The Ron Jacobs Collection

[Description by Ron Jacobs]

KHJ/Los Angeles General Manager Ken Devaney narrates this demonstration tape designed for sales use in 1965, when “Boss Radio” was a new and yet-to-be-proven phenomenon.

In addition to “the company song”, Devaney introduces airchecks from each of the original Boss Jocks: Johnny Williams, Robert W. Morgan, Roger Christian, Gary Mack, The Real Don Steele, Dave Diamond and Sam Riddle. Also featured: newsman Bill Barnard.

Ken Devaney was the best GM with whom I was ever privileged to associate: He worked his way through law school as an announcer at KMJ/Fresno in the late 1950’s. Prior to joining RKO General at KHJ AM he was a VP at Crowell-Collier, at which time that company owned KFWB/Los Angeles, KEWB/San Francisco and KDWB/Minneapolis, all hot stations that were programmed by the legendary Chuck Blore.

Ken and I first met in Fresno in 1962 when I was VP for Colgreene, which owned KMAK. We hit it off. Somehow I think we both sensed that we would be seeing each other again. With his law background and experience at one of the USA’s leading broadcast companies, Ken was the best with whom to collaborate. Regardless of what wild thing we were up to, Ken always got it. He opened a law practice in Fresno, CA. in the ’70’s.

I wrote the copy for the sales promo piece as well as the “song” lyrics, promos and liners on the simulated air checks. Hearing this material opens synapses that have been closed for more than three decades. Listening as I write this, I feel “chicken skin,” which is Hawaiian pidgin for “goose pimples.” In a wonderful way, because it is so structured, this could be the “purest” text book example of what the very original Boss format and Boss Jocks sounded like on KHJ. It is, for sure, the cleanest presentation of the format before it was altered in any way.

Here’s a clue to how early this piece is: The anonymous “host of KHJ Closeup” is Donn Tyler, original KHJ swing man, who briefly preceded Frank Terry in the Boss Jock lineup. (And the answer, therefore, to a great trivia question. Tyler left KHJ after a few weeks and returned to Hawaii, where he opened and successfully ran Commercial Recording for nearly 35 years.)

In the excerpt where he talked about surfing, Tyler knew his stuff. He and I had been friends since junior high; Tyler worked at KPOI/Honolulu when I was PD there and accompanied me to San Bernardino when we launched KMEN. Shortly after, Frank Terry and I roomed and worked together at KMAK/Fresno, where we competed long and hard against Bill Drake, who programmed KYNO during that fierce competition. Does this sound like there was a bit of nepotism going on during the hiring of the original KHJ group? Damn right there was. Both Drake and I realized that this was our shot at the Big Leagues and didn’t want to take any more chances than necessary.

Other examples: Robert W. Morgan was on KMAK’s side during the “Battle of Fresno.” Gary Mack was with the KYNO troops (and made key contributions to Drake’s concept of the format.) The Real Don Steele was recommended to Drake by Morgan, who worked with Steele at KEWB/San Francisco prior to KHJ. (Morgan’s first wife, Carol, told me Morgan loved the Bay Area so much — and was so uncertain about “the new L. A. gig” — that several times driving south towards KHJ he almost turned around his battered VW Beetle and drove back to San Francisco.)

I thought you’d find these facts interesting. It’s quite a trip to once again hear the sounds that engineer Bill Mouzis assembled back in what was laughingly called “the KHJ production room.” Production was voiced by the announcer while seated in a converted KHJ-TV announce booth. Visitors to the “trend setting, cutting edge” Boss Radio facility were always shocked to see how hopelessly funky the 1950’s setup was.

In reality, Bill Mouzis did all recording and mixing in the hallway that connected the KHJ radio news department with KHJ-TV engineering. It was there that everything Boss was produced: From months of tracking and assembling the 48 hours of “The History of Rock and Roll” to the auditions of dozens of actresses who paraded through, screaming into an old RCA 44 mike: “Tina Delgado is alive, alive!”

