FM

by Richard Neer

  Unfortunately, there were flaws in his scheme. Firstly, John and Yoko had split, unbeknownst to Michael. They were in the trial-separation stage and John was spending his nights in Los Angeles in a continuous drunken orgy with Harry Nilsson. The woman in his life at the moment was May Pang. Lennon’s attitude was that if Yoko wanted to embarrass herself in front of a huge audience, let her. George and Ringo weren’t about to see Yoko perform solo, and she was still being vilified as the woman who had broken up the Beatles. The Starship were too busy as well, so they sent their septuagenarian protégé, Papa John Creach, to perform his violin blues.

  So instead of his fantasized Beatles reunion, Michael got an earnest but challenging set from Ono, a competent performance from Papa John and the incredible Jimmy Smith, funking out on the Hammond organ. Ten thousand people showed, which was huge for a Padres game but far from the sellout Harrison had hoped for. But it got the station a ton of publicity—some negative, but publicity nonetheless.

  Harrison was also dabbling in other fields. While attending a party at a record promoter’s home in Los Angeles, he ran into a man named Bob Wilson. Wilson had been programming KDAY—a dying progressive AM station, but was getting out to start his own business. He wanted to challenge Claude Hall’s supremacy by forming a trade newspaper that would cater exclusively to radio, and not primarily service the record business as the big three (Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World) did. He’d heard of Harrison and had read a few guest columns he’d written for different industry publications and proposed that Michael be the editor of the rock section for his new venture, to be called Radio and Records, or R&R. Harrison, never one to turn down an opportunity, agreed to give it a try.

  He recruited his wife, Sharon, to make calls to radio stations for reports and they ran the operation out of their living room. It was then that he formalized the guidelines of what he was doing at KPRI into a cogent philosophy with an appropriate handle: AOR, or album-oriented rock.

  He eschewed the terms “progressive” and “free form” because they were exclusionary. He believed that the terms had come to symbolize only things you can’t do: You can’t have slogans or jingles, you can’t do promotions, you can’t direct the jocks. As early as the WLIR days, he was uncomfortable with what progressive radio was becoming.

  In the next two years, he wrote a series of articles explaining his philosophies and attracted owners and programmers across the country who wanted to have freedom and make money. They believed, as Harrison did, that the two need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, one couldn’t produce masterpieces using the paint-by-numbers approach. Programmers had to adapt Harrison’s ideas to their own situation and some did it better than others. But in the end, Michael became the unofficial consultant to a host of radio stations, now grouped under his appellation of AOR.

  All the term AOR really meant was that the station emphasized albums over singles. Traditional Top Forty would take an LP and only play singles as they were released. AOR would take a new LP, designate four or five cuts to be played (depending on the artist’s reputation and the album’s overall strength), and work them into various categories with different emphasis.

  Finally, after two years of often cutthroat competition, Ron Jacobs made one of his infrequent calls to his crosstown rival. Could Harrison meet him for lunch? Michael was curious and agreed to see the man he had fought in a neck-and-neck battle over the years. Jacobs bought him a meal at Burger King.

  Ron Jacobs had had it. He was getting out of KGB. It had become too much of a grind. He offered Michael his job, at a large increase over what he was making at KPRI.

  But Harrison had his own surprise for Jacobs. He was leaving KPRI. His column for Radio and Records had become so huge that he could no longer manage it from home with only his wife and a couple of interns for help. He was exiting radio completely, moving to L.A. for a big office in the big city to be managing editor at R&R for big money. San Diego, which had been the battleground, was being deserted by the two generals in exchange for fresh challenges up the coast.

  So Michael Harrison was out of radio again. His latest exile, although this time self-imposed, again lasted for one day.

  Band of Gypsies

  Michael Harrison wasn’t the only jock whose entire life was uprooted on a regular basis. Most disc jockeys lead a nomadic existence and typical are the stories of Pete Larkin and Charlie Kendall. Their histories briefly intertwine, and their sagas are familiar to anyone who has made a living in radio. Both men had theatrical training and considered acting as a trade at one point. Kendall gained his most success as a manager, Larkin as a jock, although he did program two stations on his way up the ladder. Both had successful voice-over careers and are on the outskirts of broadcasting today, with Kendall very active in new media.

  Pete Larkin first worked at WVOX in Westchester County, New York, before joining the staff of WLIR as a part-timer in 1969. He taught school for a while to make ends meet before plunging ahead with radio. When Harrison and I converted WLIR to rock in the summer of 1970, Larkin was not in the original lineup. Being left over from the old format, his style seemed too slick for the more natural approach we encouraged. But he loved radio and saw potential lurking at WLIR, so he agreed to come in after sign-off and work with me on modifying his style.

  After several weeks of late-night sessions, Larkin had broken his glib habits and become a valued member of the staff at WLIR. But as bad as our full-time pay was, the part-time stipend was worse. Part-timers essentially worked for free, if one were to deduct food and commuting costs from take-home pay. But Pete had an asset that none of the rest of us did: a first class radio telephone operator’s license, or as it is more commonly known, a first phone. By virtue of a rigorous course of study and a tough examination, a first phone allowed you to be a sole operator of a powerful AM station due to supreme command of the technical aspects of broadcasting. To be an FM jock merely running your own console, all you needed was a third phone, roughly the equivalent of passing a driver’s license test. (Rules have since been relaxed.)

