by Richard Neer
After I had cooled down, Muni and Kakoyiannis sat me down and said that I was being unfair and that I should give Charlie a chance, his ratings at WBCN and WMMR had been good, and he’d worked well at WMMS, a former Metromedia station in Cleveland. I was told he understood that things were different at WNEW and that I would be his adviser as sort of a program director emeritus. I could certainly appeal directly to Mike if I disagreed with any direction Charlie gave.
I naÏvely agreed to approach things with an open mind. As I welcomed Charlie to the station, he was very aware of my “drug addict” quote and wanted me nowhere near his programming decisions. He refused any orientation from me, saying that he’d rather learn things on his own. I began to realize that we would be enemies as long as we worked together, and that he was in a position to get me before I could get him.
He was given a gift from the gods weeks after he arrived. WPLJ inexplicably decided to change formats to Top Forty, leaving their three-plus share AOR audience behind. Their research indicated that for the long term, Top Forty had more growth potential. They fired most of their staff and left us with our pick of their experienced and popular jocks, people like Tony Pigg, Pat St. John, and Carol Miller. All three eventually worked at WNEW.
Charlie acted swiftly in his first months. He fired Pete Larkin and installed McEwen in the overnights. I viewed that as a warning shot at me, since he knew that I liked and valued Larkin. He steered the station almost directly to where WPLJ had been musically but with a slightly broader playlist that included select locally popular artists. He hired his wife, Lisa, as music director, rather than rely on Jim Monaghan, who knew the market better. But Jim was another one of “my guys,” so he tabbed him as morning show producer. He moved Dave Herman to middays and brought in Dan Carlyle to do late nights. He bumped Fornatale to weekends.
His quick scuttling of Superstars 2 was the right move. Charlie knew radio, and despite my problems with the way he treated people, he understood that WPLJ had just given us their audience and that if we didn’t take it, someone would. K-ROCK was about to change from Top Forty to classic rock, a relatively new format that only played rock oldies from the sixties and seventies. It had been purchased by Karmazin’s Infinity Group, which was now gobbling up some choice properties. Dan Ingram and Rosko (who had come back from France and worked at several Top Forty and urban stations) were fired as the station charted a different course. They took some former PLJ staffers, but clearly the AOR audience was ours for the taking.
And take it we did. Charlie relentlessly pressured the record labels for everything he could get, and since we were now the only rock outlet in town that played new music, we were gladly given most of what he wanted. Whatever wasn’t given, he took. He convinced one of our producers to bribe a recording engineer with drugs to get a test pressing of a new Stones release. Their label had to promise us a boatload of favors when we reluctantly agreed to pull it off the air. When Marty Martinez was dispatched to cover a David Bowie press conference, he was given a roll of out of order yellow tape stolen from the phone company. In the days before cellular technology, reporters would file their stories from pay phones in the lobby of whatever venue the event took place in. Martinez arrived early and taped over all the receivers, so that the other reporters were forced to seek phones in the street, most of which really were out of order. Martinez simply pulled the tape off one of the phones, filed a report, and got a big jump on announcing the tour dates.
Kendall’s way of handling the consultants was unique and effective as well. Whenever they would come to town, Charlie would make sure they were set up with a nonstop parade of hookers and cocaine. They stayed in their hotels and missed scheduled meetings at the station. Upon leaving, the grateful consultants would report that WNEW sounded just fine.
Charlie fired my brother for playing Monty Python’s “Sit on My Face.” Unfortunately, in a situation like this, Dan had erred big time and I was powerless to defend him. In today’s raunchy radio environment, the Python bit sounds tame, but at that time the obvious spoof on oral sex was in questionable taste for a station like WNEW. We had a female sales and promotions manager, and Kakoyiannis was very uptight about anything that might be construed as degrading to women. But essentially, these things could be dealt with in ways other than dismissal. There were suspensions, even fines that could be levied. In retrospect, it came down to the fact that Charlie didn’t like Dan on the air. He thought he tried too hard to be funny and wasn’t, always pushing for something that wasn’t there. And he’d committed the cardinal sin of being my brother and my hire. The only plea was one for mercy but Charlie wasn’t merciful in those days. After a nine-month exile, Dan-o would eventually be rehired by Charlie, who marveled at how he’d improved in so short a time.
