Avant Garde Broadcasting

Much has been written about Clarence Avant. Much like Barry Gordy (another Motown alum) there's more than a little dirt on his shoes. The documentary Searching For Sugar Man all but accuses him of stealing all the royalties from a Sixto Rodrigez's gold record. More here. But that's the record biz. It has a certain reputation, and it has had that reputation for a long time. If you expect a sausage factory to make something other than sausage that my friend is an error in judgement.

I bring up Mr. Avant because he also dabbled in radio. In 1971, (shortly after Rodrigez's flopped in the US) Avant founded Avant Garde Broadcasting. Two years later, his company bought 103.9 KTYM-FM in Inglewood, CA from Trans America Broadcasting. The license cost $321k which in today's dollars is more like1.6 million.  Avant renamed that station KAGB. It was the first African-American owned FM radio station in the Los Angeles metro.  But Avant Garde never turned a profit...

But the money situation looked dubious from the start. Avant started with a 200k promissory note from the Urban National Corporation of Boston.  Even though it too was founded in 1971 that company seems to have been on the up and up. It was capitalized to 10 million dollars via investments from Yale and Harvard Universities, insurance giants like John Hancock, Aetna and Prudential Insurance Co., J.P. Morgan & Co., and both Mobil and Gulf Oil. Even Bill Cosby invested in Avant. Avant hired Del Shields to run his company.

None of the press on Avent's move mentioned that KYFM was already the first black music station in LA. It had been playing black music programming since 1961. The OM Charles (Chuck) Johnson and the PD  Lonnie Cook were also black so they had the first black programming staff as well. Chuck and Lonnie were form KPRS in Kansas City. The station had one lone white DJ: Ron Johnson.

But in 1975 the curtain came down. Urban National pushed Avant into bankruptcy proceedings.  Avant owned Urban around 400k, and another 600k to Clarence Avant. His own independent record label Sussex lost  another $13k in private loans to Avant Garde. Bill Cosby was burned for 200k. Ouch. Football player Willie Davis bought the station and renamed it KACE. The urban format remained as did those calls for another 30 years. Willie flipped the station to Urban Oldies in 1993 and the calls to KAEV. Shortly afterward he sold out to Cox.

The KTYM calls today still live on 1460 AM which with some irony I note is still owned by  Trans America Broadcasting. Johnson and Cook remained a team after the sale to Avant and moved on to KAPP-FM and had more success with an early Top 40 format.

The Night Call Experiment

I was at a junk shop thumbing a book titled In Black America. Since it had an index I checked it for radio. There was one entry on page 315 and it regarded the program Night Calls on 106.7 WRVR-FM. There were only two relating sentences... but one was was a brutal run-on.(editors please!) Little did I know how big a deal this was. More here.

"Stations found that ghetto residents were willing to express their opinions on every issue concerning them, oftentimes most eloquently, and subsequently many stations started audience participation shows in which callers could express their grievances over the air. One of the most successful of such shows is Night Call, broadcast over WRVR-FM in New York and syndicated to more than twenty-eight other stations throughout the nation."

The program was hosted by Dell Shields and ran Monday through Friday. The program was released in co-operation with the Television Radio and Film Commission (TRAFCO), National Council of Churches, and the National Catholic Office for Radio and television.Kind of an odd cabal in the production room there for a call in show that in 1969 was taking live calls about the plight of "10 million colonial Mexican American people" in Texas, New Mexico and California. The same program aired an interview with Huey Newton, once leader of the Black Panthers. An issue of Cue Magazine described it in brief. "...nationwide show gives Negros and whites a chance to communicate with one another on the air. Anyone may take part by phoning "Night Call" collect from anywhere in the country..."

A number of radio publications make passing references to it. A 1968 issue of Billboard states that the program has 20 affiliates as of June 3rd. Those stations included: KUOW, KLIQ, WLIB, WERE, WBUR, WOSU, KSJR, WSRC, WAMO, WRUN and KERI. Listeners called in collect, a big difference from today. It ran for only 20 months based out of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. An issue of Educational Broadcasting Review wrote that it was terminated because there was no proper equipment yet invented to handle a nationally syndicated call-in program. It seems dubious to me, and as I often do in these types of situations, I suspect a racial motivation. Del Shields was a lightning rod for that exact kind of situation too. He was the executive secretary of NATRA, the National Association of Radio and Television Announcers.

It was not Del Shields only attempt at a black-oriented talk program. In 1961, Del actually was the host of the first television talk show hosted by an African American. It debuted on WRCV-TV in Philadelphia and was canceled in just a few weeks. It had been sponsored by a brewery and in Del's own words "It only took 50 letters saying 'Get that nigger off your show or we'll stop drinking your beer' to make the sponsor drop the program..." Previous to that he had worked as a radio disc jockey starting in the late 1950s. His time had included airtime at WLIB and WDAS.

In 1970, he resigned, then was retroactively fired by NATRA in a highly combative departure. He'd been very vocal in fighting for racial equality in broadcasting, something we take for granted today. In 1968 only 8 radio stations were owned by African Americans, and three of them belonged to James Brown. As Del put it "We are not begging the record companies for anything, but they will have to make us a part of it if they wish to stay in business." In response to his hot buttered rhetoric, the FCC investigated the organization. After their parting both NATRA and Del Shields fell from the public eye. Del went to work for Bill Cosby in 1970. NATRA lasted about another 5 years.