Recently a young friend of mine wrote:

“Email greetings from the site of some of your greatest glories. Yes it’s 5515 Melrose, the old KHJ, now KCAL-TV building. I have a freelance gig doing on-air promos and such. I keep expecting to bump into the ghosts of the BOSS JOCKS or some still good looking groupies.”
Aloha,

Ron Jacobs Kaneohe, Hawaii
August 2001

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
1967 is the CRUISIN’ year when “Haight-Ashbury” and “hippie” became household words, when the Human Be-In was followed by Monterey Pop … But first, a word from our guide, Dr. Donald D. Rose of WQXI in Atlanta, known to its listeners as “Quixie in Dixie,” a station that personified East Coast Top 40 AM radio and probably used more echo than any other during that period.

Rose was the early morning jock (6 to 9 a.m.) and believed the best way to get things cracking was to load up the airwaves with groaning puns and corny jokes, punctuated by the sound of a mewling cow named “Lulubelle.”

If you asked him where he got the “Dr.” in his name, he’d answer: “I studied medicine in Cairo … I’m a chiropractor. I could probably be a pretty good bone doctor … people say I have the head for it. But I’ve always specialized in psychoceramics … crackpots!”

Mooooooo.

“My voice reassures everybody that everything is okay and that we made it through the night,” the Doctor explained. “My motto is: Smile even though it kills you, and you’ll die with a silly grin on your face.”

Of course it wasn’t all smiles in 1967, for this was the year fire killed three astronauts on the Cape Kennedy launch pad, the year of the six-day Israeli-Arab war, the year 66 were killed and 3,500 injured in racial rioting in Newark and Detroit. Still, it was also when Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first black Supreme Court justice, Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant, and 35,000 Vietnam protestors marched on Washington in a gallant attempt to levitate the Pentagon.

Down in Pop Cultch Gulch, meanwhile, “Bonnie & Clyde,” “Blow-Up,” “Don’t Look Back” and “The Graduate” were among the favorite “youth” films released, and the year’s top three albums also were linked to Hollywood too: “Dr. Zhivago,” “Sound of Music” and “A Man and a Woman.”

North, in San Francisco, everything was incense and music and dope, paisley, flower-power, lightshows and, for a short while, banana peels. This was the Summer of Love. LSD Not LBJ, and Take a Hippie to Lunch. And Rolling Stone (the magazine) was born.

In the music world, Aretha Franklin recorded Respect, A Natural Woman and I Never Loved a Man … Jimi Hendrix released his first album, “Are You Experienced?” … Jim Morrison sang Light My Fire … Jefferson Airplane cut “Surrealistic Pillow” … Janis Joplin and Otis Redding were “discovered” at Monterey … the Beatles blew all minds with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” … and don’t forget Bobby Gentry’s saccharine Ode to Billie Joe. Was it any wonder that record sales passed the $1 billion mark for the first time?

Radio was changing, too, with the birth of the “underground” FM sound, also in San Francisco. But, oh, the abundance of one-hit acts, groups that failed to make it into the Seventies and usually played for the youngest listener. For instance, whatever happened to the Happenings, the Casinos, the Soul Survivors, Don and the Goodtimes, Every Mother’s Son, the American Breed, the Blades of Grass, the Lemon Pipers, the Love Generation, the Candymen, and the Fifth Estate — all of whom made debuts on the ’67 charts, and departed shortly afterward? In CRUISIN’ 1967, Dr. Don Rose’s show presents several of the whatever-happened-to’s, showing clearly the year’s teeny-weeny appeal.

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO. The original CRUISIN’ 1967 LP was released in September, 1973.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
The CRUISIN’ series goes to KJR, “serving the Pacific Northwest from Seattle,” and Pat O’Day, the disc jockey filling the afternoon driving hours of 1966 with an always cheerful shout.

It would be a little more than a year before an underground FM radio sound would begin to provide counterpoint to AM’s Top 40 formula. In 1966, pop radio was, in the most literal sense, programmed; the playlist was rigidly limited to hits past and present, and the rap was equally sparse. As a result, many radio jockeys seemed as interchangeable as the bass lines of the records they played. KJR was as Top 40 as they came in those days, but Pat O’Day kept his personality intact, lacing his record introductions and public service announcements with corny jokes and puns, cryptic references to specific Seattle neighborhoods (puzzling unless you were living there) and sendups of fellow KJR staffers.

O’Day was 31 and had ten years in radio when he first played the records in this collection. His father had had a daily religious program on a Tacoma station when Pat was growing up, and he says it never occurred to him to try any other medium. Pat served his apprenticeship in smaller Northwestern cities, starting in Oregon the year Elvis hit, 1956, moving to Seattle and KJR three years later. He’s still there today, as station manager.

