Brock Whaley Remembers: Tampa Radio in the 1970s

 

 

Brock Whaley Remembers: 

Tampa Radio in the 1970s

Interviewed by Tom Roche November 2024

 

 

BEGINNINGS_________________________

Tom Roche: So let’s go way back. For me, my first transistor radio was when I was 9. When did you get your first transistor radio?

Brock Whaley: Well, I got my first crystal set when I was four. 

(laughs) Okay.

One of those Rocket Crystal sets from State College Pennsylvania, with a clip you put onto the telephone or some kind of metal to use as an antenna.

I guess I need to establish what year you moved to Tampa? 

1961. I was seven.

Okay, so you move to Tampa, and you are listening to the Tampa radio dial.

Let me tell you about where I lived in Tampa. I lived in South Temple Terrace, on Broxburn Avenue. You could walk down to the Hillsborough River. And across the river from where I lived was the three-tower directional array of the 10,000 watt WALT-AM. So I could practically use… in fact I built a “fox hole” radio, where you used pencil lead and a razor blade as a detector, a coil and a pair of headphones. 

I’ve never heard of that. 

They used them during World War II. They built them. If you have a pair of headphones or a telephone receiver, you can wind a coil and use something as an aerial and a ground. What your detector is, instead of a crystal diode or crystal with the cat's whisker on it, you take a piece of pencil lead and put it against the side of a blue blade, Gem Blue Blades for shaving, and it will detect the radio signal. So that's how guys listened to the BBC in the POW camps during the war, on these foxhole radios. 

Wow. 

So I heard about them all. My electronic education was from books in the library, Temple Terrace library, school library. I read everything I could about electronics and radio. And WALT radio was it. WALT was the station. And then when the Beatles hit, I watched Ed Sullivan that night on Channel 13, as many did, and it was… it's hard to explain, but as others have said, it was a transformative moment. These four guys that looked like that, that were playing great music. Girls were screaming. That was fine, but man, they were rocking, and I'd never heard anything like it, and neither had the world. And I had WALT’s 10,000 watt transmitter about a mile away, so I could pick it up on anything, and I built radios to listen to it. I had it on all the time.

 

So when's the first time you're actually owning a store-bought radio, a manufactured radio?

I won one. I won my first transistor radio on The Uncle Bruce Show on WFLA-TV. He had some stupid contest. Got mom to help me send in a postcard, and I won! So they give me the radio on live TV one afternoon, in the studio audience section with all the other kids. And I turn it on, and it's got batteries. And I immediately turn dial to WALT 1110 which, of course, was a competitor of WFLA 970 radio the time. 

So you're live on WFLA-TV playing WALT radio (laughs.)

Tuning in WALT, yes. And they went to a commercial quick, and they came over and asked me to turn the radio off. 

Quickly.

So, I’ve got a transistor radio. I'm listening to WALT on it. But I'm building radios as good as a transistor radio. I'm building my own transistor radios. I'm building radios that allow me to hear WGTO Cypress Gardens, and W… what was it… WPIN in Clearwater which became WWBA…

Was there a hobbyist store where you're buying the parts, or mail order?

Kincaid Electronics, downtown Tampa.

So you'd buy schematics and a soldering iron?

I was perfectly happy doing that, and that led to my first job, at Temple Terrace TV Service where they let me hang out and work on television sets, and I learned about how television actually works. There was an old crusty guy from Nova Scotia, and he would let me come by after school, and on the weekends. They let me screw around. They paid me in vacuum tubes and parts.

And so now you're about 10 years old?

No, I’m 14, in junior high school. I was 10 when the Beatles hit and totally changed my world. In 1965 my neighbors across the street knew I was interested in radio. They let me borrow their Zenith Transoceanic Shortwave Radio, the legendary Transoceanic. And this was a vacuum tube model that had a 1.5 volt filament tube that is now hard to find. Today one 1LA6 tube will cost you 50 bucks, the mixer tube. But anyway, I get a Transoceanic Radio, and I start tuning around. I had read that stations will mail you verification cards if you send them a reception report. So with my mom, I wrote a reception report to WCBS in New York City because I heard them in Temple Terrace. And they answered. They sent me a nice card back. And I started tuning around, and what I found was there were stations playing rock and roll at night that I couldn't hear in the day, stations like WLS and WCFL in Chicago…

WLAC in Nashville, of course. 

WLAC especially. Late at night. “The Boss Man Hoss Allen.” And I start tuning to shortwave. I find the BBC World Service all over the dial. And on 6090khz I find Radio Luxembourg, they’re rockin’! This is back when they had 15 minute shows, all sponsored by record companies. So you get 15 minutes of Capitol Records, 15 minutes of Columbia Records, 15 minutes of Pye Records… They are the only full time rock game in Europe that's not a pirate, until 1967 when the pirates are banned and BBC Radio 1 is established.

Well speaking of pirate radio, you built one yourself. When did you go down to Kincaid electronics to buy the parts to transmit?

I actually ordered the parts for my first transmitter in 1966 from the Lafayette Radio catalog, Syosset, New York. What I ended up building was a 10 watt AM broadcast transmitter out of parts from TV sets that I had scrapped or gotten from the repair place. People used to throw out their old TVs out on the curb to be picked up, you may recall, and I would pick them up. TVs from the 50s. “Honey It's time to get something newer, a TV that maybe gets Channel 38… ” you know, whatever. Once I got a bicycle, I picked them up the best I could to take them home and scavenge them for parts. So I built a 10 watt AM station in Temple Terrace. I called it WTTF, Wonderful Temple Terrace Florida. I picked 1200 on the dial to transmit because the only other station on 1200 at that time in the US was WOAI in San Antonio TX, and I ain't gonna worry about interfering with San Antonio. So I built this station. I had my albums, I had my singles. We played a lot of Stones, a lot of Supremes, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, of course.

You said 100 watts? 

No, no, just 10 watts. 

Not so big.

Yes, and the limit that you're supposed to do unlicensed on AM is 100 milliwatts. Okay, so the FCC tells me I can do 100 milliwatts. And the FCC says don't hook it to an outside antenna. Oh yeah? Fuck you. (laughs) So I hooked it up to a long wire that ran from my bedroom to the telephone pole, which I shouldn’t have done. Had a good ground rod to earth it with. And then my mom or dad would drive me around and I'd see how far it was reaching. Before the album side ran out! 

Okay!

Because I only had one turntable, I had to make an announcement between every record, which was fine with me. And darn if we couldn't hear that thing in downtown Temple Terrace. I'm talking the daytime coverage here. At night, San Antonio’s signal started to bother my station, those bastards! Those 50,000 watt bastards! (laughs)

So you transmitted daily, or just whenever you wanted?

Just whenever I wanted.

Did anyone ever come to you and say, “I'm listening, when are you on again"?

Uh, no. Didn't show up in any Arbitron ratings book, didn't happen. (laughs) Just me playing around. But why would somebody tune to 1200 in Tampa? There's nothing there, it's between WTMP and WDAE… But, yeah, that was fun.

CONCERTS_________________________

Let me ask you, what was your first Tampa concert?

