I thought 'MMS was the gold standard for AOR stations in the late 70s. When the wife & I would visit her family in Cleveland, I would start trying to get the station as soon as we got into the fringe coverage area. I would listen to it even though it would fade in & out and clash with other stations on the same frequency until I got closer to Cleveland. Kid Leo, Denny Sanders & Len Goldberg were my favorites.
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WMMS' '70s and '80s dominance
- Thread starter johnbasalla
- Start date
I know its a little late to the party, but watched Radio Daze on WNEO last night.
Quoted for truth. WMMS #1 on FM and WHK #1 on AM. And Malrite had 'em both right there inside the Statler Office Tower!Cocaine said:
MMS hasn't been a great station since the morningg zoo days with jeff and Flash. Radio has changed so much over the years because of all of the new technoogy and diffeent delivery systems for content. It has made great brands like WMMS a thing of the past. there just aren't many great legendary stations anymore. WMMS was one of the all time greats.
superjj said:
Agree pretty much, but jeff & Flash and Flash were mailing it in with the tired " zoo " gimmick when Howard Stern wiped them off the dial with content. It was Poppa's Got a Brand New Bag.
No audience loyalty for a lame act. Stern set the country on fire. Jefff and Flash were just one of many shows that Stern demolished with no advertising, no TV campaigns, just compelling content.
Capulet said:
And don't forget WMMS management's insistence to Jeff and Flash not to even engage in a rivalry with Stern, and forbade them from discussing him, let alone mentioning his name on-air. Even with the amount of money that WMMS had for advertising and promotions, that was still a stupid move, even while the Zoo was in a clear decline.
Lanigan, however, did go toe-to-toe with Stern. The difference was night and day in comparison to the Zoo.
Nathan Obral said:
Nonsense.....Flash and Frizzbone talking about Stern would have made no difference. They were lazy, tired and old and in the way. In decline as stated above. Blaming management for Flash and Frizzbone's ratings masacare is absurd. That's like saying " the patient died on the operating table because the CEO of the hospital was responsible ". Huh? Who held the knife? Who was in surgery? Ridiculous excuse. Duh? Who was on the air? Milton Maltz?
Another analogy:
Blaming management for Stern killing Jeff and Flash in the ratings is like saying " the president of the team missed the 3 pointer at the buzzer" or " the coach missed the game winning field goal. " Thats carzy.
Jeff and Flash were on the air. They got creamed by an innovative clever cutting edge talent with great content. Why didn't they tell better jokes, create compelling content and revolutionize the industry? They couldn't. They lacked the skill. Stern had it. They didn't. Like you, they blame everyone else. Stern is on satellite now. What's The buzzard morning zoo doing?
Jeff was quoted in the Plain Dealer saying he was happy " when Stern came on because he owned CBS stock" ! Duh? Talk about laying down and quitting.
Lannigan's audience was not Stern's target. They did not want to listen to Stern adolescent male games and play butt bongo-bingo and listen to lesbian lover fantasy talk. The WMMS kids wanted that. Not Lannigans oldsters. Of course you're too young to remember that.
Stern beheaded Lannigan in efigey at his " We're #1 rally ".
Get real.
I don't remember specifics, but there must have been some promotion or something prior to Howard Stern's syndicated arrival because I recall knowing about it in advance and tuning in the very first day just to see what all the hullabaloo was about. So, there must have been some "hullabaloo" coming from somewhere...newspaper articles? TV news spots? And that very first Howard Stern show ... it seemed like it might not have been a live one as it was particularly ribald... produced to get a rise out of people, and when I was listening, it had no dated content ... making me think that they had a generic, or some generic shows that were used to get things started in a new market.
When Jeff & Flash left the air, they were #3, but still in double digits.... numbers that would make a station #1 today. A largely contributing factor to J&F's demise was WMMS' attempt to re-brand itself as "next generation." When, after two other formatic attempts in the 80's, WNCX went classic rock, WMMS was in a positition to dominate that position. With a classic or classic-leaning format J&F would have been relevant and NCX would have had a hard row to hoe with our without Stern.
