Tad Queasy wrote:
Exile on Route 41 wrote:
Finished that book this weekend. Very good read.
The part that touched on the mid 90s-Steve & Garry breakup-launch of WMVP on the AM part was interesting in particular. Evergreen bought 103.5 The Blaze with the extent of making it a mainstream rock station and essentially moving the FM Loop music there as Rock 103.5 while the comedy talk of the AM Loop moved to 97.9 and 1000 went sports. I guess I never really realized that Rock 103.5 was supposed to be the direct heir apparent to the FM Loop because of the different branding and younger jocks they used, especially with Mancow going after Dahl, Matthews and Brandmeier on the air. Guys like Stroud and Skafish who had played music on the Loop kind of got lost in the shuffle and Stroud wound up on WCKG while Skafish wound up on Q101 and then I think XRT?
But WMVP bombed so badly as a sports station that they aborted it in '96 and moved the Loop talk back to 1000 (even though they kept the call letters WMVP and IIRC just went by "AM 1000" on air), while 97.9 went with Alanis and Jewel until it got sold a year later. By then 103.5 had evolved to almost all new/hard rock and WCKG had Stern and Dahl and was moving towards talk, so there was an opening for classic rock and that's where we basically got the next 21 years of the Loop until Jesus bought it out.
I finished it last weekend, too.
Towards the end of the book there was a paragraph by Spike Manton in which he said management came to he and Harry (Teinowitz) and told them their plan was to have Dan Patrick do mornings, Olbermann the afternoon, and Harry and Spike would be on in between them. Olbermann was coming to Chicago that Friday and they wanted Harry and Spike to show him the town, hang out with him all weekend, and for them to get to know each other.
Olbermann came in on Friday, management met with him, and they were supposed to meet again on Monday to sign the contracts. He spent the weekend with Harry and Spike and abruptly flew back to Bristol on Sunday. On Monday, everyone at Sports Radio 1000 was fired and Harry and Spike became the overnight show on the new simulcast WMVP/WLUP music talk station.
That makes it sound like Olbermann had such a bad time with Harry and Spike that it caused the whole deal to fall through.
Oh hey, I finished this, too. I really enjoyed it. It's always crazy to remember that
the AM1000 only lasted like five or six years.
As for the veracity of the Olbermann story, while I certainly don't doubt that Harry Teinowitz is annoying enough to talk someone out of a job, let's also remember that we're talking about one of the all-time headcases in broadcasting in Keith Olbermann (and I always suspected Patrick was a little more high-maintenance behind the scenes than he lets on, too), and it wouldn't have taken much for him to throw a wrench in someone else's plans at the eleventh hour. If I had to guess, he probably got spooked at the idea of becoming A Radio Person when he always saw himself as a TV guy, that even splitting time between radio and TV would taint him and ultimately consign him to the ghetto of radio-yakking.
Getting back to the book, if I have any complaints, it's that sometimes the oral-history format doesn't flow gracefully. It's an enormous strain for interviewers and editors to really nail it, and while I think Kaempfer did the best with what he had, there are some sections that feel awkwardly spliced in, or like the person is trying to put themselves over rather than tell the story. Yeah, wow, imagine that, self-promoting radio guys. Coppock's sections can feel a little show-stealing, but for him, it works, because it's Chet Coppock. It wouldn't sound right any other way. And a minor typesetting complaint, but I'd have set the speakers' names in something other than the body typeface, just to set those off a little better. Maybe a bold sans-serif. But yeah, required reading for anyone who posts here and still cares about the industry.
EDIT: adding in the part about when the Loop and 103.5 coexisted, if you remember that documentary Radio Faces that I've posted here from time to time, I'm pretty sure they touch on the tension between Dahl and Mancow working in the same office. Kev called him "Man-love or whatever."
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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