Charlie yelled at people, forgot promises and commitments, and generally was hard to work for. But whether it was WPLJ’s abandoning the fray or Charlie’s innate programming skills, our ratings soared from the mid-twos to a four share. My morning numbers went up as well, and we did even better when Charlie removed McEwen from overnights and made him my sidekick. With Jim Monaghan producing, McEwen and I piled up some great numbers. The station even did a television commercial for us with me as Sonny Crockett and McEwen as Rico Tubbs, based on the Miami Vice satires we did. We did our show from many different local clubs with live music, the most memorable of which was pressed in a record—Elvis Costello’s rendition of “My Funny Valentine.”
Things were sweet for a while and our ratings made us impervious to Charlie’s pressure. I still wasn’t getting along with him but we’d declared an uneasy truce, since it seemed we both needed each other. And I had to admit that although I didn’t like his tactics, they did work for the betterment of the station. He updated WNEW’s remote capacity with wireless mics and transmitters and we covered every concert as if we owned them.
We got what we hoped would be a much-needed boost due to the impatience of Doubleday, the company that owned WAPP. After a solid start with 103 days of commercial-free music, they faded quickly and after two years changed formats, on October 5, 1984. Their defection gave us another ratings uptick and we sailed to a 4.3. K-ROCK had yet to become a factor, although they hired Jay Thomas, a talented disc jockey turned actor turned disc jockey to do mornings. Jay had been very successful some years before at 99X, the Top Forty successor to WOR-FM.
Charlie Kendall was responsible for a major innovation in his use of technology. For years, most stations, including WNEW, used a card system. Each song was given a grid card that the jocks had to initial whenever they played the record. The music director had to scrutinize the cards and discern patterns to see if jocks were cheating by playing only their favorites and ignoring the rest. This resulted in a lot of paperwork for both parties, and the system could easily be abused.
Computers were just beginning to be used to program stations. The knee-jerk reaction is that this represents a bad trend, and certainly given the direction radio has taken in the last decade there is justification for that viewpoint. But the computer saves the jocks and programmers a lot of work by replacing the card system and the resultant paperwork with a mouse click. Charlie junked the cards and replaced them with a program called “Selector.” Despite some initial bugs, Selector works at most radio stations where the music director simply feeds songs into it, and the computer spits them out at random. The music could then be perfectly balanced according to the factors the PD views as important.
But Charlie knew that WNEW was still different and that a computerized list of scattered rock hits was not what the jocks and audience expected of the station. So he contacted the system’s programmers and instructed them on how to build some flexibility into the system. What they invented together was “DJ Select,” and it may go down as Kendall’s most important contribution to the medium.
DJ Select allowed the jocks to delve into any category so that segues could be made and sets designed intelligently. One merely had to click on a son
g that didn’t mesh well with the others and the whole list of available tunes in that category would be at the jock’s disposal. Songs that had been played too recently or were played at the same time a couple of days earlier were eliminated. The program director set the rules, and rather than sift through hundreds of cards in different bins to avoid conflicts, a jock had a dozen choices at his fingertips, all cleared for airplay. The music director could simply print out the changes the jocks had made and there was instantly a permanent record of what was played. Instead of hastily scrawled music sheets, the jocks just clicked on the replacement songs and they were automatically entered neatly into the system. The DJs could thus have maximum flexibility, without the capacity to cheat easily.
