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He was directly responsible for many “firsts,” not only in the radio business, but also in the recording industry. His stunning accomplishments as the first program director at KHJ when “Boss Radio” was launched set Ron Jacobs apart from all others in his field.

"If Vince Lombardi were a program director, he would have been Ron Jacobs."--1990 tribute from the original KHJ Boss Jocks

Those who choose to think of Ron Jacobs only in the context of Boss Radio and KHJ are missing quite a lot. He will long be remembered for his role as program director at KHJ from 1965 through 1969, and, for his crucial contributions to Drake and Chenault’s Los Angeles efforts in radio programming that attracted national attention.

Over the decades since the Boss Radio format was launched, there has been discussion within the radio broadcasting industry concerning who deserves the primary credit for the format. Was it mostly Drake? Would it have been possible without Ron Jacobs?

In an effort to provide some clarity, Ron Jacobs gave generously of his time during 1997 by providing very detailed answers for publication here at BossRadioForever.com to questions that I posed.

Ron Jacobs participated by telephone and electronic mail to my interview questions concerning many of his career milestones, and edited the copy before it would appear online here. He also gave permission in 1997 for BossRadioForever.com to publish additional historical information that he had written, which had been previously published elsewhere and is available online elsewhere.

The perspectives Ron Jacobs shared with me in the interview regarding The Real Don Steele, his Friday sign-offs, and other Boss Jocks gives special insight into Boss Radio:

RJ: I think Steele might have even been doing those Friday sign-offs before he got to KHJ. Could’ve been at KISN in Portland or in San Francisco after that. He brought that, along with his “Tina Delgado Is Alive” schtick along with him to KHJ. And any PD who would mess with those would be nuts.

WG: Right, because that’s got to be one of the most unusual and unique things.

RJ: Steele, if you analyze his style, is a terrific minimalist. And therefore, when you do a longer form bit, it stands out all the more. It’s just like most people don’t appreciate the value of white space in a graphic layout. One time a musician friend of mine said, “The most important thing about the music is the space between the notes.” If you transcribed what the Real Don Steele say’s in a show, there is not much to it, word wise. But when you combine it with his electric energy, where he puts what he says, and how he conveys what he does, when all of a sudden he rips out one of those things, it is visceral and transcends just words. Style wise, it’s not unlike what is now called “rap.” Content wise it goes back to what Col. Parker taught me, which is you don’t over expose. If Steele did that sign-off every day, it would be less effective.

WG: Yes, that’s right.

RJ: If he did it every hour, it would be less effective. And that was also like what I said going back earlier to each guy has strengths to build on. My concept was to give each guy a shtick so that on the one hand, we had a station consistency formatically, but Morgan’s thing was to use the phone, no one else did that. Sam Riddle and Roger Christian were to focus on Los Angeles because they were established there. Steele’s thing was to kick ass in the afternoon and move it because people had already had it during the day, and so on and so on. And we worked real hard at that. But it absolutely always equally comes down to a matter of what you leave out.

The competitive world of Los Angeles radio helped shape the lives of the participants involved at Boss Radio KHJ. Ron Jacobs gave the colorful details in my interview with him.

No one’s ever going to convince me that we
weren’t the greatest rock ‘n’ roll AM station
in the world.--Ron Jacobs

RJ: Drake, me, and the jocks didn’t give a damn or think about the future, the influence on radio or anything. We had one thing to do which was to kill and be number one. And I wasn’t going to be involved with guys who weren’t ready to get in there and commit themselves 24 hours a day to climb that damn mountain, and that’s where the big rush is. I mean Morgan and me particularly, man, we didn’t believe in taking prisoners.

WG: Very serious business.

RJ: Yeah. On May 25, 1965, after the bizarre Muhammad Ali - Sonny Liston fight, Morgan and I went for a drink. After all, the fight was over in a minute. It was one of the few times I ever went to this record hangout called Martoni’s. And Morgan and I got into a screaming match with two guys from KRLA. And it almost got out of hand. We all were thrown out of the restaurant.

I mean we took that stuff real serious. And we were really young and we had a lot to prove. We had to prove ourselves to the people in our own building, the Channel 9 people. There were people who had worked in that building who had watched KHJ Radio change formats like diapers.

The engineers siting on the other side of the glass, they’d seen platoons of jocks come and go. So they just thought we were the format du’ jour. Then, when I could sense that we were having some influence on radio in general, I got a perverse joy out of leaving the air studio in the same horrible condition it was in when I first got there.

Guys would fly in from Cleveland, Omaha, wherever, to come and see what the secret thing was that made KHJ work. First he’d sit in the drab lobby, not a clue that any rock ‘n’ roll was going on. Then walk down cement hallways that looked like an old Navy building. And he would walk into the control room and there would be this old engineer and a board with pots, right? It could have been a guy with his ham radio.

The only thing I ever did in the studio was have a wooden frame built with a Lucite panel to hang up 5x7 cards for one-liners. And these out-of-town guys, who acted like they’re going to the Vatican or the Wizard of Oz--. They’d come in and see a jock sitting there in this 20-year-old room. It had one switch for a microphone and a beat-up turntable that they could listen to the records to on cue, which took a year to negotiate with the union.

