Re: Globe on John Garabedian

[SteveOrdinetz <steveord@bit-net.com>]

  Kevin Vahey wrote:
>Left unsaid in this rehash of the RKO MEX wars is how both stations tried 
>to ignore that FM was not going away. It was right around this time that 
>college students discovered FM sounded a whole lot better in their dorm rooms.

I don't think it so much that they were ignoring FM as it was trying to 
counter FM stations yet still appeal to the AM crowd.  In general, it 
didn't work...times were changing...the audience discovering FM was a 
different one than the AM audience...WRKO learned this the hard way during 
their early 70s experiment with album cuts.  The people (like myself) who 
liked top 40 didn't really want to hear all these long versions of hit 
songs or a lot of stuff by Yes or Emerson Lake & Palmer while the listeners 
who did want to hear those artists didn't want to hear them on AM.  I 
recall hearing rumors around '73/74 that WRKO management wanted to move the 
top 40 and WRKO calls to 98.5 & put the oldies on 680.  The corporate suits 
turned that one down flat.

>To me one of the great mysteries is how Westinghouse had no clue what to 
>do with 106.7.

Yeah, it was understandable in 1971, but by the late 70s the writing was 
clearly on the wall, but WBZ-FM was still just a boring automated 
jukebox.  From what I heard, no one at 1170 SFR cared.


>I was dumbfounded that so many suits in the industry really believed FM 
>was a passing fad. I sensed FM could be a monster when Jack Peterson 
>developed a following in Cambridge on WLLH-FM in the mid 60's and then 
>WRKO-FM and WKOX-FM also attracted listeners.


Didn't live around here then.  What was WLLH-FM doing?  Were either Arco 
the shy but friendly robot or WKOX-FM factors in the ratings?  Arco was 
just another jukebox, and WKOX sounded like they hired whoever they could 
get for minimum wage.  Even in their "Electronic Mama" era I thought they 
sounded bush league.


>FM had by early 1967 taken off in other markets especially NYC with WOR-FM 
>but here the only station that people bothered to buy converters for was 
>WHIL-FM and its country format.


FM converters didn't work very well.  Sensitivity & selectivity left a lot 
to be desired (understatement of the week).  It wasn't until the late 70s 
that we started to see decent FM car radios.

>We still had a few more years of great AM radio ahead of us and in my mind 
>the great story was how WHDH reinvented itself and became a monster in the 
>mid 70s. They were able to attract all the at home. teenaged girls from 
>the 60s who had become moms.


What about WBZ?  With the exception of a few years in the late 60s/early 
70s when they were a bit lost, have they ever been out of the top 5?  They 
seemed to be where all the heritage jocks were (Larry Justice, Ron Robin, 
Dave Maynoard, I think they brought back Dick Summer & Bruce Bradley too), 
and didn't have the albatross of the image of being "my parents' station".