Capulet said:
The whole station was in clear decline beginning in 1988 and continuing until 1994. Not just Jeff and Flash. A rotation of different program directors, no clear music focus, departures of long-time staffers, and complacency by the entire airstaff ALL led to WMMS' decline and fall. If anything, longtime audience loyalty to those not burned by the CHR-era of the late 1980s, the Rolling Stone debacle, the canning of Matt The Cat, Kid Leo's departure, or the mullet Buzzard kept the station up in the top 5. They likely wrote the station down in diaries out of pure habit. If the PPM system was used, I betcha it would have been a different story - WMMS may not have even been in the top 10 for all we know.
And while Lanigan was on an "oldies" station, by then he was still very much a shock jock, albeit a much tamer one - so unlike most oldies stations around the entire county! Don't forget that WMJI engaged in a nasty fight with Scene Magazine in 1993 because of the front page story on Stern (even canceling their ad account) and publicly forbade the playing of anything by artists that attended the Stern rally (America being the most noted band).
When OmniAmerica assumed WMMS and WHK at the same time, well, that's when the proverbial crap hit the fan. And radio history was made at the Stern rally. We all know the rest of THAT story.
Here's what I remember: When Stern was first picked up in Cleveland by WNCX, there was a tremendous amount of what one would call "guerrilla marketing"....articles in newpapers, lots of TV coverage, you name it. This was Stern's M.O. Be more outrageous than anything ever before, so that when you arrive in a market it is big news. This is as much "marketing strategy" as placing traditional ads, so I disagree that he had no promotion. Quite the contrary!
Now, Jeff and Flash: A couple of things were going on: #1) They were on the same station in the same time period for nearly 20 years and the act was getting tired. #2) WMMS decided to re-tool as an alternative station at that time, and they wanted to blow out the last of the old guard who didn't already leave years earlier in order to have a younger airstaff staff to match the new music emphasis (which WMMS got away from in the late 80s and early 90s, which was a big mistake, since MMS's peak years--around 1977 to around 1986-- were all new-music dominant). It really was NOT ratings. As was pointed out, Jeff and Flash's last book had them stable in top 3 AM drive total audience, a position that WMMS would never get anywhere NEAR in AM drive for MANY years to come with their parade of AM drive failures. In other words, if Liz Wilde or Danny Cheza-whatzis or any of those others came in #3, the station would have called it a triumphant success! No, it was not ratings. It was that J & F were not right for the new alt format. If WNCX were not the home of Stern, J & F probably could have jumped right over to Classic Rock WNCX in AM drive and would have been quite successful. But it was not to be. They did try to restart things on 1100 AM (WWWE in those days), but 1100 had pretty crappy overall ratings back then, they were put on in the afternoon on a station that did not have a rock and roll image, and it was an AM station, which was--and is--a foreign animal to most people under 35. Matter of fact, I remember that even Gary Dee or Danny Wright couldn't do anything with afternoon drive on that turkey station.
Now, Jeff and Flash: A couple of things were going on: #1) They were on the same station in the same time period for nearly 20 years and the act was getting tired. #2) WMMS decided to re-tool as an alternative station at that time, and they wanted to blow out the last of the old guard who didn't already leave years earlier in order to have a younger airstaff staff to match the new music emphasis (which WMMS got away from in the late 80s and early 90s, which was a big mistake, since MMS's peak years--around 1977 to around 1986-- were all new-music dominant). It really was NOT ratings. As was pointed out, Jeff and Flash's last book had them stable in top 3 AM drive total audience, a position that WMMS would never get anywhere NEAR in AM drive for MANY years to come with their parade of AM drive failures. In other words, if Liz Wilde or Danny Cheza-whatzis or any of those others came in #3, the station would have called it a triumphant success! No, it was not ratings. It was that J & F were not right for the new alt format. If WNCX were not the home of Stern, J & F probably could have jumped right over to Classic Rock WNCX in AM drive and would have been quite successful. But it was not to be. They did try to restart things on 1100 AM (WWWE in those days), but 1100 had pretty crappy overall ratings back then, they were put on in the afternoon on a station that did not have a rock and roll image, and it was an AM station, which was--and is--a foreign animal to most people under 35. Matter of fact, I remember that even Gary Dee or Danny Wright couldn't do anything with afternoon drive on that turkey station.
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