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Unlike today, in the 1960s there were no orbiting satellites to permit the live distribution of radio or television programming. The first satellite delivery of an NBC Today Show segment happened in early May 1965, but full-time use of satellites to deliver radio, television, and cable programming would be several years in the future. The most cost-effective means in that pre-satellite era to distribute syndicated radio programming was to produce it in a studio, then transfer it to open reel audio tape, and then ship it physically to hundreds of radio stations.. Drake-Chenault was a pioneer in this form of radio programming.

Today’s more convenient audio cassette tape technology had not yet been developed. But, there was available technology to play open reel audio tapes in a computerized system that diminished the need for a board operator to be on duty at the radio station. Toward the end of 1968, three RKO Radio FM stations, KHJ-FM, Los Angeles (which in the 1990s is KRTH 101); KFRC-FM, San Francisco (which changed call letters quite often, from its original calls to KFMS to KKEE and back again to KFRC-FM); and WROR, Boston (originally WRKO-FM) all switched formats to Drake-Chenault’s automated tape service called “Hit Parade ‘68.”

Drake told me that it was important to keep AM and FM programming separate for a very good financial reason:

“Initially what we did was started with sort of a middle-of-the-road type of thing not to really compete with ourselves. The next logical step was to make it more Top-40, or a combination of currents and oldies which was as far as a rock thing for specific markets. And from there we figured, ‘All right, you’ve got rock,’ and we wanted to do the oldies thing.”

One early Drake-Chenault format failed. Annie Van Bebber, one of the most singularly influential Drake-Chenault employees in their syndication wing, told me about the very unsolid emergence of the “Stereo Rock” syndicated format:

“Drake was never really into that kind of music. Basically, the whole format was put together by myself even through we had meetings with Bill. I don’t think Bill wanted that format. I think it was Chenault who did. Chenault started to run a little scared when he saw all these progressive rock stations popping up. He figured they’d better jump on the bandwagon. Drake at the time wasn’t into that at all, had no idea about the music.
“’Stereo Rock’ went on KPHD [in Fresno.] They changed KYNO-FM’s call letters to KPHD and at the time they had just bought KXOA [FM in Sacramento, California] with Mike and Willett Brown, so ‘Stereo Rock’ previewed on those two stations and one other station in Milwaukee, I think...So it went on the air and came right off. It was a good format. It’s just that Bill was never behind it, so it just didn’t last. They just sort of shelved it, tucked it away. It could have worked.”

Six other syndicated formats worked rather well for Drake-Chenault, in fact. By 1975--ten years after Boss Radio--Drake-Chenault radio had nearly 200 stations running automated radio programming in markets from small to large. The Drake-Chenault radio formats were “Hitparade,” “Solid Gold,” “Great American Country,” “Classic Gold,” “Super Soul,” and “XT-40.”

Annie Van Bebber put into perspective why the Drake-Chenault automated radio programming proved to be so successful:

“You have to remember at the time there was no competition for Drake-Chenault. I mean, I knew it was going to be successful. There was nothing around like it. There were no 24-hour music syndicated services that stations could buy. I thought it was a great thing for a small town to be able to pay $400 to buy the mastermind Drake’s format, put on the air and have these professional disk jockeys for the amount of money and cut their overhead at the stations like that.”

Clearly, Drake-Chenault had a central role in permanently establishing FM as the dominant radio medium for rock ‘n’ roll music. This crucial historical accomplishment often gets ignored because Drake-Chenault usually is remembered primarily for Boss Radio, which was strictly an AM radio thing.

Hank Landsberg, former director of engineering at Drake-Chenault Enterprises (pictured on the right along with Dave Kephart as they remove the last load of electronic gear from the Drake-Chenault building in Canoga Park in 1987) tells the inside story in his own words:

I started at Drake-Chenault in April 1974. The company was small, with maybe 10 or 12 employees. It occupied about 1/2 of the 3rd floor of 8399 Topanga Canyon Blvd. in Canoga Park, California. Drake-Chenault was located in Hollywood previously. At one time the business operated using the name “American Independent Radio” or “AIR.”

