Boss Radio: Revealed at Last
    Ron Jacobs & Bill Drake
    June 19-20, 1999       home

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Paying Dues

RON JACOBS: So, after years of paying your dues in small market radio around Georgia, you end up at last in Atlanta on WAKE.

BILL DRAKE: From 1958 to 1961. First the all night show, then I went to midday, then I went to midday and afternoon drive and production director.

RON JACOBS: I've done that, too.

BILL DRAKE: The owner of WAKE would have these old buddies of his and he’d go out and they’d sell him these things and as a special favor to them, he’d do their commercials personally. This guy never heard of a 60 second commercial. You’d give the time away. I told him nobody wants to hear this. And that’s when I said to him: If anybody ever put on a radio station that was designed for the audience and not for the advertisers, the world would be a better place.

RON JACOBS: That’s a great quote.

BILL DRAKE: Oh yeah. Because I’m thinking who on God’s earth will listen to that? That was my theory.

RON JACOBS: But, both of us had to pay our dues in the radio business.

BILL DRAKE: We sure did.


RON JACOBS: I mean because both of us, before we were 20 or 21, had already done everything there was. Because when I did the all night—

BILL DRAKE: From sleeping at the radio station to—

RON JACOBS: You got it.

BILL DRAKE: To clearing the teletype machine—

RON JACOBS: You got it, you got it!

BILL DRAKE: To writing commercials, to helping write the logs.

RON JACOBS: Right. so the station management has no idea what they're asking us to do. The way I started learning radio, I dropped out of school the minute I heard there was an all night gig. I ran in there and got three bucks an hour. But I’d put on the longest track—that’s why I remember Montovani--and while that record was playing on the air, screw it, I’d let it track and I’d go through and I’d read everything in every desk drawer that wasn’t locked. I mean that was my way of like learning and stuff like that. And shoot, I mean in those days we would do anything to learn whatever we could learn.

BILL DRAKE: It never occurred to me not to do that. I mean I wanted to, and I wanted to learn. The teletype machine or even learning how it worked or writing commercials or anything.

RON JACOBS: Right, I would go into a station on a Sunday and see fricking teletype piling up in the “newsroom,” that’s been sitting there for a day and a half. I mean what kind of idiots are these guys? Not professional people. And we had to learn to read news and to be able to pronounce words correctly.

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