The Hits Just Keep On Coming – Ben Fong-Torres, 1998 ★★

Reeling in the Ears

Once upon a time radio could sell anything: Stereos, pimple cream, Starland Vocal Band, New Coke. Then rap came to crush our aural unification. At least that’s my take from this pleasant if tepid account of Top 40 radio’s heyday in the second half of the last century.

Ben Fong-Torres, a former editor for Rolling Stone magazine perhaps best known as a character in the movie Almost Famous, pulls together people and places from four decades of Top 40 radio dominance, from the birth of rock n’ roll to the emergence of modern-day narrow-casting which sped its demise.

It was a time of fast-talking dee-jays, payola, clock-watching formulatics, and teenage audiences who steadfastly tuned into a vast entertainment kingdom of their very own. Fong-Torres explains the concept at the outset:

It would be designed to draw adults as well as teenagers, but on the surface it was a hyped-up soundtrack for that other cold war of the fifties and early sixties: the one between adults and kids.

Despite this cultural view, Fong-Torres’ approach as it develops is to make the story less about that, or even the music, and more about the people who worked on radio. It’s an approach that either sells you on The Hits Just Keep On Coming, or wears you out.

Fong-Torres presents a succession of short feature pieces on radio celebrities like Dick Clark, Casey Kasem, Gary Owens, Wolfman Jack, and Scott Shannon, many interviewed for the book, all loosely connected to a somewhat chronological account on the rise of Top 40 radio. Through their varied experiences, you get a feeling for the demands of hit radio, its pleasures and its inevitable toll.

Some of the happiest sounding guys on radio were basket cases when the mike went off. Alan Freed, the first big-name deejay of the rock n’ roll era, who both pioneered and prefigured Top 40 radio, drank a lot and accepted bribes for playing music, which eventually turned him into a casualty of a so-called “Payola” scandal. He died young and broke.

Alan Freed in his heyday at the mike of WINS-AM in New York. Image from http://nostalgiacentral.com/music/artists-a-to-k/artists-a/alan-freed/

Fong-Torres writes of one 1960s legend, “Mad Daddy” Pete Myers, who committed suicide after being moved from his preferred time slot.

Myers wasn’t the only such casualty: [Rick] Shaw, who was also a commercial pilot and flight instructor and taught a radio announcing class at the University of San Francisco, said he knew of three disc jockeys who killed themselves, along with others “who’ve gone off the end of the chemical ladder, and some who are very good, but bitter, and won’t try because they think the world is against them.”

Overall, though, The Hits is a happy book celebrating the youth culture of another time, as well as the young and middle-aged men who propagated it for personal and professional enrichment.

Fong-Torres lights upon assorted topics within the gamut of Top 40 radio. Clearly he knows the subject from his time covering music media. Yet he’s not the deepest writer; too often his approach is that of a Parade profilist offering zippy quotes for a browser’s amusement. In fact, Fong-Torres’ perch for years at Rolling Stone was as the author of short text blocks called “Random Notes;” a similar approach shows up here in the form of boxy pull-out sections populating each chapter.

A big negative for me is Fong-Torres’ focus on people who were his personal friends and/or inspirations in Top 40 radio. He spends much time on Bill Gavin, a contemporary commentator on Top 40 radio who produced a magazine and was known for his incorruptibility. Fong-Torres tells you time and again how wonderful and sagacious a fellow Gavin was, but never succeeds in making him interesting.

No such problem for Gary Owens, the legendary California dee-jay for whom Fong-Torres worked, Almost Famous-style, while still in high school. Owens even signed Fong-Torres’ Oakland High yearbook with an inspirational message in his own inimitable argot: “Stifling a child’s extravertentualities tends to subjunctuate his biophysical transmogrifications.”

Owens was unique even in the world of Top 40 jocks: His smooth baritone made him a highly sought voice-over artist and, eventually, a television star from regular appearances in “beautiful downtown Burbank” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” He was also very funny, with a hyper wit and a warped perspective on life which made him unpredictable in his buttoned-down manner.

