by Richard Neer
Imagine auditioning all that new music and trying to decide what was good enough for attention and what wasn’t, often based on one listen. And how did the mood you were in affect how you responded? A soft, sensitive ballad could speak volumes to you when you’re feeling low, but might get dismissed as sentimental pap if you’re in the mood to rock.
You also had to separate your personal feelings toward an artist from your aesthetic judgment. Over the years, you do become friendly with a handful of performers, and sometimes they don’t make records that your station can support.
A good example was Styx. James Young of that Detroit band became a buddy of mine for a period in the early eighties. He was interested in drag racing and took me to Englishtown, New Jersey, on several occasions to hang with Shirley Muldowney, a friend of his and a truly extraordinary woman. But Styx never really got the kind of airplay at WNEW that they had in the rest of the country, where they were considered the biggest band of the seventies. Most of our jocks dismissed them as hopelessly corporate.
My advocacy did help the career of a man who made records that no one considered to be rock and roll. A&M records had invited me to check out one of their new artists at a late-night club date. The previous overnight, I’d played Harry Nilsson’s rendition of the great standard “As Times Goes By.” A favorite of mine since first hearing it in the film Casablanca, I was delighted when Nilsson’s version gave me an excuse to play it.
The following evening, I went to see A&M’s latest find at Reno Sweeney’s. The small Greenwich Village club was packed for the late show, and the audience included celebrities like Candice Bergen. In the middle of a rollicking set with his small combo, the artist stopped and said, “You know, I heard this song on the radio last night, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. So here goes.” I got chills, knowing he must have been talking about my show. He then proceeded to do a killer performance of “When Time Goes By.” I went backstage to meet him afterward, and immediately fell in love with his outrageous personality. I spread the word of his talent to all my colleagues and unlike the situation with Styx, they gladly piled onto the bandwagon. My friend reached enormorous heights, from his humble beginnings as an Australian singer-songwriter playing bars in the Far East to his own Broadway show. I saw dozens of his live performances—each one more flamboyant than the next—and I was proud to have a small part in introducing the world to Peter Allen.
Likewise, your disdain for an artist’s personality shouldn’t be a factor in deciding airplay, but it’s hard to ignore. When the Pretenders’ first album was released, the station played it heavily. Warner Bros., their record label, pressured us to interview Chrissie Hynde on Scott Muni’s program months before she arrived in the States. We felt that she needed a greater body of work before putting her on with Muni in the afternoon. But we liked the record so much that I agreed to interview her on tape and replay it during Scott’s show while I filled in for him. The taping was set for 2 p.m. and would be aired the next day if all went well.
At 2 p.m., no Chrissie Hynde. Hours passed with no sign of her. Finally at four-thirty, the harried Warner’s rep appeared and apologized profusely. “Chrissie was delayed,” he said. “She really is into this but the print people have kept her longer than we thought and she’s on her way. Set up your tape and she’ll be here in a minute.”
Ten minutes later, a bedraggled-looking Hynde walked into the station with another promotion man. She stank of sweat and alcohol and was so rumpled it appeared as if she’d just rolled out of bed. She half sneered upon being introduced, and our offer of coffee was met with a rude “Don’t want any of that shit.”
I raised my eyebrows at the rep and guided her into the production studio, where I sat her behind the microphone.
“How long will this shit take?” she asked.
“We’ve been ready to go since two. We can start now,” I said, feeling the anger rise.
“Right. Let’s get this shit over with, then,” she snorted.
After waiting over two hours, I was in no mood for a hostile interview. It wasn’t like we were doing this for our benefit. It was a favor to the label since I was content just to play the album. I said that I was under the impression that she welcomed the exposure such a forum would provide.
She rolled her eyes. “Who told you that? The frigging record company? I was out late last night, drinking and screwing around with my mates. I just got up. This is the last place I want to be right now with a bunch of frigging radio people, doing a frigging worthless interview.” (“Frigging” was not the exact word she used.) Angrily pulling off her headphones, she bolted the studio, stomping right past the astonished promoter.
“What happened?” he said to me. “What did you say to tick her off?” He was torn between finishing his business with the station and pursuing his fleeing diva.
As much as I wanted to shove the Pretenders’ album into a place where only Hynde’s proctologist would discover it, it was too good to ignore or penalize. I just shrugged and we continued to support the Pretenders.
Love over Gold
The most feared, respected, and hated man in FM radio for almost two decades was Lee Abrams. The very mention of his name incited controversy wherever he went, and to this day his contributions are viewed by some with admiration and by others with contempt.
Lee grew up in the Chicago area listening to AM radio from stations across the country. Since the city is centrally located, he was able to hear not only the great stations of the Midwest like WLS and WCFL, but WABC, WBZ, and some of the powerhouses from the East Coast and Southern regions as well. Abrams was something of a child prodigy, playing and managing in rock bands in high school, and he designed a radio format based on his experiences.
