by Richard Neer
“Ted, what happens when you have three spots in a row?” I asked. Most stations had at least that many.
“Well, you can do it a couple of ways. You can wait until the first one is finished, hit the rewind button, and then slide the dial over to the next number and hit play again. You’ve got to wait till the green light comes on or it won’t be fully rewound and the next spot will start in the middle. Or else you can plan it so that you alternate live reads with taped spots, or use the spot tape once, then a reel-to-reel spot, then a spot tape again. Got it?”
He pointed toward two ancient Roberts home tape recorders. My dad had better and newer ones in his basement. Any time there were commercial breaks, you had to find the proper tape from a disorganized pile of five-inch reels stacked randomly on a desk, thread it onto the machine, cue it to the beginning, and hit the play button. Again, there was no remote control on the tape decks and they were a few feet farther back than the spot tape machine. What a nightmare.
But the biggest problems were yet to come. I noticed there were four turntables in the studio, a bit unusual because most places had only two. And they were not the rugged broadcast variety I was used to, but home units made by a local manufacturer. “Must break a lot of needles cueing these up,” I remarked.
“Uh, Mr. Reiger doesn’t believe in cueing up records. Thinks it wrecks the stylus and scratches the opening of the song.”
The Firesign Theatre once released a comedy album entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong. That precisely described my feelings at the moment. I had been taught that anathema to all radio was dead air—pauses when nothing is transmitted. Certainly in Top Forty or BOSS radio, pacing is all important. Everything has to come with machine-gun rapidity, with no silence—ever! But given the equipment at WLIR, every time you went from one record to another, there had to be a long moment of nothingness. From live announcements to commercials, a second or two of silence. One commercial to the next—dead air.
Then came the topper. WLIR broadcast in stereo, but each channel was controlled by a separate knob or fader. All four turntables were on the same two faders, as were the tape decks and spot tapes. To go from one record to the next, you had to turn both knobs down to zero, hit the switch to go from the left turntable to the right, start the right turntable, and then turn both knobs back up simultaneously as the music started. But this had to be done without cueing the record beforehand—just dropping the needle in the space between tracks and guessing how long it would take before the music started. Good luck!
Oh, by the way, the switches to go from one turntable to the next were old and had long since lost their click stops. So, like with the spot tape, you might think you were on turntable one when you were really on turntable three. And since they were home machines, not professional units, they didn’t get up to speed immediately, taking two revolutions to achieve 331⁄3 rpm. If you estimated the start time incorrectly, the record would “wow” in. In other words, it would start slowly and gradually accelerate until it reached the proper speed. As Webb explained these eccentricities to me, I broke into a cold sweat.
That night, I lay awake, not able to sleep at all, anticipating the disaster that was to be my professional broadcast premiere.
Fortunate Son
For Bill “Rosko” Mercer, the end of free form on WOR-FM in the early autumn of 1967 was a dream dashed. He found himself out of work again, and was faced with the unpleasant prospect of returning to a format he despised or finding an alternate way to make a living. Muni was given the opportunity to keep his shift, and Drake told him that he could continue to play what he wanted. But Scott’s experience taught him that he wouldn’t remain an island for long and his oasis of freedom would soon perish in the harsh desert of strict formatics. It was fortunate for both of them that the initial success at WOR-FM had not gone unnoticed.
WNEW-AM had been one of the top stations in New York for decades. Boasting such talent as William B. Williams, Gene Klavan and Dee Finch, Jim Lowe, Julius La Rosa, and Ted Brown, it was the city’s favorite place to hear all the great standards. They broadcast Giants football on Sundays and had a full-service news and sports operation. A Metromedia station, they were owned by John Kluge, who has since become one of the richest men in America. Year after year, profits increased and advertising revenue exceeded ratings because Madison Avenue loved the affluent audience WNEW attracted. But WNEW-FM was a different story.
