FM

by Richard Neer

  The next day, Michael informed Bloom that he was resigning as PD and wanted only to continue as a talk show host. He offered the station his counsel, but knew that he wasn’t going to be needed. He suggested that Bloom resign as well, before the deluge, which he now saw as inevitable.

  Bloom was outraged. He said that Harrison was deserting him by not sticking it out as program director. Since Harrison had made a commitment to travel to Australia for two weeks to consult a broadcast group there, he suggested they declare a truce and revisit the situation upon his return. By the time Michael landed back in the States, Bloom had hardened his position. Not only was Harrison out as PD, but he was taking away the talk show as well. He didn’t want anyone that disloyal around the radio station. Bloom didn’t even deliver the bad news in person; he chose to send the message through his secretary. Thus Michael’s ten-year involvement with KMET ended on a destructive and spiteful note.

  Although I sympathized with my friend’s struggles on the West Coast, I had my own problems to deal with. My relationship with Charlie Kendall wasn’t improving. I decided to clear the air with him once and for all, trying to improve our communication difficulties. I sat in his office and explained that neither myself nor McEwen responded well to verbal abuse, and that if he could learn to stop yelling and screaming at us, we shared enough common ground to work together. I said that the tirades only caused us to tune him out, and that a different tact would serve him better in making his points.

  His response was worse than I could have anticipated. “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me how I should conduct my business,” he said calmly. “I’m the boss, you work for me. If there’s any adjustments to be made, you have to adjust to me. Not the other way around.”

  I mumbled something about both of us working on the problem, but he wasn’t having any of it. Mark and I knew that he wasn’t thrilled with our morning show. I was his declared enemy from the start, and Mark was my sidekick. But I’d also misinterpreted my friendship with McEwen. My overall impression was that we got along very well and were friends above and beyond work. I had driven him out to New Jersey in search of a house. We ate meals together, played golf together, socialized outside of work frequently. We unburdened our respective romantic troubles on each other—he about his estranged wife and their attempts to reunite, and me about a volatile relationship I was having with my fiancée. It wasn’t a complete bed of roses—we did disagree about show content on occasion, but I thought that was a normal occurrence when two people spend a lot of time creating a project together.

  Later I found out that McEwen suspected me of being a closet bigot. I was hurt, since I’d hired the man after WAPP had dismissed him and had accepted him as an equal when I was doing the show by myself. Somewhere down the line, I had started to refer to him as the Dusky Moor, a quote from Shakespeare’s Othello. I thought that the appellation was a harmless acknowledgment of his dark, dashing image. It was Kendall who told me that Mark found it insensitive, and that it spoke of my disregard for his feelings.

  When I confronted Mark about it, he admitted that he had told Charlie about how it had bothered him. He also resented his role in our Miami Vice parodies and thought that they had become stale. More resentments came out and as I listened I began to believe that perhaps I was insensitive. It was like breaking up with a lover you’ve unconsciously taken for granted, where you’re read chapter and verse all the things you’d done wrong since you met. You had admitted your transgressions and thought that they’d been forgiven and forgotten. But then there are dozens of other slights and offenses that you weren’t even conscious of, minor incidents that had been laughed off when they occurred.

  It comes down to trust. I felt that I could trust McEwen, but obviously he didn’t feel likewise. If I had a beef with him, I’d tell him and it was quickly forgotten. For whatever reason, he held it all inside until it was too late. After that, our chemistry was never the same. I was guarded when I teased him on the air for fear that he would take my jibes seriously, and he protected his turf as funny man by insisting on more autonomy to do bits on his own. I was merely to serve as his straight man. Our respective romantic difficulties didn’t help. I was totally devastated when I had to call off my wedding six weeks prior to the scheduled date, and he was experiencing the daily ups and downs of a reconciliation.