This was a system that Charlie wisely pioneered, and it seemed to encapsulate the best of both worlds. I commended his innovations and his respect for the jocks’ freedom to program their own music, knowing that this system tangibly achieved what Harrison and I had dreamed of at WLIR. But forces over all our heads conspired to upset the roll we were on. Suddenly, our four-plus share and morning revenues weren’t good enough, even though they represented new heights for the station.
Group president Carl Brazell could certainly be cast as the greedy one here but he was under great stress due to another surprise development—Kluge sold him Metromedia. The old man was reenergized when he foresaw the rise of cellular-telephone technology and needed to liquidate his radio assets to fully fund his new endeavor. Rather than take on the lengthy process of finding a buyer and awaiting FCC approval, he hit upon the idea to sell to his own employees. He offered the whole chain to Brazell and his group of general managers for the fair market value, at least in his eyes, of $285 million. He even agreed to intercede with the investment bankers at Morgan Stanley to leverage the deal. Although the GMs were men of means, most of the money would have to be borrowed. He gave Brazell forty-eight hours to answer before withdrawing the offer. After gaining no sleep throughout the entire period in his efforts to forge the coalition, Brazell agreed to Kluge’s terms.
The new company was called Metropolitan Broadcasting (the original name Kluge had started with) and they assumed huge debt from the outset of their venture. Doomed from the start, stations had to increase revenues almost twofold just to stay in business. Immediately, plans were laid to spin off some of the chain to keep the others afloat.
The ripple effect was felt in Los Angeles, where Michael Harrison was told at KMET that KIIS and Rick Dees were now his target, not the vanquished KLOS and KROQ. Although still owned by Malrite, the venerable WMMS in Cleveland also heeded the siren’s call for bigger profits and turned to Top Forty, although they played almost exclusively singles from rock bands in an amalgam they called Rock Forty. They were the role model for what Brazell envisioned for KMET, as the Cleveland rocker broadened their appeal even further and reached sixteen shares. They had become such a habit in the market that people who didn’t even listen would cite them in Arbitron diaries because they were so hip to listen to. Much of what drove them to change was that AOR gurus had declared that artists like Prince were inappropriate for rock stations, which Kid Leo and his gang considered racist.
Despite the increasing corporate pressure, Mark McEwen and I still felt safe in the mornings throughout 1985. We blew Jay Thomas out in short order, and he was replaced by a weird guy who most considered a failed afternoon jock at WNBC. He had been fired when his superiors objected to a sketch that he did on the air about having sex with barnyard animals. His name was Howard Stern.
Where the Streets
Have No Name
A contest was staged in 1984 in cooperation with Radio and Records. A collective of record companies were its sponsors, and it was brilliantly conceived and executed. The setup was simple: It was open to program directors across the country and each week, they’d be asked to evaluate a certain number of records. They were to rate the records based on their final chart potential—would this song be a top twenty, top ten, number one, or miss the charts entirely? At the end of the year, the results would be tabulated and the winner would be given a grand prize, which turned out to be a red Mercedes-Benz convertible (ironically, like the one Mel Karmazin got when he joined Infinity).
What a masterstroke for the record labels! Here was a legal inducement to get program directors to listen to their new releases. In order to win the car, the programmers would have to carefully evaluate each song for its hit potential. Unspoken was the fact that if one were to pick a record to succeed, they would naturally champion the song on their own airwaves in an attempt to help it up the charts. Radio and Records profited, not only raising their already high profile with the labels, but making themselves must reading for the PDs, who naturally wanted to check their progress.
And of course, most program directors fancy themselves to be great judges of talent. Their calls on which records should be played and which should be avoided are a large factor in determining the success of their radio stations. To win or place highly in such a competition would raise one’s stock in the industry, and possibly lead to a better job in a larger market. At worst, it might convince a recalcitrant general manager of their value. And who wouldn’t want to tool around in a red Mercedes?
The winner of the contest, as it turned out.