Oh, man. It was James Brown, at Fort Homer Hesterly Armory. Maybe 1967. Under the tutelage of students of my father, a theater arts professor at the University of South Florida. I was 14 or 15 at the time. It was an all Black revue. You’re walking into an African American audience. And Byron Black, who’s passed, was one of my father's students who took me with some other guy. They were into R&B. They knew James’s music. And the thing I remember most from that show was watching two drummers in perfect syncopation, yeah, playing riffs that were as good as anything I had heard coming from Motown or Charlie Watts even. I don't know how familiar I was with Ginger Baker at the time, probably not. I think this was before Fresh Cream. I was young, yeah, 14. Anyway, it was a show. The first show I saw was a show. I remember people were dancing. I remember that horn section blared. I remember watching James Brown's feet, going how the fuck does he do that? What the fuck is up with that? But I … the thing I really remember was the two drummers, having two drummers. One of them was Clyde Stubblefield.  And the other one, I should know, but forget. They were perfectly in sync with each other, doing these incredible fills at the same moment. 

Or they’d get fined!

I know that, but also they were so… I think the word I'm looking for is not just tight, but the sharpness of them, the sharpness of the band. Knowing when to stop, the sharpness of when to start up again. And seeing this, it was the performance. And at the end Danny Ray coming out with the cape to take James away at the end of “Please, Please, Please.”

Well what an amazing intro to live music. 

You know, I came from… I had a theatrical background, and my father being a theater arts professor, so I've been around live shows. I'd been around live jazz. We went to the Unitarian Church, for God's sake, where sometimes there was a jazz concert, you know, after they burned a cross in front of it. I had been exposed to live stuff. And I'd seen the Beatles on TV, seen the Stones on TV. I’d watch Where The Action Is every afternoon on WSUN Channel 38. I'd watch American Bandstand on Saturdays, because that's when you'd see someone lip sync their latest hit. And Happening ’68 too. All Dick Clark shows, all making Dick Clark rich, as Alan Freed rotted in his grave.

So what was your first live rock show? 

That's a good question. I don't know if I could tell you my first rock show. I didn't see Jimi Hendrix in Tampa, not back then. I can remember the first records I played on the radio, but I can't remember the first rock show that I saw. I remember the first rock show where I was actively involved and was backstage, and got wasted with the band was the Joe Cocker show out at the fairgrounds, because it was my 18th birthday. Once the crew found out it was my birthday, it was, well, let’s throw a party for this young disc jockey from Tampa. And I had a great time. I did like to drink. There's plenty of stuff backstage. I remember I wanted to talk to Cocker about Mad Dogs and Englishmen, because I loved the film and I loved the record, and I know now that the camaraderie and the happy hippie feelings of the film were not like real life. 

I just read a great biography of Jim Gordon. He's the drummer that killed his mom in a psychotic rage and later spent the rest of his life in prison and died just this last year.  Jim Gordon played with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends on tour. He was the Derek and the Dominos drummer. He was one of the drummers with Jim Keltner on the Mad Dogs And Englishmen tour. And he was on that tour where he had a fight with his girlfriend, Rita Coolidge and gave her a black eye, and no one on the tour would have anything to do with him after that. So it wasn't all peace and love. Anyway, I wanted to talk to Joe about Mad Dogs And Englishmen, particularly the arrangements, some of which are all Leon Russell's work early on. And Joe didn't want to talk about Mad Dogs. So I never got any questions answered. I just remember that night. But alas I don't remember my first rock show.


THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD ____________

Let’s talk about the WUSF-FM program The Underground Railroad, Tampa’s first taste of FM rock programming. When did it start?

1970. How this began was I started calling up the DJs Walt Jones and Dave Hunter on Tuesday nights. I would take an actual… I don't have one here… I would take an actual Mason jar and hold it by the phone and talk past it, so it sounded kind of like a Top 40 jock. And back then I was a big fan of George Carlin. I didn't know at the time that Carlin had actually been a jock, but he did enough radio bits like “Wonderful Radio WINO” and so on. Carlin made fun of Top 40 jocks. So that's what I did. I made fun of Top 40 jocks, and I kept calling Dave Hunter and Walt Jones, adlibbing, through my junior year of high school.

You're just calling them up and bullshitting them as a character? 

Yeah. And sometimes they put me on the air, sometimes they wouldn’t. I'd make fun of WLCY, Elsie The Cow, etc. After a while, I got invited down there by David Hunter, sat with them live on a Thursday night show, made them laugh. I was thrilled. I was taught the basic functions of running a board and the equipment. And of course, I caught on real fast, and soon I was doing some utility work there. We used to record All Things Considered 4-6pm and play it back the next afternoon noon at 2, because we did music shows from 4-6pm, including The Railroad. I remember we had two giant Ampex 440 tape machines with 15 inch reels at the WUSF studio.That’s the way they operated. 

So if you're saying The Underground Railroad is starting in 1970, when the main place to get music is still WLCY-AM and maybe WFSO. I'm looking at a July 1970 WLCY survey with “Close To You” by The Carpenters at number 1. That’s the era of Uriah Heep, Jade Warrior, Thunderclap Newman, The Pink Floyd, Family, Quicksilver, Hawkwind and many forgotten bands. So if I'm remembering correctly, The Underground Railroad was one hour on a Friday. Is that how it started? 

Actually, it started Thursday. They had Vic Hall with jazz on Tuesday and they started playing progressive rock Thursdays starting at 7pm and going till 2am. They also started to do that on Saturday, but Fridays, there was classical music up to 11pm. I just know that when I started listening, it was Dave Hunter and Walt Jones and Bobby, what's his name, Bobby Stoner.

How long did they do the this new programming before you joined them?

Oh, about a year and a half. I joined him in the summer of 1971. I was between my junior and senior year at high school. My first show was a Thursday night at 10pm to 2am. Rick Sheffield, who I just saw the other day, still a good friend, was going out of town to see a girlfriend, and he told the program director Dave Dial… I was with him during this conversation… “I'm not doing tomorrow night. I'm driving down to Pompano Beach.” And Dial says, “Well, what am I going to do?” Everybody else had studies or was locked in with their schedule or classes, because these were all students. And Rich pointed at me and said, "We'll put him on the air.” And Dave said to me, “Are you ready?” And I said, “I think I'm ready.” And so that night I went on at 10. My first song, first record I ever played, was “Gallows Pole” from Led Zeppelin III. Zeppelin 4 hadn’t come out yet, we weren’t burdened with “Stairway To Heaven.” Second song was “Marrying Maiden” by It's a Beautiful Day, and third was “Cut Across Shorty” by Rod Stewart. Those are the first three records I played.  

And in short order comes a Tampa Tribune profile, 12/4/71, with the headline WUSF’s BROCK WHALEY IS 17, AND HE’S A PRO.

Thanks for finding that. I’d been looking forever. 

You were just happy to be on the air.

I was happy to be there, on FM, 85,000 watts power at 900 feet. We had a great signal. And after that one gig that night, I was put in the regular schedule, bang. Thursday nights, and then Saturday night seven to midnight after Richard's afternoon show. You couldn't ask for better than seven to midnight on a Saturday. Yeah. You were the “let's smoke pot” radio station. (laughs) I was so excited to do that and to play new music. I mean, I was there when Exile On Main Street came out, by the Stones. I remember when “Tumbling Dice” was released as a single. I couldn't get enough. I remember the Atlantic Records guy coming down, handing me a white label copy of Led Zeppelin IV… I wonder where that is today.  I remember smoking a joint before I put on a brand new Pink Floyd album called The Dark Side of the Moon and turning the headphones up, and after it played just going, wowww. What can I say? You know… yeah, I'm stoned. I listened to it in headphones for the first time. It made perfect sense. It flowed, you know, trying to figure out… what the hell is that instrument that Roger Waters was playing? 