In 1966, the album market was still “middle-aged.” Of the ten best-sellers of the year, only two were rock and roll. (Best of Herman’s Hermits, Best of the Animals.) The other eight were Herb Alpert (who had five!), soundtracks (Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago) and Bill Cosby, all of which had almost nothing to do with the top-selling singles charts, from which KJR and the rest of the Top 40 stations in America took their collective musical cue. Here the blend was a more variant one, as shown just by the acts that had their first big hits this year —the Mamas and Papas, the Mindbenders, the Association, the Monkees, Simon and Garfunkle, Percy Sledge, and Tommy James and the Shondells, to name a few. This was also the year that Frank Sinatra sang Strangers in the Night and the Lovin’ Spoonful recorded both Daydream and Summer in the City, while the top of the charts position went to, among others, the Beatles (We Can Work it Out, Paperback Writer), the Beach Boys (Good Vibrations), the Supremes (You Can’t Hurry Love, You Keep Me Hanging On), the Rolling Stones (Paint it Black) and — of course — the Troggs (Wild Thing),? and the Mysterians (96 Tears) and S/Sgt. Barry Sadler, the deep-throated patriot who for five long weeks slogged through The Ballad of the Green Berets.

No less imposing was the wide range of news stories in 1966 when first the Soviet and then the U.S. made unmanned landings on the moon, Medicare went into effect for the over 65s, Lenny Bruce died of an overdose of society, Massachusetts elected the nation’s first black Senator, and brutal, random violence claimed grim headlines as eight nurses were slain in Chicago and a youthful sniper at the University of Texas picked off 44 persons, killing 14.

Many of the headlines topped lighter stories, as when the Capital of England became “Swinging London” and Batman captured the largest television audiences in America; when “The Story of 0” became a controversial best-seller and after school the streets were a sea of granny dresses and Byrd glasses, pea jackets and bellbottoms. In Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor won her second Oscar (for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf7”) and Ronald Reagan gave up his role as host of “Death Valley Days” to run for governor. Don Adams of “Get Smart” put it nicely: “Sorry about that, Chief.”

— Jerry Hopkins

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Pete Johnson
The kind of radio known as Top 40 (though its practitioners might vary from Terrific 20 to Boss 30 to Fantastic 50) never got much better than it was in 1965, the year this volume of the CRUISIN’ series alights at Los Angeles radio station KHJ amid Robert W. Morgan’s morning show.

KHJ was a miraculous overnight success in the competitive Los Angeles radio market, an area which for nearly a decade had been dominated by KFWB, its Fab 40 and a roster of disc jockeys whose names were as familiar as the offramps of the Hollywood Freeway.

KHJ’s “Boss Radio” was introduced to Los Angeles at 3 p.m. May 5, 1965, at 930 kilohertz on the AM dial — a mere 50 kilohertz sneeze away from KFWB/Channel 98. Within five months, 93/KHJ had surged past the rock competition — KFWB, KRLA and KBLA — to inaugurate a rule over Southern California Top 40 radio which has extended well into the 1970s. So profound was KFWB’s ignominy that it changed to all-news a short time later, retiring from the musical fray.

KHJ was the flagship station of a chain programmed by Bill Drake (whose voice opens this record with the announcement, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Robert W. Morgan!”), a man whose sense of pop music radio was so acute that he became the most influential person in Top 40 radio — and hence in the making of American hit singles — in the latter half of the Sixties. During this period he programed or consulted stations which dominated Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Memphis, Fresno and San Diego.

KHJ was strong, shiny, clean, bright and tight. Its structure was so precise that the disc jockey became just another element in its flawless mix, a resonant, friendly, professional voice blending between music, commercials, contests (“The Big Kahuna is coming!” “Here’s another clue in the Batphone Secret Number contest!”), 20/20 News, public service announcements and station identifications and promotions. He became just another element, that is, unless he were someone on the order of the The Real Don Steele (“Tina DelGado is alive!!!” a lady would shriek mysteriously, prompting a shower of exclamation-pointed, high-velocity, loosely-rhymed Picture of Robert W. Morgan
ejaculations from The Real) or Robert W. Morgan, CRUISIN’s host for 1965.

