FM (27 page)
But to disc jockeys who didn’t appreciate these minor differences and were vexed at their musical freedom being quashed, Pollack and Abrams were equally detested. In fact, at some stations, the DJs weren’t even told about the participation of a consultant, who would be squirreled away for clandestine meetings in hotel rooms, the hidden hand that moved the chess pieces. Most jocks had enough contacts within the industry to know that their station was being consulted even if upper management chose to keep it secret, and often would plead their cases directly to Abrams, going over their immediate bosses’ heads.
Both Pollack and Abrams licked their chops at getting hold of WNEW, WBCN, KSAN, and KMET. They believed that their formulas could take these underperforming progressive stations and bring them into new levels of glory. The difference was that Pollack wanted to clean house and replace all the jocks with his loyalists, and Abrams was willing to work with the existing talent. The jocks at the Metromedia stations saw both of them as barbarians at the gate, and lived in fear of the day when the assault would bring an abrupt end to their freedom.
Eve of Destruction
Ratings at KSAN in San Francisco had achieved high levels in the early seventies. But since the salesmen’s hands were tied in terms of the station’s refusal to accept jingle commercials, the only advertisers were local head shops, boutiques, and leather crafters. National sponsors like Coca-Cola weren’t about to give up their expensive, highly produced spots to please the hippies at KSAN. Cash flow became a problem, as small businesses were notoriously lax at paying bills, especially for something as ephemeral as radio advertising.
Under Tom Donahue and his protégée, Bonnie Simmons, an eclectic band of hippie broadcasters turned the station into a virtual commune. When an interim manager issued a memo instructing the jocks not to bring their dogs to work because the carpets were being ruined by excrement, he also sent out a reminder that marijuana was still illegal and would not be tolerated on the premises. On his desk the next morning was a pile of dog feces with a roach stuck artfully in the middle. At WNEW, Mel Karmazin would have had the offenders hunted down and strung up in Times Square.
The station actually went so far as to broadcast drug reports on a daily basis. They forged a cooperative deal with a laboratory that analyzed the safety and purity of whatever substance was sent them. The subjects would deliver a small sample of their stash to the lab and be assigned a random six-digit number. A few days later, KSAN would announce the number and the results of the test. There was no fear of FCC reprisal. They had their own news department and the reporting was far from the objective presentation that WNEW displayed in its simulcasts with its respected AM news department. KSAN did a death count every day during the war, and their vehement opposition to the conflict was not hidden.
KSAN was so politically charged that when the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, their manifesto was delivered for broadcast on KSAN’s airwaves. The jocks were totally free to invite whomever they wanted onto their shows—musicians, filmmakers, activists, or just people off the street with a crazy story to tell. For the most part, they were able to craft the interviews to be entertaining and informative. Music was completely of their own selection, and individual taste prevailed over sales figures. The only attempt at formatting came when the station designated certain albums with a red dot and suggested that these be played more frequently. But the dots weren’t based on research or sales reports; they were just the records the station felt should be supported. But even this was ignored, and no one took them to task. Donahue might mention to the afternoon jock that he was playing too much of the Marshall Tucker Band, but that was the extent of the musical direction. They tried to have music meetings, but they were sparsely attended and deteriorated into complete wastes of time. Selections that became popular at KSAN would not be dictated by Donahue, but arose naturally from the staff’s collective preferences. Stationality was achieved naÏvely since everyone listened to each other’s programs and they frequently socialized. If one jock heard another playing a great track, the rest would soon follow suit.
Money wasn’t a big factor either. The music librarian in 1970 was paid ninety dollars a week, but practically lived at the station out of devotion to the cause. The jocks were all paid roughly the same amount, about three hundred dollars, and there was little jealousy and backbiting as a result. Since many of them were working their first radio job at KSAN, the egos were kept in check in the early days.
George Duncan held the reins very loosely at KSAN. It is doubtful that he would have been able to countenance this kind of activity if the station could be heard regularly by John Kluge. The old man paid attention to his complaint mail, and his conservative values were reflected in the content at the stations within his hearing. But from a distance, Duncan understood the necessity to provide a comfortable working environment for these hippies, and gave them great latitude. It wasn’t until Tom Donahue passed on in April of 1975 that Metromedia took a more direct interest in running the station. The old axiom “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applied until then and since KSAN was making them money on a shoestring budget, they acted autonomously.
