The Businessmen Of Today's Radio

[DavidKaye]

It seems that the gentleman who goes by Skyrocker has been known to be a live air personality himself...more than just a DJ. It should be pointed out that he doesn't have a conflict of interest in wanting a job in the business. He has had a very successful voice business for decades...stations have actually called HIM wanting him to come to work for them.

Yes, of course it's a conflict of interest. Apparently, this is Bobby Ocean we're talking about here given what people have said. Are you going to tell me that he doesn't want a job as a DJ? Funny, I heard him on KOIT a couple months ago. If someone wants to work in radio in a format that is no longer viable and then they trash the owners and management for some perceived "problems" in the business, that definitely is self-serving.

As for being in demand as a v/o artist, it's funny that people are soliciting Bobby Ocean and yet one of the top two voices in the business, Bo Weaver, says that he has to audition for nearly everything, even with all his past success. I suggest that this is probably closer to the truth -- advertisers and stations want voices that match what they're looking for. They don't want someone who skews too old or too banker-ish or too this, too that, so they ask for auditions. Now, if someone is specifically positioning for an oldies format and wants Bobby Ocean due to his nostalgia value, then yes, I can see where they might seek him out rather than him seeking them out.

Now, none of this should be construed as to my opinion on Bobby Ocean as a DJ. I happen to like him very much as a DJ and felt he was an asset to KOIT (I may have even said so at the time here or on ba.broadcast). But this trashing of station management claiming that they're nothing but bean counters who don't know what they're doing is simply on the wrong track.

Once again, if personality DJ formats worked today, every station would have personality DJs.

 

[mort guffman]

Um. Newcomer to this board...and about to sign off for good.

What a total load of BS. All of it. You people are pathetic. You embarrass us...we who actually still WORK in radio.
Ben Fong Torres, Bobby Ocean, John Mack Flanagan...IRRELEVANT. For years. DECADES!!!

David Kaye?
Henry Ochs?
Never heard of you. You have ZERO credibilty.


And this ENDLESS obsession with KFRC. At best, a slightly better-than-mediocre Top40 station in it's very brief prime time.

BORING.

c ya-
-------Mort

 

[DavidKaye]

Um. Newcomer to this board...and about to sign off for good.

As you wish.

What a total load of BS. All of it. You people are pathetic. You embarrass us...we who actually still WORK in radio.
Ben Fong Torres, Bobby Ocean, John Mack Flanagan...IRRELEVANT. For years. DECADES!!!

Your point is well-taken, and I agree. Old vaudevillians refusing to get new skills for the movie age. Old hot lead typesetters refusing to learn new skills. It happens in every industry.

David Kaye?
Henry Ochs?
Never heard of you. You have ZERO credibilty.

I haven't heard of you, either, so we're even. I stated my background here in another thread a couple weeks back. I don't expect to be known, just as thousands of other radio/TV people who have come before and after me aren't known, either.

And this ENDLESS obsession with KFRC. At best, a slightly better-than-mediocre Top40 station in it's very brief prime time.

There's no denying that KFRC had a heyday when it was a hot, exciting station, relevant to the community. People would go to school or work and quote Dr Don Rose jokes. KFRC had a good 10 years. But...this was 30 years ago.

Not to be nostalgic, but the things I happened to like about the old KFRC, which nobody mentions here:

(1) Dupont Gai, the weekly public affairs show put together by kids from Chinatown about things relevant to them. It was poignant, funny, irreverent and reverent, sometimes all at once.

(2) The Ever-Changing, Transcendental Multilingual, Two-Ton Mustard Seed, produced by the late Allan Pierce. It was a sound collage program put together "in the community's spiritual interest". I would drop what I was doing to listen to the show. (It was actually produced at KFAX, but KFRC was its best-known outlet.)

(3) Father Harry of the God Squad -- little vignettes about how as a teenager to deal with peer pressure, trust, friendships, all sorts of things.

(4) Jo Interrante and Jan Yanihiro of the KFRC public affairs department who were always on top of things important to the community.

(5) The general mood that KFRC was San Francisco in the same way that KSFO was San Francisco to the previous generation and KMEL became San Francisco to the next generation.

 

[DavidKaye]

I meant to write Beau Weaver, not Bo Weaver. See his comments about the voiceover business at http://www.spokenword.com

 

[DeadAudicy]

mort, you're reading this board from the wrong angle. Don't let it mess with you. Members here for the most part are good, honest folks who, in their adult years, still live somewhat in awe of a medium that has lost its allure to most everybody else, and feel the odd need to pontificate ad infinitum about some pointless minutae involving some jamoke who once made a career of elevated yapping.