What's with all those grandfather clocks, dude?

And Doris Troy belting it out at the end, that woman was just wailing! Again, all I could say was, wow. So there were records that, that I came across, that I really love to this day, just because I got to play them early, got to play them first.

You got to share them with Tampa. These were cultural touchstones when The Underground Railroad was the only game in town. And Top 40 was like, the same as network TV, just not reflecting any of this colorfulness, this anti-war sentiment…

The great thing about USF in many respects is back in 1971-72 they had a pretty solid FM signal. We covered out to 100 miles reliably. And they sold underwriting, much like we're all used to on PBS and NPR shows today. It was one of the first to do it for music. There was a water bed store or two, or a head shop that that paid a minimal amount. We were asking them to sponsor an hour. So, yeah, it was unique. It was unique because it was in a market that did not have a full-time commercial station doing that music on FM. 

YouTube Clip: Brock Whaley WUSF-FM Tampa "Underground Railroad" - Random aircheck of Progressive Rock circa1972

https://youtu.be/f4KDk7gvgLA

Right.

There was no competition. The first competition really came from guy named Bobby Flyer on WTCX over in St. Pete. He came on for an hour or two at night playing what he thought was underground music. There was also the dreadful FM 101 WDAE that came on and did top 40 music in monaural, even by the time Q105 had come on in stereo. But FM 101 was playing stereo music in mono on FM, and wondered why they never got any traction. 

Yeah.

At one point, I went and talked to WDAE, to their Ed Ripley about rocking it, but I was, I was young. I didn't know what I was talking about. Here’s an 18 year old kid wanting to change the format of a heritage FM station in Tampa. (laughs) So that didn't work out. But WUSF was a great learning experience. It was a great experience. And learning how to segue to songs that go well together, also how to segue to songs that don't go well together. There are plenty of those. All of us were playing our favorites. I mean, I'm serious, we all played our favorites. It was just a different kind of radio, and I have to admit that it was self-indulgent.

Well, listening to the archive recordings today, the few that survive, DJs are pretty self-indulgently stoned a lot of the time and can hardly get a sentence out.

YouTube Clip: Brock Whaley 1970s Umm Errrr

(Laughs.) Yeah, that's true too. (Laughs.) That’s true too. And that was, that was quite often the case at both WUSF and WFSO in late afternoons. The ‘FSO parking lot had quite the reputation for frivolity when there were long album cuts on.

We’ll get to that. So what was the mindset of management at WUSF? Why did they allow this early rock format to happen?

Um… I think… I wasn't involved in the decision, but I think there was pressure by students in the Fine Arts department that, hey, this is our radio station. It's supposed to serve the community. We're the community, and we're not being served. Also, there was an administrator there, Bill Brady, who carried his balls around in a wheelbarrow. Great voice, (affects very deep voice) “On WUSF-TV, Tampa” and he was all for experimentation. He had played swing records, I mean real swing records, race records, back in Decatur, Illinois, in the late 30s, early 40s. So he knew what it was like to play music that he liked but was out there. He didn't understand (newer rock.) He didn't get it. But he wasn't going to give us any problem for it. I don't know if it would have been allowed to have happened if there had already been a commercial station like 98 Rock or WQSR at the time. I think the fact that the music wasn't being aired anywhere… obviously it was part of some underground subculture. You were starting to be able to actually buy a copy of Rolling Stone in Temple Terrace. 

 

 

While I'm thinking of it, name all the hosts at Underground Railroad that you can recall.

Oh man… Bill Mims was on. Bill Mims was on, Laurie Yeager, Vic Hall, Bobby Stoner, yeah. Dave Hunter, and he worked with Walt Jones.

Laurie Yeager, the gal you married.

Background, background! (laughs) Tom Clark, who later changed his name to John Lander and became a huge Top 40 jock in Boston and LA and San Francisco. There was a guy there named Norm Palumbo. There was… I'm trying to think of her name. There was a woman who was in the band Mercy that had the top 40 hit “Love Can Make You Happy.” She was at WUSF.  She worked as a DJ, later went on to many years at WFLA working with Jack Harris and Tedd Webb, but I can't remember her name right now. And WUSF is one of the few stations where Tedd Webb didn't work in Tampa…

Right. We’ll get to him. I recall Vic Hall was a jazz host who dug 40s-50s styles. He put on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew when it came out. He took the needle off the record after two minutes. 

Yeah, yeah. Good old Vic… he was a volunteer and every Thursday or whenever he was there.

You also engaged in some spoof commercials, a phony “Prize Patrol” greatly influenced by Firesign Theater. 

YouTube Clip: Brock Whaley as Morton Pie on WUSF-FM Tampa PRIZE PATROL

The Railroad played a lot of Firesign Theater and other hippie-era comedy albums that are long out of print.

Yep. Monty Python, the great Credibility Gap with the wonderful Harry Shearer, of course. We played comedy and were encouraged to do that. We’d play a side of Firesign Theater, if that was the right thing to do. We weren't going to interrupt Nick Danger Third Eye! (laughs) And what I did, the spoofs you're talking about, I just did for fun.

So things were changing a bit, but I think because of the uniqueness of a real progressive album station, that's why it got to stay on as long as it did, and that's also the reason that eventually it was pulled down.

Was there a last straw that ended it, or was there something like a management change?

Oh, there wasn't a last straw. The last straw is the fact that the wife of the president of the university liked her classical music and wasn't a fan of Uriah Heep. So there you go. 

(laughs)

It was a whole administrative reorganization thing. It had had its time. By the time The Underground Railroad went off, WQSR was on for some hours, so the music was available on FM locally. And I always listened to… I had a great FM in my car… so I listened to WORJ up in Orlando all the time… the station Lee Arnold and the late great Mike Lyons ran… because they were doing it right. They were commercial. They rocked harder at night. Quite longer album cuts and the like but they were basically doing the same format, and they were doing it to make money.

And that's also early 70s?

Yeah, early 70s, right. WORJ was the central Florida rock station back then. Bill Mims and I would drive up and meet the guys at night, because Lee Arnold, the program director, worked till seven, and then Mike Lyons, the music director, didn't begin untill seven at night. So seven to midnight at a transmitter site in the orange groves in Winter Garden, Florida. Gee, there can be nothing to go wrong there! They were miles from civilization, almost miles from any road… like the old WFSO thing… under this free standing 800 foot tower (equivalent to an 80-story building) in the orange groves. And the way they had WORJ set up was the studio was at the transmitter. You were in the transmitter room. Everything was shielded, but you were right there under the tower with your records and your mic and your (tape) cartridges. And you were right there! That added to it as well.

Like legendary KAAY-AM’s midnight Beaker Street in Little Rock.

Exactly. It wouldn't have been… it wouldn't have been as loose if it had been in a building, with suits.

Downtown. 

Yeah. Someone had to run out the log every night and record tape carts every night and all that. But they were… it was completely separate. But circling back to Tampa…

Yeah…. So Underground Railroad is given their walking papers, and you're counting down to the last show, and then it's over, right?

Yeah. Well, I was gone before it ended. I was at WUSF for two years, and then went to WFSO summer of 73 and immediately got hired to do middays. I said, Sure, why not?

So you'd been a volunteer DJ, and suddenly you were making a little money?

