Ah, but they are fun to wade through!
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Top-40 AMs transition in the 80s.
- Thread starter CentralFL
- Start date
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Sure, when I want to spend time doing that. And (as you know well, David) I do that sometimes.
I just thought that since the OP wanted to make that specific point, I would make it easier for people to get to that page without having to look for it. (And part of that comes from my experience that having to find it on my own invariably gets me sidetracked by something else I find while I am searching, until I eventually forget what it was I was looking for!
)And further digging now indicates that it may have not happened. Kind of like the Uncle Don legend. But they were very popular in Atlanta, and they were all of a sudden off the air, enroute I think, to WABC.
50 Stories: 50 Years in Radio
Urban legend. Did not happen. I read an interview with Brian Wilson, and he said "Another One Bites the Dust" was not played in morning drive. Also, I know their PD, John Young. Ross and Wilson did not leave Z93 on the best of terms, but that story is not true.
KLEO was a great station. In the late 70s, recall hearing that in others' cars when I was a teen before I could drive.
KEYN-FM (and AM!!) was also great to hear.
I know there's one KEYN FM "The rock of Wichita" aircheck online, but that's from the early 70s. The station sounds more Top 40 with medium-type hits like Dione Warwick and Petula Clarke-type songs, but would love to hear airchecks of KEYN (and KLEO) from the late 70s
Both great stations.
Recall hearing KCMO's early talk in 1980, when I was a senior in high school, driving in central Kansas.
On KMBZ, it was a full-service AC with some sports and talk programming, but mostly music outside of a.m.
Recall the last day this great jock was there the week before they added Rush's national show in the late 1980s.
Even recall the last song he played, indicating his goodbye.
A Sinatra song covering Mrs. Robinson, if I recall correctly.
I believe that.
Reading more about KHJ, I noticed, while the station took MANY chances playing "hitbounds" -- songs their PD thought would become big hits -- many weren't.
Also odd, The Beach Boys' Barbara Ann and Wouldn't It Be Nice never charted on KHJ's Top 30 charts.
Now, that doesn't mean the station didn't play the songs (I wasn't around to listen), but, reading a RD forum topic on it, it seems they weren't played), but that they didn't place on their charts.
Instead, KHJ played the flip side, God Only Knows, which was No. 39 on BB but Top 10 KHJ.
Odd because the first went to No. 2 on Billboard and the other No. 8, but was AWOL on the charts.
I hope other LA stations played the great groups' hits.
The thing to keep in mind about KHJ prior to 1973 and especially during Ron Jacobs' tenure as PD (1965-69) was that KHJ was on records early and off them fast.
By the time a record peaked in Billboard, it was often in its last week or off KHJ's chart altogether---sometimes for weeks.
There was also a lot of politics that no one is left alive to tell. If KRLA or KFWB got an exclusive on a record, KHJ would sometimes ignore it for its entire chart run---and KHJ had enough muscle and influence that doing so could depress single sales for that song by 40% or more in L.A.
As for the stiffs that did get played---Jacobs believed in his own ears and was willing to be wrong and "hear the hits first" was a big damn deal in L.A. in those days. Anyone who played the WABC game of waiting for a record to prove itself would have been roadkill. That changed over time and by 1973, that's how Paul Drew played it.
I do like how they took chances and didn't wait inexplicably long to play a charting hit single, something that got rarer in the early 80s.
I recall a story about Brian Wilson in 1967-68 appearing at one of the LA Top 40s, offering to let the station be the first to play The Beach Boys' latest single.
The slow jock said thanks, but no thanks, "it's not on our playlist..."
A call to his PD had the PD almost screaming at him:
"It's BRIAN WILSON, dummo!! Play the song!!"
Don't recall which station that was, but would a jock really refuse to play the latest Beatles song if Paul McCartney or another big well-known singer from another group made a station such an offer?
Okay, so that story is one Terry Melcher told in a 1971 Rolling Stone piece on The Beach Boys:
There are several reasons to doubt this story. First, Terry Melcher is the only one who's ever told it. IF it had happened, the jock would have lived off that story---"the time I got yelled at" are great stories, especially when they involve big names.