You do imply with your comment on the irrelevancies of the past, that radio people today have some imagined relevance. Should that implication be your actual view, I'd have to disagree. At least the comments on this board show a passion (albeit beyond some reason) for their heroes. I doubt if any but a small percentage of pop radio listeners today (or ever) care the least about who behind the mic blathers the best or what they're blathering on about.

To quote your namesake movie, "...I think we have to work on the music a little bit more. But I don't want to make trouble. So..."

 

[LKellerIII]

Um. Newcomer to this board...and about to sign off for good.

And this ENDLESS obsession with KFRC. At best, a slightly better-than-mediocre Top40 station in it's very brief prime time.

There's no denying that KFRC had a heyday when it was a hot, exciting station, relevant to the community. People would go to school or work and quote Dr Don Rose jokes. KFRC had a good 10 years. But...this was 30 years ago.

Not to be nostalgic, but the things I happened to like about the old KFRC, which nobody mentions here:

(1) Dupont Gai, the weekly public affairs show put together by kids from Chinatown about things relevant to them. It was poignant, funny, irreverent and reverent, sometimes all at once.

(2) The Ever-Changing, Transcendental Multilingual, Two-Ton Mustard Seed, produced by the late Allan Pierce. It was a sound collage program put together "in the community's spiritual interest". I would drop what I was doing to listen to the show. (It was actually produced at KFAX, but KFRC was its best-known outlet.)

(3) Father Harry of the God Squad -- little vignettes about how as a teenager to deal with peer pressure, trust, friendships, all sorts of things.

(4) Jo Interrante and Jan Yanihiro of the KFRC public affairs department who were always on top of things important to the community.

(5) The general mood that KFRC was San Francisco in the same way that KSFO was San Francisco to the previous generation and KMEL became San Francisco to the next generation.

Pardon a slight correction - KFRC had about 19 good years, and it ended about 23 years ago (assuming you count from the 1966 beginning of the Drake format up to the end of the music with the game show format in 1985...and Magic 61 shortly thereafter.

I don't think anybody here ever claimed the Big 610 was a cultural icon. Obviously, it was tightly formatted commercial mass market entertainment meant to appeal to a broad audience of predominantly young listeners. And by the early 70s, there were a lot of young listeners who preferred the FM album rock stations like KSAN, and thought Top 40 stations were ridiculous. Personally, I liked both formats.

I think when people on this board get nostalgic about stations like KFRC, KYA, KSFO (and others), it was because those stations did more than just regurgitate the same music over and over. Jocks like JMF and Bobby Ocean provided entertainment value, and their talent was their ability to do that quickly - in just a few seconds between songs and going into commercials. And yes -some stations in that era like KFRC provided high quality news and public affairs programs like those mentioned above. For KFRC and KSFO both, it wasn't just to meet FCC requirements, or that programming wouldn't have been so compelling. Station owners considered it their duty to go beyond the requirements.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

I don't think anybody here ever claimed the Big 610 was a cultural icon.

I hereby claim that the Big 610 was a cultural icon.

A cultural icon is what you make it out to be. I tend to look at radio the same way I look at trains and baseball cards. (You might think this is a stretch, but stay with me.)

I have been fascinated by trains since I was a kid. I have no idea why. A train is ... well, it's a train. It's a machine and equipment and steel rails. It's a mode of transportation that moves people and goods from Point A to Point B. I have no idea why I can identify the difference between a GE U30C and an EMD SD45T-2, but I can.

And the funny thing is that thousands upon thousands of "civilians" like me can, too. I collect books, memorabilia and videos about the Western Pacific, a largely non-descript railroad company that just happened to have tracks near where I grew up. Why? I'm guessing nostalgia, but I'm not sure.

The same with baseball cards. I collect San Francisco Giants baseball cards from the 1960s. A 1962 Fleer Jimmy Davenport card or a 1967 Jim Ray Hart (Topps #220) holds special meaning to me. I don't collect Detroit Tigers baseball cards, or Atlanta Braves; with few exceptions, they don't have any value to me, much the same as an aircheck from a Detroit or Atlanta radio station generally holds no value to me.

I don't collect baseball cards as an investment, and I don't collect railroadiana or radio ephemera as anything more than a personal interest. (Although the items collected for the radio museum extend beyond a hobby, and have helped create a second career for me.)