The big man’s death shook the station like an earthquake, and staff members to this day are emotional when his name is brought up. His four-hundred-pound bulk was a constant health risk and, combined with the drugs in fashion at that time, it is regrettably understandable why his heart stopped beating at the age of forty-six. It is likely that Donahue’s days at KSAN were numbered in any case, as he was in negotiations with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to buy and manage his own station to compete in the San Francisco market. Always the astute businessman, why should he make money for John Kluge when he could be maximizing profits for himself and his allies? Simmons was appointed program director after his death.
Given the lack of album-rock competition and the politics of the times, KSAN remained the hub of the city’s popular culture for some time. Bill Graham, the Bay Area’s preeminent concert promoter, gave them tie-ins to all the major shows. Van Morrison, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the other top bands that lived in the area would drop by for impromptu interviews. But even when the visits were scheduled in advance, the jocks often forgot to promote them and frequently neglected to record them for posterity. Each jock was issued one reel of production tape, and since it cost fifteen dollars, they were careful about how they used it and which interviews they decided to archive.
This careless spontaneity actually had a beneficial effect. The listeners never knew what was going to happen next and were discouraged from changing the dial for fear they’d miss an important event, like a visit from Mick Jagger or a fistful of Grateful Dead tickets about to be given away. Since the promotional budget was less than twenty thousand dollars yearly, cash giveaways or expensive vacations were not even considered. The prizes awarded included dinners, albums, or concert tickets, given to them by record companies. Any promotions that KSAN did were linked to the lifestyle of the audience and often played on its creativity.
One campaign that worked beyond their expectations was a contest staged to design a billboard for the radio station. Anticipating only a handful of entries, the jocks figured they could determine the winner at a quick informal meeting. But upon receiving over five hundred entries, they actually had to convene a panel of art critics and marketing gurus as judges. One submission that almost took top prize was a poster depicting an explosive battle scene with the caption, “Oh KSAN you see, by the dawn’s early light.” But a few nights before the winner was to be announced, an explosion took place at Metromedia’s Foster and Kleiser billboard offices in Oakland. The proximity of the bombing made the judges uncomfortable, worrying that the destruction might have a connection to the contest. So they awarded the grand prize to a cartoony space moose that had to be seen to be appreciated. The best of the other entries were rounded up and turned into an exhibit that toured the country.
One crazy promotion that backfired was designed by Warner Bros. rep Pete Marino to publicize the release of Randy Newman’s “Political Science.” Marino was a flamboyantly gay figure who owned a Rolls-Royce that was elaborately emblazoned with colorful vignettes of San Francisco. He reputedly was a close and personal friend of Liberace and they exchanged clothes on occasion. He also frequented the North Beach strip clubs and was a friend of the Condor’s Carol Doda, a busty exotic dancer. He recruited her for the promotion, centered around the song’s repeated chorus, “Let’s drop the big one.” The idea was to simultaneously release hundreds of doves from atop KSAN’s downtown building, literally covering the sky with birds. What this had to do with “dropping the big one” was certainly a stretch, unless the doves relieved themselves en masse. Local TV stations were notified and cameras were all out, awaiting the big moment. KSAN jocks trooped up to the roof with Doda, who wore a Randy Newman T-shirt stretched so tightly over her enormous bosom that Newman’s picture was distorted beyond recognition. On the way up the stairs, the jocks fired up joints and exhaled the smoke into the birdcages. Cameramen craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the spectacle, although I’m not sure which they thought was the more spectacular, Doda or the doves (maybe she embodied the “big one[s]”). But at the crucial juncture, the birds had inhaled so much smoke and were so stoned that they refused to move from their perches. So Marino and the staff reached into the cages and began tossing them off the roof, with grotesque consequences. The birds were too looped to fly and fell to the pavement like mini–lead zeppelins, where they were run over by trucks and buses. The ASPCA got involved and the station had a full-fledged embarrassment on their hands. The incident was fictionalized years later on the TV show
WKRP in Cincinnati,
with turkeys dropped from a helicopter replacing the doves.
