Former musicradio77 WABC assistant program director Julian Breen says
that Rick Sklar, the mastermind behind the success of the most listened to station in the
history of American radio, succeeded, in part, because he had “great patience in
dealing with the corporate executives.”
Julian worked alongside Rick from 1968 to 1971, becoming production
director just weeks after the station had abolished some of the network shows that had
been obstacles in maintaining a music listening audience. WABC would soon have 8 million
listeners a week – by far the most in the country.
The ABC radio network had just been divided into four demographic
pieces – with WABC being part of the American Contemporary Network, which offered
concise newscasts at :55, some entertainment-related features and Howard Cosell’s
Speaking of Sports commentaries.
The station no longer carried The Breakfast Club, which had
interrupted its music programming weekdays from 10 to 11 a.m., and it had eliminated the
news block that had run from 5:55 to 7:15 on weeknights.
“Within six months we were at the top of the market,”
Julian recalled during an Apr. 1, 2005 phone interview with musicradio77.com.
Julian was working in production and doing newscasts at WCTC in New
Brunswick, N.J., when WABC technician Richard Silverberg, who had been his roommate when
they were attending Rutgers University in New Jersey, told him there was an opening for
the production director’s position at musicradio77 WABC.
He called Rick, had a job interview and was hired about a week later
in January 1968.
Julian, who now does some consulting work for a small number of radio
stations and analysis of Arbitron ratings, said that another reason for WABC’s
success was that Rick, who died in 1992, “could negotiate and outlast the
opposition.
“When you dealt with Rick he almost always had another card that
you couldn’t see that he could use to win the game,” he added.
“He also went to great lengths to avoid any controversy within
the company which might reflect badly on him,” Julian said. “And, he guarded his
turf zealously.
“He pretty much had a free hand with the music selection,” he said of his friend and mentor. “If the corporate people had questions, we had thorough documentation on why a song was on the air.
“The recordkeeping of the data on the surveys was meticulous and
they were kept for three years on the sales, the surveys and how the record progressed,”
he added.
Frank Kingston Smith, who was hired in the spring 1971 after Julian
taped air checks of some of his shows in Philadelphia, has said Rick “would take care
of his guys.
“If there was someone ranking on them, he would take their side,
and people would complain about the darnedest things,” he said in a 2004 phone
interview with musicradio77.com.
“He was a disc jockeys’ programmer, not a sales department
programmer,” he concluded.
Julian said that Rick, like most complex individuals, is not “well
described by sweeping generalizations.”
He said he experienced encounters that both support and take
exception with Frank’s comments.
Julian said one day legendary WABC afternoon personality Dan Ingram
did a lengthy intro to a Stevie Wonder song “in which he led Stevie, stumbling over
obstacles he couldn’t see, up to the microphone to sing.
“By the end of Ingram’s show that day, Sklar had calmed the
waters and had Dan’s apology to the blind advocates written and ready for Dan to
sign,” he recalled. “Case closed.”
However, he said when Roby Yonge, who was an air personality at the
station in 1968-1969, began announcing rumors about Paul McCartney’s death on the air
during his overnight show in October 1969, “Rick threw him to the wolves replete with
a security guard to escort him from the building.
“Was the incident simply an excuse to get rid of Roby whose WABC
career had cratered and who was said to be working out the remaining months of his
contract in the overnight?” Julian said. “Or, was the lesson that a disc jockey
faces heavy-duty consequences if he swamps the corporate switchboard and exposes the
company to controversy over on-air statements about a recording artist, all of which would
reflect badly on Rick?”
Rick - who worked at WINS in the late 1950s and early 1960s during
the payola scandal, which damaged the careers of the late Alan Freed, the father of rock
& roll, and other air personalities - was noted for making sure that WABC air
personalities didn’t interact with record promoters and that air play was based on
the sales of the record at the stores in the metro New York City area that were surveyed
weekly.
Julian said that he agrees with Al Brady, who served as program
director of WABC in 1979 and 1980, that no one will probably ever know whether the format,
which at one time called for playing the # 1 song every 60 minutes, caused the low time
spent listening numbers on the station because people tuned in to hear the top songs or
they tuned out because the top song was being played again.
“WABC didn’t have many rules, but the ones that were there
had to be followed,” he said in response to a question on the high repetition of the
top three songs on the musicradio77 survey.
“If anything, I think the repetition was a positive,” said
Julian, who now lives in Pennington, N.J. “At that time there was a lot of turnover
in songs. The list turned over through periods of time and not that many number one songs
stayed there for several weeks.