The bottom line: cultural icons are what they are. They can be local or global. They can be Don Sherwood or Howard Stern, KFRC or ESPN. To me, "collecting radio" can be equated to "collecting baseball cards" -- it's something that holds a personal interest, whether it's simply nostalgia or an abiding passion.

 

[DavidKaye]

Pardon a slight correction - KFRC had about 19 good years, and it ended about 23 years ago (assuming you count from the 1966 beginning of the Drake format up to the end of the music with the game show format in 1985...and Magic 61 shortly thereafter.

I count KFRC's good years to be from 1970 to 1980. In the Drake years KFRC was okay for what it was, but there was no personality there. Listen to Bobby Dale from 1966 and it's astonishing how bad he is. I mean, Bobby Dale, one of the greatest DJs ever, and he really sucks at KFRC. The format was too tight.

It really wasn't until the Paul Drew and Michael Spears years (1970 on) that KFRC became the personality station people remember. Listen to an aircheck of Beau Weaver (still my favorite KFRC DJ ever) from 1974 and the contrast to the Drake KFRC is astonishing. Beau gets in all kinds of comments including mocking a KFRC contest. The KFRC of 1974 sounds alive; the KFRC of 1966-68 sounds like automation.

To me, this lasted until 1980, when by then KSFX had long since taken over as the place to listen. And then, of course, KMEL came into its own a couple years later.

I think when people on this board get nostalgic about stations like KFRC, KYA, KSFO (and others), it was because those stations did more than just regurgitate the same music over and over.

KFRC since its 1966 inception always had a wide-ranging playlist that people often don't realize. Listening to old airchecks it's amazing how many songs KFRC played that never went anywhere; in fact there are songs that I don't even remember at all! And not only was it rock and MOR, but some genres I can't even define. (I mean, KFRC even played "The Lord's Prayer" -- what genre was that?)

 

[LKellerIII]

Pardon a slight correction - KFRC had about 19 good years, and it ended about 23 years ago (assuming you count from the 1966 beginning of the Drake format up to the end of the music with the game show format in 1985...and Magic 61 shortly thereafter.

I count KFRC's good years to be from 1970 to 1980. In the Drake years KFRC was okay for what it was, but there was no personality there. Listen to Bobby Dale from 1966 and it's astonishing how bad he is. I mean, Bobby Dale, one of the greatest DJs ever, and he really sucks at KFRC. The format was too tight.

It really wasn't until the Paul Drew and Michael Spears years (1970 on) that KFRC became the personality station people remember. Listen to an aircheck of Beau Weaver (still my favorite KFRC DJ ever) from 1974 and the contrast to the Drake KFRC is astonishing. Beau gets in all kinds of comments including mocking a KFRC contest. The KFRC of 1974 sounds alive; the KFRC of 1966-68 sounds like automation.

To me, this lasted until 1980, when by then KSFX had long since taken over as the place to listen. And then, of course, KMEL came into its own a couple years later.

I think when people on this board get nostalgic about stations like KFRC, KYA, KSFO (and others), it was because those stations did more than just regurgitate the same music over and over.

KFRC since its 1966 inception always had a wide-ranging playlist that people often don't realize. Listening to old airchecks it's amazing how many songs KFRC played that never went anywhere; in fact there are songs that I don't even remember at all! And not only was it rock and MOR, but some genres I can't even define. (I mean, KFRC even played "The Lord's Prayer" -- what genre was that?)

When I was talked about KFRC's "good years," I was including all the years they had high ratings, though toward the end, of course, they were unable to compete with their FM competition, though the format was still viable. From 66 thru 70, the KFRC I heard was what I was able to DX at night from Los Angeles. I mostly remember KO Bayley, who I thought was good. It was the less "bubble-gum" alternative to sister KHJ. But no, it wasn't the more personality based KFRC that came late.

As for the songs that "never went anywhere" - it was called Top 40 (or Top 30, for Drake stations) - and it was a very democratic format that - over the years, often included a lot of pop, country, and whatever else people wanted to hear. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bobby Goldsborough, and Tammy Wynette all had hits on the Top 40. Some songs were stiffs, and only appeared for a few weeks, then dropped off the list. That's how it worked.

 

[djj]

Um. Newcomer to this board...and about to sign off for good.

What a total load of BS....You embarrass us...we who actually still WORK in radio....
-------Mort

Out of curiosity, not knowing your age / broadcast experience / pop culture philosophy,
who or what incited you to get into radio business? Most in the biz have an inspiration...

Cordially curious,
--jay