During the 1960s, the ratings success of the Boss Radio format on KHJ in Los Angeles demanded attention. Before the decade ended, people in the radio broadcasting industry started talking about who did what at the station in an effort to try to determine who deserved credit for the ratings success of of KHJ. Over 40 years later, some people still have very strong emotional responses to things that happened so long ago.
Emotions
As human beings, we need emotions. But, sometimes, we let our emotions take over our lives. I’m thinking about this because in March 2009 I was a recipient of group emails sent by various individuals whose goal was to engage in emotional discussions online about who was responsible for “The History of Rock and Roll” documentary that first aired on KHJ in 1969. Over the years since 1975 when I first conducted primary research into KHJ, I wondered whether it served any reasonable purpose for me and others to engage in discussing KHJ and the past. Logically, I thought that the past is the past and obviously the past never changes. Of course, I was being too logical. This has more to do with emotions than logical or reason. People have an emotional need to keep remembering and talking about things in the past.
This website of mine is an attempt to help promote a clear understanding about KHJ in the past and the people in the past who made KHJ the ratings success that it was. You may work yourself up emotionally about what you read here. But, the reality is that this website attempts to clarify once and for all what happened in the past at KHJ in Los Angeles without emotional strings attached. Even so, I realize and accept that some people will continue to keep discussing their perceptions about what happened and work themselves up emotionally.
Short Attention Spans
Because you are here today reading my website, you have a fighting chance to understand what made KHJ successful starting in 1965 when the Boss Radio format was launched. Many answers to questions about who did what, and, who deserves credit are found right here on the pages of this site by way of the words of people who were there in person and saw what happened. These website pages contain many decades worth of information and commentary from people who were involved in Boss Radio and KHJ and beyond Los Angeles from the middle of the 1960s onward. Nowhere else will you find this degree and depth of collective wisdom about Boss Radio, KHJ, and the national radio programming efforts of Bill Drake and Gene Chenault. If you are among those who have short attention spans, you likely will become overwhelmed. However, those of you who actually take the time to read all that I have pulled together here for you at this website will be rewarded with sharing in the collective wisdom.
Let’s start by going back to the year 2007, when discussions about who deserved credit for KHJ in the 1960s heated up Don Barrett’s LARadio.com website to the point that Bill Drake wrote a very rare commentary that starts with an apology: I’m truly sorry that after all these years this response became necessary. This mess puts a cloud over some otherwise very fond memories. I find this very unpleasant. And sad. Let’s not try to rewrite history. Let it be. My God! That was over 40 years ago.
Drake (right), who died in 2008, was pictured at the 1990 Silver Anniversary of Boss Radio KHJ with his former business partner, Gene Chenault (center), and reknowned radio talent Casey Kasem.
Impact of the “Drake” Brand Upon Others
After the success of KHJ in the 1960s, the so-called “Drake sound” expanded across America and into Canada. Several people who were involved in Boss Radio told me that the way the trade press and others started using the name “Drake” generically did not give proper credit to everyone involved in the creative process.
“Chenault’s point of view that night was that ‘Grant and Lee had been brought together on the same team.’ And of course, I’m going ‘Right on! Which one am I? ‘Grant or Lee?’ Drake’s rap to me that night was, ‘This is just the beginning. RKO’s got these other radio stations. After we do the job here in Los Angeles, Ron, well then, we’ll move on to other things. You’ll take the East Coast and I’ll take the West Coast.’ Or, vice versa—I forget which coast I was supposed to get.”—Ron Jacobs
Drake remembers that getting the contract to program the RKO Radio chain starting with KHJ was the beginning of the attainment of a goal which he and Gene Chenault had long held. They wanted to program several stations simultaneously. The reality is that their coming to Los Angeles to KHJ and creating Boss Radio was never intended as an exclusive LA deal:
“The reason I wanted to get into that in the first place was that I wanted to do a multiple-station thing. At the time we were doing Stockton, Fresno—those were the first two—and San Diego, there were three. Then with the advent of the L.A. thing, I had to drop Stockton, and there were still three. Just trying to put it together, whether it was a station like KFRC [San Francisco] or whether it had been some place else didn’t much matter to us.”
Bar Napkins Spawn Pop Culture Success
In the September 2004 K-Earth 101 interview broadcast in Los Angeles, Drake commented that the development of the radio format for Los Angeles happened as he and others wrote down “...a few things on some bar napkins...” at various places.
