AUDIO • BUSINESS • PEOPLE • TECHNOLOGY

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His real name was Philip T. Yarbrough, but when he worked in Atlanta on WAKE, he chose the name Bill Drake to rhyme with the station’s call letters. It came to be a name representing both myth and reality–a mix of rumors, contradictions and power.

He lived 71 years and died from lung cancer in Los Angeles on November 29, 2008. He did not like going on the record after years of being misquoted by trade publications. However, in 1999, Drake sat down with Ron Jacobs for a one-of-a-kind interview in which he discussed what most people want to know about him and his life.

Ramona Palmer, who was his wife when he was just starting out in the radio business, remembers him in an exclusive commentary entitled “Married to the Boss of Boss Radio” that was first published here on Boss Radio Forever.

In early September 2004, K-Earth 101 (KRTH-FM) broadcast the legendary documentary “The History of Rock and Roll” accompanied by a rare interview with Bill Drake. During that interview, the 60-something Bill Drake articulated the importance of that famous radio format named “Boss Radio” on KHJ back in 1965:

“You have to realize that everybody had to adhere to the format. That was it. If they didn’t like that, then out of here. Don’t come here. So they knew that. And we looked for people who believed in it. We used it as a backdrop, like an assistant to the whole thing. Even if you have a bad day, you can only drop so far because the format, and the momentum, and the jingles and the music–just the mechanics of it will only let you fall so far.”

When Drake and his team came to Los Angeles, the found, as Drake explained in the K-Earth 101 interview, “There were some people who thought they were quote ‘personalities.’ If somebody was a ‘personality,’ we said fine. Robert W. Morgan certainly was. Real Don Steele certainly was. The thing is: Even they [Morgan and Steele] didn’t have something to say every time. And they learned that. Do it when you got it and keep your mouth shut otherwise, and keep the forward momentum going. People tune in to hear the music.”

In 1990, Drake was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about the 25th anniversary of the Boss Radio format at KHJ. He evaluated the contributions of his team this way: “We cleaned up AM radio. We put everything in its place. It was radio that was designed for the listener. Before us, disc jockeys would just ramble on incessantly.”

In 2006, Drake was quoted on www.top40timeclock.com as explaining: The REAL key to radio programming, is what you DON’T play…Anybody can come up with a list of songs to play…those lists are everywhere…What to leave IN and what to leave OUT is the REAL secret…and few people have that gift.

From modest beginnings, Drake and his business partner, Lester Eugene Chenault, assembled a team which initially gained national attention because of Boss Radio in 1965 on 93/KHJ in Los Angeles. The success of Boss Radio and all the descendant formats that were developed in the years following 1965 gave Drake the kind of power mystique which is usually reserved solely for motion picture or political celebrities.

Drake Power

He was called an “all-business bachelor” by Time magazine in 1968, and his power and influence was the subject of speculation by trade magazines and the mainstream media.

He had decided that he would no longer do interviews. Yet, Bill Drake agreed to a 1975 interview with me during which he said he had stopped doing interviews because of how he was quoted in the trade magazines and how they portrayed him. “I think that the trades a lot of times are–. I’m sure they don’t mean to be, but sometimes they are very prejudiced about things. I used to sit down and do interviews. It’s the reason I finally stopped all of that.”

He knew me from the radio station in Hollywood that he and Chenault consulted. I was very low on the totem pole and hardly had any interaction at all with Drake. But, he knew me, and for reasons I’ll never understand, Drake agreed to talk with me on the record about Boss Radio and Drake-Chenault radio programming. So, I met him at his home in Beverly Hills.

As we sat by the swimming pool, he told me what he had stopped doing interviews. “I’d pick up one of the trades the next week or whenever it was going to be in, and I’d read something that hadn’t even come up. They’d say, ‘Well, your tight playlist has come under considerable criticism from the record industry.’ I’d answer, ‘Well, I’m sure a lot of people don’t like it, but that happens to be what we do.’ I mean, I would say something that simple, and the headlines would say something like, ‘Drake Blasts Record Men,’” he explained.

Drake elaborated on how this coverage of him centered around the Drake-Chenault team’s programming of WOR-FM in New York. “Music in New York was a little different because we were playing more oldies there and I think that’s one of the things the trades didn’t like. They [the trades] felt that we were going to stifle all current product if we played oldies. It’s funny how those things get started. People actually begin to believe them.”

The power that Drake had was the subject of a lengthy October 1969 True magazine story. “Most professionals in broadcasting agree that Bill Drake is the most powerful man in American radio today,” writer Gene Lees explained. “He is also the most powerful figure in American popular music. Record manufacturers, singers, songwriters, music publishers, all depend on ‘air play’ to make their wares into hits. Drake says that he doesn’t play favorites. His company, he says, programs only records that the public wants and that fit into his own conception of good programming.”

