for the $25,000 Button.
Well, we should say two things about Rick Sklar. First, WABC was an amazing station. As David says above, so many people listened and tried to copy the magic. I was lucky that I grew up in NJ and could see the WABC tower from my family's front window. I loved it!
Did Sklar see FM radio becoming dominant as quickly as it did? No, but I'm not sure others didn't either. Most people thought AM and FM music stations would co-exist. FM would have more adventurous formats and fewer commercials. I'm not sure what Sklar would have done differently if he had realized ALL music formats would move to FM, both mass-appeal AND more sophisticated. WABC was the nation's most popular station for many years. Then it fell off a cliff when FM radios became inexpensive for homes and easy to install in cars.
Second, Super Radio sounded great to me! I have heard that sample tape with Dan Ingram hosting. If I owned an FM station in a medium to small market, I'd subscribe! But affiliate sales were not Sklar's job. He set up a great sounding network, easy for local stations to adapt. ABC signed up affiliates but apparently not enough in large markets. The company's expectations were apparently too high. Maybe with all those talented DJs who expected to be paid well, you couldn't run it with just a lot of small to medium markets. And as said above, it was too early for stations in large markets to hand over their programming to a round-the-clock network, with only your morning show local. That's even if you could have Dan Ingram, Ron Lundy, Jay Thomas and other big names as DJs on your station, owners in large markets didn't want to give away so much control.
SuperRadio was largely a 1965 Top 40 sound in a 1982 CHR world. It might have worked as an oldies station, but even then I suspect it would have had limited, regional appeal to people who had heard and liked WABC, in the same way KRTH worked ten years later as an echo of KHJ.
Now that's interesting! I do remember on occasion Dan Ingram would mention ratings in other cities like Pittsburgh. Certainly, there was a following with that nighttime signal of WABC. And that daytime signal had a far reach too!
And speaking of that signal which was an obvious plus for Rick Sklar, I never thought of AM in terms of nighttime interference or reduction in nighttime power etc.
It's when I eventually moved to S. Florida (Ft. Lauderdale area) and experienced dreadful AM reception for many Miami based stations at night. Too much time has passed now for me to remember exactly what station this why - it may have been the old news/talk 790 AM. There was this sound of a clock in the background. To this day, I have no idea what that was all about.
But WABC had one helluva signal!
Not exactly. There were FM stations in large markets that were already programming 24/7 formats from TM, Schulke, Bonneville, and even Bill Drake! Most of them were beautiful music. They did it by bicycling reel to reel tapes around the country. WPAT and WTFM were two examples in NYC.
WRFM had Bonneville. I think WPAT created their own music sets.
Sure, but all the announcers were your employees. With beautiful music, you ran the tapes but your DJs were the voices, you decided if the breaks included news briefs or weather forecasts, you chose whether to announce each song or not, even whether you'd totally automate or do live-assist during the daytime hours. WRFM and WPAT did live-assist 24/7.
And with Bill Drake and Mike Joseph, you followed their guidelines, right down to the jingles and commercial minutes. But again, you employed the DJs. They sat in your studios, they voiced your spots, they went out on your remotes, they participated in your promotions.
By contrast, with SuperRadio, you only had one DJ in morning drive, five days a week. The rest of the schedule, it was Ingram, Lundy, Thomas, Barsky, etc. You turned over your entire station to them, except for 20 hours a week. They even did promotions from their studios in New York that you would have to execute in St. Louis or Fresno.
Yes, the stations did use their own announcers. But I know from a former Schulke station announcer that Schulke had very strict guidelines, and stations could not arbitrarily decide whether to announce each song. In fact, this announcer told me that Schulke was the only format in history with built-in dead air. The announcers were told that after a music segment ended, they were to count to 3 before talking.
I read in John Rook's bio that after Cecil Heftel fired Buzz and hired him as the consultant, someone recommended Bill Tanner to him. Rook said that when he spoke to Tanner, he quickly understood what Rook was trying to do and was hired.
WRFM was owned by Bonneville, and they used the Bonneville national music but with local talent. Marlin Taylor programmed the format at Bonneville Media Services in Tenafly NJ. WPAT used a national service. I think it was Schulke, but it could have been TM.
It depended on the station. WRFM used local announcers. Other stations used the national voice, similar to Jack today. The national voice recorded all the local breaks, generic weather, and time checks. It was very sophisticated, with reels and carts.
The point is that lots of radio stations had turned over their programming to national services by the early 1980s. However, the ABC-owned FM stations did not. They had successful formats that had been operating for more than 10 years by the time this began. ABC Network couldn't convince their owned & operated FM stations to carry the network.
The other problem was another company: Satellite Music Networks, had created 24/7 formats delivered by satellite, exactly what ABC had wanted to do. Ultimately, in 1989, ABC bought SMN. Transtar began the same year as SMN, and was doing the same thing. All of the new competition was too much for ABC.
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Plus apparently the interface wasn't as user-friendly. The big heritage networks were being outplayed by smaller syndicators. One of them was Drake-Chenault. They were also in the 24-7 format business.
What is your source on this? WPAT was in the Beautiful Music format since the late 1950's, way before the Schulke's, Bonneville's and TM's were around. I lived in New York throughout the 80's. Schulke stations had a distinctive sound, and WPAT's music did not have that sound. They possibly could have switched to a national syndicator at some point.
I'm starting to think you're right. From what I'm seeing, they wanted a distinctive music mix, and doing their own thing was the only way to do it. They also wanted to shift timing between the AM & FM to comply with the non-duplication rule. WVNJ used a service in Chicago. Perhaps FM-100. The closest affiliate I can find for Schulke is Philadelphia.
But those taped syndicated formats you mention were not "live" formats delivered by premium telco lines. The ABC / Sklar format was going to be delivered the same way as the NBC all news format. TM and SRP (Shulke) and the rest sent tapes that were run on local automation with zero national "synchronization".
The Sklar / ABC format meant fixed length stopsets, even if you were not all sold out. Fill with Red Cross PSAs, etc. That was very unappealing to many local stations. It also was going to take a percentage of hourly availabilities, just like traditional network news and, back in the day, soaps and drama shows. Local stations did not like that, either.
The model for Sklar's networked Top 40 dates back to the 1930's: a wired live network delivered by phone lines.
Note: most of the syndicators did not bicycle tapes between stations. You used a tape in their determined rotation pattern until an updated version arrived. Everyone in that format got the same updated tape. You returned the old tape and it was either re-used or destroyed, depending on the condition of the reel and the "wear" on the tape itself.
Which may be another reason for why it failed. As I mentioned, Satellite Music Networks and Transtar had already moved the taped music formats to satellite in 1981, three years before Sklar.
Yes, WPAT never used a syndicator, just like Jerry Lee's station in Philly did not... or all of Art Kellar's "EZ Communications" stations.
When we took over WPAT AM in the later 1990's, we got the site and the building and all the old automation and music library from the Beautiful Music days. Thousands and thousands of albums, and many of the tape they made locally, too.
The sales literature indicated "direct delivery". While they may have been considering satellite, it was initially thought out as a wired network in the traditional ABC system and, most important, their mentality.
Since it never launched, we won't know if by the time they might have launched they would have transitioned to satellite.
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