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Boss Radio was created in May 1965 for the RKO General Incorporated radio station KHJ in Los Angeles. Even though the Boss Radio format was show business and meant to please an audience, the fact remains that the format was not implemented for purely entertainment reasons. Boss Radio was launched as a business tactic to increase the ratings of KHJ and specifically help RKO General make a better return on its investment in the Los Angeles radio market. The corporation and the radio station each had four decades of history before the mid-1960s format change. RKO started nearly a century ago. In 1925, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy) purchased Film Booking Office (FBO) Studios in Hollywood. The elder Kennedy, who had a deep appreciation for the financial viability of motion picture entertainment, bought into other film companies so that FBO Studios ultimately included companies named Keith, Orpheum, and Pathe. Keith is the “K” and Orpheum is the “O” in RKO. Then, David Sarnoff, the founder and president of Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the parent company of National Broadcasting Company (NBC), pooled his financial resources with Kennedy’s film interests, adding the “R.” The resulting merger created a company named RKO Radio Pictures. The strongly positive reputation of RKO Radio Pictures was solidified with such classic films as the original King Kong in 1933, numerous Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and most notably, Citizen Kane by Orson Welles in 1941. Billionaire aviator Howard Hughes bought controlling interest of RKO in 1948, then nearly destroyed the company with his eccentric approaches to the filmmaking business. Desilu Productions, the pioneering television and movie company owned by the husband-and-wife television comedy duo, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, purchased the RKO studio lot in Hollywood on Melrose Avenue in 1957, and later sold it to Paramount Pictures. The motion picture side of the original RKO continued to exist in various corporate forms until 1989 when Dina Merrill and Ted Hartley purchased RKO Pictures. The broadcasting side of RKO developed on both the east and west coasts. In 1943 the General Tire and Rubber Company entered broadcasting with its purchase of The Yankee Network, Incorporated and its stations, including WNAC-AM/FM/TV in Boston. The stations continued to operate under the Yankee Network banner. Then in 1950, the General Tire and Rubber purchased Thomas S. Lee Enterprises Incorporated, doing business as The Don Lee Network, Incorporated named after its founder, Cadillac dealer Don Lee (father of Thomas S. Lee), whose primary stations were KHJ-AM/FM/TV in Los Angeles. In 1952, General Tire and Rubber purchased Bamberger Broadcasting Company, owner of WOR-AM/FM/TV in New York City and merged the stations into The Don Lee Network. After purchasing the former RKO Radio Pictures from Howard Hughes (minus the motion picture lot that went to Desilu), all of the stations that General Tire owned were merged into General Teleradio Incorporated. Two beneficiaries of the RKO motion picture library were channel 9 in New York, WOR-TV, and channel 9 in Los Angeles, KHJ-TV. General Tire merged its broadcasting and film operations into RKO Teleradio Pictures Incorporated, and ultimately changed the company name to RKO General Incorporated. Bill Drake and Gene Chenault were programming consultants for the radio side of RKO General starting with Boss Radio at KHJ-AM in 1965. They expanded their programming onto the FM side with KHJ-FM in Los Angeles (later called KRTH or K-Earth 101) and ultimately programmed numerous FM and AM stations owned by RKO General across the United States (such as CKLW and WRKO) until 1973. Drake-Chenault Out at RKO The radio stations owned by RKO greatly benefitted by the presence of Bill Drake and Gene Chenault and their team from the mid-1960s until RKO terminated the contract in 1973. Money. It was really all about money. The end of the Drake-Chenault radio programming dominance begins immediately after the flow of money into RKO starts to drop. In 1972, Bruce Johnson was selected as president of the radio side of RKO. As the new head of RKO’s chain of radio stations, Bruce Johnson’s prime responsibility was to keep the chain from losing ground to the emerging power of FM stations to attract and maintain loyal audiences. Much like when television become a potential threat to AM radio in the 1950’s, it was now 20 years later, and FM posed an obvious financial threat to AM radio’s stronghold over the American radio audience. To offset the loss of listeners to FM and to what was then called “progressive rock,” the RKO flagship station, KHJ, started changing its music format at least a year before Bruce Johnson was hired. Billboard magazine explained: “The imitators would hardly recognize the new sound of KHJ today. Some of the programming foundation is still there—such as an image of being the station in town on which to hear oldies (called ‘goldens’ by the staff of KHJ), but even the goldens have been cut back drastically.” And, as in the 1960’s, the other Drake-Chenault-consulted stations followed the lead of KHJ in order to “update the stations’ programming and be a little more a reflection of what’s being sold in the music market—albums as opposed to singles.” The inclusion of album cuts on RKO stations, however, seemed to be what led to the chain-wise drop in ratings. Bruce Johnson was concerned about preventing further ratings slide. He described for me the situation he found: “When I took the job I was told