Morgan (and Steele, and Sam Riddle, and a few others) was able to assert his identity through the fractions of minutes the Bill Drake format allowed disc jockeys. His confidence drove him to take chances few others would dare within those small crevices of time and his wit enabled him to make them good. Robert W. Morgan was among the first to take telephone calls over the rapids of Top 40 radio, bringing the idea of the vastly popular radio talk shows into a new area. His quick intelligence is coupled with a near-perfect radio voice: rich and deep and clear, with the uncolored enunciation which is the inheritance of those raised in Ohio.

Born in Mansfield, Ohio, Morgan grew up in nearby Galion, a small town. He attended the College of Wooster, 45 miles east of Galion, but his studies succumbed to his interest in WWST-AM/FM, which served Wooster’s 15,000 population and the surrounding agricultural area.

After a spell of reading Farm Reports over WWST, Morgan moved to Los Angeles, determined to make it in the Big City. The Big City wasn’t listening to Robert W., though, so he headed north to Oxnard, Cal. (pop. 40,000), where he landed at KACY. The Army intervened for three years, during which he managed to do two shows a day at KMBY at Monterey (pop. 22,000) by sneaking off-base from Fort Ord, using the name Mark Caroll on the air. Next came KMAK in Fresno (130,000). He moved to KROY in Sacramento (190,000) in 1963, working there as Program Director and as Morning Man. This stint was followed by eight months at KEWB in San Francisco. In each market, Morgan earned top audience ratings. Then came KHJ in Los Angeles (pop. 2.4 million).

By the time he returned to “Boss Angeles,” Robert W. Morgan was a polished pro, ready to joust for ratings with the formidable phalanx of Morning Men already arrayed on the city’s asphalted turf. He Morganized his competition within a year and maintained powerful ratings over the length of his 8-year association with KHJ. His mastery of the morning was officially proclaimed in 1973 when Morgan was named Top 40 Air Personality of the Year by Billboard, the music trade publication.

The biggest crop of 1965 was probably hair, as American youth fully succumbed to Anglomania, much to the grief of those barbers who weren’t quick enough to set themselves up as hair stylists. In January of the year, President Lyndon Johnson, not yet a Credibility Gap victim, outlined plans for the Great Society, a vision which was to fade in the glare of a domestically-divisive war in Vietnam. Medicare was signed into law on July 30. Winston Churchill, Malcolm X, Adlai Stevenson, Albert Schweitzer, Nat King Cole and Stan Laurel all died in 1965.

— Pete Johnson

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
The Johnny Holliday in CRUISIN’ 1964 was the “original” Johnny Holliday — lots of disc jockeys were “assigned” that name in later years — and in this, the year the Beatles invaded the U.S., he was No. 1 in the ratings from 3 to 7 p.m. on WHK, Cleveland.Holliday, if possible, went even faster than B. Mitchell Reed (CRUISIN’ 1963), probably thanks to his experience announcing sports in Cleveland, and every word was perfectly enunciated, thanks, perhaps, to his two seasons of Cleveland summer stock. Plus: he savored the rhymed cliche unlike any other (“let’s click the turnstiles in our wax files,” “headed for the tippety-top of the ol’ pop crop”) and went absolutely bananas over alliteration (he broadcast not from a studio, but a “platter pad,” conducting a “platter patrol”). In the vales of verbal virtuosity, Johnny Holliday was the Master Mouth, a Tour de Force de Tongue.

Holliday, who had been with WHK since 1959, wasn’t just known for his delivery speed and sleight. Over the years he’d won dozens of public service awards and while with WHK organized station basketball and softball teams which raised over $100,000 for local charities.Picture of Johnny Holliday

For much of America, 1964 moved almost as rapidly as Holliday’s mouth, for this is when Top 40 radio stations began clocking the time in “Beatie minutes before (or after) the Beatie hour” and reported the temperature in “Beatle degrees.” For a while there, the four “mop-tops” had five of the top 10 places in the singles chart, three of the top five albums. And when the “fab four from Liverpool” appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” an astonishing 73 million people were watching — nearly 45 per cent of the entire U.S. population! Beatlemania had struck.