He was an early advocate of research, initially doing a crude form of exit polling as people left concerts or club dates. In the mid-sixties, he picked up on the disenchantment many felt for Top Forty, and foresaw the rise of progressive radio on FM. He envisioned a modified Top Forty station that didn’t play bubblegum music, featured a broader playlist, and eschewed screaming, mindless jocks. However, he didn’t embrace the free-form stations of the time, considering them too political and too extreme in their bizarre music. He felt that there was a third way—to change the familiarity factor from the songs to the artists. Therefore, although listeners might not recognize a particular tune, they would be comfortable identifying the artist. Spending his summers in Miami, he was able to latch on as a gopher at WQAM and learn how the business worked firsthand. WMYQ gave him his first shot at programming in southern Florida, and the ratings were impressive.
Abrams is a promotional wizard above all. When he sets his sights on something, he blitzes it with every technique known to man. When WRIF, an ABC affiliate in Detroit, was going through the same kind of political mess that was occurring at WPLJ in 1971, Abrams hit them with a direct-mail campaign to sell his services to them as a program director. Armed with the success in Miami and a speaking voice that belied his eighteen years, he convinced the brass to meet him in Florida, whereupon he dazzled them with a one-hour presentation. They asked for another meeting in Chicago, and finally offered him the job. Although they didn’t allow him the freedom to wholly implement his plan, he did take the station from a 1.6 share to a 4.1 within a year. By this time, he’d been contacted by a Raleigh, North Carolina, FM station, which he agreed to consult on the sly. When ABC found out about his outside activities, they issued an ultimatum—either us or them. Abrams chose consulting, and quickly picked up another station, WRNO in New Orleans.
By now, his success was being noticed throughout the business, largely through his own promotional efforts. Superstars, as he dubbed his programming system, paralleled what Harrison had refined at KPRI and KMET and was not far philosophically from what we did at WLIR, although it was far more rigidly structured. Abrams was still small-time, though, and had to turn down jobs because he lacked the resources to fly into other cities and consult. H
e needed an infusion of capital and a partner, and he found one in Kent Burkhardt. Kent had been running an old-school AM consulting firm out of Atlanta, and Abrams met him at an industry convention. He convinced the older man that FM was the coming thing and that in order to have a more complete consultancy, Burkhardt needed to expand his horizons. It took them less than twenty minutes to hammer out a deal.
With the money and power of Burkhardt/Abrams behind him, Lee was able to annex dozens of new stations to his broadcasting empire, including the Taft Group. Each situation was different, but since he still only had a limited staff, much of his research was aimed at a national audience as opposed to many local ones.
His prime area of knowledge came from “call back” cards. He arranged for certain key record stores to include cards with every rock album they sold, which the customer would fill out and send in, and after two weeks, a representative of his company would call back the purchaser with several questions. They were along the lines of “Now that you’ve had a couple of weeks to live with Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull, what do you think? What cuts do you like? What radio stations do you listen to?”
With these calls, he was able to find out some interesting things. One early example concerned Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, which was selling very well and getting airplay on progressive stations. Abrams was able to glean that although its purchasers really enjoyed the album, they were inclined to listen to jazz stations, not rock, and therefore it shouldn’t be played. Earth, Wind and Fire posed a similar dilemma for FM programmers, and Abrams was able to provide some clues. The unfortunate side effect of this research was to eliminate a lot of the R&B music that had found its way onto progressive stations as spice. In most circumstances, this wasn’t an outcropping of racism, merely the myopia of the research. What dry research fails to grasp is whereas listeners might indicate a partiality to Led Zeppelin, hearing too many of the same songs by that band could turn them off. It is analogous to surveying diners on their favorite food. They might tell you that they prefer steak. But if you serve them steak every night, they will tire of it and beg you for anything else. Their response when questioned would still be that steak is their favorite. But like any positive reinforcement, you get better results when you reward Pavlov’s dog intermittently, instead of every time he performs his trick. Zeppelin blended with other popular genres will work better than a monotonous mix of Zeppelin, Whitesnake, and all their other imitators.
Another method Abrams used was to hand out questionnaires at concerts and asking the attendees to fill out specific questions about what songs they liked and what other bands they wanted to hear on the radio. Obviously, much of this was subjective, and had to be interpreted by someone who knew the music and understood the lifestyle issues of the audience. Like Michael Harrison, Lee believed in mixing with average listeners and getting a feel for what they liked. The problem was, as his business grew, he was able to spend less time doing that and more time in airports and hotels, sequestered away with radio insiders who would skew his perceptions.
The obvious problem with this broadband approach is that every market has local eccentricities and that Abrams’s research doesn’t allow for these. His standard reply was that the 90 percent of the country who liked FM rock favored the same songs by the same bands. The remaining 10 percent reflected local differences and were up to his individual program directors to decide. The 90 percent seemed an arbitrary figure, but the point was taken.