  In any team situation, especially if it involves only two people, success and failure can be equally dangerous traps. When you are successful, you tend to paper over differences, which can then grow until they get out of hand. When things aren’t going well, small differences can be magnified to the point where they become insurmountable obstacles. Friends constantly whisper in your ear that you would be better off without the other guy dragging you down, and your ego tells you that they’re right. You tend to look for solutions outside yourself, when a hard look in the mirror might reveal the source of your problems. We had our good moments, but the numbers were shifting inexorably in Howard Stern’s favor. Looking back, I don’t think that anything Mark and I could have done would have changed that.

  Our last best chance came when John McGhann, a former director of NBC’s The Source, agreed to produce our show. McGhann was just what the doctor ordered, a cheerleader who could boost our sagging spirits. He was constantly nudging us in the right direction, lavishing praise when we succeeded and offering encouragement when we fell short. His infectious enthusiasm even made Charlie believe that the show might work after all. But John wanted to be an actor, and after a couple of months of working with us, he left for Los Angeles. He was able to score some nice guest shots on television, including a role on L.A. Law, before his death at a much-too-early age.

  After John left, Charlie felt the show went downhill. I didn’t believe that, but when Stern’s numbers passed ours in the summer ratings book of 1986, they decided to pull the plug. When we got off the air one Friday in mid-October, Mike Kakoyiannis’s secretary told us we were both wanted in his office.

  That walk down the corridor was the longest I’ve ever taken. It felt like we were on Death Row, about to be executed and powerless to earn a reprieve.

  “Are we going to be fired?” Mark asked as he turned to me, incredulously.

  “I don’t know. Sure feels like it, though, doesn’t it?”

  By our downcast looks upon entering his office, Mike knew we had already figured it all out and there was little that he could offer to ease our pain.

  “Fellas,” he began. “What can I say? You’ve just done your last show. I know you guys tried hard, but the results just weren’t there. Stern has to be stopped, and his momentum is getting to be too much. I’m sorry. You know I like you both personally, but this is business.”

  Mike hinted that there might be an opportunity for me somewhere else soon, but he wasn’t specific. He went on about severance issues, but we were too stunned to absorb his words. Neither one of us had much to say. We asked about who would be doing the show and he replied that Charlie would be handling it on an interim basis until they found a replacement. Our newswoman, Lisa Glasberg (now Lisa G), would be kept on for now.

  Mark and I went out to breakfast and lamented our fate, second-guessing every decision we’d made in the two years we worked together. The fact that we weren’t being replaced by some hotshot from another market made it even worse. It was like being told that “you guys are so bad we’ve got to get rid of you now even though there is no Plan B.” We didn’t blame each other, though, and I felt that whatever the fates had in store, Mark and I had buried our differences and would still be friends. I was wrong about that. At first we talked regularly, but over the years my phone calls to him went unreturned until I finally stopped trying.

  He was hired by CBS television to be the jolly weatherman on their new network morning show, even though his weather background consisted of reading ten-second reports off the wire. Al Roker was the obvious role model, but Mark’s comedy experience and friendly persona were a natural for morning tel
evision. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, until Kakoyiannis approached me about producing a sports show for WNEW-AM. As it turned out, I wound up hosting The Sports Connection on that station, which led to my current career path. But as events would curiously transpire, my next air work was on WNEW-FM.

  McEwen and I had no idea that Charlie Kendall himself was on thin ice. His drinking and cocaine use had gotten worse as his unhappiness at WNEW grew, and it caused mood swings that made him difficult to work with. He had resigned time and again in battles with Kakoyiannis about control. Mike had resisted moving Dave Herman to middays, and was now battling Charlie on his plan to return him to mornings to succeed Mark and me.

  Mike felt the need to be in complete control of what went over the air. He told Charlie that as a rookie general manager, he’d made the mistake of not riding herd closely enough on me when I was program director, and he wasn’t about to make the same error. He also felt that Charlie could be a bit of a loose cannon, and needed to be reined in at times to save him from himself. Mike had a tight relationship with our promotions director, Rose Polidoro, and if Rose wanted a campaign on the air over Charlie’s objections, Rose generally won out. Mike had also usurped Charlie’s authority by hiring Carol Miller without Kendall’s knowledge or approval. It was presented as a fait accompli and Charlie had to bite his tongue and live with it. He was forced to fire Meg Griffin and replace her with Carol. Jeff Pollack would soon replace Abrams as consultant and his advice about retooling the station by firing everyone was reaching some of the proper ears within the company.

