by Richard Neer
And new businesses were emerging that could take advantage of FM’s low rates to reach their target audiences. Record companies didn’t need to dish out payola to individual jocks; they could buy inexpensive commercials on the stations that played their records. Boutiques and head shops couldn’t afford WABC and would sound out of place there if they could, so they gravitated to FM. Concert promoters and publications that sought credibility with a young audience could find it with low-key ads read by hip FM jocks.
With the combination of low overhead and a ready-made marketplace, FM owners began to see water transformed into wine. So managers didn’t know or care if jocks were playing unfamiliar, noncommercial music. Most of the DJs were making more money than they needed. They got free dope from admiring fans. Sex was there for the asking. They were in hog heaven. Why sell out and play something that some suit ordered you to when you already had everything you needed?
I grew to admire the way Muni ran the station. He was effective in keeping the corporate wolves at bay. I don’t know if it was because he is such a keen judge of human nature or that he is just lazy, but his loose-reined approach was right for the times. As he hired new people, I began to realize that his rambling interview technique was actually pretty cagey. The key to finding good jocks was assessing what kind of people they were, which he was able to do in the long sessions, without their knowledge of his agenda.
He once told me how he approached audition tapes. If he heard something memorable in the generally slick productions he received, he asked the applicant to sit down with a tape recorder and, in six to ten minutes, explain why they thought they were good enough to be on WNEW-FM: “If they started out in a staccato, ‘Mr. Muni . . . I feel . . . that I should be . . .’ I could tell they were just a reader and I threw their tapes out. But if someone could put his feelings on tape in a cogent manner, and showed an all-around knowledge of the music, then we might have a keeper.”
Unlike Top Forty, where what you do on the air is an act, manufactured to fit a style of forced excitement, on progressive radio you couldn’t fool the audience into thinking you were something that you weren’t. One veteran jock told me, “The key to all of this is sincerity. Once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy.” It wasn’t easy to fake it on FM, however, and those who tried were generally found out in short order.
To succeed on progressive radio you had to a) know the music,b) understand and preferably share the listeners’ politics and lifestyles, and c) have a delivery compatible with a and b. Of course, these elements won’t guarantee fame and fortune, but without them there is little chance of success.
Knowing the music was first and foremost. In those days, the slightest slip could undermine your credibility with the audience. While Alison Steele was still learning and making the transition from Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa, she introduced a cut by saying, “Here’s some new music from a band called Flowers.” She didn’t realize that Flowers was the title of the new Rolling Stones record, because Flowers was in large letters on the front jacket and the band was merely pictured on the sleeve. This story haunted her for ten years among serious music lovers, well after she had learned the ropes.
In the progressive era, a jock was often attracted to music that wasn’t popular yet. One could get behind an artist and with enough airplay, the public might follow the lead. This advocacy might not be limited to the life of one album. Take Peter Frampton. While performing in the band Humble Pie with Steve Marriott, he released several acclaimed but modestly selling albums. As a solo act, his first two records were good, but didn’t really make a dent in the marketplace. Upon releasing Frampton Comes Alive!, basically live performances of his previously issued material, he sold over fifteen million copies and was an instant superstar. WNEW-FM played both Humble Pie and Frampton’s early solo stuff, knowing that he had talent but not knowing how popular he’d become. But for every Peter Frampton, there are ten Warren Zevons, who, despite a long career of quality work, has never achieved much commercial success.
So when choosing music, the (traditionalist) progressive jocks balanced the artists they liked with quality material they knew was selling. The decisions were harder with popular bands that weren’t considered any good. The consensus on Grand Funk Railroad, among music cognoscenti, was that they had very little original talent. They sold a lot of records, though, and a disc jockey had to carefully weigh the perceived lack of quality versus the commercial value.
To Muni, it was no contest. He played the FM hits his audience wanted and if that included Grand Funk, so be it. His oft-repeated quote were the words he lived by: “There are no experts, Fats.” But on the other side of the coin, Jonathan Schwartz didn’t seem to know or care about what was selling. The music he played was for his own entertainment, as a musical scholar. His famous quote was: “There are only two types of music—good music and bad music. I prefer good music.” If the public didn’t like it, so what?
The sixties culture bred a brand of disc jockey who didn’t care about ratings—they were an anathema. These jocks were interested in self-expression, which often translated into self-indulgence. It’s the elitist attitude that “I know better than the marketplace. I know what’s good, the great unwashed public doesn’t.” Most of the jocks with that posture had other means of income and could afford their arrogance. They attracted cult followings who were extremely loyal. But although they opened creative pathways hitherto unheard on commercial radio, in the long run they threatened ruination for the format.
Let’s use the analogy of the “auteur” filmmaker, who wants control of every element of his vision. He demands the final say in every aspect of work, even those where he’s not an expert. He makes often interesting but commercially failed pictures. This approach only succeeds financially when you have a rare director like James Cameron, who is able to blend artistic vision with commercial sensibilities.