For his part, Drake was focused on the national expansion that was made possible by the work of the talented team at KHJ. “KFRC [San Francisco, California] was approximately a year after KHJ, sometime I’d say around the Summer of ‘66. I think that CKLW [Windsor, Ontario, Canada] and WRKO [Boston, Massachusetts] and WOR-FM [New York City] at the time, then WHBQ [Memphis, Tennessee] was six months to a year after that, I think. I forget the time. I don’t really know, but it was KHJ and then KFRC and then a little later the others.”
Drake further explained that he entrusted the programming management of KHJ to Jacobs because he believed in Ron Jacobs. But, there was more to the decision than that. Drake admitted that he, himself “being program director at KHJ was never the intent.”
When KFRC also succeeded in attracting a large audience as KHJ had done, Drake noted that some critics labeled the Drake-Chenault programming as purely a California phenomenon:
West Coast Radio Conquers North America
“They said at the time after Los Angeles and San Francisco, ‘Well, that’s West Coast Radio.’ You never know, so at that point we’d been approached by a guy from KAKC in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was good money and also it was a very interesting thing for us because I figured, ‘All right, if this is supposedly ‘West Coast Radio,’ Tulsa is the middle of the Bible Belt and home of Oral Roberts and all that stuff.’ So, we went into Tulsa and did it, and the same thing happened. We had actually tested [the format] there in the middle of Oklahoma before we did Detroit, Boston, New York, and all that.”
There is one infamous example of a major market where the format never had a chance. After the programming successes of the format in New York and Boston, efforts were begun in Washington, DC to replace a classical music format with the rock and roll format. Local protests against the intended format switch were so vocal that Washington, DC’s classical music format was preserved.
However, the execution of the Drake-Chenault format and imagery grew to be consistent from market to market. Newsweek observed, “The Drake sound is a deliberately bland, smoothly modulated mixture of pop favorites, and has been so successful in capturing mass audiences that, within the trade, its creator’s name is now used generically, like cellophane and aspirin.”
Drake, himself, told me that once the consultancy had grown to a nationwide scale in the RKO Radio stations and also at a handful of non-RKO Radio stations, the maintenance of the formats and sound involved the cooperation of a team of people, who followed directions on paper: “I think there were very few times where everybody was together at the same time. Generally it would be a thing of going into a market or one of the other guys going into each market. Or one or two of them individually coming out here. But as far as everybody actually sitting down in the same room at the same time, I don’t think it happened more than twice, if then. Even in those situations it was for that purpose. It might have been some RKO meeting or something like that...Of course it was also very highly designed on paper as far as what goes where and what’s done there and how it’s done and so on and so forth. It’s going to be pretty close anyhow if you’re getting anywhere near the proper execution of it.”
Drake characterized for me how he saw the group working together: “You can, if you do it properly, get a lot of people sort of ‘thrashing things out’—a little different ideas and insights into things. That’s what we always tried to do was exchange a lot of information on all that between the stations. One thing would trigger something or another. The basic concept of the thing, the basic structure of all the stations was almost identical.”
Gene Chenault told me that he saw Bill Drake as the “architect” of the Drake-Chenault programming, and explained Drake’s low profile within the group efforts as intentional. Chenault stated that Drake could monitor the sound of consulted stations from the listener’s perspective—at the beach, driving in a car, at home—but away from the environment of the station itself.
But, how did people really feel about the use of the “Drake” brand name?
How People Felt
Ken DeVaney, who in 1965 was selected to be the general manager of KHJ when Boss Radio started, explained his opinion to me in 1975 about who contributed to the creation of the format, imagery, and sound besides Drake himself:
“I suppose it’s like any other organization. The more remote a figure becomes, the more there is a mystique...If I may use the Howard Hughes analogy: Power we understand he has because he controls the dollars; the mystique is a product of his absences. If he was a known quantity, that is to say, a guy who’s on the streets daily and making public statements. There is no mystique to President Ford or to Ronald Reagan principally because of that fact that they are very visible and we see their failings or the attributes daily—their good qualities and their bad. Well, Drake just wasn’t around.
“And it’s very easy once you have that kind of remote position from any given structure to have a mystique. As far as power was concerned, yeah, he had ‘life and death’ [hiring and firing power] over jocks. I felt some of his activities were not too healthy for the personnel—certain things he would do: his, seeming to me, unwillingness to allow credit, for example, to be accepted by the persons who had developed an idea, but arrogating this to himself.