Mark Chernoff, a short, slender man with sandy brown hair and a mustache, was programming WDHA in Dover, New Jersey. He had grown up a radio devotee, loving WABC, and then worshiping WNEW-FM. But he was also a scholar of the entire medium, aware of what WPLJ, WMCA, WNBC, and all the other major stations were doing. Like most programmers, he started out doing DJ work at a small station, eventually working his way up to WDHA. Like WLIR, it was a respected suburban station—its signal blanketed the middle and northern portion of New Jersey, but failed to reach Manhattan. Record promoters would visit a couple of times a month, and saw WDHA as a starter station for their new acts. If they couldn’t get a record played at WNEW-FM, they could work the suburbans—generate some sales and requests, and hopefully get noticed in the big city. Smart programmers in the large markets would key on certain smaller stations for guidance when the call was close. It was almost like the chain of progression in baseball—first you succeed in Class A ball, then AA, AAA, and finally, if the talent is there, you get to the majors.
One always had to be wary of stations that were too malleable to record company inducements. Heavy airplay may accompany a promotion, based on a large schedule of advertising and free concerts that may have nothing to do with a record’s potential. No smaller-market programmer was immune to such enticements, because revenue is so critical, but Chernoff was able to maintain his reputation for integrity despite those pressures. WDHA was considered a good bellwether because of its proximity to New York and Chernoff’s acumen at selecting hits.
And now he had proven it. Radio and Records called him with months left in the contest to inform him that he’d won. He was so far ahead of the competition that no one else could possibly catch him in the remaining weeks. Chernoff, with children to put through college, eschewed the convertible for a trust fund to help pay for their education. This was not your typical radio dude.
Chernoff was able to strike a balance between his dedication to an all-consuming business and his devotion to his family. He was active in his community and supportive of his sons’ Little League, coaching their teams when most others would be attending record company parties. He was as immune to hype as one could be in this business, and his discipline paid off when WNEW-FM needed a music director.
Charlie Kendall had been served notice that his wife could not stay in the position. Aside from the nepotism issue, the two represented a power block that alarmed Mike Kakoyiannis. So when the word went out that WNEW was looking, Chernoff applied, speaking first with Kendall and then going through the Muni ritual. Mark had met Scottso at a convention some months earlier, and the two had spent time together, sharing common tastes in music. Muni also appreciated Chernoff’s tota
l lack of artifice in a business filled with phonies constantly striving to advance their own causes. But leaving the interview with Muni, Mark felt that WNEW wasn’t really interested in him, having spent most of it listening to Scott regale him with stories. Sound familiar?
Weeks passed and Chernoff hadn’t heard from Kendall. Through friends in the business, he discovered that the candidate list had been narrowed to two, and that he was one of the survivors. His friend Jim Del Balzo of CBS Records suggested Chernoff call Kendall to thank him for the interview and to ask if he needed anything more from him. It was possible that Charlie hadn’t decided yet, or had and was postponing it.
Mark agreed to make the call, feeling despondent about not getting the job, but hoping to plant his foot in the door for future consideration. Upon reaching Kendall, the program director cut him off as he began to thank him for his time.
“Great, man,” Kendall said. “When can you start?”
Kendall had thought he’d already informed Chernoff that he’d gotten the job and was wondering why he hadn’t heard from him. Chernoff maintains that he never received any such call. However, he wasn’t about to argue the point and quickly gave notice to WDHA. Mark would later play a huge role in the further ascension and eventual undoing of WNEW-FM.
Meanwhile, at around this same time in Los Angeles, Mike Harrison was having his meeting with Lee Abrams on how to fix KMET so that they could beat Rick Dees and give the struggling Metropolitan a chance to stay afloat. There was no rancor between the two but that meeting convinced Harrison that his time at KMET as program director was over. Abrams couldn’t refute Harrison’s logical arguments in favor of his own music mix. They went back and forth into the night, and Abrams wound up getting sick. Harrison literally had to carry him back to his hotel room. It was the beginning of the end for KMET.