Bill Drake: Top-40 Radio Innovator Has Died

Top-40 radio in the late 50s and early 60s, before Bill Drake, was loose and clanky.

A song would end. The deejay would talk. He'd play a couple commercials, give the time and temperature, play a jingle, and another song. After it ended, he'd talk again, play a couple more commercials, talk, and play another song. So it went until the news came on.

It was a time of quirky personalities: Dick Biondi "the wild Eye-Tralian" in Buffalo; Russ Knight "the Weird Beard" in Dallas, Arnie "Woo-Woo" Ginsburg in Boston, Tom Clay in Detroit. Entertaining they were, but their shows crawled. Some jingles lasted thirty seconds. In order to remain quirky, they talked, rambled, gabbled on when it sometimes appeared as if they really had nothing to say. Some, in their own minds, became bigger than their stations.

If their stations sold all of the maximum allowed eighteen minutes of commercials per hour-and they often did-the clutter could seem overwhelming.

Top-40, it its early days, was a term applied to any popular music station with a printed survey. Some surveys included as many as seventy current records. Songs meant for teenagers tended to cover the same topics: boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love, boy and girl break up. They tended to sound alike; quickly, cheaply created things to be forgotten when new ones came along. A station's personalities, and not necessarily its music, sold it to advertisers.

All of this was in the back of young Philip Yarborough's mind as he lived the nomadic life of a career radio deejay. He'd changed his air name to Bill Drake, since it rhymed with the call letters of his station at the time, WAKE in Atlanta. It was also a lot shorter.

At stations in Fresno and Stockton, California, and at KYA in San Francisco, he fine-tuned what would become known as the Drake sound: short playlists (thirty current records), fewer commercials, always a contest going on, less talk, more music. In 1964, San Diego's KGB went from fourteenth place to the top in three months as a Drake station.

The British Invasion-specifically, the Beatles-raised the general level of American social consciousness. Pop songs were no longer two and one-half minute boy-girl dramas. Lyrics reflected current events: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the developing counterculture. The time had come for music to come out from under the quirky personalities, and Bill Drake needed more stations.

Los Angeles station KHJ had been on the air since 1922. In audience surveys, it languished in the middle of the pack, playing an unspectacular mix of new, and old, music.

At 3 PM Pacific time, on May 5, 1965, Drake sprang "Boss Radio" on an unsuspecting southern California. By fall, the perennial loser was number one.

Rival KFWB became an all-news station. KRLA lost much of its audience, and began a decline from which it never recovered. The radio industry began to notice what Drake, and his partner Gene Chenault, were doing out west.

While Boss Radio was taking over LA, WKNR was Detroit's number one top-40 station despite its weak signal on the east side of town. Its only serious competition was WXYZ, the former Lone Ranger station owned and operated by the American Broadcasting Company. As a network O&O, "Wixie" was required to air the full complement of ABC newscasts and public affairs programs, and "Don McNeil's Breakfast Club." It positioned itself as a top-40 station, but its broadcast day included a lot of non-music time.

On New Year's Day 1967, WXYZ dropped top 40 for adult music and show tunes. Keener had Detroit to itself until May 1. On that day, the first CKLW Big 30 survey appeared in record stores, and Drake radio appeared in the Motor City at 800 on the AM dial.

WKNR lasted until 1971, when it dropped top 40 for easy-listening instrumental music. At the 1310 AM frequency, where the Who and Stones once ruled, Percy Faith and the Mystic Moods Orchestra were in heavy rotation. Mourners who attended Keener's funeral noted that the station became hot at a good time but increased its commercial load until it sounded strangled, at which time CKLW's Drake format finished it off. Another market conquered.

Drake had his detractors. He wasn't that great a jock, they said, and took out his frustrations on those who were. The format turned jocks into card-readers, and was the death of personality radio. Les Talk would be a good Drake air name. Then, the deejay who used it could, truthfully, without misgivings, promise his listeners "much more music with Les Talk."

If you had something worth saying, however, and could say it in seven seconds, it worked. "The Real" Don Steele and Robert W. Morgan became legends on KHJ by keeping their comments short, relevant, and funny. As did the jocks on The Big 8:

C! K! LW! "Fire"-Arthur Brown-around here, it's mostly "fire Mike Rivers" . . . five twenty-two, CKLW Beat The Bomb time . . .

C! K! LW! The Who, and "I Can See For Miles" . . . all the way to the nearest YWCA . . . ten-seventeen, CKLW Location X time, on the Charlie Van Dyke show . . .

C-K-LW, with Ed Mitchell . . . Friend and Lover, with "Reach Out In The Darkness" . . . just make sure your hands aren't cold . . .

Bill Drake took the personality out of top-40 radio, but I still remember this stuff.

On the success of The Big 8 and Boss Radio, WOR-FM New York, WRKO Boston, WIBG Philadelphia, and KFRC San Francisco adopted the Drake format. Lots of music. Short jingles, each one with its defined role. A distinctive top of the hour ID, played opposite competitors' newscasts, in the middle of six songs in a row: "And the HITS . . . just keep onnn comin' . . . "

Tribute web sites have been created by fans of Drake stations, and of others that weren't clients but copied the format that supposedly squeezed the life out of personality radio. The sound comes to life on aircheck sites such as ReelRadio.comand Dale Patterson's Rock Radio Scrapbook

The Drake format remained the formula for music radio through disco, and the dance-pop 80s. Light commercial loads, cut the talk, play the music, keep things moving. It remained so until computers and software programs made voice-tracking practical and solved the problem of balky deejays by eliminating them.

Only Todd Storz, whose idea it was to play the same forty records over and over, changed the way music is presented on radio as much as Bill Drake.

On Windsor oldies station CKWW, co-owned with CKLW, the hourly IDs voiced by Bill Drake can still be heard. Only the call letters have changed. The IDs serve as a small, but appropriate, tribute to the man who made Boss Radio boss, and the Eight really big.