In film, auteurs are eventually forced to scale back their works for lack of financing. So a Woody Allen can make small gems with a tight budget and remain viable. Highly paid actors are willing to work for scale to participate in one of his films because they believe in the quality of his craftsmanship and want to enhance their own artistic credibility. One understands going in that you’ll never make a fortune doing a Woody Allen film.
Progressive FM jocks started out making Woody Allen films—low-budget, highly personal masterpieces that stretched the creative envelope. Ratings were never huge, but neither were expenditures. But as disc jockeys began to have financial responsibilities of their own, like families and mortgages, their repulsion toward commercialism was tempered by an understanding that they couldn’t build sandcastles without getting their hands dirty. And fortunately for them, America was undergoing a transformation from greedy capitalism to the belief that there were higher values outside financial goals.
Even management drew the line at advertising products they found socially irresponsible. Ads for the armed forces were not even considered, either as a moral stance or because they realized that doing so would alienate the audience and the rest of their sponsors. They had to walk a fine line between risking their credibility by presenting an element that might undermine the image they’d sold to the savvy student community, and limiting their revenues by being “too hip for the room.”
There were borderline decisions to be made. In the early seventies, Bob Guccione was infuriated by Alison Steele’s refusal to read commercials for Penthouse magazine on the air. The college-age men Guccione was courting were listening to Steele, perhaps with his magazine in one hand, but the feminist contingent in the audience saw the magazine as exploitive. Mindful of Guccione’s protests, management arranged a meeting with Steele to allow him to plead his case. Although not a bra burner, Steele was offended by much of the content of Penthouse and told the publisher flat out. Tempers escalated as he refused to accept her arguments until she brought the dialogue down to his level.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t car
e about naked women. I hate hair. The only hair on my entire body is on top of my head. Even my eyebrows are shaved, and I’ll leave it to your imagination what else. I can’t stand those hairy-looking women, spread-eagled in front of the camera. And until you do something about that, I won’t read your spots.” Guccione retreated, and the day was hers.
The line had to be walked with music as well. Playing too many hits was perceived as being just as dangerous as not playing enough. In 1971 on progressive stations, commercialism and ratings often took a backseat to credibility.
Ratings have been determined in essentially the same manner for decades. Arbitron selects a representative sample of the population and sends them diaries. On these pages, a listener is to mark down what radio station he listens to, and for how long, for which he is paid a token fee. Phone calls are made to follow up to ensure that the diaries are being attended to. At the end of the week (Arbitron weeks go from Thursday to Wednesday), the diaries are mailed in and the results tabulated, weighted against the market’s demographic and ethnic makeup. That’s why most big radio promotions are done on Thursdays, the day the diaries are sent back in—because if someone has been negligent in their recording duties, they hastily fill them out on the day they’re due in. Every three months in major markets, a book comes out, detailing the hourly listening habits of the region. On a monthly basis, “Arbitrends” are released, which are less dependable, mid-course samplings. A common mistake is to overreact to trends and make changes, only to find that statistical errors render the trend’s findings unreliable.
Although ratings are king now, in 1972 credibility was more important to most FM programmers. And the demise of WPLJ, with its highly credible but low-rated jocks, was to soon have a major impact on WNEW-FM, and especially on young Michael Harrison.
Dirty Water
The early world of progressive radio was a small and incestuous one. Even though they were then owned by another company, WBCN in Boston was always regarded as a sister station to WNEW-FM.
WBCN was the first station to broadcast in stereo as engineers at nearby MIT discovered how to multiplex with the “aural exciter” (broadcast in stereo). T. Mitchell Hastings owned the station in its early days, along with WHCN in Hartford and WNCN (later WQIV and WAXQ) in New York. The three comprised the “Concert Network,” and all were respected classical stations until Hastings became seriously ill with a brain aneurysm in 1968. He underwent a partial lobotomy, which required a lengthy rehabilitation. By the time he returned to work, he owned an underground rock station in Boston, which his employees had surreptitiously implemented on WBCN while he had been recuperating. It seems the old man never recovered enough to fully understand what had happened, and the staff had free run of the place. They would explain things to him as if speaking to a child, since despite his corporeal presence around the offices, much of his intellect had been left in the operating theater.
WBCN’s most celebrated jock was a fellow named Charles Laquidara. He’s done mornings in Boston on and off for almost three decades, and his story has some eerie parallels to those of many other early progressive jocks. Charles wanted to be an actor and did radio part-time, playing classical music at Pasadena, California’s KPPC. Like WLIR, the suburban station was located in a basement, this time the cellar of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. His approach was revolutionary in that he viewed the classics as “the people’s music” and not just serious work for intellectual snobs. He distilled the essence of what he did to this: explaining opera to plumbers. He’d take an aria and break it down—translating the story, noting the technical prowess of the performances, and using his keen sense of humor to make it accessible for the hoi polloi. He continued to pursue an acting career after graduating from the Pasadena Playhouse.