Because I was hired as Director of Engineering, I saw the company from the perspective of the studio operations. The “corporate culture” was fairly informal, Drake-Chenault being a small organization. I was hired by the General Manager, Bert Kleinman. The Program Director was Lee Bailey. There was a record librarian, Val Faulkenbridge.

In 1974, Gene and Bill were concentrating on K100, trying to make it the “FM version” of KHJ, with The Real Don Steele and Robert W. Morgan as evening and morning drive DJs. It never did all that well in the ratings, partly because of its mediocre coverage from Coldwater Canyon. K100 never did cover as well as other LA FMs that had their towers atop Mt. Wilson.

There were two studios in 1974. Studio B had been built at least 4 or 5 years before I got there. It may have been a studio at DCs original location in Hollywood. The second was built by Jim Somich (then the Chief Engineer at K100) in 1973. Both studios were equipped with lots of equipment that had been “imported” from Gene’s stations in Fresno, KYNO (AM) and KPHD (FM). In fact, Gene’s FM station in Fresno was the “test bed” for many of the Drake-Chenault automated music formats, and it served as the “test lab” for the automation equipment that was developed to run the formats.

Back in the 60’s & 70’s, automation equipment was “sluggish” and loose! But that didn’t matter if you were running a “backround music” format, which was all automation was used for in those days. The thought of using reel-to-reel automation to run a tight top-40 format was unheard of.

That’s were some Drake-Chenault innovation came in. The problem of loose, sloppy seques was solved by using a “one-second advance” on the 25Hz tones that signalled the end of each song on a reel of tape. Instead of the 25Hz tone beging at the end of the cut, it was advanced-in by one second, so it “hit” 1 second before the end of the cut. This gave the next tape deck a “1 second head start” to stabilize and come up to speed, which yielded tight seques without any “wow-in”.

My first job at Drake-Chenault was to perfect the system for advancing the cue tones, so they’d be recorded exactly one second before the logical “eom” (end of music) point at the end of a cut.

Here’s how it was done: Master tapes were recorded using Sony (consumer) 4-track (1/4-inch) recorders operating at 7.5 inches per second. We used a separate track for the cue tone. It was not a 25Hz tone, but instead a 1 kHz tone. Since it was on a separate track, it wasn’t audible in the regualar audio tracks. The 1 kHz cue tones were put on at the logical eom point at the end of each cut. They were not advanced-in yet. Since these cue tones were on their own track, the studio engineering could re-record them as many times as needed until each cue was in exactly the right place, tight up against the end of the song.

Once the master was done, it was duplicated to a convention 2-track (professional format) tape. The dupe was done in reverse, or tails-out. The master played from tail-to-head. During this process, the 1 kHz tone was sensed, and triggered a 25 Hz generator which mixed in a 25 Hz cue tone wherever there was a 1 kHz tone on the master. However, the system was designed so that the 25 Hz generator remained on for 1 second after the 1 kHz tone ended, thereby “stretching” the 25 Hz tone by exactly one second. When playing the dupe heads-out (normal), the 25 Hz tones were advanced exactly one second before the eom point indicated by the 1 kHz tone on the original studio master.

During the day shift, the only studio engineer working was Mark Ford, who came from KMEN in San Bernardino. He did mastering of the syndicated formats, as well as produced the famous Drake-Chenault demo records. Both studios were used during the night shift. Two studio engineers worked from about 5:00 pm until 1:00 am or so: Mike Williams and Kent Randles also did mastering of the syndicated format tapes.

The studio guys produced the masters. I usually made the “sub-masters” (with the advanced 25 Hz cue tones), which were then sent to SuperScope in Sun Valley, California for high-speed duplication. Despite the fact that the station copies were third generation copies, they sounded pretty good. When I started in 1974, we had about 100 clients, and shipped perhaps 300 ten-inch reels of tape each week.

