Issue #460 - April 23, 1974
Tony Mann came from WRKO in Boston WCAO in Baltimore and landed in the afternoon drive slot at KHJ for a short period. He appeared on three surveys in a two-and-a-half month span and that’s about all I know about him.
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93/KHJ Boss Radio: A Look Back
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7 comments:
Now there is NO New Music listed.
"Midnight at the Oasis" turns some people off, but I love it. Muldaur's silky voice, the playful lyrics, and the sultry arrangement still sound good to me.
"Tubular Bells" was an odd single, but it's another one I really liked. Everyone thinks of it as being from "The Exorcist," but it's actually used for only a few seconds in that movie. I'm realizing as I write this that I've never heard the full album side by Oldfield.
Tony Mann was hired out of WCAO in Baltimore and left KHJ for KRIZ in Phoenix...a huge jump downward in 1974.
No offense intended to the jocks or to PD Gerry Peterson (who in my book was awesome as PD at KFRC in 1980-1983), but Peterson's hires at KHJ during this period were part of what made me regard the once-mighty KHJ as "just another radio station". Billy Pearl and Machine Gun Kelly are the only exceptions.
When Charlie Van Dyke became PD in January, 1975, he started cleaning house. The only survivor from the Peterson staff was the Gunner. Larry McKay, Danny Martinez and Billy Pearl were replaced by Bobby Ocean, Mark Elliott and Dr. John Leader. And (though I would have argued in favor of Pearl)KHJ started sounding like something special again.
Nearly half of the "Thirty" (12 titles) have been on the chart for more than 10 weeks.
Barbara Streisand sets a record with "The Way We Were" (18 weeks)...and Redbone's right behind with "Come And Get Your Love" (17 weeks).
Burned out music, substandard jocks (except for Van Dyke and Pearl), horrendous audio processing (Peterson pressed loudness to the point of pumping and distortion in '74) and one shotgun jingle.
Now I remember just why I drifted away.
I can't recall if we've gotten an explanation for WHY the playlist got so tight. I can't believe it's because the records themselves were just so good that listeners wouldn't let them leave. And it's not as if new singles weren't constantly being released. And yet we've all noted that the high point of turnover was 1967 through 1969. Records were seldon on the Boss 30 for 10 weeks, and the few that were the truly biggest hits. So what changed?
Steve:
The biggest change was that research (in its infancy in radio programming) was indicating that familiar music was more important to listeners than new music. Being "first with the latest" didn't matter anymore.
When Jacobs was breaking records left and right on KHJ, he was playing to musically hip 16-21 year olds of the mid-late 60s...it seemed like every day there was some important new release.
But by 1974, KHJ and Top 40 in general was increasingly playing to 10-14 year old kids, with a definite skew towards girls. Not only weren't they sophisticated musically, they only wanted to hear their favorites...and it took four or five weeks before songs really began to register with them.
There were stations worse than KHJ in this respect. By '74, WABC wouldn't add a record that hadn't already cracked Top 10 in Billboard...and KCBQ, San Diego was adding songs in January '75 that KHJ had added three months earlier...playing them only after they'd become "proven" hits.
Of course, for older listeners (15 and up), this became a huge tune-out...and accelerated the migration to Album Rock on FM...effectively killing AM Top 40 (with a few notable exceptions such as KFI and KFRC).
Does anyone know where Tony is now...he is an old friend from way back when he worked at WFIL in Philadelphia
Tony was not his real name and Mann was a stage name. You'll be able to find him using T as his middle initial if you know his real name, and the fact that he once lived in Tempe, Arizona. I don't know what he did after WFIL, but he's still alive as of 2017 according to any internet search, using the information I supplied above. I worked with him in Arizona when he was at KRIZ in the mid 70s, where his wife told me his real name, but it was in confidence, so I don't want to disclose it to anyone who doesn't already know it.
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