Radio On Strike

 It used to happen in this country. People used to band together and go on strike and it was a good thing. In the 1930s it was to stop pay cuts, limit child labor, end company scrip, and so many other inhumane practices of industry in that era. In the 1980s it sort of fizzled after President Regan [R] went to war against the middle class. I was reading a back issue of a trade magazine and found the image below and it got me thinking. These days the only strike that shuts down a radio station is a lightning strike.

My gut feeling was that they were very rare. Strikes are traditionally the tool of people that perform manual labor, blue collar workers. In general, white collar workers don't strike. It's a generalization, but it's fairly accurate. So to that end I have compiled a list of Radio-related strikes and their dates. This is limited to white collar staff: writers, producers, announcers, musicians etc. I have excluded the strikes of TV staff, radio manufacturers, and telegraph operators as those are not strictly radio-related. This is an incomplete list, but I have hopes that readers may make a few additions. I found many of these in the book The Encyclopedia Of Strikes In American History  By Aaron Brenner. Also excluded are the occasions when a union threatened to strike and management made concessions. Those events are poorly recorded, and I am not confident I coulld make a proper list of those.


2011 - AFTRA strike on record labels [here]
2005 - CBC Radio Strike
1982 - AFTRA strike on WINS-AM
1978 - AFTRA strike on advertising agencies
1977 - WBAI Pacifica Radio strike
1974 - WAOK-AM
1974 - AFTRA strike WWDJ
1970 - KZAP-FM staff sit down strike
1968 - KMPX-AM
1967 - AFTRA100 radio station strike
1965 - WSIM-AM, Radio and Television Broadcast Technicians
1962 - KFWB-AM
1958 - CBFT(Radio-Canada CBC) Radio producers strike
1958 - MGA Studio Musicians  (later re-merged into AFM)
1948 - AFM recording  ban
1948 - The Radio Writers' Guild
1947 - WCKY-AM Radio technicians strike  (IBEW)
1944 - NABET engineers at NBC
1942 - AFM recording  ban (2 years)
1941 - ASCAP radio strike
1936 - Marine Radio Operator Strike (MEBA)
1938 - WTCN-AM News Staff
1935 - ARTA strike at Macay Radio & Telegraph Co. 
1921 - Marine Radio Operator Strike (MEBA)

**************UPDATE**************

I  keep this list updated at a static page here

The Drake-Chenault formula

Drake in Drake-Chenault is Bill Drake, the Chenault is Gene Chenault. The irony of my hatred for their version of radio is that it's alive and well today. they brought the gift of repetition and automation to Top-40. There was probably as much automation in FM radio in the 1970s as there are today. Sure the hardware was rudimentary, but it worked.

At the time the FCC had passed a new regulation prohibiting owners of AM and FM stations from simulcasting programming. This was intended to force media owners into running original content on their shiny new FM stations. The result was somewhat the opposite. With FM still fresh out of the shrink wrap it's ad revenues were still quite low. So station owners turned to automation and syndication to keep costs down. This played right into Drake-Chenault.

Drake was the VP of programming at RKO. Gene Chenault owned KYNO in Fresno. In the beginning they started to market production music on tape under the company name barton Industries. In 1967 they began pitching a Top-40 countdown style program called Hitparade which launched on KHJ. They began consulting shortly thereafter. But RKO was watching their own ratings slide. They put the heat on Drake-Chenault with the general impression that their new hobby automating FMs was hurting their business arrangement for RKOs network of AMs. Drake could no longer multitask.

Drake and Chenault left and formed American Independent Radio to market pre-recorded programs.For them consulting was to apply the Drake-Chenault formula. Their Top-40 formula was made of most of the things we take for granted in radio. It was the original more-rock-less-talk arrangement. Programs were broken into hours, hours in to quarter hours, bumpers, liners, jingles, branding, short repetitive playlists... and it worked. It produced ratings. As much as I despise it, it's still the standard for CHR Formats today. More here.
But taking the autonomy away from the DJ was received poorly, at least by DJs. Sometimes their arrival at a station went badly: Staff walkouts, vandalism, and theft. KMPX for example experienced all three. Drake-Chenault was the polar opposite of the free-format mania some stations had been running with. Their GM Bert Kleinman bragged in 1975:

"Current estimates indicate that over 20 percent of all stations in the United States are automated. In 1974 alone, it is estimated that 500 AM and FM stations have switched from manual to automated operation. At thiis rate over half the radio stations in the country could be automated by 1980."

In 1979 Billboard called them "the fastest growing syndicator around." Stations using the Drake-Chenault formula were calling it Top 40 or Hot 100 might have been spinning as few as 30 singles. There's no slow fade out on this story. Their partnership dissolved and they sold the company. It dissolved in the mid 1980s. But aside from that anti-climactic exit they succeeded in every way possible. Their formula has had total industry dominance since the late 1970s.

