1957 was one of those watershed years in radio. Most of the stations were doing live shows with actors and / or live orchestras. Rock and roll was in its infancy. Big Band, swing, jazz Country and Western and what we now call standards were the 300 pound musical gorillas on the radio. There were some stations playing blues and Rhythm and Blues.
Music radio where DJs played records was just starting to replace radio plays and the live bands primarily as a cost savings effort. The early DJs had a huge collection of records to choose from; literally thousands of choices. They came in an hour or so before the show to prepare by pulling the records and albums that they were going to play on their show that day. 45 RPM records with just one “A” side song on them were just coming into their own.
Out in the Midwest, Todd Storz, the owner of a small chain of stations was sitting in a bar with his station manager Bill Stewart. They observed that the patrons of that bar put money into a 40 song juke box all day long to listen to the same songs over and over. The thing that amazed them was at the end of the day, the waitresses put their tip money into the machine to listen to those songs they heard all day one more time before heading home. They tried the idea of the top 40 the first time on KOWH in Omaha. The DJs objected strongly and some of them even resigned. But the audience loved it. And Top Forty Radio was born.
It spread like wildfire across the country, picking up jingles, and high energy DJ’s along the way. No longer were records announced completely in golden tones before the first note played. Now the DJs talked over the intros to the songs; “walking up the records and hitting the post.” Their voices pitched up and tempos matching the rock and roll beat coming off the turntables. Even the news has a rock and roll tempo to it. Instead of the usual 15 minute newscasts common in the day, we heard a five minute newscast at the top of the hour and a 2 ½ minute headlines on the half hour. Some stations in order to be playing music when their competition was doing news moved the top of the hour news cast up five minutes with the idea that the news would end with a station ID and then an up tempo “kicker” song that would carry the audience into the longer music segment.
It took a while to understand why this worked; it was against the standard wisdom of most of the radio programmers of the time. The answer was that the listening habits of the American radio audience were changing. No one listened to the radio for hours on end anymore. Television had captured those folks. The radio listener usually listened for a half hour to an hour. And more and more, they were listening in their cars as they commuted to and from work. The shorter playlist meant that the individual listener was more likely to hear the most popular songs on the Top Forty Stations than those who stuck with the longer playlists.
The other thing that came with Top Forty was audience participation. Contests and open Request Lines were the most popular ways to get audience participation. And if you could get the listener’s name on the air it was all the better.
At WCOS, where I was spinning tunes from the “Top 60 in Dixie” in the late 1960s, we did a show remotely from Doug Broome’s drive ins. In the early 60s, it was from a broadcast booth on the roof of his location at Main and Confederate. The kids in the cars would pass their requests to the waitresses on scraps of paper, notebook pages or even napkins complete with a splotch of mustard or ketchup. The waitresses would gather them in bunches and then one of them would climb the stairs to the booth and give them to the DJ. By the late 60s, we learned our lesson so when we moved out to the location on Two Notch near Beltline, we built the radio booth at the end of the first row of teletrays. During my shows out there, I don’t think I ever sat in the air chair more than a minute or so. I was always stepping across the 12 by 14 room to answer the knock on the door. We got a lot of requests from the “Cool Cats and Hot Kitties” at that door, but it seemed to me that there were more coming from the “Hot Kitties” especially earlier in the evening. Hey, I’m not complaining! The other thing we did around that time was to reduce the “Top 60 in Dixie” to the “WCOS Fun 40”
But the thing that drove the ratings was the “Instant Request!” When the instant request jingle hit the air, all three phone lines in the studio lit up almost simultaneously. We would put the lucky third caller on the air live and let them tell everyone who they were and what song they wanted to hear. One thing we noticed almost immediately was that a group of listeners got lucky more than the others. At first, we thought it might be a function of what telephone exchange they were in. Did those in the “Alpine” exchange have an advantage over the others? Somebody finally spilled the beans that those “lucky” callers were dialing all but the last digit of our phone number and holding it until they heard the jingle. We leveled the playing field by putting all of our call in lines on hold until we started the jingle and then releasing them and taking the third caller. Sure enough, the rest of the audience started getting their requests answered more often.
The other thing that we realized was that our audience changed by demographics and listening style by show “daypart.” The morning (6 AM – 10 AM) and afternoon (4 PM – 7PM) drive time audiences were the most mobile, the most male, and listened for the shortest time. The midday show (10 AM – 4PM) was mostly stationary at home and mostly female and listened for longer stretches of time. The evening show (8PM – 1 AM) was pretty much evenly divided into students listening at home while doing homework and those out cruising in their cars between drive ins where they would order their burgers, fries and chocolate shakes and make their requests.
The oddball shift was the overnight shift. In the case of WCOS, that was the “All Night Satellite.” It was sponsored by the Taylor Street Pharmacy, the only 24 hour pharmacy in town. They played the show over speakers in the pharmacy at night. That was my first full time show at WCOS, having taken over when April Black left radio. For most of that shift, WCOS Radio was the only station on the air. So my audience was the most diverse; composed of our normal listeners and those from the R&B, and Country stations as well. They tended to listen for hours on end as they worked and not make as many requests as the audiences of the other shows did.
The average length of a Top 40 song back then was 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That meant that it was possible to play 18-20 songs an hour depending on the commercial load. So it was easy to play the same song twice or even three times per 5 hour shift. The thing that amazed me was that I would often get a request for a song within 15 minutes of playing it. When I asked if they heard it a few minutes ago, the answer was “Yea Man – hit me again!” So old Todd Storz got it right out there in Omaha!
I must admit that by the time some songs spent 10 – 12 weeks on the chart, I was pretty tired of them. Those “up and comers” and “golden oldies” chart extras were pretty attractive to me. On the plus side of the register, I was so familiar with the songs on the chart that “hitting the post” or otherwise interacting with a particular song was a piece of cake. Some stations would mark the length of the intro on their records but we never did that. Even today, I can still remember how long the intro is; not so much in seconds but as to how many “beats” I have until the “post.”
In the morning I’ll walk into the On Air Studio at WUSC-FM with some 20,000 oldies at my beck and call, I’ll do my level best to play 40 of them during the two hour show! But I will have only 6 -10 songs in the queue, usually songs that I have not played there before. The rest of the show I’ll go where the music and the requests take me. That is the old school way. Not quite the same as my Top Forty days but close enough. If it is a normal day, half of the songs I play will be requests. That is just the way it was and ever should be. Oh MY!
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