Of course the Beatles didn’t control the record charts, they merely seemed to. Roy Orbison was back with Oh Pretty Woman; Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells and the Supremes were there for Motown; the Four Seasons sang Dawn and Rag Doll; Barbra Streisand recorded People; the Drifters cut the classic Under the Boardwalk; the Beach Boys continued their ’60s chart run with I Get Around; Ray Charles released Busted; Nino Tempo and his sister April Stevens won the “best song” Grammy with Deep Purple, and all were joined by the Swingle Singers, Tony Bennett, Al Hirt, Andy Williams and the Singing Nun.

As is often the case, TV Guide probably told more about America than any other text, for here were listed “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Munsters,” “Bewitched,” and “Peyton Place.” And between those wonderful shows came charging the White Knight and the White Tornado and, singing and grinning insipidly, the wonderful Doublemint Twins. Only “Shindig” and “That Was the Week That Was” seemed related in any way to youthful reality.

And reality was grim, as three civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney — were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi … the Warren Commission Report made the claim that Oswald did it alone … Lyndon Johnson stormed into the White House over Barry Goldwater … and the U.S. began bombing North Vietnam — four of several incidents that put young America on the march again.

Such matters were seldom mentioned on Top 40 radio, certainly not on Johnny Holliday’s “wonderful funderful platter patrol.” Here everything was designed for your driving and dancing pleasure. One of the most unusual songs on CRUISIN’ 1964 isn’t a “song” at all, but a commercial for Rambler, an automobile whose ad agency acquired the rights to a 1958 hit by the Playmates called Beep Beep (CRUISIN’ 1961) and wrote new lyrics. Of course the “song” was still about the mighty little Nash.

— Jerry Hopkins

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO. The original CRUISIN’ 1964 LP was released in September, 1973. Johnny Holliday is also a REELRADIO contributor.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
WHEN B. Mitchell Reed returned to his native New York in early 1963 to take over the seven-to-eleven evening shift as one of WMCA’s “Good Guys,” he was known as — coming from Hollywood radio — “The Fastest Tongue in the West.” Fifteen seconds into this CRUISIN’ volume and it will be abundantly clear why. In many ways, Reed epitomized the early ’60s radio sound, where sound effects, noisemakers, commercials and songs rattled like machine guns on the firing line. Reed’s jivey 10O-mile-an-hour rap was unequalled, and perfectly tailored for the time and medium.

BMR, as he is known today — Mitch to his friends – might have seemed an unlikely candidate for Top 40 radio because he had a masters degree in political science and early in his career, as WOR’s successor to the original “Symphony Sid,” had been strongly identified with a different sound, hosting the all-night “Birdland Jazz Show.” Picture of B. Mitchell Reed
B. Mitchell ReedBut regardless of what records he played, Reed was colorful. Nick-names — an often self-conscious display of ego indigenous to pop radio — began piling up like aliases in a Damon Runyan anthology: “The Boy on the Couch,” “The Mad Monk in the Monastery,” “The Fastest Tongue …” and when he grabbed the No. 1 spot in New York at WMCA, leaving Murray the K and Cousin Brucie tap-dancing for second, “Your Leader, the Nuttiest on the New York Turf.”

Reed’s first year as a “Good Guy,” 1963, was a pivotal year for popular music. Half a dozen musical trends continued as Jan & Dean recorded Surf City, Chubby Checker abandoned the twist for Limbo Rock, Edye Gorme told everyone to Blame It On The Bossa Nova and Trini Lopez popularized an old Lee Hays-Pete Seeger tune, If I Had a Hammer. More significant, this was the year Motown made its first real impact, with Little Stevie Wonder’s Fingertips, Heat Wave by Martha & the Vandellas, the Miracles’ You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me and the first hits of Mary Wells. Then Peter, Paul & Mary established a young singer-songwriter named Dylan with Blowin’ in the Wind and Don’t Think Twice. And in the last months of the year, the Beatles appeared. The new styles, the new sounds, were set.

The national scene was in greater, more shocking flux. School prayer was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Over 200,000 civil rights demonstrators gathered in Washington to hear Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream …” A nuclear test-ban treaty barring all tests except those conducted underground was signed with Britain and the Soviet Union. The U.S. Surgeon-General linked smoking and cancer. And President Kennedy was shot.

By year’s end, so numbing was the assassination, nearly all of 1963’s diversions seemed forgotten. Gone from recent memory were the year’s three top award-winning films, “Lillies of the Field,” “Hud” and “Tom Jones.” Gone were Koufax and Drysdale and Podres, the Dodgers’ triple threat. Gone were all those elephant jokes. The show presented on this volume of the CRUISIN’ series is from a period six months earlier.