  WAYE in Baltimore was an AM day-timer (a station that broadcasts only while the sun is up). Pete’s background and first phone qualified him for a job as program director and morning man. A strictly low-budget operation, he worked the winter months from 7 a.m. until noon, with but one other jock, who worked noon until sign-off. In the summer months, another staffer was hired to fill the midday gap necessitated by the longer hours of daylight. WAYE was a completely free-form station, so as program director, all Larkin had to do was mind his own show and make sure he and the one or two other jocks were roughly on the same page. There was no competition, and despite the limited operating hours and the AM signal, WAYE was able to score ratings in the four range, very respectable for a progressive format. And like other stations of its ilk, the music wasn’t confined to pure rock. When Igor Stravinsky died, the station did a lengthy musical tribute to the maestro, and when Tammy Wynette issued “Stand by Your Man,” Larkin liked it so WAYE played it. They once did a phone-in contest, asking listeners who they liked more: Sinatra or Presley. They played neither, but were flooded with callers voicing their preferences.

  After eighteen months, WKTK in Baltimore came calling. They saw the impressive numbers Larkin had achieved under severely handicapped conditions and offered him more money. But the real lure was their powerful FM signal. Despite the fact that they were a part-time religious station airing God Squad programming in the morning, Larkin’s afternoon show and the effective nighttime staff piled up good ratings. Again, this demonstrated the relative unimportance of mornings in FM’s early days. The freedom wasn’t quite as complete as it had been at WAYE, but restrictions were few. Jocks would reach a consensus on recommended cuts from new records, and Larkin once had to scale back a nighttime personality who took on a Satanic persona for his show. Larkin didn’t feel comfortable with the slogan “God in the Morning, Satan All Night,” which might have described what was beginning to
develop, so he nipped it in the bud. Other than that and short of murder, it was almost impossible to abuse the freedom. Almost anything was acceptable, including long raps, which were encouraged as expressions of personality rather than diminished as they are at music stations today. For most of the day, there was no competition—WAYE handed WKTK many of its listeners after sign-off. And many of these would stay once they sampled FM’s aural superiority.

  After eighteen months, Larkin was on the move again, this time to afternoons at WMAL-FM in Washington, D.C. The market was bigger and the money better, even though he wasn’t brought in as program director. Interestingly, the network of record promotion men was instrumental in acquiring the job. Baltimore and Washington are considered one territory, so when an opening occurred or was rumored in either market, the hypesters were aware of it and didn’t hesitate to recommend their favorites. Since promotion men help jocks advance their fortunes, these same people could be expected to return the favor when a record came out that needed help. Quid pro quo.

  Owned by the Washington Star newspaper, WMAL-FM was already formatted in 1973, but very loosely. Its main restrictions were a result of dealing with labor unions. For the first and only time in Larkin’s career, he had an engineer with total control over the technical elements. So rather than program spontaneously, as most progressives did, Pete had to plan his show in advance and type up a play sheet for the engineers to follow. There are obvious disadvantages to this approach. From the management side, it added an extra salary, along with the attendant benefits package, so it made it harder to show a profit. From a programming aspect, in addition to the loss of spontaneity, the “feel” for the music was missing from the engineers’ often heavy-handed segues. Some of the younger techies might understand how one song should flow into the next, but some of the veterans transferred from WMAL-AM had a strong distaste for the music, which could manifest itself in many negative ways. The split-second timing—when a song like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” with its abrupt ending, was played, another song had to begin precisely at the right moment—just wasn’t there. Another downside was the lack of Michael Harrison’s X factor. Since a jock could preprogram twenty-minute sets, he was free to roam the station while the engineers ran the show, which came at the expense of the symbiotic relationship with the music. A jock would sound like he wasn’t listening carefully, because in many cases, he wasn’t listening at all. The sizzle was missing from the delivery, and ratings could suffer as a result.

  Contemporaneously, WNEW-FM had the best of both worlds. Engineers were eliminated in 1972, but prior to that point, the turntables were in the air studio and under the jocks’ control anyway. Therefore, the commercials and other necessary annoyances were handled by the engineers, leaving the staff free to concentrate on the music. After the engineers’ original union contract expired, WNEW-FM went into a full combo operation, which actually was less desirable. It became a more lonely existence during off-hours, and the presence of another mind for stimulation was missed, especially if it was one simpatico with the culture. The jocks then had to perform the mundane tasks of keeping the program log and re-filing commercials, which also took away the total concentration on the music. But the segues would always be the way the jock wanted them, and some preferred the privacy to the company of another collaborator.

  WMAL-FM was Larkin’s longest-running radio job, lasting almost five years. The program director was a man named Terry Hourigan, who had come over from WMAL-AM and had all the sensibilities of an easy-listening jock—every bad habit that Larkin had rid himself of in becoming a credible progressive jock. He was a nice man but clueless in the intricacies of rock programming. The station was called the “Soft Explosion,” an oxymoronic slogan with the accent on moronic. Hourigan had the problem many superficial jocks do—handling every record with an equally sunny approach. This entailed treating an apocalyptic song like “Eve of Destruction” with the same upbeat outro as “Afternoon Delight.” Listeners saw through this very quickly.