The station was originally headquartered at 565 Fifth Avenue, sandwiched into a small area next to the massive AM complex. Like most owners, Kluge was content to simulcast his AM signal on FM until the FCC’s duopoly ruling in 1964. Given no choice by the commission, Jack Sullivan, head of Metromedia’s radio division, charged George Duncan with the job of inventing a new format for the FM stations.
George, the general manager of WNEW-FM, was a beefy, florid Irishman who wore his Gaelic heritage and Catholic faith like a banner. He favored crisply pressed dark suits, and kept his bald bespectacled head immaculately barbered. A graduate of Cornell University, the ex-Marine once served as a milkman and a New York State trooper.
Duncan was justly proud of his service record, and Scott Muni had to break up more than a few bar fights late at night when some inebriated patron insulted the Corps or the Catholic church in George’s presence. And those who knew of these twin loyalties were not advantaged if they tried to use them dishonestly to advance their cause. On one such occasion, a hotshot young salesman petitioning him for a job had nearly clinched the position when Duncan mentioned in passing that he had been a Marine.
“Oh, yeah. I was, too,” mused the job seeker, trying to ingratiate himself further.
“Really?” said Duncan, with a raised eyebrow. He didn’t look like an ex-Marine. “What was your serial number?”
“Oh jeez, I don’t know. I forgot,” came the answer. The man, despite his otherwise impressive credentials, didn’t get the job, because no Marine ever forgets his serial number for the rest of his life. The man was a fraud, and if he’d lie about that, could George ever trust him with anything else?
Duncan looked forward to experimenting with something that could generate another profit center for Metromedia when the duopoly ruling came down. His original blueprint was to form a station that played similar music to WNEW, but with this twist: The disc jockeys would all be women.
By today’s standards, this doesn’t sound so radical, but in 1966, this was a completely alien concept. Women weren’t generally accepted in the media at all except as window dressing. There was the token TV weather girl, often the butt of the anchors’ sexist humor. But they weren’t taken seriously as reporters or disc jockeys. Their voices were thought not to cut through the limited frequency response of AM radio, and on television and in the workplace, they were seen as a distraction.
But Duncan posited that with FM’s wider bandwidth, a quality woman’s voice could attract male listeners or other women, who might take pride in their sisters’ accomplishments. With the civil rights movement and feminism gaining momentum in the sixties, the idea seemed to have merit. Four hundred women auditioned, and among those hired were Alison Steele, Nell Bassett, Sally Jessy Raphael (yes, her), and Rita Sands, who later became a news anchor at WCBS radio.
Duncan’s plan never got a real chance. Initially, male reaction wasn’t positive and women seemed to resent the idea of their mates being seduced over the radio by female jocks. Madison Avenue firmly believed that women could not sell products to other women. Metromedia Group head Jack Sullivan had told George in a casual meeting that “something is happening in rock music” and suggested that he visit some clubs in Greenwich Village and experience the new phenomenon close up. In addition, Duncan was being handed a gift by RKO’s abdication and wasn’t about to return it.
The following story ran in Billboard on October 28, 1967:
Bill “Rosko” Mercer, the former all night personality with WOR-FM who resigned a couple of weeks ago, has been hired by WNEW-FM for a
progressive rock show and will handle a seven days a week stint, 7–midnight. George Duncan, station manager at WNEW-FM, said the decision for the change in the programming and image of WNEW-FM was “made strictly on Rosko’s availability.” WNEW-FM is “building for the future,” he said. The station plays easy listening music. WNEW-FM was the first all-girl station in New York. The girls are being retained for the daytime operations of the station. Duncan said he saw no reason why the combination of the girls daytime and Rosko nighttime shouldn’t work. He said Rosko will play “meaningful” music. “Our music has progressed in this direction for some while. Rosko’s availability only pushed up our timetable for the change.”
It wouldn’t be the first or last time that a radio executive misled the press. Duncan had already laid the groundwork for Jonathan Schwartz of WNAC in Boston to do middays, and Scott Muni was in negotiations to come in to host afternoons. One by one, the women were replaced, with the exception of Steele, who was sent to the Siberia of overnights.