“But, I’ve got to tell you: With Ron Jacobs and the staff that I had down there—and I’m not going to try to exaggerate my contributions at all; it was probably minimal—but that’s where the ideas were cooked and hatched and developed. And Drake wasn’t around.”
Given human nature, it would be unreasonable to expect that Ron Jacobs could be satisfied with the situation at KHJ, at least insofar as his not getting credit for doing what he did to make Boss Radio so successful. In the 1975 interview with me, Ron Jacobs told me that he met with Drake and Chenault at a Los Angeles restaurant called The Cock and Bull, “for dinner and drinks—which were referred to in the group as ‘winkiepoos.’ There was a lot of optimistic and euphoric talk about the incredible future that was ahead of us.”
“That’s the point where Chenault got carried away...Chenault was hoisting a winkiepoo and saying, ‘We have Grant and Lee together on the same team now, and we will toast the ratings gods, and beat everyone in Los Angeles...’ Chenault’s point of view that night was that Grant and Lee—or something equally preposterous—had been brought together on the same team.’ And of course, I’m going ‘Right on! Which one am I? Grant or Lee?’ Drake’s rap to me that night was, ‘This is just the beginning. RKO’s got these other radio stations. After we do the job here in Los Angeles, Ron, well then, we’ll move on to other things. You’ll take the East Coast and I’ll take the West Coast.’ Or, vice versa—I forget which coast I was supposed to get.”
Jacobs further elaborated to me: “I never felt myself as part of Drake-Chenault. I mean, I always feel I’m working for the people whose name appears on the paycheck. Drake-Chenault was, because of FCC requirements, at least technically not in the line management of the station. They were literally consultants. As they expanded, I had to pretty much restrain my emotions about their success on Xeroxing what myself and others had done at KHJ.
“So, I wasn’t spending a lot of time getting off on the fact that Drake-Chenault consultancy had elevated the RKO station in Boston from nothing to everything—except for whatever satisfaction you can get in knowing someone has taken your stuff and doing it at another station...It was important to me that the people that mattered knew and the people, more importantly, that I personally respected intellectually and hung out with knew… From then it got to be downhill. I was probably sublimating my bitterness about it and it resulted in my eventually splitting from there.
“If you were writing about McDonald’s, no matter what PR Ray Krock put out in his lifetime, you must remember that the whole deal was a creature of the McDonald’s brothers’ imagination. Krock cloned it, beyond, I’m sure, his wildest dreams. In this analogy, think of Drake and me as the brothers and Chenault as Krock. Is that metaphor subtle enough?”
Getting Screwed in the Aftermath of ‘The History of Rock and Roll’
Jacobs further clarified this for me: “Henry Ford’s name is on cars because he started that automobile company. But he didn’t invent the automobile.” When I asked him about Ken DeVaney and others had said to me, Jacobs responded: “Ken DeVaney very politely but pointedly stated the truth. I left KHJ when my contract ran out in June 1969 after, what I considered, getting screwed in the aftermath of ‘The History of Rock and Roll.’ There were a lot of broken promises.”
Drake has pointed to the many contributions of Ron Jacobs to the overall success of Boss Radio. Jacobs, himself, noted how Drake gave him credit in Claude Hall’s book. But, clearly, the whole issue of who deserves credit will likely never been resolved to the complete satisfaction of everyone. Jacobs told me, “I can’t say that it didn’t bother me somewhat, but it felt more important that I got the job done and that the people in the business, as long as they knew who was doing what, okay--. Because inside the station everyone knew who was doing what and there was no question about that. And at the KHJ 25th anniversary in 1990, the guys with whom I got to number one with gave me a platinum CD presentation saying, ‘If Vince Lombardi comes back as a Program Director, he’d be Ron Jacobs.’ That meant a lot to me. I broke up on that one.”
Mark Denis, gave me some additional comments which clarifies the situation further: “Every program director at the Drake stations—at least as far as I know—was basically in charge of his own ship. Promotions and contests either originated in the radio station itself...or else we’d work together with [national program director] Bill Watson or maybe one of the other program directors was doing a promotion or another one of the stations in the chain was. Or Ron Jacobs would have one at KHJ and so we’d do it that way.”