I made a little money at WUSF. I was always paid at WUSF, not a great amount, a little money. And FSO being a commercial station, yeah, offered a regular paycheck. I don't remember what it was, but it was enough to live in Pinellas County at the time, or commute back and forth from Tampa, which I did for a time. I would commute over the Howard Franklin Bridge every day for a while there to get from Temple Terrace over to Pinellas Park. Same thing when I later lived in Tampa and worked in Sarasota. That was was godawful, US 41 or 301. Every night.

So suddenly you've gone into your field while you're still in high school. So there was really never any need to go to college and take Mass Comm or anything, right? That's my experience. I was directing the local newscast while I was taking Mass Comm at FSU, and I'm like, why am I wasting my time in school? 

That’s exactly what I felt. Also, there was an incident with the… I should say my father was over at the Theater Arts department, a tenured professorship. And there was a guy in the speech department, Dr. Manny Lucoff.  And there was some class, like Introduction To Broadcast 1, or something like that which I had to take if I was going to be a speech major. So I took Dr. Manny Lucoff’s. He liked to be referred to as Doctor. And I get a… well my father comes to me after about a month of the Broadcast class and said Manny Lucoff called me. He would appreciate it if you would stop correcting him in front of the class.

(laughs) I had the same experience at Florida State myself, correcting the professor…

Yeah, yeah, (laughs) “No Dr. Lucoff, WGTO doesn't mean from Gainesville to Ocala. It means from Gulf to Ocean. Okay?”

Same with me, stuff like that. “Excuse me, the FM limit is now 100,000 watts, not 50,000 anymore.” A good way to know your field but flunk the class.

So there ya go….

WFSO_________________________

So a WFSO gig comes along, and this is a strange duck in the world of broadcasting: A loose-ish rock format on the AM dial. How lucky was St. Pete to have a station that unique?

It was very unique because in the daylight hours or up until afternoon, late afternoon, it pretty much ran a Top 40 rotation of their records. At first they had jingles, you may recall, they had a stop-down for three commercials in a row, but they were rock oriented. I mean, you could look at a (Billboard) Top 100 chart. And I could probably pick out the records that would be on FSO and pick out a lot of them that wouldn’t. They were not afraid. For some reason, program directors when I was there did not have any prejudice against British music. So that's why you would hear bands from Great Britain that you've never heard anywhere else, except on that radio station. It was pretty free flying. But it did not play the radio station game in that it was too small a station. Even though it was in Tampa, it was too small a station to report to Billboard or Cashbox or Record World or one of the trades. If you report to the trades, the record companies like you a lot more, because you're reporting that you're playing their product.

Then as now…

If you're not (reporting your playlist) anywhere well why should I care, fuck you, you’re just a little… But, there were some record people, say 80% of them, knew what the station was up to, what the station did, and treated the station accordingly. In other words, the Elektra guy wasn't going to bring me a Judy Collins record to play on WFSO. But on the other hand, when I was there, WFSO’s own weekly chart meant nothing (nationally)… except there's one example in the US where “All The Young Dudes” by Mott The Hoople was a Number 1 record…

Yes.

And so was “Gudbuy T’Jane” by Slade,

Right. Let's look at a WSFO playlist from April 1973 … At Number 1 “Give It To Me” by The J. Geils Band, an insanely catchy song. Number 2 “Thinking of You” by Loggins & Messina, I guess that's for female listeners. “Daniel” by Elton John…”Orly” by Guess Who… I've never heard that. 

Oh, great song. The Paris airport.

“No More Mr. Nice Guy” by Alice Cooper, and then further down, Brownsville Station, Steely Dan, Dr. John, The Raspberries, Edgar Winter, Gilbert O’Sullivan…

(laughs) There you go!

Susan Jacks, Strawbs, Rolling Stones.…

That's a perfect example. What is Gilbert O’Sullivan doing in there? That’s a British pop singer, next to all those other records. Really when Glenn Scott was program director, he was a very loose Program Director in that sense. You could put a piece of baloney on his desk and he would add it!

March of 73: “Black Coffee” by Humble Pie is Number 113 on the Billboard Top 200 but Number 1 on WFSO… written by Ike and Tina Turner. 

Yeah, not on any other radio station in the United States! On A&M.

Going further down the weekly survey:  Richie Havens, Don Farden, Billy Preston, Lou Reed, Hollies, Faces, Beach Boys, Melanie, Gary Glitter, 

(laughs) 

…Deep Purple, Derek and the Dominoes, Moody Blues, New Seekers, Skylark, and the single “Death of Samantha” by Yoko Ono! 

(laughs) Another only-on-FSO hit bound surprise! (laughs) They would play almost anything. But… if it really stank, it wouldn't last. Because we had a swamp out back. We had the swamp where we would just fly those 45s right into the swamp, and no one would ever see them again.

I'm remembering that in 1973 I was a big fan of Captain Beefheart, and he put out something resembling a commercial single called “Click Clack.” And I wrote the station a letter, and they added it just off of one letter. So they were pretty open to that. Seems that's an example of the station that served the community. There were few, if any national ads, it was all head shops, drive in theaters, and bars…

Well actually there were ads for beer, ran a lot of Budweiser ads. You would get a lot of ads for that Margie Sexton at Gulf Artists Productions, the promoter. She really kept the station alive at times. She would always advertise on FSO and use us as her voice. She loved FSO, and she would bring a band in like Humble Pie. Nine times out of 10 it would be a “WFSO Gold Promotion”, which really means nothing. You just get to say “You're welcomed to town” and they feel like they’re a big deal. But there was national advertising like Budweiser ads, ads for AMCO transmission. It's the same as it is now, with a heavy male audience. We called it beer and trucks. That’s what my 18 to 34 year-old men are interested in, beer and trucks. So go out and sell to them, right?  

YouTube Clip: WFSO FRANK ZAPPA SPOT TAMPA BAY 1973

https://youtu.be/jr1kvX9MM8U

So, right off the top of your head, what were the  local waterbed and head shop ads you can remember? One that immediately comes to mind is The Rats Hole.

Right. And there was a good record shop in St. Pete, Modern Music. And I'm trying to think of all of them. There was Asylum Records down in Sarasota. They didn't advertise up where we were. We ran a lot of movie ads. “STARTS FRIDAY!” We ran a lot of movie ads for either movie hits that were playing, or horror flicks. Because, again, we have the 18 to 34 audience, primarily 18 to 24 year-old males and so yeah, there were a lot of movie ads with screaming in them. We're not going to be selling any expensive perfume here on this radio station, but we'll sell you motor oil and gasoline and car parts, and we'll tell you what's playing at the Mustang Drive-in, what’s at Curtis Hixon Hall.

YouTube Clip: Brock Whaley WFSO-AM reads surreal donut tag in middle of reggae-ish 7 Up ad c.1973

But what was interesting about WFSO were these “traded out” ads that Dan Johnson, the owner, had. And what a “trade out” was, you give a business free advertising for a service that they have. And so we had Pinellas Park Generator Service ads. “Park Generators Where The Professionals Do More.” And I thought, why are we running a generator service ad? Well, that's where Dan Johnson got his car batteries (for free.) And it was the same thing with some Buick dealership, where Dan got his Buick from. And those were in the mix of everything else we were doing. 

And that was on the up and up? Just to benefit the General Manager?

Yeah, that was on the up and up. A lot of GMs did it. A lot of GMs still do it. But it was done back then. It was a trade and it was how the accounts were known, trade accounts. And you'd be listening to a commercial set on WFSO… you’d hear Jethro Tull playing the Bayfront Center, and you'd hear an ad for Budweiser beer. Then all of a sudden, you'd hear an ad for Park Generator and Battery. And you're going, one of these is not like the other. What is this doing here?