If someone asked how we did “it,” I would point at my head and say, “Hey man, this is showbiz. What KHJ is doing is not based on equipment or any of that stuff, it’s based on this little thing called imagination.” That’s what I learned from Colonel Parker, it’s what I have always preached, and that’s what I have always gotten off on. I can do the mechanical stuff, formatics, scheduling. I’m a Virgo, I can do numbers and letters and color-coding. A part of me is really into that. The other side is like, “Wow, what do you do next that people are guessing about.”

My theory on the air used to be, they’ll listen if they don’t know what you are going to do next. That finally comes out almost word after word in the Howard Stern movie. Well, I was doing that stuff when Howard Stern was in grade school, or whatever.

I mean, after doing a high school show, I first got paid as an announcer when I was 18. I was a program director for the first time in 1958, when I was 20. And by wonderful, fortuitous circumstances, I was at KPOA, where we were running “Lucky Lager Dance Time,” which was programmed by an ad agency guy named Bill Gavin—and the three-station group had Mike Joseph as their consultant.

It was a great time to learn from guys who were really the pioneers of Top 40, along with Storz and McLendon. And I stayed in contact with Colonel Parker for 40 years. Tom Moffatt and I were honorary pall bearers at his memorial service in Las Vegas. The mechanics were the cake, but The Colonel showed me how to whip up the frosting.

WG: A lot of people really worked together well as a team at KHJ.

RJ: There are so many people that deserve credit. Ed Dela Pena, the chief engineer, and the way we were able to integrate our engineering department and our programming concepts, that’s a whole story. The fact that the TV station eventually not only settled down, but realized that interaction would help us both. We came up with a tremendous TV show. That’s another thing we had going. No other station in town had their own weekly TV dance show.

WG: That was Sam Riddle’s show?

RJ: Yeah. Sam Riddle had a show but that was replaced by the show called, 9th Street West.

WG: That’s right. I remember seeing that.

RJ: It was a great promotional vehicle. I mean, the Big Kahuna would go on and do his thing. And in those days there were no music videos. Artists and record companies were anxious to be on the number one station and the TV show.

We had an exciting scene going. Like, in the summers of 1965, ‘66 and ‘67, not only was LA the center of the rock ‘n’ roll universe, but KHJ was the pulse of it.

You could drive down Hollywood Boulevard on a Friday night and with your car windows open and it was like just the this wonderful, AM, bass-booming sound. Boss Radio! Everybody was plugged in. It was just wonderful. In the beginning it seemed like Sonny and Cher were living at the station. Brian Wilson or one of the guys would come up to the entrance at ten o’clock at night and hand the guard a vinyl, and it would turn out to be something like “Good Vibrations“ or “California Girls.”

Those years will always be special. I have done other things that have been wild on other levels, okay. But to be there, sitting in the front row of the Hollywood Bowl when Bob Dylan played something electric for one of the first times. Watching The Doors grow from a neighborhood band to a Jim Morrison cult nowadays—know what I mean?

WG: Yeah.

RJ: To see the Big Kahuna go to Dodger Stadium and see the whole crowd turn away from Sammy Koufax to see this silly thing in feathers. It was a rush, man. Like they have “fantasy baseball” and “fantasy football,” I would love to be able to take my best or our best hour of KHJ, and put it up against WABC’s best hour. Because no one’s ever going to convince me that we weren’t the greatest rock ‘n’ roll AM station in the world.

The maintenance of the Boss Radio format would not have been possible without one essential invention--the telephone. Ron Jacobs explains why.

WG: The role of the telephone seems to have played a big role in Boss Radio.

RJ: Well, it was actually pretty cool to have a car phone. That was one of the best status symbols there was in those days. I mean the hippest bachelors drove along Sunset Strip in the car, talking on the car phone. You pushed-to-talk on microphones like a police radio. But the thing looked like a phone that was mounted on the hump between the front seats. And if I heard something happening when I was driving around, I didn’t hesitate to call in.

The other side of that coin is the way things get totally blown out of proportion over time. I’ve been told by second and third and fourth hand people that the hot line was ringing all the time, at least at KHJ. Well, that’s a crock. I mean I spent a long time as jock before I did that gig. And I know that in most cases, it’s not very productive to hassle someone during their shift.

I would call Morgan when I had an idea in the morning, because we could communicate so well and he could always implement what I suggested if we agreed it was worth trying. Morgan would always come up with what I imagined, or improved on it. Most times I talked to a guy after his shift or sent a memo to him.

WG: Yeah, if you disrupt him in the middle of something and it wrecks the whole pace. Time magazine wrote something about Drake having all those phone lines and calling in all the time.

RJ: Well, Drake had phone lines that he could listen to stations on, but Drake very rarely ever called a Boss Jock on the air. I don’t remember that during the time I was at KHJ, that Drake maybe called the jock more than a dozen times.