Roger Christian was involved in Boss Radio at KHJ as one of the “Boss jocks.” He later worked at K100 in Los Angeles preceding the Drake-Chenault consultancy there, and lost his job when the Drake team took over at K100. He gave me a “Drake-employee” perspective on Bill Drake and how employees were treated: “He did hire some knowledgeable people—people who were very dedicated to him—who produced out of desire for recognition, out of fear, out of whatever...I think somewhere along the line if these people are not still with [Drake] whether he treated them right or whether he didn’t—obviously they went on their own.”
Ken DeVaney provided comments that went ever further: “I think Drake has managed—probably through the Machiavellian skills of Chenault—to arrogate to himself credit for a great many things he had absolutely nothing to do with because it was good for the Drake-Chenault company to present that kind of picture.”
This response prompted me to ask a follow-up question of Ken DeVaney: Did DeVaney think Chenault acted as the “image manipulator” at Drake-Chenault? DeVaney’s answer was direct: “Oh God, yes. Oh, no question about it. He’s the guy with the skill to do and accomplish these kinds of things.”
Claude Hall, the Billboard magazine columnist, told me this about Drake: “He assembled a good staff. One of the smartest things he did was hiring Ron Jacobs because Ron Jacobs was a very, very hard working guy. He’s extremely bright...Drake may not be that bright, but the thing that Drake does: he thinks. He just sits back and thinks a lot and his major role, I think, in RKO during his time as consultant, was a thinker—as a brain to figure things out...A lot of people think Drake invented the tight playlist, that he invented this and he invented that. He didn’t. But like a genius—and the role of a genius takes in many different facets—what he was able to do was synthesize. Einstein didn’t ‘invent’ E=mc2 he synthesized it. And this is what Drake did.”
Bill Gavin, the radio and music industry columnist, gave me his appraisal of Drake’s Los Angeles efforts with Boss Radio at KHJ: “When he came into Los Angeles, there’s no telling how his ideas would have worked out if he hadn’t had Ron Jacobs. I’ve always credited Ron with more than half of the credit for making Drake’s system work, and work so beautifully at KHJ. There’s no question about it. He had a great team and he motivated them. Drake didn’t have to do too much in the day-to-day and week-to-week operation except just sort of be a coach from the sideline. Jacobs was the captain, the big motivator, and he’s one the great guys in radio.”
Mark Denis told me something very similar, in the context of explaining the eventual decline in the popularity of Drake-Chenault radio: “There was a tremendous respect for Bill Drake because he obviously had a successful record and so on. But, Bill Drake’s success was due, I think, in large part to the people he had working for him, Ron Jacobs, particularly...I think the reason for that [the decline in the popularity of Drake-Chenault radio] is the absence of Ron Jacobs...I really honestly believe that.”
Bill Gavin told me what he saw as the reason for the decline in popularity of Drake-Chenault radio. He said he believed that the nationwide Drake-Chenault radio programming grew to be “self-defeating to the extent that the tighter it becomes, the more sterile it becomes. The more you muzzle your jocks, the more you make them robots, the sooner you alienate any of your listeners with any sense of taste or maturity.”
Conclusions
Any writer of history should expect to get into disputes over “who deserves the credit” for a particular event, or, series of events that he is writing about. I wrote this website after I did primary research and did not base what I wrote for this website on my own subjective opinions. Nor did I attempt to spin what I wrote to curry favor with anyone because I don’t “owe” anyone in the radio business.
My conclusions, based on years of research and writing about the events surrounding rock and roll radio in America in the 1960s are these:
The name Bill Drake will be well remembered for decades in the radio industry (as will the names of Boss Jocks Morgan and Steele). Other peoples’ names associated with Boss Radio and KHJ—Chenault, Jacobs, DeVaney, Watson and the rest—may be less remembered. This may not be fair to those other people. Nor this does not mean that those other peoples’ names deserve to be forgotten.
We are aware how top motion picture directors’ names are remembered through the years, even while individual actors or technical personnel names from the movies fade from memory undeservedly. And so it must be accepted with radio industry names.
Does Bill Drake, single-handedly, deserve “all the credit” for Boss Radio? Of course not.
I do not wish to leave you with the impression that I credit “only” Bill Drake. Throughout his entire life, the simple fact is that Drake did not claim that kind of credit for himself. He was not the program director at KHJ. He was not one of the Boss Jocks on the air at KHJ. He was the one man, however, whose name widely became generically attributed to the radio programming style that was called Boss Radio. All that Bill Drake is credited with accomplishing at Boss Radio and later throughout the RKO Radio chain was made possible by the hard work of many people, whose names, over the years, may fade from memory undeservedly.
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