Can we talk a little bit about the difference in just the production of a radio show in 2025, where it’s all computerized in advance, sort of space bar, space bar. But back in those days, you had just two turntables, manual tape carts, and you were freaking busy with those short records.

Busy, yep. Most pop songs were two and a half to three minutes. So that's what you had to work with. But after you did it for a while, I didn't consider it busy. I just thought it was, it was what I did. But especially during free form or underground radio at WUSF, you really had to be cognizant of what you were going to play next and why. Unless Tom Roche, interviewing me now, dropped by with some 45 he insisted on airing with the reverb turned all the way up. (laughs)

That was “Trenchtown Rock Live” by Bob Marley, I believe. (laughs)

It was, yep, it was. Never sounded better, never sounded farther away in a valley. With that (WFSO) reverb knob turned up

Good times. So WFSO was daytime only, and AM radio stations competed with lightning static in the Tampa Bay summer, which must have been really annoying,

Terrible lightning static. The station was not only limited to 500 watts, but it used a very directional antenna pattern. You couldn't hear it south of us in St. Pete Beach, because we had to protect the (AM 570khz) station in Cuba, even though Cuba didn’t pay any attention to the rules. But we still did in terms of protecting their radio station. So we didn't shoot anything to the south. We couldn't (transmit) anything up towards Orlando either, which unfortunately went right through Temple Terrace in North Tampa. 

Where I lived at the time. A hard catch. 

We had a nominal signal there, because we were adjacent to a radio station in Orlando that had been established in the 1920s, WDBO (“Way Down By Orlando”) on 580. And we were on 570 so we couldn’t send too much of a signal to cause interference. But what did happen (in the other direction) because of the way the transmitting antennae phased, it was kind of like a cloverleaf. We sent a lot of signal out to the east. You'd hear us on the Space Coast. And as you know from your days at FSU, there are times where you could actually hear tiny 500 watt WFSO on and around the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee, which was, what, 238 miles away or something…

Right! In the afternoon, right on the car radio. I couldn't believe it. And yet the year before, in Temple Terrace, my first apartment, I could barely get the station.

That’s because of that “null antenna pattern” which the FCC required but eventually relaxed. And tit for tat, Cuba has raised the power on their 570 station, down in Santa Clara. And today it’s a real problem. 

(AM 570 switched to news/talk format in 1978, then a Sinclair religious format around 2000, and switched to Mexican programming in 2023.)

Who were some WFSO hosts? Wasn’t there a DJ named Chuck U Farley?

Yes, real name Charles Gooding.  You had Art Williams, real name Arthur McKannon.

And he went on to make some nice money with Home Shopping Network.

Oh he made a ton of money with Home Shopping Network. And there was Glenn Scott, he was program director for a while. Bob Seymour was there. 

Right, a name I was trying to remember, Bob Seymour, he too was on Underground Railroad. 

He also did jazz shows on USF,  he just retired a few years ago. He was a real champion of jazz.

What bands pop into your mind when you think about looking across the WFSO studio turntables? What are the albums that are strewn around the control room at that time?

Do you remember 666 by Aphrodite’s Child? That was a huge FSO record. Anything by Savoy Brown, Chicago Transit Authority, Cold Blood. Yeah, anything that was out there… and we had the freedom during the progressive hours on FSO to play whatever we wanted. But we had that freedom all the time on USF.

I'm curious about these old playlist/surveys stations printed up each week on their own. This looks to me like two days work for someone between researching it and typing it up. And there's no computers back then, right? There must have been a human being at the station who, well, you said that the playlist was just a very rough guess. No one was, say, counting the number of spins…

No. No one knew how much airplay any one of those records was given. There was no scientific thought behind it. There was no true measurement or weighing what songs were getting more play than anything else.

Could it have been in some cases tracks that the music director simply liked? Here’s a WFSO chart from 1970 with the remarkable early Fleetwood Mac track “The Green Manalishi” at No. 4.

Yeah, yeah.

And here’s Jefferson Airplane’s droning “Have You Seen The Saucers?”.

Some stoner at RCA thought that would make a hit single! (laughs) 

Yeah. The flip side, “Mexico” is not listed for sure. 

And look at this — all the way down at No 40, at the following Frigid Pink, Marmalade, The Jaggerz, and New Colony Six is… Rodríguez! The obscure South African success Sixto Rodríguez, 40 years before Searching For Sugarman. 

Well, when I was music director doing the chart, I would put records that I just wanted to see as number one, like “All The Young Dudes,” that deserves to be number one. “Do Ya?” by The Move, that deserves to be number one. “Borstal Boys” by The Faces, the first single from Ooh La La, that deserved to be number one, yeah. But as you saw, these printed charts - given away at record shops - expanded, because they were able to sell advertising.

So now we turn to the most well-known host, after you, from the WFSO days. That would be Tedd Webb. It always seemed incongruous to me that this cat started as a hippie stoner radio DJ, and over time morphed into this conservative radio icon. What's your thinking on that?

You know, I talked to Tedd about those days, because both Tedd and I were members of an anonymous organization that met regularly. And he got clean and sober the last couple years of his life. And good for him. I got sober in 1993. And he said to me, he said, “If they wanted to pay me to say that the sky is green, I'd say that the sky is green.” Tedd said, “This is, this is the deal right now. There are a lot of angry people out there who think Trump is the bee’s knees. And for me it's easy to go along with that and make stuff about it, because there's so much craziness about it.” So he wasn't a real right-wing guy by any means. Tedd went where the checks were written, as in “Whatever you want me to say, I’ll do it.”

But at first, Tedd was simply evolving away from rock radio. 

Right, yeah, he loved sports. He had the personality to do talk radio. He could talk for hours on his own. Tedd was one of a kind. There was the Tedd Webb that you knew personally, yet he was the guy on right-wing radio. He did the right-wing Trump stuff, because they paid him to do the right-wing Trump stuff. And he said it was fun to do. So that's how he ended up doing that. And, yeah, he was on WFLA for almost two decades, which is a lifetime working for a Clear Channel / iHeart Radio Station, which WFLA is. So, he did grand in that regard. He was well-liked. I never met anyone in the business who didn't like Ted. Tedd would surprise you.

Would you go as far as to say that he probably voted Democratic?

Oh yeah, if he voted. IF he voted. (laughs)

And yet he's on the radio, giving all these people marching orders and feeding them half-truths.

Yeah, that's what happened. That's what happened. But he was smarter than that. Personally he was a very smart man who just had a natural radio ability. His real name was Henry Ruiz Jr. He was a Cuban American.

 

 

And you and Tedd loved some pot back in those days.

Oh, we loved some pot. Everybody at WFSO loved some pot. Let me tell you a story. I just was telling a friend of mine. I may have told you this, but I was over at Ted's house one day, Laurie was there, and some woman that Tedd was dating for a minute. I forget who else was there. We were playing some board game, and we were pretty well loaded, and there's a loud knock on the door. We all freeze, ‘cos in that era you’d look up for a second. And it's none other than freaking Gordon Solie! Gordon Solie of WYOU Top Gun country radio, the Golden Gate Speedway, and of course Championship Wrestling from Florida. (affects wrestling announcer voice)  “Ooh, the man was bloody, he was down, there was no need for that! So long from the Sunshine State!” (laughs) So we’re awed that Gordon had come over to Tedd’s pad. 

