The radio stations owned by RKO greatly benefitted by the presence of Bill Drake and Gene Chenault and their team from the mid-1960s until RKO terminated the contract in 1973.
Money. It was really all about money. The end of the Drake-Chenault radio programming dominance begins immediately after the flow of money into RKO starts to drop.
In 1972, Bruce Johnson was selected as president of the radio side of RKO. As the new head of RKO’s chain of radio stations, Bruce Johnson’s prime responsibility was to keep the chain from losing ground to the emerging power of FM stations to attract and maintain loyal audiences.
Much like when television become a potential threat to AM radio in the 1950’s, it was now 20 years later, and FM posed an obvious financial threat to AM radio’s stronghold over the American radio audience.
To offset the loss of listeners to FM and to what was then called “progressive rock,” the RKO flagship station, KHJ, started changing its music format at least a year before Bruce Johnson was hired. Billboard magazine explained:
“The imitators would hardly recognize the new sound of KHJ today. Some of the programming foundation is still there—such as an image of being the station in town on which to hear oldies (called ‘goldens’ by the staff of KHJ), but even the goldens have been cut back drastically.”
And, as in the 1960’s, the other Drake-Chenault-consulted stations followed the lead of KHJ in order to “update the stations’ programming and be a little more a reflection of what’s being sold in the music market—albums as opposed to singles.”
The inclusion of album cuts on RKO stations, however, seemed to be what led to the chain-wise drop in ratings. Bruce Johnson was concerned about preventing further ratings slide. He described for me the situation he found:
“When I took the job I was told that the basic problem was the ratings of the RKO station which had all been dropping like a rock. They were down about 30% I guess, chain-wide.
The problem was, as a consultant, Bill Drake was not in a position to order changes, that the program directors had become very independent, that they were doing whatever they wanted to do and weren’t taking his advice. That was the reason things were falling apart…
“Their position was that they should be employees of the company: Drake and Chenault should be employees of the company. Their recommendation was they may be vice-presidents—Gene in charge of administration, and Bill in charge of programming. And we should also bring on the staff, Bill Watson as national program director and Bernie Torres as Bill Drake’s assistant…
“So that whole thing was presented to me and I said, ‘Okay, fine. If that’s the problem, let’s attack it that way.’” So it was that the Drake-Chenault team became employees of RKO Radio.
Bruce Johnson explained that one of the first things that Drake-Chenault urged RKO to start playing progressive rock in Los Angeles on FM by using the ill-fated “Stereo Rock” automated audio tape format:
“They [Drake-Chenault] wanted us to take the progressive rock format here at KRTH—it was then KHJ-FM. I didn’t want it. I don’t think Bill really wanted to do it, I think it was more Gene’s idea or somebody else’s idea. Bill was never hot about it...I didn’t feel, based on the type of service we had gotten in the past on oldies and hit music where we were waiting two and three months to get a reel of audio tape, I didn’t see how we could be competitive…
“I refused it and we decided to come up with something else which turned out to be the oldies rock format of the 1950’s and 1960’s which they called ‘Classic Gold’ and that was developed, I guess, in October 1972. It went on the air here in Los Angeles on KRTH and when it became such a tremendous success here, then it spread throughout the country.”
Out of a possible negative situation, something positive grew. The Drake-Chenault “Classic Gold” format became a proven hit. And, thanks to such a strong beginning with the format, KRTH in Los Angeles since the 1970’s has maintained a strong audience loyalty as a preeminent classic oldies station. On the AM side, KHJ finally faded away completely into memory in the late 1980’s when the station was sold and was turned into a Spanish-language station to serve LA.
The decline of Bill Drake’s and Gene Chenault’s clout at RKO Radio continued into early the 1970’s. Bruce Johnson was a strong management figure to which Drake and Chenault, as RKO employee, had to answer. Bruce Johnson explained what happened:
“When my regime came along, we would say, ‘Why? What factual data is there to support this thing that you want to do? Prove it to me that what you say is valid.’ And we would have arguments about that. ‘Who the hell are you to tell the ‘great man’ what he’s doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not trying to program the stations, I just want to know why we’re doing these things, and certainly these things are not going well. We keep losing, and I want to stem the tide.’”
Bruce Johnson told me that a key issue in the internal corporate friction between the Drake associates and himself was the fact that Drake and his associates were working for two companies, RKO and Drake-Chenault Enterprises:
“It didn’t matter in the beginning. It mattered to me later on when I felt that maybe too much time was being put in over there and not enough with us. I asked Bill at one time, I said, ‘Make a decision. It’s either us or it’s them. You know, if it’s going to be both, then it will be 50/50 and not 60/40 or whatever.’ That became a problem.
“We felt we were paying a great deal of money to then American Independent Radio, later, Drake-Chenault Enterprises. We thought we ought to have better service than we were getting. I got a little upset at times that some of the work that was being done by the music director was going to Fresno and other places, and we had a lot of discussions about that.”
The tensions grew until in 1973, Bruce Johnson canceled the RKO consultancy contract with Drake-Chenault. And so, after 8 years of setting in motion highly successful programming systems process on a nationwide chain of major market radio stations that generated a lot of revenue, on one day in Los Angeles, it was just all over. Shortly after that, Drake and Chenault and many of their team from RKO went over to K100.
After the Drake-Chenault team was ousted by RKO management from KHJ in 1973, for a dozen or so subsequent years, numerous consultants were brought in who kept changing both the sound and style of the station. In 1974, for example, superstars of rock and roll were invited on the air to do their own thing live on the air.
On September 20, 1974, the morning drive slot for one day only was held by John Lennon. His famous personality and wit are preserved in these rare recordings, where you also get to hear much of the late-1970s KHJ imagery and promos:
JOHN LENNON on KHJ part 1 (4:15) MP3, 1.95 MB
JOHN LENNON on KHJ part 2 (5:10) MP3, 2.37 MB
JOHN LENNON on KHJ part 3 (4:07) MP3, 1.80 MB
Posted by Woody Goulart. Filed under: Business •
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