— Jerry Hopkins

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
Now CRUISIN’ goes to ’62
Lay some groovies over you
Recreate the good ol’ days
Twistin’ in the summer haze
Screamin’ rhythm, diggin’ you
It’s early Sixties radio-ooooo

That’s the way Russ “The Weird Beard” Knight might introduce this volume of the CRUISIN’ series. In 1962 Russ was a beefy college grad with a Masters degree who found himself holding down the seven – to – midnight show on KLIF in Dallas. By 1962 all the radio production gimmickry that had been developing reached some sort of zenith in kitsch artistry. And Russ Knight, graduate journalism degree and all, was perfectly suited to the medium (and message). His voice rose and fell with facility, moving up and down the scale like an express elevator. He had a nickname (and a weird beard to match it) and a fan club and he called himself the “savior of Dallas radio.” Damned near everything he said rhymed. Horns honked and everything echoed echoed echoed. It was high powered radio cacophony at its best.

Picture of Russ Knight
Russ KnightEven the jingles and commercials had extra pzazz – thanks in large part to an outfit called PAMS (Production, Advertising and Merchandising Service) in Dallas. PAMS was begun in 1951 and by 1962 had produced thousands of musical pitches and promotional spots, influencing pop radio nationally. Many of these spots are on the CRUISIN’ series.

Prior to 1962, rock and roll, and pop radio, had gone through some harsh years. Since 1959 most of the music had been rather bland. There hadn’t been much happening and in ’62 there seemed to be a searching for the next “thing.” So this was a year the television networks recognized the folkies and made “Hootenanny” one of several regularly scheduled folk music shows. Others had their eyes on California’s coastline, where the Beach Boys went on a Surfin’ Safari, starting a second “trend.” Still more thought the wave of the future was coming from Brazil in the bossa nova beat, while the dance madness (essentially the twist) hung on like a dog to a meaty bone. Nor had the blandness disappeared totally; there are several superb examples of gingerbread left over from the early Dick Clark era in this volume of CRUISIN’.

1962 was many things musically – somewhat exciting (certainly not so boring as ’59, ’60 and ’61), extremely commercial (surfboards, twist clubs, TWO “Hootenanny” magazines), and somehow encouraging, no matter how apparently directionless. It was, if nothing else, a peculiarly “pop” year – a year when pop culture and all its inherent fallout occupied everyone’s thoughts.

It was when Herman Taller’s “Calories Don’t Count” topped the year’s best-selling book list, (although more copies of the “JFK Coloring Book” were sold.) John Glenn circled the earth three times. The New York Daily News sellt a reporter to Harvard University to check reports one of its professors, Timothy Leary, was feeding his students unusual drugs. “Lawrence of Arabia” took the best picture Oscar. And the Yankees took the pennant again.

More seriously, President Kennedy faced down the steel industry when it tried to boost prices and later in the year faced Khrushchev down, telling him to take his missiles out of Cuba, or else. Congress investigated The Fabulous Frauds of Billie Sol Estes. The Soviets orbited two cosmonauts in two space ships, simultaneously. Francis Gary Powers was returned to the U.S. in history’s best-publicized spy-swap. Arthur Goldberg and Brian (Whizzer) White were named to the Supreme Court. And 1,113 Cuban invasion prisoners were ransomed with $53 million in medicine and baby food.

— Jerry Hopkins

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Pete Johnson
The year is 1961 and CRUISIN’ presents radio, just as it was then. Like the other volumes of the CRUISIN’ series, this record consists of hit songs, radio commercials, jingles, disc jockey chatter and other audio memorabilia from the year. Our host for ’61 is Boston’s own Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg, the city’s number-one disc jockey from 1956 to 1967. Arnie’s WMEX show was called Night Train and, through a curious chain of associations with the sound of trains going “Woo Woo” in the night, Mr. Ginsburg gained his nickname.He was virtually a household word in the New England area thanks to a promotion by the Adventure Car Hop which offered two-for-one specials to any customer who mentioned “Woo Woo” Ginsburg. Adventure also named a special dish after him, the Ginsburger. Arnie’s Friday night record hops at the giant Surf Ballroom in Nantasket Beach were a year-round Picture of Arnie Ginsburg
Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburgtradition for a decade and every name artist and group eventually played there with Arnie. He was on the air continuously for twelve years and his youthful following was fantastic in its devotion, possibly because he transformed adolescent insecurities into a triumph. His voice — a continual teenage crack — combined with the constant clatter of kazoo, cowbell, buzzer, bermuda bell, car horn, oogah and train whistle, epitomized the noisy awkwardness of teenagery, but Arnie managed to bring it all off with humorous grace.