After introductions he says, “Tedd I'm here to get two lids, and I need some blow.” (laughs) And I hear this come out of a voice of a man, you know, who I watched on Channel 13 for years as a kid, Channel 38, Channel 10. Anyway I don’t think the deal went down. And also, he knew who I was. We had a brief, nice conversation. But it just goes to show you, you never know. You never freaking know. Here was Mister Championship Wrestling From Florida, wanting pot and blow from Tedd Webb, of all people, because Tedd knew the stars when he needed to. This was the 1970s and if Tedd didn't have it, knew where you could get it. Tedd never steered anybody wrong. But I know he was an honorable man. He was a character. He was a character. 

Here’s another story… this was during a thing called BMI week at WFSO, where you would list every song you played and who wrote it for a week. And those would be randomly selected stations and gradually the list was sent into BMI, the broadcast music licensing people, and that's how people got paid.

But what a chore.

Yeah, well, (laughs) Ted, of course, was friends with everybody in the in the Tampa band Blues Image. So you never heard more Blues Image records in a one week period in your life than he did that week! Because he was making his friends all rich by giving them the royalties by playing their records. 

So he wasn't just compiling a pretend list, he was playing their records.

He was playing them, oh yeah. He wouldn’t cheat. Hourly, yeah, hourly. (laughs) What I was going to say about my career in Tampa, earlier, was the person akin to my career who lasted even longer in Tampa was Jack Harris. And Tedd was fabulous. If Tedd was in the area of the WFSO studio, even though he was I think working at WLCY at the time, he would drop by. You never knew who he'd be with, or what would be with him. He was just always a wonderful guest.

Is it your memory that daytimer WFSO had some level of consistent popularity, not gangbusters? And when did WFSO decide to just change formats and go up for sale?

Right after they got their 24-hour license They had to put in a third tower to operate at night, with a goofy pattern at night as well. They actually came in better in Temple Terrace at night than earlier in the day. And by then, FM had shown superiority in ratings, in advertising money being spent. Because, don't forget, Tampa became a pretty progressive FM market pretty fast. I mean, once you have Q-105 in stereo playing top 40 hits, and you had stations like WQSR, WQXM aka 98 Rock, the format was pretty well established. There was room for it, and there were people who embraced it.

But in all the time of the WFSO era, they were never inside the top 10 stations in town, right? They were always on the fringe anyway?

Never, never. They never showed up as a top 10 station. Except… if you broke it down demographically, with males between 18 and 24 who lived in Pinellas County, well then it did quite well. Hillsborough County as well.

You had a memorable time at a Grateful Dead show in 1977, ending in an arrest, if you want to comment

No, I don't mind. I guess enough time has passed. Maybe I don't want to say who I was with, okay, because it's still a secret for him. But really, it’s kinda funny to get busted at a Grateful Dead show amongst all the people having a reefer there. 

What's the venue? 

Lakeland Civic Center. Polk County, Florida, where my parents later retired to, and I had to visit for 10 years where my mom eventually passed in a nursing home at 93. 

Way back in the early 70s, the Grateful Dead started their own label. They were going to play Curtis Hixon Hall. And I'm on WFSO one Saturday afternoon. It's just me and the natural inhabitants of the swamp out there off Starkey Rd. in Largo. And this nice looking black car pulls up and out of the car comes Bobby Weir and Jerry Garcia, and another guy who's a representative of their label. He says, “Well, you added our record early. We thought you might like to talk to them before the show.” Now I was not the Grateful Dead fan at all. I didn't know much about The Dead except what was legendary. So I asked them a few legendary questions. 

What I remember most about them visiting was Jerry Garcia brought a six pack of YooHoo’s in bottles, that chocolate drink. And Jerry sat through the interview wolfing down YooHoo’s. We had to go outside for the obligatory joint together while some record was playing. We come back inside. We talk a little more. Jerry's wolfing down more YooHoo’s. Jerry's offering me his Camels. So I am smoking unfiltered Jerry Garcia Camels. Jerry was the talkative one. Bob Weir just kind of stared around the studio going, “What the… aah… Where am I?” (laughs) Bobby is seemingly thinking, “I wasn't prepared for this today. Where am I? Who is this kid that's talking to Jerry right now? What is this? They got a lot of records here. What am I doing anyway?” 

Fast forward, four years later, The Dead are playing Lakeland, and a friend and I decided to go over to the Lakeland Civic Center to see them. My friend and I brought some windowpane. I figured if I'm gonna see them, I might as well take some acid. Plus, we’ve got a couple of joints amongst us. It’s first come, first serve seating. There is no real floor plan to the event, as things were back then. We’re passing a joint back and forth, and we're laughing about something, and I say, “Hey. Look at that guy over there. He looks like a plainclothes narc.” And we laugh. And my friend says, “Yeah, probably is a Lakeland narc.” Well, the next thing you know, my hands are being cuffed behind my back, and the Lakeland narc is telling me I'm under arrest for use and possession of marijuana. And he arrests my friend as well, and they put us in the back of a Lakeland car, and my hands are handcuffed, and I'm trying to get my handcuffed hands around to my right pocket. I must not be found carrying two hits of windowpane (laughs) for use later in the Grateful Dead show! And I'm fishing around and fishing around and acting like I’m Ian Drury. I mean, I'm all over the place. I finally get it and deposit it under the seat of the van. I feel good. I got rid of it. But get this… the friend busted with me just happened to have the same last name as the Sheriff of Polk County but was not related at all. And suddenly the deputies become very interested in how well he knew the Sheriff of Polk County. And my friend wasn't saying anything. And of course I speak up and say, “Well, he's mentioned his uncle a time or two.” So anyway, they decide to charge us with simple possession, a misdemeanor. At the time my father was teaching up in Jacksonville, and they drive all the way down from Jacksonville to pay $120 to bail us both out. 

The Orlando Sentinel ran a one-paragraph item saying Lakeland police had arrested 57 concert goers that one night. 

 

 

Really? Really? I never knew that. Well later on, we go before the Polk County judge who oddly enough adjudicates us not guilty and throws the thing off the record. So we're not charged with a damn thing. We're free to go. We got our bail money back, or my parents did. Everybody's happy. And if it hadn’t been for my friend’s last name, we’d probably be in the Bartow County Jail still rotting away because we were not only possessing but using marijuana in a public place, a Grateful Dead show.

A year later, they played Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa. Again I brought along windowpane. Finally. I loved the show. I absolutely got into the groove right away. I saw what people meant. I got it, for that night, for that moment in time. I got it.

 

 

What do you think when you hear your WFSO 1973 air check I found and restored (and posted to Vimeo) with the head shop ads and the fast talking approach to album rock?

 

Vimeo Clip (2 hrs): https://vimeo.com/407316064 

I think I'm having a great time. Yeah, I am. I think I'm having a great time. I don't care, this little 500 watt am station that was part of the joy of it, yeah. The parking lot was smoke-filled. Radio used to be, you know, it was more than just records and back announcing. It was having some fun, seeing how far you can push the envelope at the time, doing what you wanted to do.

So when did you decide to leave WFSO-AM?

I was there for two years, and I got an offer to go down to WQSR-FM, which was on by that time. 

WQSR_________________________

So now we are up to 1975.

Yeah, ‘75 got a job at QSR,

And they called you.

Yep, they call me

More money. FM money now? 

Ooh yeah, more money. But I was spending it all on gas because I was still living in Temple Terrace and driving down 40 to 301, all the way down to Bonita Road in Sarasota to get to the studios at QSR.