The story also noted how in Los Angeles on KHJ “Drake began hammering on a slogan of ‘Much More Music,’ backing it up by playing more records per hour – 14 of them – than the competition.” Drake is quoted as saying that he cut down on the amount of air-personality talk to make room for more music. “I tell them, if you want to say something clever, say it in 15 seconds.” Notably, however, it was pointed out in the story how “Drake also cut the number of commercials per hour, on the theory that when listenership goes up and the station can raise its advertising rates, the station would earn more money from fewer spots.”

In an August 23, 1968 Time magazine article entitled “The Executioner” because of Drake’s power to fire on-air personalities who did not measure up, the success of the Boss Radio format at KHJ was explained in some detail: “Once new jocks are hired, they are drilled for a couple of months in the Drake style. The big idea is to unclutter and speed up the pace. The next recording is introduced during the fadeout of the last one. Singing station identifications, which sometimes run at oratorio length else, are chopped to 1 ½ seconds on Drake stations. Commercials are reduced to 13 minutes, 40 seconds an hour – almost one-third less than the U.S. average. Newscasts are scheduled at unconventional times, such as 20 minutes after the hour. Thus, when the competition is carrying news, Drake-trained deejays run a ‘music sweep’ (three or four recordings back-to-back) to lure away dial switchers.”

“Drake has built a wall around himself,” observed True magazine,“ and Bernie Torres is its biggest brick. This is to keep record-promotion men and assorted hustlers from driving Drake to distraction. Drake is a night person who only rarely rises before noon. Part of his staff, including administrative assistant Bernie Torres, a stocky, good-looking type, comes to the house daily. Torres takes the phone calls, usually telling you Drake isn’t home. When he recognizes the name as that of someone Drake will talk to, he reverses his position and calls his boss to the phone.

“At one of his favorite restaurants, he had to lay down the law to the management that he wasn’t to be bugged by promotion men while he was eating. To those he admits to his circle, Drake is a gracious host, an agreeable and often quite witty companion. It is hard to find anyone who hates him personally, even among his bitterest critics.”

The Mystique

The legendary Bill Drake mystique itself was a creation, an invention that grew out of the “Hollywood flavor” surrounding KHJ radio in Los Angeles in the 1960s and continued into the financially successful Drake-Chenault Enterprises projects through the 1970s. The “real” Bill Drake–a very tall, well-groomed, polite, Southern gentleman–differed from his well-crafted corporate persona.

Bill Drake played up his image as a “rock and roll radio recluse” with a telephone at his side which he used to place calls to the radio stations he consulted. At the radio stations, whenever the “hot line” lit up, it could strike fear into the hearts and souls of the employees who wondered, “What if that’s Bill Drake calling me?”

That was the role or “performance” that Bill Drake honed to perfection because it enhanced his power and his mystique and celebrity. That image had a tangible dollar value for many years.

It was highly unusual for Bill Drake to grant face-to-face time with people he didn’t know–and even rarer when he talked for publication about himself and Boss Radio. But, in 1975 Bill Drake agreed to talk with me to cooperate with my masters thesis research.

As it turns out, in doing so he helped set in motion the preservation of a portion of rock and roll radio history that otherwise would have survived only in people’s memories. Think about it. How many people who worked in Los Angeles radio with Bill Drake and Gene Chenault have published a book or created a website to tell their side of the story?

To this day I have saved one small piece of note paper upon which Bernie Torres, one of Bill Drake’s closest associates, had scribbled directions for me on how I could get to Drake’s house on South Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, “south of Wilshire, between Magnin’s and Sacks.”

The reality is, Bill Drake behaved like a down-to-earth kind of guy. He answered all my questions and he was not egotistical. My take on Bill Drake was that he presented himself as a gentleman, all the while chuckling more than a little at how many people in the radio industry had ascribed such power mystique to him. Of course, he loved the attention and the image because it helped him make a living. Who wouldn’t have enjoyed that? Who wouldn’t laugh all the way to the bank?

To monitor the stations whose signals did not reach his home in California, Drake had a monitoring system in his house where he could dial up a number in any city where a consulted station was located. He could as easily dial to the stations themselves whenever he wanted to use his phone as a “hot line” to reach people at the client stations.

Mark Denis, KGB program director from 1966 through early 1969, explained to me what happened to the San Diego station after Drake-Chenault acquired consultancy contracts outside of California:

“I was in San Diego almost two and a half years. I saw him [Drake] two times in San Diego and maybe had three telephone conversations with him at the most…But my contact was through [national program director] Bill Watson. It was like a chain of command type thing.”

Two American news periodicals broke the story nationally on the monitoring device and the “hot line,” bestowing an air of mystique upon Drake along with the status as a “great aloof leader.” The magazines explained that “by the dial of a number,” Drake could “monitor any of his ten client stations across the country” from his “$200,000 Bel Air mansion that boasts Spanish decor, five ‘master’ bedrooms, a sumptuous swimming pool and 24 telephone (including one in each bathroom.)”

Aided by such media coverage, Drake’s power mystique grew to be as much a personal and professional trademark as his name itself. The public perception of what Bill Drake was during the national consultancy—at least within the radio and music industries—was that Drake was some sort of all-powerful, ever-watchful, and decidedly mysterious mogul.