A glance at the titles from this volume of the CRUISIN’ series will confirm that 1961 was a musically nondescript year. There were, as there are in any year, some outstanding rock and roll records, but there were no exciting trends; there was no sense of growth. In some ways, the musical doldrums of the year could be credited to the aftermath of the Payola hearings of 1959 and 1960. Some of radio’s most influential and colorful figures had their wings singed by the Washington investigation. The exposure of their loss of real or imagined innocence turned things grey for a while.

Inevitably, with the erosion of the power of some of radio’s key rock and roll figures, Top 40 radio was on the rise. With its limited number of playable records, chosen on a relatively conservative basis, and its de-emphasis of the radio personality, Top 40 programming tended to homogenize popular music. 1961 was one of the most homogenized years.

Historically, it was also a bland time. Despite the dynamism which John F. Kennedy projected from the White House, the tide of human affairs seemed to be running against the United States. We severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and shortly afterwards fell on our faces in the Bay of Pigs. The East Germans constructed a wall between East and West Berlin, creating fears of war. Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, became the first man to orbit the earth.

From the vantage point of 1961, it seemed as if the country were doomed to normalcy. Russia remained the huge vague threat she always seemed to be. Political activism was at a low ebb on campuses. Joe College didn’t listen to rock and roll. That was for high school. He also didn’t grow his hair long. That was for Beatniks. College was an ivory tower with few ties to the surrounding terrain. Surfing was becoming a huge youth cult on the West Coast and it had become identified with a simple brand of twangy guitar music, but no one had yet thought to set words to it.

A lot of musical — and attendant social — excitement had happened in the Fifties and there was a lot to come in the Sixties, but the early part of this new decade was its least exciting portion. Rock and roll seemed to be settling into a paunchy middle age and it was fitting that, as Billboard (the music trade magazine) reported in March of 1961, Chuck Berry had closed his St. Louis night club and was opening a 30-acre amusement park in Wentville, Mo. Thus did one of the founding fathers of rock and roll join the landed gentry. On January 15, 1961, Chuck Berry was 30 years old.

— Pete Johnson

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
It’s 1960 and the CRUISIN’ series goes to WKBW in Buffalo, New York, where Dick Biondi exercised one of the most powerful sets of lungs in pop radio. Good old screaming Dick Biondi — “the wild Eye-trallan, the supersonic spaghetti slurper” (his own description), a man who could read at random from the real estate classifieds and make it sound like headlines for Armageddon. He went to Memphis and picked leaves from Elvis Presley’s lawn, awarding them to his listeners. On holidays the “Big Noise from Buffalo” devoted three hours to telephone greetings from the top recording stars. Daily he joked with his radio pals and hollered at his listeners. He read commercials in a high-pitched shriek, dedicated songs to everybody’s certaln someone in a breathless, lurching wail that traveled seventeen Eastern states. (Mail came from as far away as Havana and Greenland.) And he ate peanut butter and sauerkraut pizzas on the air and told knock-knock jokes so corny they made you suffer. Almost half of the Buffalo audience was his. It was listen to Biondi, or else.

In a way it was as if Biondi were trying to pump some enthusiasm and excitement into a scene that was sagging pitifully. In 1960 the Congressional payola probe continued; in Philadelphia alone twenty-eight disc jockeys were canned. Picture of Dick Biondi
Dick BiondiRock also lost two more of its early stars, as one auto crash took Eddie Cochran in England (hospitalizing Gene Vincent) and another took Johnny Horton as he was en route to a show in Nashville. Even in the music there was death, as Ray Peterson sang about a stock car driver who entered a race to win money for a wedding ring, crashed and sang as his final words: Tell Laura I Love Her. (Of course dozens followed right along, recording saccharine smash hits of their own.) Rock and roll’s demise, like that of Mark Twain’s, had been greatly exaggerated — music with a beat still dominated sixty per cent of the Top 40 — but more than Biondi’s screech was needed to bring things back to an exciting peak. Not all was gloom and doom, certainly. Elvis was back, after appearing in a film about an Army tank sergeant (natch!) called “G.I. Blues”, and warbling just like the good old days. Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson and several others of real talent had hits.

