Don’t Play The Flip Sides Of Hit Records.
The Saturday night that I sat in a radio station control room for my very first disc jockey shift the number one song was “A Hard Day’s Night”. Others on the playlist included: “Tell Me” by The Stones, “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime” by Dean Martin, “People” by Barbra Streisand. “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters. “Where Did Our Love Go by The Supremes. “Can’t You See That She’s Mine” by the Dave Clark Five, The Four Seasons, “Rag Doll”, “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena”, “No Particular Place To G” by Chuck Berry. “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys. “Wishing and Hoping”, Dusty Springfield. “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. “Nobody I Know” by Peter and Gordon.
The Pick Hit Of The Week on KOTN was the new Beatles single, “If I Fell”.
As was common at many Top 40 stations in the 60’s, the station played both the Number One song of the week and the Pick Hit every hour. On this Saturday night my request lines were buzzing with kids wanting to hear the other side of the new Beatles record. So I proudly introduced and played for the very first time in Pine Bluff, Arkansas: “And I Love Her”. The next afternoon I was sitting in the control room dropping commercials into the baseball game broadcast. Buzz Bennett, my program director came in to talk. He explained to me that what I had done with the Beatles song was okay because he was going to put it into rotation the next day. However, a professional disc jockey only played from the approved list. A lot of thinking went into selecting the songs for the list. The point was to only play the hits because that’s all people really wanted to hear. The Hits. Buzz said we should always be looking for which new songs had the best chance of becoming a Hit. KOTN got about a dozen new singles each week from record companies. Most of them were crap, but there was always some golden record to be found and those were the only ones worth the airtime. First, he said we have to like them ourselves before we play them. He told me he could already tell by the way I mixed the songs and the Oldies I picked that I had a “pretty good ear” but that wasn’t enough. The important thing was if listeners were going to like it. Now, we don’t know that unless we put it on the air where they can hear it, right?. So, we have to pick the ones we’re gonna play very carefully. He pulled out that week’s Gavin Report and the Billboard chart and talked about numbers, the way the record positions changed on the charts from week to week and, importantly, the printed reports from other stations around the nation of their picks and plays of new songs. “Steve, the two most important indicators of hit records are first, Requests and the second is record sales. Having a good ear for picking the one or two best new songs out of a dozen is not enough. You have to find out if listeners are going to like it and you have to find out real quick. And if the listeners aren’t calling for it and they are not asking for it at the record stores after we’ve been playing it a couple of weeks, then we take it out of play.” And we don’t play the B-sides of any records. Guys at record companies spend even more time thinking about this that we do and in 99% of the cases, there’s a good reason the song isn’t on the A-side.” No, that’s not all exactly verbatim, but that was the first lesson I got about being “professional”.