The Moose is on The Loose

It is generally written that before Tom Donahue hooked up with KMPX, there was nothing subversive about rock radio. But The Moose, your Captain of the all-night flight, was very real. When some radio people talk about the true beginnings of free-form radio, they talk about the Moose.

He was a native of Rochester, N.Y. and after three years at WKBW he came to KYA in the Summer of 1962 The Moose worked at KYA on four different occasions, at KSFO three times, KFRC twice, and at KNBR during his career in San Francisco. You can listen to clips here: http://www.bayarearadio.org/audio/kya/index.shtml

When the owner of KYA asked him to be program director, he balked at the Promotion. Vindictively the boss put him on overnights. It went down more like letting a wild lion out of a cage. It was here on the Super Freak 1260 that he flew directly thru the great egress of the 1960s. He rallied the people for protests, for civil rights, and free speech. He praised long hairand drugs and railed against war; all with a timeless blend of silliness, surrealism and cynicism. Every night he played free-form rock 'n' roll and the youth listened.

If there was a record on he didn't like, he'd have his engineer hit a sound-effects cartridge of a bombing attack, and the record would soon grind to a pathetic halt. In a lilting, laughing voice, he got away with sayings like, "May the bird of paradise eat your face completely." He gleefully attacked sponsors. His biggest advertiser was Mayfair supermarkets, which used a jingle sung by "Bob and Penny Mayfair." One night, Syracuse bombed the bouncy couple.

He had an imaginary crew and offered in-flight movies. and at 5:15, he delivered a farm report, doing the voices of Barnyard Benny and Cy Lo. reportedly he did not mave multiple personality disorder.

But behind the Mic, he was a family man. He sold driftwood at a shop on the village fair. He didnt take drugs and did his show hopped up on hot cocoa. He claimed not to ingest anything stronger than a cheeseburger.

On March 27, 1994 the historic KYA call letters disappeared forever, as the call letters were changed to KYCY. [Now KZRZ] http://home.att.net/~musicmann/kya.htm

Classic Rock is born

Classic Rock is a radio format not a genre. It contains many genres including actual oldies from the 1970s, psychedelic rock, prog-rock, and others. It is an odd format in that it has become totally entrenched in our language as if it were a genre or even if you get self-deterministic; because we all use it as if it were, it has become so.

Interestingly enough most Classic Rock stations originally played a little something we used to think of as AOR. Album-Oriented Rock. that too was a format but despite the persistence of the term, it no longer exists. The format is completely extinct! the idea was to play album cuts, in addition to (or instead of) singles.

I have seen the argument that this was also the birth of alternative rock radio. I think this is mostly crap since the term alternative rock did not even exist in 1967. I see it as something that sprung organically, decades later from another generation of pop music. I'll write that up some other time.

Previously 106.9 KMPX had been many things, a jazz station, MOR (middle of the road) and others. but in 1967 KMPX was owned by the Crosby-Pacific Broadcasting Company and was brokered ethnic and running a mighty 80,000 watts. In 1967, rock promoter Tom Donahue scraped together some favors, some cash and some chutzpa and sweet talked Station manager Ron Hunt into phasing out some foreign language programs in favor his "hippie-station" concept: album-oriented rock music with an emphasis on San Francisco-based bands, and announcers who took a more laid-back approach to the mic. By August of that year they were hippie-rock 24/7. Donahue was the First AOR PD in the nation. Months later they picked up a sister station in Pasadena KPPC.  Clips of Donahue talking here:

Early on things were promising but not profitable. staff worked for little or nothing. But a year later cash was flowing, listenership was up and so were ad rates. But salaries were still ranged from terrible to non-existent. then management fired Donahue and brought in Bob Prescott as PD. This led directly to a strike by the KMPX staff on March 18, 1968.

Ever the capitalist, Leon Crosby opted not to meet the demands of the workers. in stead he brought in a replacement staff. It was much like the way Regan handled the air traffic controllers strike in 1981... except a mixing console wont kill anyone. The strike at KMPX lasted eight weeks. KMPX lost almost it's entire staff and most of it's advertisers and even lost some of it's playlits's core artists. Several rock bands including the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead requested the the station no longer play their music.

Then Donahue took the whole staff across the street to KSAN and reassembled his radio commune. KMPX had a limited revival but never recovered. By 1972 after a series of ownership changes they flipped to nostalgia. Today KIFR operates on the 106.9 channel in Frisco, as a Infinity Broadcasting licensee running News/talk. KSAN is still a big classic rocker. More here including a documentary film:

NOTE: the book the Art of Rock has several of the now famous psychedelic KMPX promotional station posters. You can see it here.