If he did, it might be just to say that sounded cool. I mean, because that’s not the way that things work. No one can deal with two different people calling the shots.

Drake would call me no matter what hour of the day. And I would deal with it depending on what it was, like talking to the guy after a shift when he got out of the booth, asking him to come into the office, or sending him a memo, you know what I mean?

One of the real joys of KHJ was that we had what I consider in a lot of ways the best all night guy ever, Johnny Williams. Not only he was great and consistent sounding on the air and a good guy, but I knew that I could go to sleep at night and not get phone calls like I had in the past when someone had taken a Volkswagen apart and put it together in the K-POI big main studio. Or the studio walls were covered with eggs that people were throwing around, partying in the middle of the night. Or people were arriving in the morning and finding someone lying in his own puke.

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Top 40 radio had to learn by experience how to cover news events. Two examples of overwhelming news events are the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

WG: When you were in Fresno, JFK was assassinated. You refer to the fact that a Top 40 radio station had “no guidelines” for how to handle this.

RJ: The assassination of Kennedy to us who were essentially young guys—I mean in ‘63, I would have been 24-25—was such an incredible surprise, shock, and astonishing event just as a citizen.

WG: How did you guys deal with that at the radio station?

Ron Jacobs: To have been responsible for what went on the air when, you know, you had a news commitment that you were responsible for as well as religious programming--. In the first place, when John F. Kennedy was shot, it was the first time I had ever seen a wire service machine actually say, “Flash,” which you had always heard was going to happen.

The second thing is those days the stories always used to be punched in by teletype operators and there would be a perforated strip of what they had typed. And the reason those machines always clattered constantly is that the strip was usually thirty seconds or so ahead of what was feeding down the line. When the information came in about Kennedy, we stood over the machine and one or two letters would come out and then it paused.

And it was like, there was no CNN. I mean we just huddled over the machine. And then finally when the word came in, which I think the first one was a priest had just come out and said that Kennedy has been given his last rites. I just had to suppress what I was feeling personally because I was really an admirer of JFK. So to read that bulletin and then play Peppermint Twist—I don’t know. We grabbed whatever was in the building, which was probably a Mahalia Jackson or a Mormon Tabernacle Choir record and put it on as “appropriate music.”

And as a person I remember thinking to myself, well, ha, with all this forensic stuff they have these days at the FBI, at least this will be resolved unlike the Lincoln assassination, which in 1963 was still controversial. How ironic that was. Like, the real truth, at least in my opinion, about the JFK assassination, is still being suppressed.

There is one thing that I regret not having kept from that day. There are a lot of things I did in radio that I don’t have, but that’s okay. But on November 23, 1963, I wrote an editorial in which I said that it might take a long time to get to the bottom of this, but eventually history would record the truth. I actually tried to make a statement. Probably Robert W. Morgan read it and we replayed it with somber music and that’s about all that we could do. We canceled the commercials.

And then finally I was able to go home. And then just maybe when things got normal, you saw Lee Harvey Oswald get shot by Jack Ruby on black and white TV. I mean, I don’t want to let my personal feelings about the Kennedy assassination get into it, because I don’t think we’ve been told anything about it that is even close to the truth. But at the time, dealing with it was totally new ground.

WG: In one of your emails you mentioned that you thought being in LA at KHJ was “Camelot” from 1965 until 1968. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in LA in 1968, and that must not have been easy to deal with.

RJ: The thing that hit home about Robert Kennedy was that one of his campaign headquarters was right across Melrose Avenue from KHJ at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe. And that had been a place for local and visiting Democrats who would come in limousines, coming in and out of there.

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After Ron Jacobs left KHJ in 1969, he formed Watermark, from which the legendary “Cruisin’” series of record albums (pictured at the top of this page) and the famous “American Top 40” countdown with Casey Kasem originated. Jacobs also produced several other record albums for Elektra, including the cult classic “’A Childs Garden of Grass: A Pre-Legalization Comedy.” He subsequently returned to rock and roll radio programming at San Diego’s KGB.

In 2001, Jacobs used the Internet to express his opinions in a “Call to Action” regarding Randy Michaels and Clear Channel. Later that year, Jacobs used a site named Balance Radio Broadcasting as a platform for his views about Clear Channel. But the site lasted only a few months before being pulled following a controversy over telephone calls between Jacobs and Randy Michaels that appeared online in paraphrased text and digital audio.

Jacobs used 93khj.com in 2002 to promote a vanity-published book about his years at the station. You can learn more by The Ron Jacobs Collection on ReelRadio.com and Ron Jacobs Online .

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There are at least two other historical footnotes worth mentioning about that restaurant on Melrose Avenue across from KHJ: Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe is also where California Governor Jerry Brown could be seen with Linda Ronstadt when they were dating. And, director Roman Polanski’s late wife, Sharon Tate, along with a few of her close friends ate dinner at Lucy’s Ed Adobe Cafe just hours before they became the victims of mass murder at the hands of Charles Manson and his cult.

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 wg (at) woodygoulart (dot) com or visit woodygoulart.com.

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