Like Tom Donahue, he hated what Top Forty radio had become. The high-energy disc jockeys who seemed oblivious to the changes the country was going through in the mid-sixties, the inane promotions, the senseless jingles—it all offended him. He and his friends used to smoke grass on the hilltops of Encino and talk about what radio should be: the best of all genres of music, put together intelligently.
His dream came to fruition when Donahue consulted KPPC and transformed it into KMPX South. But like its San Francisco counterpart, KPPC’s ownership couldn’t make it work financially with Donahue over the long term, and they also were struck by the jocks. Metromedia had a station in Los Angeles, KMET, and before long George Duncan had repeated the magic trick that had worked in New York and San Francisco. KMET became a progressive station and hired Raechel Donahue. In 1968, KPPC started over again with a new staff, which included Laquidara doing overnights.
True to his vision, he mixed Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Grateful Dead in his sets. Originally, he knew nothing about rock but learned to love it. Within months, aided by his ambition and promotional skills, his legend grew in L.A. Fresh from his West Coast triumph, he returned home to New England for the holidays to visit with family. It was there that he first heard WBCN in Boston, and was so impressed that he called the station and introduced himself, hoping that his reputation had traveled east.
“Oh yeah,” they answered. “You’re the crazy bastard who mixes classical with rock and roll. Come on in.”
As with everything, timing is crucial and Charles happened upon WBCN just as their afternoon jock was preparing to leave for a career with a rock band. Management liked his rap, so in 1969, Charles Laquidara replaced Peter Wolf, who would achieve his own measure of fame and fortune with the J. Geils Band. He was also one of the first rock stars to marry a famous actress when he wed Faye Dunaway.
Besides having a lighthearted approach to radio, Laquidara was extremely active politically, another trait more intrinsic to West Coast commercial radio. He refused to participate in anything remotely related to the war effort. In fact, he and WBCN were once sued for his remarks after reading a camera shop commercial. President Nixon decided to invade Cambodia in an attempt to clear out Vietcong sanctuaries and bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. But most leftists felt that the incursion only prolonged the war and extended the killing fields to an innocent neutral country, and Laquidara wasn’t shy about saying so on the air. A local sponsor called Underground Camera asked that he read a live ad for Honeywell’s newest 35mm offering. He refused (Honeywell was a major arms manufacturer), but management prevailed upon him to read the spot anyway. He did so professionally, extolling the virtues of the new Honeywell Pentax camera exactly as the copy stated. But at the end, he added his own fillip: “That’s right, run right out and support Honeywell, the company responsible for killing all those Cambodian babies.”
Laquidara wasn’t aware that the chief executives of Honeywell were in Boston, listening intently to hear the great WBCN host praise their new camera. WBCN was not pleased with the $200,000 legal action that followed, but publicly supported Charles and eventually won the lawsuit. On another occasion, after several major universities had gone on strike protesting the war, he lamented the fact that no school in Boston had followed suit. So he read a fabricated news story stating that the students at every school in the country had decided to boycott classes, with the exception of Boston University. The BU students, who were meeting at the time to decide upon a course of action, were thus moved to strike, lest they be out of sync with their peers.
After three years in various time slots, Laquidara accepted the morning show on a dare. WBCN’s female morning host was venting to him in the studio one day, complaining about the treatment that women received in radio, always getting the worst shifts. She ranted on obscenely about her lousy hours until Charles opined that mornings weren’t so bad.
“Oh yeah?” she challenged him. “Why don’t you try it, then?”
“As a matter of fact, I will,” he replied.
In trying to find a memorable handle for the morning show, he envisioned all of New England waking up on a big mattress. So, in 1972, The Big Mattress was born. His attitude was typi
cally irreverent: He did a parody of an AM morning show, using all the bells and whistles normally associated with Top Forty, but with a twist. He had a game show called “Mishegas,” a Yiddish expression for craziness. Karlos, his version of HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, occasionally took over his show without warning. He brought in Tank, a sports guy who reminded everyone of a character who hangs out at a local bar and has an opinion about everything. He did spoofs of commercials using the fictitious company Dutchko (“If it’s Dutchko, it’s so-so”). He invented words like “schloony,” which meant foggy or demented. It was almost as if the Firesign Theatre had come to morning radio. For the first time, FM morning ratings achieved double digits, and Laquidara became a wake-up fixture in Boston until 1976, when he decided that the show got in the way of his cocaine use. He “retired” with much fanfare and spent the next two years in self-imposed radio exile.
During this time, he was wooed by WNEW-FM. He interviewed with Scott Muni, who was impressed with the fact that someone had finally broken through the FM morning barrier. But Laquidara valued his freedom and needed to be assured that Metromedia wouldn’t attempt to control his content. As a litmus test, he asked Muni if WNEW was playing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Muni, still executing Duncan’s conservative edict when it came to possibly obscene lyric content, told him that the line “even when she was given head” disqualified it from consideration. Charles decided then and there that WNEW-FM wouldn’t be a cool place to work and removed his hat from the ring. He preferred unemployment.