But the station wasn’t always cruel to flying creatures. KSAN had a great ability to galvanize its audience during times of crisis. When an oil spill devastated Stinson Beach, the station put out the call for its listeners to help to save the shore wildlife. The next morning, five thousand of them showed up to rescue injured birds. They did a “Turkey Exchange” every Thanksgiving morning, where listeners would post messages like “I’m new in town and have no place to go for dinner. Call this number if you’re willing to open your home to me” or “My husband and I have room for four more at our house. Call 555-1333 if you’re hungry.” Thousands shared dinners over the years and the station never was informed of one ugly incident.
Lee Abrams tried to crack the market in 1975 with KYA-FM, but it was a dismal flop, mainly since the music was not reflective of the market’s vagaries. Things changed shortly after that with the advent of KMEL in July of 1977. Armed with an enormous promotional budget, they made ratings inroads very quickly. Riding a wave of boastful publicity claiming that they would immediately annihilate KSAN, it took them longer than they figured to finally surpass them. KMEL took the best elements of what their competitor was doing and gave them form and structure. Popular favorite songs, which might turn up once a day at KSAN, appeared with regularity at KMEL. Like most free-form stations, the programming at KSAN could be erratic, rising to the level of art but too often wallowing in self-indulgence. The jocks were losing sight of their audience and were paying too much attention to their peers in the industry, who had a tendency to be too far ahead of the curve, always seeking the new and adventurous, even at a time when the audience was searching for the safe and familiar. The spoils of success infected some of the jocks with inflated egos and they were not working as hard as they once did to keep up with the music. Stationality was broken as musical tastes diverged; the new-wave movement caused a rift between AOR aficionados and punk rockers. Drugs were also a major distraction, as their grip on some staff members distorted priorities.
At the root of KSAN’s success was their strong tie to the cultural and political identity of the city. But the Vietnam War had ended, and there was a sympathetic Democratic president in office, so radical politics became less a factor in choosing radio stations. And the best values of the hippie counterculture had become absorbed into the mainstream. Bonnie Simmons reflects, “I don’t think that radio makes the culture, but mimics the culture. Your success can be judged on how well you mirror what’s going on outside. And for ten years, I think we made a pretty good stab at it. Maybe ten years is the life cycle of a radio station, and nothing can stop the inevitable evolution. The audience changes and seeks other things from their radio.”
Metromedia saw these signs and was alarmed by the erosion that KMEL was causing on the ratings. Management was pressed to make massive changes. Simmons saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that the free-form days were coming to a close. She had come up through the ranks under Donahue and had too much respect for his memory to be the one to format the station and shut down its freedom. She resigned at the end of 1978. Still in her twenties, she accepted a national promotions job in Los Angeles with Warner Bros. Records and started a new phase in her career. It was time.
Total free-form radio was in trouble in Boston as well. The newly formatted WCOZ was quickly threatening WBCN in the ratings and scooped them on some major shows, establishing instant credibility. The most notable example was a Who concert at the Boston Garden on a snowy November day. There had been an afternoon basketball game at the venerable old arena and afterward, bleacher-style concert seats were hastily rolled out over the ancient parquet floor. The debris from the game was merely swept aside under the risers since there wasn’t time between events for a thorough cleaning. After the opening act completed their set, smoke began to rise from beneath the bleachers. The doors to the adjoining alley were opened and the wind and snow came pouring into the building, actually fanning the flames. Some of the concertgoers panicked at the terrifying sight of flames crawling up the wooden bleachers, but the Boston fire department quickly snuffed out the blaze and restored order. The fire delayed the Who’s entrance by at least an hour as the arena was partially evacuated. The fans were in a foul mood from the acrid smoke and lengthy wait and were pounding their seats for the show to begin. But as the band finally hit the stage, something was clearly wrong. They stopped midway through their first song as Pete Townshend apologized and started over. As soon as they began again, Keith Moon collapsed and fell from his drum kit, completely incapacitated. The band beat a hasty retreat with Townshend promising, “We’ll be back.”
It seems that the delay caused by the fire had upset the delicate mix of drugs and alcohol that Moon needed to fortify himself for each performance and he was now hopelessly stoned.
The band trooped back onstage and Roger Daltrey made an announcement. “Keith has been taken ill. We’ll have to come back another time. We promise to return in April.” The crowd booed mercilessly and hurled garbage and ugly obscenities toward the stage as Daltrey threw the microphone down in disgust and stomped off.