Rosko started on October 30, 1967, followed by Schwartz a month later and Muni in early December. “This Rosko thing has been unbelievable,” George Duncan told Billboard. “Not only in advertising, and his show was immediately sold out, but in mail pull. In one day, we received letters from a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a physician, all saying they were glad we hired Rosko. The doctor said that he felt that the only station left for him and his wife was WQXR after WOR-FM changed.” In that same issue, Duncan admitted that WNEW-FM was going all the way with “meaningful” music.
The very term “meaningful” indicated his naÏveté when it came to the monster he was creating. “We spoke Russian,” said Jonathan Schwartz, years later at a reunion. “They [management] didn’t understand it. It was like we were speaking Russian.” Indeed the bosses didn’t know what they had; but ironically, neither did the jocks. They were “faking it,” according to Rosko, and some did it better than others as they hurried to educate themselves about a brand of music that was foreign to all except Muni. They only knew that there was an audience, a very vocal audience, who appreciated Metromedia’s picking up the baton from WOR-FM. They targeted advertising toward the youth market, placing print ads in The Village Voice and local college papers.
Mornings continued to be a simulcast of WNEW’s Klavan and Finch, until program director Nat Asch hired John Zacherle, who had no radio background but was a familiar figure on local television. Zach was moved to late nights in fairly short order, mainly because his poor eyesight caused him difficulty reading the studio clock. One morning as Duncan commuted from Westchester County, Zach said it was 8:15, causing Duncan to curse himself for being late for an important meeting. After breaking several traffic laws to minimize the damage, he discovered that he was actually early and the Zacherle had overstated the time by an hour—it had been 7:15.
Someone a bit more dependable was needed, so ex–Top Forty jock Johnny Michaels was brought in to hold down the morning gig. Everyone worked six days a week live, but were heard for seven since the weekend shows were taped in advance. Pay was scaled at $175 a week, and in the beginning there was little opportunity to make anything on the side.
It was a disparate group—“the crew of the SS Motley,” as Muni would often describe them. Jonathan Schwartz, whose father, Arthur, had written “Dancing in the Dark” and a number of pop standards, had grown up in Southern California and New England, enjoying wealth and privilege. A childhood playmate was Carly Simon, of the Simon and Schuster publishing scions and later a talented singer-songwriter. He was able to afford an apartment and maintain an office at Carnegie Hall. A budding writer, he put together a collection of short stories entitled Almost Home and penned a semiautobiographical novel called Distant Stations. “Jonno,” as he was called, liked to dress shabbily in torn jeans and rumpled golf shirts. He was an intellectual and a clever raconteur who took pride in using certain multisyllabic words for the first time on a rock station. His trademark was the stories he would tell on the air, very much like Jean Shepherd did on WOR at the time. Whereas Shepherd rarely played music, Schwartz now was forced to step away from his background as a Sinatraphile and lover of standards—literally moving from Bing Crosby to David Crosby. He loved the sound of his own voice, which retained a slight Boston accent. Often he would play a song simply because he enjoyed saying the name of the band.
Bill “Rosko” Mercer was the star. His show began at six with a set piece, “a mind excursion, a true diversion” and “reality, the hippest of all trips” over the bass line of some cool jazz. He ended every night at ten with the words, “I sure do love you so.” He played jazz, blues, R&B, rock; his musical range was the widest on the staff. And he’d read stories by Shel Silverstein or poetry from The Prophet, all in a voice that was the most exquisite ever heard on the FM airwaves. He had a mild, barely perceptible Southern lilt, but his sound was pure honey poured from a jar—gentle yet masculine, smooth yet crackling with emotion when the moment called for it. Originally perceived as a black militant, he was certainly the most political disc jockey in the station’s history. He didn’t hesitate to make his opposition to the Vietnam War known, expressing his criticism of the government in unambiguous language. He and Schwartz mixed like Israel and Iraq. At staff meetings, which Rosko always dominated with his highly opinionated convictions, they were often at each other’s throats and more than once had to be separated by Muni.