At KHJ, jocks didn't preside over the turntables---there was an engineer doing that. And the engineer would have told the story, too.
The guards at the gate were not unused to late night visitors in the KHJ studios. They would have asked who was there to see who, called the studio, and asked if they were expecting Brian Wilson. They'd have been in like that.
Around midnight, the jock would have been either Humble Harve or Johnny Williams, and Melcher knew them both personally, so it wouldn't have been "the disc jockey" or "this asshole" and it would have been a better story, because he'd have schmoozed hell out of them.
I asked both Ron Jacobs and Bill Drake about this when I had the opportunity to correspond with both before their deaths, and both agreed that NEVER happened.
Wanna know what did happen?
Melcher gave it away when he repeated the story over the years, adding a date---July 11, 1967---the date the astrologer said was "right". And that part is true.
But Brian knew how the business worked. He arranged, in advance, for KHJ to have the exclusive, with an embargo on it until that day.
This is the KHJ Boss 30 for the week of July 12, 1967. They were sent to the printers the Friday before (in this case, July 7) so that they'd be in record stores by Thursday morning (the new Boss 30 got counted down every Wednesday night). Look what's at the top of the Hitbounds:
Melcher was full of crap, but figured four years later in Rolling Stone, who'd ever know?
So, let's talk about that for a minute, even though that's not what happened here.
If it HAD been Heroes and Villains, the jock would have been agreeing to play a song that stalled out at #9 on the Boss 30, that lasted all of four weeks on the chart---25-9-9-20 and gone.
The Beach Boys weren't the Beatles, and Paul McCartney, like Brian Wilson, knew enough not to show up in the dead of night in the studio. He could have shown up at Bill Drake's house at Bel Air at 2 in the morning and that might work---but not the scenario Melcher made up.
And what if it was John Lennon instead of Paul McCartney, and the record was You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)?
If you ever wanted to hear Ron Jacobs scream into a phone, that would do it.
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It took a lot less than that to get Jacobs to scream, on the phone or in person. At Radio Express, I just would not answer until he quit yelling, so he stopped using that technique with me. Years later, he told me in a email that I was "about the only person to figure that out".
True. It didn't really take anything to make Ron do that.
He was a jazz fan. Years after he left KHJ, he admitted that he'd be at home listening to KBCA for hours, realized he hadn't checked on KHJ in a while, and instead of changing stations, he'd just pick up the phone, call the hotline and when the jock answered, yell
"TIGHTEN UP, DAMMIT!"
...and slam down the phone and go back to listening to KBCA.
While KRUX and KTAR (though I thought it was ac, not top-40) were good answers to the posed question, KRIZ was not. Going by memory, there was an either 2- or 3-week period where the 1230 frequency was completely silent between the time KRIZ signed off of the air and the time KFLR came on the air. I oughta know--I was living in Phoenix at the time and I kept checking the 1230 frequency daily to see if KRIZ's replacement had come on the air yet.
I always wondered why KHJ didn’t play those Beach Boys songs.
Sometimes it is understandable why a station didn’t play a big hit. Maybe too controversial or too heavy or too easy or too R&B.
Other times it can seem odd. KHJ never charted the Monkees Valleri, although I’m almost certain I’ve heard that song on a Real Don Steele aircheck.
Another one, KHJ only played Sly Stone’s Everybody Is A Star, the B Side of the BB #1 Thank You.
KHJ didn’t like The Ohio Express although they did play sister act 1910 Fruitgum Co. In general, KHJ didn’t play nearly as much bubblegum as Midwest stations. WLS was all over the Ohio Express and the Archies and other similar records. However, KHJ played a lot of Sunshine Pop records, which in many ways is a more lightweight genre than bubblegum.
As I said on another thread, I love that Bill Drake let the RKO stations sound like their market musically. KFRC, KHJ, WRKO, WHBQ and CKLW playlists are very different in the 1960s and that makes that era so interesting
Sometimes it is understandable why a station didn’t play a big hit. Maybe too controversial or too heavy or too easy or too R&B.
Other times it can seem odd. KHJ never charted the Monkees Valleri, although I’m almost certain I’ve heard that song on a Real Don Steele aircheck.