  Finally, not two weeks after we’d been sacked, Kendall’s frustrations built to the point where he’d had enough. He typed a lengthy, strongly worded memo to his bosses, detailing his unhappiness with Mike’s constant undermining of his authority. He spelled out the conditions under which he would stay on, and stated unequivocally that if those conditions weren’t met, he would resign immediately.

  Before submitting the memo to Kakoyiannis, he showed it to Muni. Scott perused it and said, “Why don’t you just put a gun to your head now, Fats. It’ll be less messy.”

  He showed it to his production manager, who also urged him to withhold the memo. But his wife knew the toll the constant grief was causing her husband and favored the power play. She was convinced that Charlie was in the right and that Mike would cave in to his demands. Kendall agreed, and never seriously considered the possibility that he was overplaying his hand. So Charlie submitted his Magna Carta and within minutes was called in Kakoyiannis’s office.

  “Charlie, I’m going to pretend this never happened. I’m going to tear this memo up. Now let’s sit down like men and reach some kind of understanding. I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t accept this.” This showed progress for Mike, who had reacted impulsively to inflammatory memos in the past.

  Buoyed by his wife’s support and his own sense of righteousness, Kendall believed that if he stood firm, Mike would have to agree to his ultimatum. “No, Mike,” he said defiantly. “The memo stands.”

  Two days later, Kakoyiannis sent for him again and accepted his resignation. Mark Chernoff was elevated to program director. Dave Herman returned to do mornings, but was unable to stop the Howard Stern onslaught. Chernoff came to see me in my Sports Connection office, shortly after he’d gotten the job of his dreams.

  “I didn’t agree with Charlie’s decision to fire you guys,” he said. “I’m not sure this would have been the morning show I would have gone with, but I thought you deserved more time. In any case, it’s too late now, but I think you’re a good jock and I want to keep you active here. Can you work next Saturday afternoon? I’m stuck. I really need you.”

  Barely a month after I was fired, I was back on the air, albeit as the lowliest fill-in man, instead of a popular and highly paid morning cohost. But under Chernoff’s more gentle guidance, the station rose to new heights, achieving a high-water mark of 4.4 in the 12+ share. Mark continued Charlie’s format but with a lighter touch, loosening the musical restrictions just a bit and adding songs that he knew had been popular in New York before Charlie’s arrival. He softened the sound by taking a little of the harder-edge songs out of the rotation, on the belief that they encouraged teens at the expense of our older audience. He wasn’t the pushover some expected him to be, showing surprising toughness when the station’s interests were involved. He solidified what was to become the golden era for WNEW-FM, in terms of ratings and revenue. But a series of business transactions having nothing to do with good radio pushed him into the waiting arms of the competition—and Mel Karmazin.

  The Long and Winding Road

  Ironically, the seeds for WNEW-FM’s ultimate destruction were sown as it reached the height of its ratings popularity. It took years for the vine to finally wither and yield no more fruit, but for KMET, the end came with shocking suddenness.

  George Harris, Charlie Kendall’s successor at WMMR in Philadelphia, was brought in to fix KMET after Harrison resigned and lasted only a few months. There was no chemistry among Harris, Howard Bloom, and Lee Abrams. Frank Cody was next and was out within a year. Larry Bruce was last in the string. Barely a year from the time Harrison departed, the station’s ratings sank back to a one share and they flipped formats, becoming “The Wave,” a smooth-jazz station. One of the first triple-Z jazz outlets, they changed their call letters to KTWV and hired Harrison’s Goodphone assistant Christine Brodie to program it, where she remains to this day. It has been a modest success, but never achieved the ratings it had in the early eighties.