that the basic problem was the ratings of the RKO station which had all been dropping like a rock. They were down about 30% I guess, chain-wide. The problem was, as a consultant, Bill Drake was not in a position to order changes, that the program directors had become very independent, that they were doing whatever they wanted to do and weren’t taking his advice. That was the reason things were falling apart… “Their position was that they should be employees of the company: Drake and Chenault should be employees of the company. Their recommendation was they may be vice-presidents—Gene in charge of administration, and Bill in charge of programming. And we should also bring on the staff, Bill Watson as national program director and Bernie Torres as Bill Drake’s assistant… “So that whole thing was presented to me and I said, ‘Okay, fine. If that’s the problem, let’s attack it that way.’” So it was that the Drake-Chenault team became employees of RKO Radio. Bruce Johnson explained that one of the first things that Drake-Chenault urged RKO to start playing progressive rock in Los Angeles on FM by using the ill-fated “Stereo Rock” automated audio tape format: “They [Drake-Chenault] wanted us to take the progressive rock format here at KRTH—it was then KHJ-FM. I didn’t want it. I don’t think Bill really wanted to do it, I think it was more Gene’s idea or somebody else’s idea. Bill was never hot about it...I didn’t feel, based on the type of service we had gotten in the past on oldies and hit music where we were waiting two and three months to get a reel of audio tape, I didn’t see how we could be competitive… “I refused it and we decided to come up with something else which turned out to be the oldies rock format of the 1950’s and 1960’s which they called ‘Classic Gold’ and that was developed, I guess, in October 1972. It went on the air here in Los Angeles on KRTH and when it became such a tremendous success here, then it spread throughout the country.” Out of a possible negative situation, something positive grew. The Drake-Chenault “Classic Gold” format became a proven hit. And, thanks to such a strong beginning with the format, KRTH in Los Angeles since the 1970’s has maintained a strong audience loyalty as a preeminent classic oldies station. On the AM side, KHJ finally faded away completely into memory in the late 1980’s when the station was sold and was turned into a Spanish-language station to serve LA. The decline of Bill Drake’s and Gene Chenault’s clout at RKO Radio continued into early the 1970’s. Bruce Johnson was a strong management figure to which Drake and Chenault, as RKO employee, had to answer. Bruce Johnson explained what happened: “When my regime came along, we would say, ‘Why? What factual data is there to support this thing that you want to do? Prove it to me that what you say is valid.’ And we would have arguments about that. ‘Who the hell are you to tell the ‘great man’ what he’s doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not trying to program the stations, I just want to know why we’re doing these things, and certainly these things are not going well. We keep losing, and I want to stem the tide.’” Bruce Johnson told me that a key issue in the internal corporate friction between the Drake associates and himself was the fact that Drake and his associates were working for two companies, RKO and Drake-Chenault Enterprises: “It didn’t matter in the beginning. It mattered to me later on when I felt that maybe too much time was being put in over there and not enough with us. I asked Bill at one time, I said, ‘Make a decision. It’s either us or it’s them. You know, if it’s going to be both, then it will be 50/50 and not 60/40 or whatever.’ That became a problem. “We felt we were paying a great deal of money to then American Independent Radio, later, Drake-Chenault Enterprises. We thought we ought to have better service than we were getting. I got a little upset at times that some of the work that was being done by the music director was going to Fresno and other places, and we had a lot of discussions about that.” The tensions grew until in 1973, Bruce Johnson canceled the RKO consultancy contract with Drake-Chenault. And so, after 8 years of setting in motion highly successful programming systems process on a nationwide chain of major market radio stations that generated a lot of revenue, on one day in Los Angeles, it was just all over. Shortly after that, Drake and Chenault and many of their team from RKO went over to K100. The Fate of RKO Starting in the 1980s, based on charges that RKO General violated federal laws, the Federal Communications Commission forced the corporation to relinquish all of its radio and television broadcasting licenses and sell the station facilities to the new licensees at equipment value only. WNAC-TV channel 7 in Boston was the first station license of RKO General to be revoked. Channel 7 in Boston became WNEV-TV owned by New England Television on May 1, 1982. The name General Tire and Rubber Company was changed in 1984 to GenCorp, a major technology-based manufacturing company headquartered in Sacramento, California. The RKO radio network was bought by United Stations, later known as Unistar. Corporate mergers followed and RKO/Unistar was bought by Infinity, ultimately part of CBS Radio, which, in turn, was bought by Viacom. RKO General’s KHJ-TV channel 9 in Los Angeles was the last station license to be pulled. Channel 9 in Los Angeles became KCAL-TV in 1990, originally owned by the Walt Disney company until 1995 when Disney bought Capital Cities/ABC and sold KCAL-TV to Young Broadcasting. |
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