My romance with radio began early and became a career that’s lasted a lifetime. I was in grade school when Rock ‘n Roll swept the nation. The year the Beatles hit America, 1964, I got my first job as a disc jockey. I was sixteen then. Two years later I was the Program Director of that station. I worked at an even dozen stations over the following two decades. The radio of my age was an itinerant profession. Disc jockey’s didn’t make much more than a living wage in the smaller markets. The goal was to get to the Bigs where a guy could make a salary equal to about 80 thousand a year in today’s money. And there were quite a few who grossed $150 to $200 thousand a year in inflation adjusted dollars. To get there, you had to move up the food chain; tiny market, to bigger market, to even bigger market stations.
Music radio wasn’t something taught in school. It was something you learned by doing, by observing, by listening to the other radio geeks you worked with, sharing ideas. My career took me to Chattanooga, Pensacola, Panama City, Tallahassee, Little Rock, New Haven, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee and few more. I picked up a lot along the way, learning what I could from the successes and failures of others in my cohort, and from my own wins and losses. I kept articles from the trade sheets that were the industry’s trade papers and information sources; Billboard, the Gavin Report, the Friday Morning Quarterback, Cashbox magazine and Radio & Records.
In 1983, I launched myself as programming consultant, advising Pop and Country formatted stations. Now of course “consultant” is viewed as either a dirty word or a joke by most people working in any line of work. That was certainly so in radio. The first one I worked under was a big name in the business. He called me once a week for a ten or fifteen minute conversation about the new songs I was considering for airplay and not much more. He was paid $1000 a month in 1974 dollars, an amazing amount of money for an hour’s work. (note to young self: Become a Consultant.) The thing I liked about him was that he was a personable guy who let me do exactly as I wanted at the station. He didn’t screw with my playlist nor my promotions nor my airstaff. And, it was a benefit to be associated with his name on a professional level at the time. The second, and last, consultant I worked with was rude asshole, pure and simple. He was also the group Program Director of the RKO-owned Top 40 radio stations, a chain that included the four greatest rock’n’roll radio stations that ever was. KHJ/Los Angeles, CKLW/Detroit, KFRC/San Francisco, WRKO/Boston. The stations were already legends of our business, having become so with the genius of two other men; those being Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs. My consultant took over when the founders left the company for other adventures. He was a good program director. The graph paper and numbered songs rotation system he developed was the inspiration for the music rotation algorithm that is today known as my MusicONE scheduling software. I am very grateful for having crossed paths with him for eleven months in the middle 70s.
My earliest memory is of me standing in the seat of my Dad’s Plymouth. 1951 and I’m three years old or so. He’d taken me with him to pick it up at the auto shop. He’d had a radio installed in it. The memory is: I’m standing next to him as he sits behind the wheel, turns on the juice and music came out of the dashboard. That radio made my daddy very happy and that made me happy, too. I have another memory of my mother getting a contest call from a radio station asking what the secret phrase of the day. Mother listened a lot, but this day she hadn’t heard the announcement and she didn’t win the prize. I think my now five-year old brain must have registered: You need to be listening to the radio all the time. I did. Rock n’ roll radio made that a very easy thing to do.
Elvis hit in ‘56, my 10-year old girl cousin went nuts for him. I thought he was OK, but the guys who really got my crank turning were Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Chuck Berry. Where I lived, though, a little town in south Arkansas, the local station played this music from 4:30pm until sign off at sundown. In the winter, that was a little after 5pm and there was no daylight saving time. Late at night, I might be able to find a station from far away on the big radio in the living room, but bedtime for me was 9pm and the TV was already in control of that room. I got into the Boy Scouts when I was 10 and my teen-aged pack leader was a ham operator. Our group met weekly at his house. He had his hobby room behind the garage filled with fantastic gear with dials and bouncing VU meters, a Morse-code clicker and a real microphone. There was a soaring antenna above the building and after our official Scout meeting business was done, he would dial to WNOE in New Orleans. It came in crystal clear and he fed it to a big speaker in the back yard as we played ball or whatever it was we did. I just remember the radio pumping energy and enjoyment into my ears and veins.
My father transferred to Little Rock, the biggest city in the state, where I entered the 7th grade. The state capitol had TWO full-time rock ‘n roll stations. KXLR and I don’t remember the other one. One of the station DJ’s came to some school event. Stan Steele, he was. The girls got silly and giggly and some of them were kept touching his arms and trying to hold his attention. Drove a bug-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite. A white one. He had a job playing records on the radio, girls clearly found that attractive and he got paid so well he could drive a sports car.
In January of 1964 The Beatles came to America. That summer, I walked into the Top 40 station in my town and asked for a job. The program director sat me in front of a microphone, handed me some news copy off the AP teletype and told me to read it over a few times. “When you’re ready, push the red button on the tape recorder. This button stops it. Call me when you finish.” He listened, said I had a pretty good voice for a kid and told me to come down on Saturday night. Mike Miller the evening DJ would show me how to run the control board. I was 16 and about to enter my junior year in high school.
Heavenly luck it was. That young program director was Buzz Bennett, on his way to become one of the greats in this business. The station was owned and managed by Buddy Deane. Google the name, Or, click here.
Six months later, I became the station’s full time night-time DJ and for the last half of my junior year and all of my senior year in high school, every kid in town listened to me, the only rock ‘n roll station in town. It helped that there was only one other choice and my station was way hotter than the other one was. After high school, a man from that station got another job as general manager at a station in another town and hired me as program director. I was eighteen when I took it.
Radio in America in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s was an itinerant career. To move up, to get a better paycheck you had to move from town to town. It was easier to get a $25 a week raise going to work for another station than it was to get your current boss to give you a bump. The best thing about it was getting to work with different people, seeing how they did things, sponging the good ideas, learning the craft.
When I started my consulting business in ’81, the personal notebook I’d been keeping for some ten years began to synthesize itself into this Manual. Each week, I’d write another think piece or a formatting instruction to include in my mailings to my clients. It became my primary teaching tool as I trained and supervised young program directors and announcers.
Within a few years, I’d written so much that my collection filled a 3-ring binder. The writings had been getting positive comments and with the encouragement of some of my readers I put all the short articles, memos and random writings into chapters and began marketing the self-published book. Over the next twenty years, this thing was purchased by just over 4000 individuals and radio stations around the globe. I pulled it off the market a decade ago because it was getting a little dusty, in need of updating. But people keep hearing about it one way or another, every now and then I get an inquiry generated by some random google search. So, here I am working on an update.
You have in your hands a documentation of experience. This is what I learned. It provides a game plan for music radio programming. You can take away what you will, adjust some of the tactics and ideas to your own needs. You won’t find anything else like it. These formatics and philosophies worked well for me and my stations. I hope you can gain some knowledge and profit from my experience and observations.