[JPL] Bill Drake, 71, Dies; Created a Winning Radio Style

[Peter Poses]

Bill Drake, 71, Dies; Created a Winning Radio Style ~~~ By WILLIAM
GRIMES ~~~ Published: December 1, 2008

Bill Drake, who transformed radio programming with a syndicated format
that delivered more music, fewer commercials and high-energy "Boss
Jocks" — D.J.'s big on personality but economical with words — died
Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 71.

Bill Drake in the 1990s. The cause was lung cancer, said Carole Scott,
his companion.

In the 1960s, Mr. Drake, an up-and-coming disc jockey and programmer
from south Georgia, revolutionized radio when he and his partner,
Lester Eugene Chenault (pronounced Sha-NAULT), decided that radio
stations could make a lot more money and reach more listeners if they
cut back on D.J. chatter, accelerated the pace of their programs and
gave audiences more of what they presumably tuned in to hear: hit
songs.

He and Mr. Chenault introduced a formula, eventually sold as a
syndicated package with prerecorded music, that would revamp — and
homogenize — radio stations across the United States.

Under the slogan "Much More Music," KHJ in Los Angeles, an early
client, began playing 14 records each hour, far more than the
competition. Commercials were limited to 13 minutes and 40 seconds
each hour, a third less than the competition had.
Station-identification jingles (usually performed a cappella by the
Johnny Mann Singers) were cut to one and a half seconds. A new breed
of disc jockeys, billed as Boss Jocks, were drilled to keep their
patter to a minimum, and to standardize it.

The results were startling. KGB in San Diego went from last to first
in its market in 90 days. KHJ, with Boss Jocks like the Real Don
Steele and Robert W. Morgan at the microphone, leapt from 12th place
to first in 1965. In New York, critics howled when Mr. Drake and Mr.
Chenault forced out the legendary D.J. Murray the K from WOR-FM, but
the station doubled its audience.

In its heyday in the early 1970s, the two men's consulting firm,
Drake-Chenault Enterprises, served about 350 client stations with
makeover advice and totally automated packages in six different
formats.

"He took Top 40 radio and turned it into a machine," said Marc Fisher,
the author of "Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution
That Shaped a Generation" (Random House, 2007).

"He pared it down to the essentials and made it a vehicle for selling
advertising rather than an entertainment form, something you tuned in
to for music, the news, the time and the weather, all in a slickly
designed format," Mr. Fisher said. "It is common to think of radio
that way now, but in the 1960s it was revolutionary."

The standardized formats influenced other AM and eventually FM
stations nationwide to lose not just their individualized D.J. stars
but also to some degree their independent voices. The comedian George
Carlin joked about Boss Radio as early as 1972 on the album "FM & AM":

"Hi gang. Scott Lame here. The Boss jock with the Boss sound from the
Boss list of the Boss 30 that my Boss told me to play."

The Boss D.J.'s drew their own followings, however, and younger fans
who grew up with them attend reunions to meet their favorites.

Philip Taylor Yarbrough grew up in Donalsonville, Ga., and began
working at a local radio station as a teenager. While attending South
Georgia Teachers College in Statesboro, he worked the 9
p.m.-to-midnight shift at WWNS, where his sign-off theme was Hugo
Winterhalter's version of "Canadian Sunset."

"If you were a freshman girl and were off campus somewhere and heard
that, you knew you were in deep trouble unless you could get back to
the college before the song was over," said Ramona Palmer, whom he
married in 1959 after taking a job at WAKE radio in Atlanta and
changing his name to rhyme with the station's call letters. The couple
divorced in 1966. Two later marriages also ended in divorce. He is
survived by a daughter, Kristie Philbin of Delray Beach, Fla.

At WAKE, where he began as a D.J. and rose to become program director,
Mr. Drake began tinkering with the programming so successfully that
the station's parent company sent him to California to work some magic
on its San Francisco station.

In 1962 he was hired by Mr. Chenault, the owner of KYNO in Fresno, who
also had innovative ideas about packaging radio. Together they created
Drake-Chenault Enterprises, rescued KGB in San Diego, their first
client, then struck gold with KHJ.

"We cleaned up AM radio," Mr. Drake told The Los Angeles Times in
1990. "We put everything in its place. It was radio that was designed
for the listener. Before us, disc jockeys would just ramble on
incessantly."

No longer did D.J.'s introduce songs, or spin yarns about teenage
romance, or project a quirky personality, in the style of Wolfman
Jack. "His insight was realizing that you could turn these D.J.'s into
household names even if they didn't really do anything on the air,"
Mr. Fisher said.

Songs got the Drake-Chenault treatment, too. Regardless of the stature
of the artist, two minutes was just about the limit, which meant that
even Beatles hits were trimmed to fit. The Top 40 list was shrunk to
the Top 30. Another Drake-Chenault innovation was to program the news
at odd times, like 20 minutes after the hour, so that their stations
would be playing music, and enticing listeners, when others were
broadcasting the news.

By cutting down on commercials, the stations were able to sell
advertising at higher rates. "Everybody else was choking the goose
laying the golden egg, jamming in as many commercials as they could,"
he told www.radioandrecords.com last year. "When our slots were sold,
that was it."

Mr. Drake gained a reputation as a ruthless, detail-minded operator.
Special phone lines in his Bel Air home allowed him to monitor his
client stations by punching in a code and listening. If he did not
like what he heard, things could become unpleasant.

"When that phone rings, you know it's death time, man," a
battle-scarred D.J. told Time magazine in 1968.

Mr. Drake sold his interest in Drake-Chenault Enterprises in 1983, and
the company dissolved in the mid-1980s. In recent years, Mr. Drake
developed "Top 40 Time Clock," a syndicated cavalcade of more than
1,800 hits aimed at the baby boom generation.

"It has a great hook," Mr. Drake wrote in a Web site promotion. "You
can't wait to hear what comes up next. It's the History of Top 40
Radio without the narration."

In other words, no D.J. chatter. As Mr. Drake told
www.radioandrecords.com, "I always said if you're going to say nothing
anyway, say it in as few words as possible."