For consultants like Abrams and his stations, the delegation of authority could be a thorny issue. Lee’s deal was made with an individual general manager or a group manager of stations. Abrams would have final say, and could hire and fire the program director and jocks. At these stations, he bore total responsibility for what happened, good or bad. But many stations had existing PDs and jocks in place and were doing well, and only wanted suggestions from Burkhardt/Abrams for fine tuning. This could alternately be frustrating and affirmative for both parties. If ratings improved, the consultant would take the credit; if it failed, he could always tell management that his orders were not being followed properly. Either way, with Abrams’s ability to spin events in his favor, his firm looked good.
His greatest successes came in markets where he could regiment a self-indulgent free-form station musically, while allowing the jocks to be creative between the records. Sets and segues were not important in Lee’s scheme, only the right mix of music that gave the station the consistency, or stationality, he sought. He used a card system and clock, so that the individual jocks were limited to playing what was selected by the program director. Jocks hated to hear that Lee was coming in to consult because they knew that it meant the end of their freedom musically.
One could make a case that if the freedom had been used responsibly in the first place, there would be no need for people like Abrams. Radio is not rocket science, and anyone who was even modestly perceptive could figure out how to be successful in the seventies. But there was an attitude shared by many jocks that their show was an extension of their personalities, and that they had to select their own music to perform at their highest potential. Once that freedom was taken away, they merely became voices relating to nothing.
I’ve seen this from both sides. When I was just a disc jockey, after a few self-indulgent months of total liberty doing overnights, I came to realize that if I did a show to please only myself, I was pleasing an audience of one. Like Harrison, I believe that most of my choices are universally applicable to a mass audience. The difficulty comes with a record that you know people want, but you don’t particularly like. The reverse is when you like something that isn’t going to appeal to the masses. A responsible free-form jock will exert the self-discipline to limit or eliminate personal favorites that lack commercial potential, and concentrate on songs that are popular. If you can’t appreciate most of those, then it’s time to seek another form of employment.
But when the freedom is taken away completely and one is left with a computer printout, it completely kills the jock’s involvement in programming music. As much as consultants can tell you that DJs should focus on their talk segments, so much of what was talked about in progressive radio sprang directly from the music. Without its inspiration, many jocks descend into vapid talk about the weather. At WNEW, where we were billed as “musicologists,” the idea of having no choice diminished the personalities into wanna-be comedians, and many weren’t skilled in that area.
Program directors are in a similar box: If they don’t control the music, they risk the mistakes that an inexperienced jock or an arrogant veteran might make. If they totally strip their staff of its musical discretion, they can wind up with a bland jukebox. They also ignore consultants at their own peril, knowing that they’ll be criticized to upper management if their digressions from the formula aren’t fruitful. The other option is to blindly follow the consultant’s lead, and hazard the reprobation that they aren’t perceptive enough to call their own shots when the advice is leading them in the wrong direction. They also have to fight off the perception among the jocks that they are merely puppets, following some out-of-town bully’s directives.
Stations choose to handle this in different ways. If the program director and general manager have a strong, trusting relationship, the consultant’s input is merely weighed in with several other factors and can be contravened. But other PDs are told that since “we’re spending all this money on a consultant, we should heed his counsel.” These programmers usually don’t last long and are replaced by someone in the consultant’s stable of disciples who is willing to move up the food chain with him.
For all of the flaws that a consultant might bring to the table, Abrams at least understood the good things about free form and tried to incorporate them into his plan. “Perfect album sides” were an endorsement of when jocks were legitimately excited about a record and wanted to play a side in its entirety. Abrams merely identified the albums worthy of this and scheduled them at strategic times. He like
d “Twofer Tuesdays,” where a station would play two songs in a row from each featured artist—a scaled-down version of Muni’s miniconcerts. He subscribed to occasional thematic sets, but selected the songs on their individual merit and not just because they fit the theme. These elements sprang from early progressive radio; the difference was that under Abrams, they were planned and selected by the programmers as opposed to the jocks. At a skillfully executed Superstars station, it was hard for the average listener to tell it wasn’t free form. If the jocks played their roles properly, they could manufacture enthusiasm and make it sound like these preconceived elements were actually spontaneous. And if the jocks did discover a band or song independently, they could run it up the chain of command and their input might be heeded and even valued.
Some of Abrams’s Superstars elements were original, but many of them were the creation of individual jocks and programmers at the stations he consulted. One of the benefits of working with a consultant is that each week you receive a newsletter that alerts you to programming and promotional ideas that have worked in other markets. The challenge is then to adapt the ones you fancy to your individual situation. That’s why you hear many of the same features on different stations across the country, with only minor variations in their execution.
Some program directors found a way of dealing with Abrams that kept his reach away from their territory. In the seventies, Lee suffered from common human weaknesses involving sex, drugs, and rock and roll. If a programmer could keep him supplied with enough of each, Abrams wouldn’t have enough time in his short visits to critique the programming, and the PD could enjoy more autonomy.
