I can only tell you this because I was around when it happened. The ‘perfect’ radio station. KHJ Los Angeles. Like all truly great things in pop culture, it was only truly great four about four years, from Spring ’65 until ’69 when program director Ron Jacobs left to start what would ultimately evolve into today’s Westwood One company. Radio geeks should get Jacob’s book to learn just how much effort and work went into creating it and making it sound so effortless in its execution. I didn’t hear an aircheck of KHJ until ’67 and it was like hearing The Beatles for the first time. Like, we all knew there was rock ‘n roll and those guys were rock ‘n roll, but, man, this was a whole ‘nuther world of rock ‘n roll coming at us.
On a Sunday afternoon last year, sitting with the tablet on the porch, I came across a YouTube audio of the morning man, Robert W. Morgan; one un-cut hour from 1967, thirty-months after the launch and at the peak of their wave. I just let it play like real-world listening as I read through the newspaper. About forty minutes in, it hit me. I had not heard a single thing I could criticize. Now understand, I made a nice living for twenty years being paid to critique radio stations. People outside the business would sometimes ask what a programming consultant did, and my joke was, “I get paid to tell disc jockeys to shut up.” Amusing, but not quite true. My service was aimed at improving the DJ’s. Focus your thoughts before you open the mike. Say what you gotta say quickly and get on with it. Remember you’re talking TO people not AT them. Those kinds of things. And I’d suggest ways stations could better identify themselves and how to position the spots breaks, what to say or do going into and out of those spot breaks. Sure, the content of the KHJ hour was fifty years old, but it was everything that makes for great music radio. The music selection and flow. The DJ who really likes what he’s playing, says so and sounds comfortable and amusing. It is very clear the DJ lives and breathes the same air as his listeners. There is News that is interesting and well presented…and on and on.
In short, the station was like the first time coach Knute Rockne’s football team to threw a forward pass. Nobody had ever done that before. It wasn’t against any rules and it was flabbergasting amazing. That was KHJ in the 60’s. I heard this little ditty below one time years and years ago. This morning the YouTube dropped it into my suggestion box. This is a little 104 second “song”, the original KHJ DJ team each rapping a line about his show. The station hit the air with this promo, I don’t know how long Jacob’s had it on the air but he was so manic about the station’s production, I expect he figured six weeks was enough.