Even at 50 cents a gallon

80 miles each way. So, yeah, it was an adventure. But I liked WQSR. 

So at WQSR, once again, DJs were encouraged to be creative. Steve Huntington did that well researched Time Warp program. You did a show called Listen Here, where you curated the best new releases. And as before, this was creative radio compared to the Top 40 stations that were just cranking out a product. Am I correct? 

Yeah, Top 40 screamin’ and shoutin’, selling Clearasil, you know, the same old deal. Then FM finally caught up with AM and ruining that format by overselling it, too many commercials, bland personalities…

The so-called Underground FM format began a slow transition to Album Oriented Rock, aka AOR, with the rise of outside-the-market paid consultants. When did you first know things would be changing?

Well, when WQXM/98 Rock came on, and I was at QSR as a program director, that's when I knew. That's when I knew that there was somebody out there smarter than me who understood how the ratings game really works, and that was Lee Abrams. And we did have a battle there for a while between WQXM and WQSR, where I was partially responsible for the lousy QSR numbers in one (ratings) book, because I would not give up the mantle of progressive radio while they were playing Styx every half hour. This was just the beginnings of Abrams (consultants) corporate rock. This was Journey, Foreigner, Kansas radio, yeah. I mean, there were some gems in there, but man, oh man… "Carry On My Wayward Son” at the top of the hour. Please God, kill me now. And they won, yeah.

Here’s a quick QSR story. QSR was bought by two New York advertising men, a guy named Carol Newton, and Ted Rogers. Ted had a varied background, working with NBC and working with Metromedia, working with networks and agencies in New York. So he had some great stories. Anyway, the night that we knew President Nixon was going to resign, I put together a 15 minute tape thing to run after Nixon goes, and it was just a montage of Nixon speeches all the way back to the 50s, and musical hooks to go along with them. You know, the Checkers speech… “I am not a crook”… all of that stuff. I went back and mined that stuff and spent the whole day putting it together and editing it on a 10 inch reel at 15 inches per second, because I wanted the razor blade edits to be nice. And we ran the resignation speech of Nixon. We stole it from our AM station, which had a network affiliation. All it took was a simple patch cord. (laughs) So we ran the resignation, and then I ran this piece that I put together on Nixon and his downfall that I was very proud of. And the phones start lighting up, and the (management) hotline lights up, and I answered the line, and it's Ted Rogers. And Ted said, “Brock, I want to tell you that was one of the finest pieces of audio production I've ever heard. I'm real proud to have you working for me at WQSR.” Yada yada yada. Maybe he’d had a cocktail in him or two, but he was quite complimentary about the broadcast. And I did not know until years later, working in Chicago in the early 80’s, years after I had left QSR that Ted Rogers was responsible for the Checkers speech and was responsible for Nixon during the debates. He was Nixon's television and radio guy all through the 50s. I didn't know he did that. He didn't make noises about doing that, but apparently he loved Nixon enough to work for him. And I had just put on this 15-20 minute show that basically trashed the President’s character, but he liked it. He called me up because he liked it. And I never knew that untill later, probably after he had passed. He had been that tight with him, and yet he let me mess around that much. 

So tell me about meet and greets during the seven years of your time in Tampa radio… you must have seen so many live shows, on the house, and so many backstage meet and greets.

I did, and there are quite a few that I enjoyed.

But a lot of them were work?

Some were work, but some just surprised me with how good they were. Like the first time I saw Springsteen at the Jai Alai Fronton, that was late 1975 so just when “Born To Run” was breaking.  And that was a two and a half hour phenomenon. It was something.  Another time I got to give Bonnie Raitt flowers on stage, and she kissed me. I also saw Elvis Costello, again at Jai Alai Fronton. I went backstage, and these Columbia Records honchos were in town. It was a package show. Mink DiVille was on it, and Nick Lowe.

Let me interject to say it was end of first semester at FSU that weekend, final exams study, and I declined taking a trip to Tampa to see that, and Little Feat the next night. I still regret it.

So I’m introduced to Costello by one of these Columbia Record guys, and they say “This is Brock Whaley. We believe he was the first person to play your music in the States. He had an import copy of your Stiff Records single “Radio Sweetheart” that he played the hell out of. He’s been a big, big supporter of your record.” And that first album had come out, My Aim Is True… so they tell Costello I've been playing all his records. And he turns to me and he says, gruffly, “WELL ARE YOU PLAYING THEM NOW?” I go, “uh, yes, certainly.” And he pivots and heads to his dressing room. That was my first encounter with Mr. Costello.

Briefly what about WQSR and the failed 4 channel FM quadraphonic format?

What a joke.

You invited me down to the station one night, and you walked in there at 6pm with a bunch of albums under your left arm, and with your right arm as if by rote, you shut down the “QUAD” switch on the wall. You just slammed it to OFF, saying, “Bye.”

I'll tell you two things about quadraphonic records. There were two incompatible systems. There was the SQ system that I believe Columbia and its associated labels and A&M and Warners used, and there was this other funky system that RCA used, and RCA used a what's the word I'm looking for? It used an ultrasonic tone, like a dog whistle, or that range of high frequencies, to separate the right/left back channels from the front. So when you went to “slip cue” an RCA or associated label encoded record, it went zzwwsh each time, on the air, as the speed caught up to the quadraphonic sound. The other thing about quad that I didn't like is that I always kept kept a mono clock radio with me, and I noticed that there was a lot of crap out-of-phase artifacts. They never paid any attention when they mastered these 4 channel things to see what they would sound like when arriving at a mono radio. And so you would have a record where the vocals completely disappeared, or you couldn't hear the right channel at all, or things just sounded out of phase. Yes, quad was an awful idea. It didn't work.

I want to talk more about the New Wave era. You’re at WQSR, and modern rock has, you know, evolved from piquant hippie rock, to progressive rock, to bloated two-album set rock. Drum solo rock. The meandering double Yes album comes to mind 

Exactly. Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973).

I do remember thinking, this is a little much. And of course, as their punishment, they played that entire album at a gig, shivering, at Tampa Stadium in freak 34 degree weather, with the audience sitting on their hands. And it was agony. 

(laughs) It was no Metal Machine Music!

So you're at QSR. And Costello was the commercial breakthrough of punk, or punk-light. Could any punk be on the playlist then? 

Not at all. But what could happen were Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds and similar.

That's kind of pub rock to me. 

Pub. Yeah. I don't remember playing anything that was, you know, other than The Ramones now and then…

That first LP was almost viewed as comedy.

But it was also, a DJ had to have his wits about him, because what record are you going to play after the 1:45 song ends? (laughs)

Meanwhile at WFSO, our friend Mike Cooper is Music Director by then, and he added "God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. So there was some of that, but I'm sure you guys probably didn't even have, like, a punk hour at WQSR. It was just untouchable. 

We weren't advanced with anything that edgy, even that late at QSR. Steve Huntington was music director. He had a broad range of interests. I mean, we played everybody. We played Jesse Winchester, Bob Marley, Nicolette Larson. And he constructed these great “Time Warp” sets.

Is he around?

Steve Huntington, yes. He's good. He's retired in Sarasota after being fired from satellite radio running the Jimmy Buffett Channel. He formulated that with Jimmy Buffett . And he assembled the Jimmy Buffett channel out of his home in Sarasota for years and years, and it was just like two or three years ago that Sirius XM blew him out. I think the Buffet channel's gone too.

So again, any other, any other comments about QSR starting to evolve into the next or new generation? 