Other dee-jays include Rick Dees, a Los Angeles legend who actually managed to have a Top 40 hit of his own, a parody number called “Disco Duck” which shot to the top of the charts in 1976. Dees cheerfully admits to taking humor where he finds it, even from others’ material. He describes one radio station he worked at as “the Karen Ann Quinlan of radio, it was plugged in but nothing was going on.”

When The Hits Just Keep On Coming focuses on the charisma of Owens, Dees, and other big-name dee-jays, it is decently readable. Then there’s the business side. Here I found the book lacking.

Fong-Torres describes a kind of tension between two different formats, one stricter than the other. “Color Radio” came first, a term taken from the then-novel innovation of color television. As radio found itself competing with television for attention in the 1950s, programmers latched on to the sound of young America, rock n’ roll, and hired disc jockeys to introduce songs in a quick, joyous fashion. The job catered to a certain type of personality, extroverted and a bit outrageous, at least on air. Program director Pat O’Day explains his strategy:

“I carefully hired my jocks. They had to be real communicators and entertainers. We had a goal, and that is that every thirty minutes, we want to make people laugh, or cry, or do something.”

As advertisers picked up on the popularity of the medium, a more focused approach was taken by others, most notably Bill Drake. Drake championed what became known as “Boss Radio;” under his guidance, the Los Angeles market became known as “Boss Angeles:”

If Drake had only one goal, it was to do everything he could to keep listeners from tuning out. Besides the clutter-cutting, he set newscasts away from the traditional top and bottom of the hour, or the five-minutes-before the hour trick that early Top 40 pioneers tried. His newscasts were at twenty minutes before and/or after the hour, allowing for “more music” sweeps of as long as forty minutes.

Fong-Torres explains how this approach annoyed purists like O’Day, who felt it undercut on-air personalities into chirpy sound-bites. But it comes across as a distinction without a difference. After all, both approaches were ultimately subservient to the music.

Ben Fong-Torres at left, with Paul McCartney. Is he listening to what the man said, or tuning him out? Image from http://www.chicagonow.com/eye-on-chi/2011/10/eoc-spotlight-on-journalismjobs-com-ben-fong-torres-interview/

The music is where I felt most let down by Fong-Torres’ book. He admires Top 40 music for its diversity more than its quality. “Top 40 meant democracy in radio,” he writes, and adds its inclusiveness was especially meaningful to him as a Chinese-American. But he doesn’t seem to think much of the music or its place as table-setter:

In the early sixties, in the aftermath of the payola scandal, Top 40 radio sometimes sounded shell-shocked. There were all these surrogate teen idols – as if an Elvis could be replaced by a Frankie, a Fabian, a Bobby, or a Conway.

It’s a common trope that the early 1960s were a wasteland for good music, not without merit, but Fong-Torres fails here and elsewhere to look deeper at the sounds that connected with young people. The Beatles’ prominence later on gets some attention, less so Motown. In an appendix, Fong-Torres lists out all the number-one hits as tracked by Gavin’s publication, mentioning “If You Don’t Know Me” by Harold Melvin & The Bluenose. Did he really not know the act was called “the Blue Notes”?

One nice supplement to The Hits Just Keep On Coming is a compact disc containing over an hour’s worth of air checks by notable dee-jays who appear in the book. We get to hear Freed denounce the movie Blackboard Jungle for defaming teenagers, “the greatest and most wonderful age group in America.” Casey Kasem, unrecognizable from his stint beginning in 1970 of hosting the nationally-syndicated “American Top 40,” does lame but upbeat patter in a kind of “Amos-&-Andy”-style that no doubt would be frowned upon today.

A majority of the on-air talent featured in the air-check disc are West Coast dee-jays, another failing of the book as I see it. It was on the East Coast where Top 40 radio first took off and thrived. Fong-Torres, who lived and worked in California, keeps his attention on his part of the world, making only occasional detours east.

As hungry as I was to relive the experience of my own youth, picking up on the sounds I used to hear on stations like WABC-AM and WNBC-AM in New York, I found myself coming up short reading this patchwork account. It’s not a bad book, and it covers a fantastic topic, but left me wanting more.

Fortunately the work of these and other dee-jays live on, if not on terrestrial radio, then on YouTube in aircheck form. I recommend going there first, and giving this book a look if you are hungry for more.