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Posts Tagged ‘Elvis Presley’

January 8^th is a special date for me.

It’s not because I’m an Elvis Presley fan. I like a lot of Elvis’ music but I wouldn’t categorize myself as a fan.

No, it’s because Charles Manson was a fan. Not THAT Charles Manson but, instead, the Charles Manson who was the general manager of radio station WGLD-FM, Chicago on January 8^th, 1973. It was on that day forty-one years ago that Manson decided to switch the station’s format, without bothering to tell the station’s owners, from Progressive Album Rock to Oldies.

At the time, I had just been fired from WGLD’s sister station, WMOD-FM/Washington,DC for defending the use of a “Chicken Man” joke on-air by the station’s morning personality, Jack Casey. It’s a long story.

In any case, as a member of the union American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), I had received a several pay package from WMOD and Sonderling Broadcasting which owned both the Washington and Chicago stations. Three weeks after being fired, I found myself flying to Chicago at the behest of Sonderling’s corporate program director, Dave McNamee to take over as program director for WGLD-FM. Consequently, I had not only been promoted from the ranks of on-air personality to management within the Sonderling organization but was also receiving both my severance payments from WMOD and my new program director’s salary from WGLD!

Radio. You’ve got to love it.

As it turned out, my stint in Chicago didn’t last very long. Manson didn’t like the idea of corporate imposing me on him and our relationship was strained from the beginning.

In early 1973, the Nixon administration was out to get broadcasters because they felt that the media was being too critical. This was just prior to the Watergate hearings and the administration was sending a message to the media.

At the time, a radio personality named Bill Balance was having some success doing a sex talk call-in show in Los Angeles so radio general managers in other cities decided to create their own local versions of a sex talk show. Charles Manson was one of them. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought it through.

WGLD’s midday music personality was assigned to host a one hour sex talk show each weekday.  If I recall correctly, it was scheduled between 10-11AM Monday-Friday.  I wasn’t a fan of the show because it really didn’t fit with what we were trying to accomplish with the station and I would have preferred to can it but the general manager ignored my objections. Of course, typical of the radio industry at that time, management hadn’t bothered to train this DJ about any of the legal ramifications involved in such a show.  One of the FCC’s rules made it clear that it was a finable offense if the content of a sex talk show was targeted at persons younger than 18 years old.

One morning during the sex talk program, the host found himself assigned to do a live read of commercial copy for a local driving instructor. Although I had warned him about being careful about the appearance of talking to teens, during his reading of the commercial the host ad-libbed a comment in which he said something along the line of “Hey, kids. They can help make sure you pass your driver’s test.”  Either the FCC was monitoring the show, a competitor had taped and submitted the recording to the FCC or a listener complained. In any case, WGLD got busted and the station became a poster child for the Nixon administration’s war against smut on the radio. Of course, as the program director I was held responsible for the DJ’s gaff.

That episode plus some other “philosophical differences” between Mr. Manson and myself resulted in my departure from WGLD in July, 1973. Once again, Sonderling Broadcasting was paying me a generous severance which allowed me to lounge by the pool and to watch the Watergate hearings.

One day, I received a call from Dick Booth, a former colleague at Northeastern University’s WNEU radio, who offered me a job at a new FM station in Pittsburgh where he’d been hired as station manager.  I was his second hire. The first was a 19 year old kid named Bob Pittman.

So, I loaded up my meager belongings into a rental van and drove to the Steel City where I met the guy who would ultimately offer me positions with his teams at WNBC, New York and at MTV.

All because of Elvis’s birthday.

On Elvis Presley’s birthday in 1973, the general manager of WGLD-FM in Chicago, an Elvis fan, decided to change the format of the radio station from progressive album rock to pop oldies. He made this rather rash decision without consulting with the station’s corporate headquarters at Sonderling Broadcasting. The general manager’s name was…Charles Manson. (No, not THAT Charles Manson).

Meanwhile, I was living in Washington, DC where just after Christmas I had been relieved of my duties as a DJ at Sonderling’s WMOD-FM and collecting severance pay because of a Chicken Man joke. Allow me to explain.

While introducing a recorded commercial message for a sale on chicken at the Giant Foods chain voiced by  the owner of the chain’s local advertising agency, the morning DJ had introduced the spot “And now, a word from Chicken Man”. The Chicken Man radio series which satirized the superhero genre was a favorite among young radio announcers at the time.

Unfortunately, an associate at the advertising agency who was monitoring WMOD-FM and heard the comment was unamused. She complained to the station’s local sales manager who then mentioned it to me. As it happened, I was unofficially in charge of the programming department while most of the other managers were out of town on business. I had also attended a holiday party on the previous evening at the home of the advertising exec who had voiced the spot.

Confused about why the agency would find the DJ’s comment offensive, I decided to contact the agency owner to get a better understanding of the problem so that management could address the situation upon their return. Luck wasn’t with me that day and the person who answered the phone was the young woman who’d made the original complaint. I attempted to explain that radio listeners tend to presume that the relationship between a radio station and the businesses it advertises are friendly and that the Chicken Man comment was obviously meant to be cutely humorous. Her response was that she didn’t like my attitude. She then hung up, complained about me to station management, and I was summarily fired.

That brings us to January 8^th, 1973 when the company suddenly found itself in need of my services to help get the situation in Chicago under control. So, I found myself in the odd situation of collecting severance from the Sonderling’s Washington station while simultaneously collecting a management paycheck from its Chicago station where I had been hired as program director.

As it turned out, Charles Manson resented my appointment by corporate management to the Chicago position and he ended up dismissing me 6 months after I’d taken the job.

However, my former college radio station manager at Northeastern University at just taken a job in Pittsburgh to launch a new Top 40 station and he offered me a job as one of his first two employees. The other person he hired was a young kid named Bob Pittman. And, together, the three of us launched one of America’s first FM Top 40 radio stations, WPEZ.

Pittman later hired me at WNBC, New York and at MTV: Music Television.

So, you might say that I ended up as a member of MTV’s original management team because of Elvis.

Here’s to The King!

I love Billy Joel’s music and I respect him as an artist. But I have to disagree with him on his generalization that “Before MTV music said LISTEN to me, and after MTV it said LOOK at me.”

I’d argue that pre-MTV rock music artists like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and KISS were very much visual as well as music acts. Fashion and attitude have been part of Rock N’ Roll culture since its inception.

During MTV’s early years, our team of researchers surveyed MTV viewers in those markets where the channel was available in order to learn their reactions to the songs we played. We used a methodology common to radio where the respondent was asked to rate a song based on how familiar they were with it and their level of positive or negative reaction to it. Early on, we were trying to determine a way to factor the visual variable into the equation and we found that the MTV viewers we spoke to frequently responded “I’ve seen that song”. Consequently, we changed the language in our survey to ask “Have you seen this song?”.

During my four years as MTV’s Director of Video Music Programming, it was my observation that the video component might have created some initial interest in a song but, if the music didn’t strike that responsive chord with viewers which catapults a song into the level of viable hit, the video was going to provide the necessary momentum to save the song.

It’s always been about the music.

Image may attract attention but, in the end, it’s the relevance of the music and the emotional connection it makes with the listener that really matters.