“There was a wide range of music because it was before record
companies learned how to niche markets,” the former WABC assistant program director
said. “Songs had to cross a lot of boundaries at that time to become a success.”
He said the music meetings held each week largely revolved around the
sales of the records over the previous week.
“In some respects the music meetings were fun,” Julian
recalled. “But some of them were preordained. We had the results from the survey.
However it gave us a chance to become familiar with the music for the weeks ahead.”
Over WABC’s 22 years as a music station such air personalities
as Scott Muni, Cousin Brucie, Bob-a-loo and George Michael complained that the music
format was too restrictive.
In the early 1970s, WABC reduced its Tuesday night survey from 20 to
14 songs, although there also were some hot prospects and recent solid gold that also
received moderate air play.
“After 14, it’s not as much a science,” Julian said
regarding his support of the shorter survey. “In New York, 14 turned out to be a good
cutoff number. After that, the statistics become less convincing.
“The people who typically are critical of the short play lists
are the disc jockeys who have to listen to the same song three or four times during a
show,” he said. “It colors their judgment.”
He noted that Tom Donahue almost single-handily invented progressive
radio at KMPX in San Francisco during the late 1960s, in small part, because he was
frustrated by the repetition of songs on top 40 radio which he had worked in at KYA in the
Bay Area.
Julian left WABC in the summer 1971 to become the program director at
KYA.
Julian agrees with other WABC personnel who through the years have
said that Rick “was a master promoter.”
However, Julian said that there were “very few contests because
the phone company prohibited us from dong a lot because the volume of calls was
interfering with their lines. You didn’t have the cut-offs that you have today.
“There were times where we would include a phone number in a PSA
[public service announcement] and the organization would become so swamped with calls that
they would ask us to take it off the air,” he said regarding WABC’s
impact.
He said that in contrast to today’s radio market where companies
have their names connected with concerts and promotions, Duracell was probably the only
advertiser that had a tie-in with a contest during his tenure at musicradio77.
He noted that the double prize give-away in 1968 featured an armored
car, often carrying Roby Yonge, who was then the early afternoon air personality, to
someone’s home that was listed in a local telephone directory or that had sent a post
card to WABC with their address. If the person knew the prize that day they would receive
two of them.
Julian also said that Rick sought perfection.
“He wanted to get things right and would take the time to do so,”
he said. “Sometimes it would take several days to do a promo. Quality control was a
Rick Sklar word.”
Julian said that Rick “didn’t trust people right away. It
took about a year for me to get to the point where I could just do some production piece
without much or any input from him.”
“Yes and no,” he said when asked if Rick Sklar was
well-liked at WABC.
“He often was either your best pal or very secretive,”
Julian recalled. “The door could be open or closed, although most of the time it was
open.”
He said “it’s a shame that ABC never incorporated his
talents into other parts of the network,” regarding the impact that Rick might have
had in the growing company that was becoming a giant in both radio and television.
Julian, who has long had a strong reputation for his production of
promos and commercials, said he arrived at WABC during an era when ad agency producer Tony
Schwartz and the Beatles were changing the sound of radio spots.
“The overwhelming influence at the time was the Beatles, who
would even have tracks run backwards,” he said. “In some instances with the
commercials I did tremendous overdubbing where there were five or six generations.”
Julian noted that Schwartz produced the Pepsi spot that had the
sounds of a bottle opening.
“Repetition tells you what is important,” he said. “If
the key word is music, you should use it more than once.
“I started to get into that,” he added. “There was
more repeating of words and overlapping of words.”
Regarding personnel decisions, Julian said that Rick made a smart
move in hiring Harry Harrison, then the midday personality at rival WMCA, to succeed Herb
Oscar Anderson from 6 to 10 a.m. when Herb left in September 1968.
“Rick always believed that known names work better,” Julian
said of Harry’s popularity at WMCA, where he had been since 1959. “Harry was a good enough technician that he
grasped the format from day one.
“My recollection is that the ratings went up after Harry took
over,” Julian said. “I think Herb had been depressing the ratings.”
“Herb was a real pain to deal with,” he said of the
longtime morning personality who later worked at other stations in New York City. “He
taped his Saturday show, and would start the taping Friday at 9 a.m. and would go between
studios so that he could finish the last hour of his live show and start taping the first
hour of Saturday’s show.
“You needed to have a director and a technician to operate
everything,” he added. “And you had to tape two sets of possible weather
forecasts on carts to insert into the show depending on how the next day turned out.”
Julian said he always has been impressed with how Harry interacts
with people.
“There are not that many people like Harry in the major markets,”
Julian said. “He was a very likable person who wasn’t self-absorbed by his
celebrity.”