Another one, KHJ only played Sly Stone’s Everybody Is A Star, the B Side of the BB #1 Thank You.
KHJ didn’t like The Ohio Express although they did play sister act 1910 Fruitgum Co. In general, KHJ didn’t play nearly as much bubblegum as Midwest stations. WLS was all over the Ohio Express and the Archies and other similar records. However, KHJ played a lot of Sunshine Pop records, which in many ways is a more lightweight genre than bubblegum.
As I said on another thread, I love that Bill Drake let the RKO stations sound like their market musically. KFRC, KHJ, WRKO, WHBQ and CKLW playlists are very different in the 1960s and that makes that era so interesting
It is odd that some radio stations don't play big hits.
I notice KHJ didn't play Chicago's Color My World, or rather, it didn't chart on the station's list. As it was a flip of Beginnings, they might have played it.
But still seems odd as the station,, from the airchecks I've heard, leaned more toward the AC stuff.
I notice The Dave Clarke Five didn't chart so well on KHJ either.
As I said, if KRLA or KFWB were given an exclusive, Jacobs wouldn't play it unless he absolutely had to. And in those days, there wasn't much forcing KHJ to do anything.
Examples: KHJ played the Kinks' "Lola" for a week, then figured out what it was about. They didn't play Sly & The Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettin' Me Be Mice Elf Agin)", though KFRC did. And within three years, it was in the Gold library at KHJ (now I see you mentioned it further down).
You did. KHJ, along with a lot of other stations, played it when it premiered on the TV show the year before. Colgems didn't release it as a single until a year later, in a re-recorded version, and KHJ had already been there, done that.
Again, gotta remember that KHJ made the hits instead of waiting for them. If you read the KHJ book by Ron Jacobs, you'll see that he was aiming to balance teens with adults---it was key to the success of the station.
Right.
Again, you can't hold KHJ to that standard. It was through with most of its music in the pre-1973 era before they knew where something peaked in Billboard. What mattered was L.A.
KHJ did very few double-sided hits. Beatles, yes. Creedence, yes. It was the exception not the rule.
Here's the Boss 30 from the week "Beginnings" peaked:
Don't judge a station's lean based on airchecks. The lean varies by daypart and season.
The Dave Clark Five weren't that big a deal in Los Angeles. They didn't burn up the charts at KFWB or KRLA, either.
It's not so odd when you realize that back in those days, you didn't have one or two companies dominating a local radio market. What you instead had were many different stations with many different owners whose quirky tastes sometimes assisted in determining whether specific songs were added to the station's playlist, regardless of how well they were doing nationally.
Case in point. KRUX in the Phoenix market, per the ARSA surveys, never played The Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On," though it went to #1 nationally and was played by crosstown rival KRIZ back in November and December of 1966. KRUX didn't have it in for the group--"You Can't Hurry Love," went top 5 at the station in late September of 1966 and the followup, "Love Is Here and Now You're Gone," went top ten on KRUX in March of 1967 (it went to #1 nationally). The only real conclusion I could make is that, for whatever personal reason, the owner (or music director) at KRUX didn't like "You Keep Me Hangin' On," and therefore didn't have the song added to the station's playlist.
There are several other songs and stations that fit into the same category, and that's what some local station owners and music directors did.
Listening to this KHJ aircheck, counting down the big hits of their Boss Radio time, the Boss 93 of 1965, the host mentions how KHJ had a "world premier" of The Beach Boys' California Girls.
Boss 93 KHJ
Great the great station was the first to play the great group's great song, one of their most known hits.
FYI... the song that played before The Beach Boys was Sonny and Cher's Just You, according to the music references below the Youtube video. I didn't recognize it and see it charted nationally @ No. 20, but isn't listed in that link as charting on KHJ.
Boss 93 KHJ
Great the great station was the first to play the great group's great song, one of their most known hits.
FYI... the song that played before The Beach Boys was Sonny and Cher's Just You, according to the music references below the Youtube video. I didn't recognize it and see it charted nationally @ No. 20, but isn't listed in that link as charting on KHJ.
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