There were 5 “automated” syndicated formats: XT-40 (top 40), HitParade (AC), Solid Gold (AC with oldies), Classic Gold (oldies), and Great American Country. Originally, all tapes were “voiced” with either a front-announce or back-announce. Only the recurrent reels were non-voiced. All formats, except Great American Country, were voiced by Billy Moore. The country tapes were voiced by Bob Kingsley. The announcers would come in once each week and record the ‘intros’ and ‘outros’ for all the reels that would be produced that week. Then the studio engineers would mix their voice-tracks with the music, which came (of course) from LPs and 45s.

Drake-Chenault’s studio engineers were the best. They would spend hours manually editing the tics and pops out of records until they sounded pristine! Many clients thought we got our music from recording studio master tapes....NOT! It all came from vinyl.

A few years later, Drake-Chenault began to offer format tapes either with or without built-in announcers. My next project was to bring all the tape duplication in-house.

In my early days at Drake-Chenault, our programming tapes were high-speed duplicated by Superscope in Sun Valley. Their quality was usually good, but it was very, very difficult to maintain “phase coherency” on the copies. Phase errors would manifest themselves as “muddy sound” when an stereo FM station was being heard on a mono radio. Since in those days, most listeners were listening on mono radios, maintaining accurate phase coherency was of paramount importance.

In 1975, I determined that we could produce better-sounding tapes by using an in-house “real time” (not high speed) tape duplication system. I built the first system using 9 Crown model SX722 recorders. I modified the machines so we could run them at 15 inches per second, duplicating tapes at double-time. In addition to duplicating the music, the system also inserted the 25Hz cue tones and added the 1-second advance needed for tight segues when the tapes were played back.

Overall, the system worked well. It produced good-sounding copies that were only one generation from the master, not two as was the case with the high-speed dupes. Level set, equalization test, and head alignment tones were duplicated from the master tape to the copies. We aligned the recording heads to each individual reel of tape, to correct for any potential phase errors. After each reel was produced, it was checked on a special “QC” machine to verify that levels, EQ, and phase were within tolerance. We guaranteed phase to within 90 degrees at 10 kHz, a very tight spec that was unheard of in our industry.

The system usually ran two shifts per day, from 8am until about midnight. The first duplicating technician I hired to run the system was Terry Tretta (pictured in the studio), who ultimately became one of Drake-Chenault’s best production engineers. In 1979, Technics (part of Panasonic Corp.) introduced their RS1500 series of “closed loop” recorders. These machines were much more refined than the old Crown decks. Their closed-loop tape path made them very stable, producing much less phase error than the Crown units. We replaced all of the Crown decks with RS1500s, and increased the capacity of the system by installing 24 Technics decks. Running at double-speed, the duplicating system could now produce 24 excellent quality copies each hour.

I am still convinced that those “inexpensive, consumer” Technics RS1500 decks are one of the most reliable, rugged, and accurate tape machines ever built. I designed special “head adaptors” so I could install Nortronics “Duracore” heads, which would last an incredible 3 or 4 years, with the machines operating 16 hours per day, 5 days a week!

By now, Drake-Chenault’s client list had grown to over 300 stations, requiring us to ship about 1,000 reels each week! We did this week after week, year after year. In all the years I was at Drake-Chenault, we NEVER missed a shipping deadline! The current and recurrent reels ALWAYS shipped on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so the new “hits” could air by the weekend. The 3M and Ampex tape sales reps really loved us. We practically destroyed the old hydraulic elevator at 8399 Topanga Canyon Blvd, bringing up thousands of pounds of tape each week.

Written by Hank Lansberg. For much more about Drake-Chenault, visit Hank Lansberg’s site DrakeChenault.org.

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You can contact the author if you modify this text to make it a working email address:
 wg (at) woodygoulart (dot) com or visit woodygoulart.com.

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