  Janis Joplin’s final album, Pearl, contains a great driving lead track entitled “Move Over.” In my mind, it is still far stronger in its condemnation of an insensitive lover than anything Alanis Morissette has expressed. Joplin scats over the closing fade, “and you expect me to fuck you like a goddamn mule.” The music director at WMAL-FM brought this line to Larkin’s attention, but told him not to tell Hourigan, because if he knew, he’d pull a very strong record.

  So it was Larkin’s little secret. Congressman Harley Staggers was spearheading a campaign against obscene song lyrics, and since the station was based in Washington, there was always the danger that the congressman would catch wind of “Move Over” playing on D.C. airwaves. But like most iconoclasts, Larkin took pleasure in tweaking pompous politicians with a holier-than-thou attitude. He almost drove off the road one day, however, when Hourigan, who preceded him on the air, played the song and came out of it with a sunshiny, “Hey, there. Nice, nice thing from Janis Joplin,” having no clue of what she’d just sung. Pete wasn’t about to take musical direction from this man, and thankfully, little was offered.

  ABC bought the station and soon converted it to their Rock in Stereo format, bringing in their own jocks and, in time, firing Larkin. It was as if Wal-Mart had come in and bought their little general store. The call letters were changed to WRQX and they battled powerhouse station DC-101 for market supremacy. Pete knocked around D.C. doing commercials and fill-ins at other stations for a while, until an opportunity arose in New York.

  Charlie Kendall’s travels were even more circuitous than Larkin’s. Charlie was working in radio in Mississippi at the age of fourteen, then worked at several different jobs at West Coast stations before alighting at WMMS in Cleveland in the early seventies. Charlie was a morning host and a music director in Ohio, but his real success came in management. He was programming WBCN in Boston by 1977, crossing paths with Charles Laquidara. It was Kendall who first introduced a structured format to that legendary station, but Kendall, having risen through the talent ranks, appreciated the difference between a station that emphasized systems over people.

  Charlie could be his own worst enemy. He was an original whiskey and cocaine guy, which endeared him to some members of the staff, but his tendency to behave erratically and miss too many workdays hurt him with upper management. He had a low threshold for boredom, which meant he rarely was content to leave well enough alone. It seemed that he was only happy in battle, and once a fight was won he wanted to move on to new challenges. He’d pick turf wars with his bosses, struggles that he would have easily won with his intelligence and radio acumen had his destructive habits not impaired his perceptions. Once, sitting in the back of a limo, he became so angry at a subordinate that he bit him viciously on the shoulder, drawing blood.

  His talent allowed him to get away with such behavior temporarily and his superiors would tolerate it as long as the numbers were strong. But within a couple of years, WBCN was sold to the fledgling Infinity Group, which refused to keep bonus incentives in Kendall’s contract. Since Charlie will almost never compromise on principle, he was gone in a flash.

  Kendall quickly got a job as station manager of an Indianapolis station, but soon realized that managing a sales staff and a group of accountants wasn’t for him. After two months, when the program director’s job at WMMR in Philadelphia became open, he leapt at the opportunity. Like Pete Larkin, that made five stations in less than a decade, the Gypsy lifestyle of a radio person.

  When We Was Fab

  As celebrated as John Lennon and Paul McCartney were, the “quiet” Beatle, George Harrison, had surprised many with his popular success. George had released a triple-record set called All Things Must Pass, produced by Phil Spector, that had sold far better than any solo Beatle effort to date. It featured several hit singles, including “My Sweet Lord” (for which Harrison was later sued because it sounded like the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”). But as George continued his solo career, including h
is Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, the critics began to sour on him. Although Harrison’s solo material was solid, he was dismissed as a lightweight, and Lennon remained the media’s darling.

  Dave Herman had always enjoyed George’s work, and eagerly accepted an invitation from a friend named Rich Totoian to catch Harrison’s show at Madison Square Garden in 1975. The concert was transcendent, one of the finest the now established morning man Herman had ever seen. He was outraged at the savage treatment the press had accorded George and told his friend that he’d like to meet Harrison and tell him personally that many in the media sincerely enjoyed his work. In fact, Dave wanted to interview the former Beatle for his wake-up show.

  Dave’s friend Totoian was a national promoter for A&M Records, which distributed Harrison’s Dark Horse label, and he got word to George that Dave was interested in an interview. Dave wrote an impassioned letter, expressing his feelings on how shabbily George’s work had been treated. Shortly thereafter, he received word that the media-shy artist consented. He was to fly out to L.A. the following weekend and interview Harrison at his home. Herman immediately booked his trip, which included a red-eye flight Sunday night so that he could return for his Monday morning show.

  Upon arriving at Harrison’s Los Angeles digs, he was escorted back to the pool area to meet the Beatle. After their introduction, he began to set up his tape deck and microphones, but Harrison looked disappointed.