Zacherle first gained prominence as the host of late-night horror movies on the local ABC-TV affiliate. Made up like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, he’d approach these cheesy offerings with a warped sense of humor, often injecting his image into the film to make cryptic comments. He even had a number six hit record, “Dinner with Drac (Part One),” in 1958. The affection he engendered among the younger generation then translated to an emcee job with an afternoon dance party on a local UHF station. It was a parody on American Bandstand gone bizarro, with Zach dressed up as the ghoul, muttering under his breath as precocious high school girls gyrated wildly to the new music.
But the dance party introduced him to the new rock and he formed a lasting bond with the music. So when a friend told him that WNEW-FM needed DJs in their new format, he contacted Duncan and Nat Asch. They originally hired him to do weekends, but the response from the now college-age audience that remembered him from his ghoul days was so great that he quickly moved into full-time. Asch felt they needed someone a bit different to do mornings and after consulting his teenage son who said Zach was cool, he got the job. His broadcasting skills were minimal: He broke every rule in the book and radio mavens were indeed horrified upon hearing him for the first time. When the engineer opened his microphone, he sounded as if he had been aroused from a deep sleep. First, you would hear papers rustling as he scrambled to gather his notes. His sentences featured long pauses interrupted by staccato bursts of rapid-fire mumbling, punctuated with his infectious chortling. Boris Karloff on acid might be an apt description. He very often forgot to keep track of what he played and would spend minutes either trying to remember or finding the scrap of paper he’d scribbled it on.
As a boss, Duncan could be an intimidating figure to some of the jocks who only saw the straightlaced ex-Marine aspect of him and missed his iconoclastic and playful side. But he led the WNEW-FM jocks with a sense of family, even after he ascended to head of Metromedia’s radio division. One DJ tells a story of how he was filling in for the morning show host when an FCC inspector showed up at 6 a.m., unannounced. This particular bureaucrat was notorious for his intimidating style and rigid enforcement of even the most arcane rules. He had bullied countless jocks into committing nervous mistakes on the air. The inspector was taking notes and asking detailed questions, making the young man even more edgy than he already was. A radio custom is to sign off the program logs in advance near the end of a shift so that you won’t forget. At 9:45, the skittish DJ logged off, stating the time as 10 a.m. The inspector jumped down his throat.
“How d
are you sign this log as ten a.m., fifteen minutes early,” he scolded. He then extracted an official-looking form and wrote up the transgression. The shaken jock left the studio several minutes later, convinced that he’d not only lost his job but had endangered the station’s FCC license. The first person he ran into in the hall was George Duncan, ramrod straight in a blue serge suit, who asked him how he was doing.
This is it, I’m about to be fired, the kid thought. Instead, Duncan placed his arm around him.
“You know that guy from the FCC?” Duncan whispered ominously. “Fuck him.”
According to Scott Muni, Duncan later scoured the accusatory report and found several procedural violations in the inspector’s tactics. He complained vociferously to his supervisor in Washington, which led to the man’s dismissal.
Under Duncan’s leadership, WNEW-FM began its wobbly journey from a miscast group with diverse backgrounds to a team of eclectic personalities that made radio history. Their mission was to explore the new world of rock, which was experimenting in art rock, blues, country and folk rock, psychedelia, and other progressive forms. But other radio conventions were left unchallenged.
An odd quirk in those early days was that while WNEW-FM simulcast hourly news from their AM sister station, there was guitar music playing gently underneath it. Most listeners thought that this was some sort of hippie affectation to soften the authoritative tone of the WNEW-AM newsmen, but in reality, it was a technical matter. An FM transmitter triggers a red beacon on most receivers indicating that the signal broadcast is stereo. This was considered a competitive edge in 1968 when some stations were still monaural. But FCC policy stated that the beacon could only remain on for four minutes when the actual broadcast material was not in stereo. Since the mono newscasts were five minutes in length, to avoid shutting down the beacon, they had to find an unobtrusive way to keep it fired up. After scouring the music library, Asch and Duncan found a guitar work by German composer Georg Philipp Telemann that would fit behind every conceivable news story—from the most dire tragedy to the lightest kicker.