Historically the scene was equally mixed. (As usual.) The French joined the nuclear club by exploding an A-bomb in the Sahara, Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 reconnaissance plane went down in the Soviet Union. (President Eisenhower got caught in a lie when he said he didn’t know anything about the U-2s.) Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina. Cuba began confiscating Amerlcan-owned factories on the Island. After spending twelve years on Death Row, Caryl Chessman was executed. The first sit-in was held in a Woolworth’s in North Carolina. And John Kennedy was elected President.

Other events of the year (some headlined, some unrecognized publicly): Pittsburgh took the World Serles from the Yankees … George Martin (who’d later produce records for the Beatles) was named to EMI’s artist and repertoire staff … Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was given a Pulitzer Prize … “The Apartment” (starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray) got the Oscar for best picture … and Bob Dylan was a freshman named Robert Zimmerman at the University of Minnesota.

— Jerry Hopkins

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO.

ORIGINAL LP COVER NOTES
By Jerry Hopkins
In the last year of the decade which saw the sound of popular music change, 1959, Hunter Hancock was beginning his seventeenth year in radio. He was, then, the glib, excitable and often corny host of the “Harlematinee” on KGFJ in Los Angeles, a program perhaps better known as “Huntln’ with Hunter.” Each afternoon, his medium-to-high-pitched voice came booming across all Southern California, introducing records “from bebop to ballad . . . swing to sweet . . . and blues to boogie . . . some of the very best in rhythm and blues records featuring some of the greatest and most popular Negro singers, musicians and entertainers in the world!” The odd thing about it was Hunter Hancock was not just white, but a white Texan; he never said he was black, of course, but no one ever suspected he wasn’t. So he was the most popular radio personality in the local black community, and because he had a reputation for launching new artists and hits, he also appealed to a wide segment of the youthful white community. So adept was he at picking talent, in fact, that Mercury Records had given him a gold record for helping the Platters sell a million copies of Only You in 1955, and many other artists had included his name in the lyrics of their songs.

Like others in the CRUISIN’ series, this record includes much of the social, cultural and commercial driftwood of the year — the theme songs, informatlon about upcoming sock hops, the fast deejay patter — as well as many of the hits.

Hunter HancockDespite the generally exceptional quality of the songs included here, 1959 was a tragic year for pop radio. The Congressional payola probe in Washington provided juicy reading over morning coffee and toast as dozens of popular disc jockeys across the country quit under pressure or were fired. (Alan Freed, the man who coined the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll,” was charged with accepting $30,000 in bribes from six record firms and resigned on the air, sobbing, then playing Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko-Bop by Little Anthony and the Imperials.) And three of the leadlng record artists — Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens — died In a plane crash en route to a concert in Fargo, North Dakota.

Even so, rock and roll did make some significant and sometimes amusing gains in 1959. A total of eighty-eight different record companies managed to land one or more singles in the top fifty slots of Billboard’s Hot 100 during the year, a demonstration of the good health and strength of independent production. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the grand old man of music licensing organizations, announced it was reconsidering its rule to keep rock writers out of its membership. And Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins and all the “Hit Parade” gang finally hung it up for Lucky Strike, after failing so miserably to sing the week’s top songs with any conviction, promise or beat.

Historically, it was considerably more exciting, more hopeful in 1959, as on the year’s first day Cuba’s dictator-president Fulgencio Bautista caught a fast plane for somewhere and the bearded, clgar-chewlng People’s Hero, Fidel Castro, rode Into Havana on the shoulders of his countrymen. Charles DeGaulle took office as President of France. Congress voted admission of Hawaii as the fiftieth state. Nlkita Khrushchev, speaking to the U.N., asked the disarmament of all nations within four years.

— Jerry Hopkins

The original Cruisin series was conceived and produced by Ron Jacobs. The “airchecks” on CRUISIN’ were not actual broadcasts, rather, they were masterful re-creations featuring legendary air talent.

Our thanks to RJ for making this classic material available to REELRADIO.