  Harrison moved back to the East Coast and bought his own talk station in Springfield, Massachusetts. He did the morning show, served as general manager, sales manager, and almost everything else. Caught in the crossfire after the changeover at KMET, Howard Bloom was dismissed.

  Metropolitan Radio, as many had predicted, was a fool’s errand. Carl Brazell had known that he faced an uphill climb, but believed that he and his other general managers were up to the task. Was it altruism, sentimentality, or shrewd business acumen that had caused John Kluge to sell his life’s work to Brazell and company?

  It was probably a combination of the three. He undoubtedly wanted the company he had formed to remain in good hands, staying true to the principles that had guided him in amassing an enormous personal fortune. This was not the prime consideration, however. By giving his general managers financing and only forty-eight hours to respond to his offer, he executed a cagey business deal. He left radio and television completely for the nascent cellular-technology business. I don’t have to tell you how that worked out.

  These were the go-go eighties. It was a time when you could buy a home for three hundred thousand, live in it for a year, and sell it for four hundred. Wall Street was creating new millionaires daily. No one saw an end even remotely in sight. So when the numbers at Metropolitan didn’t add up—when you leveraged $285 million with the only hopes of payback coming if your gross doubled in two years—it wasn’t blocked by more conservative heads. The financiers at Morgan Stanley figured that if Brazell and company couldn’t hack it, they’d sell at a profit to someone who could.

  One by one, Metropolitan spun off stations until only three remained—WMMR, KMET, and WNEW-FM. By then, they were grateful to find an angel to bail them out of their fiscal condition, and that company was Legacy, which was investing heavily in what Karmazin famously called “oceanfront properties.” In New York, that meant WNEW-FM, a stable AOR with an impeccable reputation and solid management in place. Ratings had jumped to a 4.4 share under Chernoff as the competition struggled to find an identity. But whereas Brazell was a veteran radio man who profited by the sale after an honest attempt to run the group, the owners of Legacy had a track record of buying and holding short term, and then selling at an immense profit.

  This hadn’t been possible in the past. With Reagan’s policy of deregulation, the FCC had relaxed its rules on station ownership. Previously, the government viewed broadcasting as a publi
c trust and wanted stability. When a license was applied for, they sought proof of sufficient capital. They wanted to know that their licensees would operate their businesses for at least three years in a responsible manner in the public interest. But now broadcasting was looked upon as just another business, with the stations a mere commodity. If leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers worked for Gordon Gekko, it was good enough for radio. The bankers were in charge and FCC approval was merely of the rubber-stamp variety. As long as Wall Street ratified the deal, the FCC was assuaged and gave transactions only a perfunctory look.

  It was at around this time that Kid Leo decided to leave WMMS in Cleveland after a sixteen-year run. Malrite had a national program director, and every decision Leo made was being questioned, down to the level of what singles they decided to add. There were so many layers of corporate management that radio just wasn’t fun anymore for this child of free form who loved music. He resigned to take a position with CBS Records that allowed him to work directly with artists.

  Mark Chernoff initially wasn’t too concerned about new ownership. The intelligent thing to do would have been to leave well enough alone. With ratings and profits at an all-time high, why upset the big apple cart? But Legacy wanted instant results so that their bottom line would look good to potential suitors. That meant using their own people rather than Metropolitan’s and their hastily made decisions started a snowball rolling that would turn into an unstoppable avalanche.

  The first ghastly move was to bring in a general manager from Rochester’s WCMF named Pete Coughlin. Under his leadership, the station in upstate New York had shares in the mid-teens and dominated the AOR market. This was impressive unless one looked further and discovered that when Coughlin had taken over the station, it had numbers in the mid-twenties. He had spent his childhood in the metropolitan area, so it was assumed he understood the market. This assumption allows that when a ten-year-old leaves New York for the hinterlands, he takes with him a complete understanding of the media in the tristate area. Sound business reasoning, to be sure. Immediately upon joining WNEW-FM, he wanted to tear the place apart.