He said he has “never completely understood why [Roby] was
hired. “He had a great voice but he didn’t have a great deal of interpretive
ability.
“There were times when I had to have him say five lines
separately and then have a technician splice them together rather than having him be able
to read the commercial continuously in one take,” he added. “He didn’t get
a lot of respect around the station.”
Julian said Dan Ingram got, by far, the largest volume of production
work.
“He had tremendous technical skills,” he said “There
were spots with four or five drops and he had to hit them according to the music, and he
would do it in one take.
“Dan had an amazing ability to listen and talk at the same time,”
Julian added. “He also had tremendous range, which is why we used him on so much
production.”
He said that on the air what impressed him most about Dan, who worked
at WABC for almost 21 years, was that: “he bought a quick mind that allowed him to
ad-lib very effectively.”
Julian said that during his tenure, Brucie was the most recognized of
the All-American air personalities.
“That is not common for a night personality,” he said.
“Usually it is the morning drive guy, because he has the largest audience.
“We rarely used Brucie for production,” he said. “When
we did use him it was mostly things that fit what he could do well. He didn’t have
the range, because he was always Brucie.”
Julian said that Brucie’s “best shows were when someone
behind the scenes was doing a lot of the work.”
“Bobby Ryan arranged the show well for him and kept everything
on time,” he said of the former WABC technician, who later was elected to the state
Senate in Nevada.
“Bruce was often disorganized,” Julian added. “He was
on the phone a lot. We tried to get Bobby on a lot of Brucie’s shifts, because we
knew he had the skills to make Brucie better.”
He said Ron Lundy, who was at WABC for almost 17 years, “was a
great guy who had enthusiasm and presence in his delivery.
“He was someone who felt that he was the luckiest person the
world to be working at WABC,” added Julian, who produced the audio segment of a
simulated Ron Lundy show that was used in the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy.
He said that late night air personality Chuck Leonard had a smiling,
smooth delivery and did offer some funny ad-libs.
“However, I thought he had a lot more talent than he showed on
the air,” Julian said. “Chuck had a very good mind. He often was a whole lot
funnier and creative off the air.”
Julian recalled that in the fall 1968 when White Room, by Cream was
being added to the survey, Chuck heard the song at a music meeting and after the first
lyric said, “In my white room,” Chuck, the first African-American air
personality at a major market Top 40 station, replied: “I don’t like that.’
“Then when the next line was: “with black curtains,”
Julian recalled that Chuck said, “ ‘Now I like that song.’ ”
He said that today there hardly are any personality rock stations
similar to the top 40 stations that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I don’t think you find many personalities that interact
with the music on their shows,” Julian said of today’s disc jockeys. “You
get the impression that they feel that the music gets in the way.
“If you play a song it would exclude more people than a schtick
that you have planned,” he added regarding much of the current programming.
On a separate topic, he said that the XM and Sirius satellite
networks “will have a lot of impact. Terrestrial radio is used to sucking on high
commercial loads that are much higher than what people were used to years ago on FM or
even on WABC years ago.
“How do you replace that revenue?” he said. “It’s
like trying to get someone off of crack.
“Right now it’s like the old AM and FM battle of years ago,”
Julian added. “The issues are satellite stations with fewer commercials or no
commercials. That’s a hard one to fight against. I know about a dozen people that
have either Sirius or XM and I think all of them use it as their primary form of radio.
For them it virtually has replaced terrestrial radio, except for traffic reports.
“I think that XM and Sirius are doing the right thing by going
after big audience lures such as Major League Baseball, the National Football League and
Howard Stern,” he said regarding the satellite networks’ marketing
strategies.
Julian, who has done consulting analysis of the Aribtron ratings for
several years, said he believes that “by and large they do reflect the popularity of
the stations.
“The only people who usually attack the numbers are the ones who
are trailing in the ratings,” he added.
Some years after leaving WABC, Julian was largely responsible for
developing two radio formats.
First, he established Back Seat Music at WPEN in Philadelphia in
1975, a format that focused on rock music from 1955 until late 1963.
“It wasn’t terribly successful,” Julian said. “I
think it was two or three years too late to float off the music being played on the music
stations on AM.”
He also developed the Magic format that was launched at WMGK-FM in
Philadelphia. The song rotation included several tunes from such artists as James Taylor,
Carly Simon and Carole King.
“It was beautiful music for people who don’t feel old,”
Julian said.
He has looks back with pride and fondness on his tenure at
musicradio77.
“My years at WABC were the most intensely creative of my career,” Julian said.
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