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different brand of power: utter verbal anarchy. Taking a page from the mad-rapping R&B jockeys of
the fifties, your average Top 40 DJ of the mid sixties was a helium-voiced microphone fiend. He
sputtered away in rapid-fire volleys that crackled audibly across the tinny, echo-laden frequencies of a
transistor radio. Breathless, hypnotizing, hysteria inducing, his between-song pat- ter must be
considered an early form of rap. Unlike the syncopated flow of a late sixties jock, it seemed to exist in
a separate sphere from the music it accompanied.
The jocks used songs as a springboard into the ozone. Every market had its exemplars, but the king
of kamikaze Top 40 had to be New York City s Murray Kaufmanns, a.k.a. Murray the K. Like all disc
jockeys, Murray hopped from station to station. His peak was on WINS in the mid 1960s, when he
famously ingratiated himself with the Beatles at their first U.S. press conference and proceeded to ride
their coattails to something resembling fame and fortune. Dubbing himself  the Fifth Beatle, Murray
focused his radio show and amphetamine verbal shtick almost exclusively on the Fab Four. Somewhat
aghast, New Journalist Tom Wolfe fired off a famous 1965 profile of Murray the K.
The radio is now something people listen to while they re doing something else . . . [the
kids] are outside, all over the place, tooling around in automobiles, lollygagging around
with transistors plugged into their skulls, listening to the radio. Listening is not exactly the
word. They use the radio as a background, as an aural prop for whatever kind of life they
want to imagine they re leading. They don t want any messages at all, they want an
atmosphere. Half the time, as soon as they get a message namely a commercial or a news
spot they start turning the dial, looking for the atmosphere they lost. So there are all
these kids out there somewhere, roaming all over the dial, looking for something that will
hook not the minds but the psyche.
Typically bizarre sixties footnote: When people finally tired of the Beatle gimmick, Murray the K
dropped it. Then he reappeared in love beads. Unbelievably, he helped to invent the rambling
 progressive rock format at New York s WOR just months later.
Overall, the heyday of hysterical DJs didn t last long. By 1966, AM radio was turning into a lean,
quiet purring machine thanks to a man named Bill Drake. He began at KYA San Francisco and started
a syndicate, Boss Radio. In Drake s hands, the Top 40 format became an airtight system, elevating
radio programming into a social science. For all practical purposes, Drake eliminated DJs or at least
recast them as robots.
A former DJ himself, beginning in Donaldsville, Georgia, Drake was the first successful Top 40
programming consultant. He remade rock  n roll radio in a fast-paced, clean-cut mode, eliminating
its shrieking excesses along with its personality. Drake instituted many of the practices still in use
today: a tighter playlist, tightly reined-in disc jockeys, and continuous market research conducted
through listener surveys and focus groups.  Much more music (and less chatter) was a Drake tag line,
yet he cut back on the number of records a station could play. The Top 40 became the Boss 30,
supplemented by a handful of  hit bound new releases and occasional oldies.
 We work a little in reverse, Drake told reporter Harry Shearer in 1967,
trying to find out what the public wants, and then trying to create that. For instance, by
finding out why people tune out a station. It s actually even a subliminal area that we try to
go into, and precise attention is paid to the placement of everything. There s a great
amount of emphasis on keeping it CLEAN.
All the surveys and research created a vicious circle: If the results show that people don t like
unfamiliar records, then stations would play fewer records and play them as often as possible. The
systematic and relentless repetition of the Top 40 operates on the assumption that people tune in for
short stretches, while riding in the car, for example. On the air, the DJs would function as announcer
clones, stripped of even the pretense of tastemaking power. By design, all those zippy station jingles,
solid gold weekends, million-dollar contests, and  insane promotions started to sound the same.
While this spelled short-term success for many of Drake s clients, he ignored the shifting currents
in rock  n roll. Drake concentrated on hit singles, using sales figures as his main criteria, just as
album sales began to overtake singles in the later 1960s. Aesthetically, the move toward complexity
and ambition in rock was about to render the Top 40 irrelevant; AM radio retreated to the land of
lowest common denominator, the province of preteens and old fogies.
The Beatles became a new kind of celebrity, reinventing the pop music scene in the process.
Rather than be co-opted by Hollywood like Elvis Presley, they nudged rock  n roll into its next phase:
serious, self-conscious, conceptual, and grand. Their audience and their peers gladly followed. FM
radio with its full stereo sound and large number of underutilized stations was the natural outlet
for this latest revolution. Murray the K, the Fifth Beatle himself, was ahead of this curve. Moving to
New York s WOR in late 1966, he led the station into uncharted waters: a roster of hip, knowledgeable
DJs playing not just singles but an eclectic mix of album tracks. Barely a year later, the station s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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