The problem with QSR against 98 Rock was that QSR was playing too many records. Too many new records. It had too much depth to it. If you were a music fan, a real music fan, it fit your bill, because it played a little bit of everything. WQSR was playing music for people who enjoyed music. We were not playing music for people who used radio as an appliance, and that's the difference. 98 Rock was programmed for radio used as an appliance. If you play a new record, play something damn familiar after it. And the new records were mostly, I joke about it, new records from Kansas, Styx, Ted Nugent, Eddie Money… when that period of corporate rock was just beginning. Over at 98 Rock, Lee Abrams had a piece of some of those bands. I think he had a big piece of Yes, by the way, and he loved them. 

Shades of Tedd Webb and Blues Image (laughs)

Anyway, when Lee Abrams took over WQXM with consultant-driven playlists, he cleaned my clock at WQSR. I just quit.

98 ROCK_________________________

Yet you joined 98 Rock, first as music director. You joined the enemy.

Joined the enemy. I was at WFSO, then QSR, then back to FSO briefly, then QSR called and wanted me to be the program director. So I was the Program Director of QSR. Across town so to speak, was 98 Rock… consulted by Lee Abrams and Lee Michaels, late, great Lee Michaels.

Lee Abrams and Lee Michaels?

The late Lee Michaels. Two Lees.

And we’re not conflating this with Lee Michaels, the musician on A&M?

No. Lee Michaels left us unfortunately in an automobile accident, just pulling out of his driveway in Buckhead (Atlanta), decades ago. But Lee Abrams was there at at QXM and as was their habit, they tried to get good people on their competitors moved out of town. It was one of the tricks you used to do with (corporate) radio: If your competition had someone who was really good, you tried to get that someone moved out of the market. Works like that in television, too, to some extent in some markets: “This guy's good. Let’s get him out of Augusta, put him in Peoria.” You tried to get him a job somewhere else. And so I was offered a raise and the chance to program an Abrams station in Albuquerque. KRKE FM.

Interesting

Yeah, well, that's how it works.

Did you know at the time of the offer that you were being played, in that game?

No. I just come off these terrible ratings at QSR as a program director, beaten badly by 98 Rock. Mike Lyons was programming 98 Rock at the time. Now Mike and I were the best of friends, but never worked in the same station together ever. So I get a call from Lee Abrams, the big radio honcho, and he says, “You know, we've had our eye on you for a while, Brock Whaley… How would you like to go out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and run a rock station for us, do the programming? You’ll run it.” I had never thought about the southwest. I'm not a southwest kind of person. I don't have a lot of clay and cactus around my house. But, sure… So I went to Albuquerque for a week. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I hated the people, the station, KRKE, perky radio! Albu-KIR-KEE radio, happy KIR-KEE, 94.9. And (sighs) … yeah. So I got Lee Abrams on the phone about the fifth day. “This thing is not working. If you want this station to be a success, more power to you. But I can't do it.” And he says, “Good. Because I'm sending you back to Tampa to work at 98 Rock. So he rescued me from a bad situation. I forget the guy that finally took the KRKE job (after me), but a year later, it was no longer a rock station. The management just didn't understand what to do with perky KIR-KEE.

 

 

I recall there was a Tampa Tribune piece, like farewell Brock and your great service to Tampa radio, and good luck in New Mexico. And off you went. And then a week later, you were back? 

Yeah, my departure and my return were both written up in the paper. I was happy to be back. Let me tell you, I'm not Albuquerque. It's not a highlight on my resume of jobs done, but I did it, and that was my connection with Abrams, which later turned out to work for me very well.

So that was horrible, and you were back in Tampa Bay after a week, but you now you couldn't come back to WQSR. 

No, no, I couldn't. Nor did I want to. I had seen the writing on the wall by then, 98 Rock had been on about six months and already pretty much killed QSR in the ratings. 

And was that because of their more careful research such as testing of song hooks? 

Yeah, and because they played Styx and Journey over and over, you know? While I was at QSR it was what we considered corporate rock, while we were playing Althea and Donna B-sides. WQSR was still in the “underground” mode.

The last gasp of “underground.” 

Yeah, yeah. And WQXM 98 Rock was programmed with a very tight playlist, and yet not tight. There was a card file system. You had a piece of paper with song categories on it, like A-B-C. You had a card catalog with the songs that fit those categories, and you're supposed to pick the top card and play the song and put the card in the back. Of course, people gave me a lot more leeway because of who I was. Oh and there were a couple cards that were thrown behind the board never to be played it again. 

Accidentally. (laughs)

Uh, one of them was “Wango Tango” by Ted Nugent. And “Baby Come Back" by Player, "Isn't It Time” by The Babys… miserable corporate pop rock… or stuff that was just out there. And I wanted to get these off the card system and see how long they were missed. And many of them were never missed by Neil Mirsky, the program director at the time. Still compared to QSR, it was a much tighter formatted station. I started there on the evening shift, seven to eleven pm. That was fine with me. I liked afternoons and nights, and I was working with the consultants for the first time. Lee Michaels was really my point man of the Abrams organization. And Lee and I would argue over records every week as to what we were going to add to the playlist or get rid of. I remember we had a big fight over “Who Are You?” by The Who. He didn't think it was going to be worth playing, and I insisted on playing it. And of course, we played it, and we all know how that worked out. But it was… it was more controls than I'd ever seen in terms of the playlist. And certainly, there were more formulaics involved into what is played after this and what is played after that. Actually, considering how rock stations are today, 98 Rock was kind of loose. Tampa was used to loose radio with the Underground Railroad and WQSR and WFSO in the evenings. So it couldn't be too tight. It was what we call “day part” — that is, the real hard hitting records don't show up till the afternoon. The more melodic records for women were played middays, when women are primarily your audience. So it was programmed like that. Hits in the morning, softer stuff midday, start rocking the afternoons, and pedal to the metal of the evenings. It was “day-parted” depending on what time of day would allow you to play what kind of song.

What about allowances for your personality and expressing opinions? Was that reined in also?

No. That’s one of the things Abrams liked about me, and particularly Lee Michaels. And I worked with Lee in Honolulu later, he was a good guy, he was a pal and a good radio man. Knew what he was doing. Always wore this large black cowboy hat, kind of imposing on people if you didn't know him. He was a sweetheart once he got to know him. He he took a liking to the things that I did.

I recall that ridiculous “giveaway” promo.

Yep. WLCY-AM was still a big Top 40 station, although Q-105 FM was about to permanently show them the door. They were running some sort of contest where they would give you anything you wanted. I think it was called the Ultimate Contest. And a number of top 40 stations bought it from KSDO in San Diego, which came up with it originally. And they would just have these promos listing prizes. You could win the Cadillac, you win the color TV, win the Caribbean vacation, yada yada yada. And I spoofed the concept in some promos for 98 Rock: Take the same concept, except we come to your house and we take whatever we want. Whatever we want. We would take your stove or we would take your TV, or your new car, just the reverse of what they were doing, just for the hell of it. And that very spoof ad, of the WLCY contest, won me my first Addy Award for best radio promotion in Florida. But, yeah, I had done it just for the hell of it.

YouTube Clip: Brock Whaley 98 Rock Tampa "We're Winning By Stealing" Promos

Another one of the bits that I came up with… this was much later when I worked in Honolulu… I came up with a contest Name That Bogus Band. And I would go to Tower Records and I would buy all the most obscure California music magazines I could find. There was one in particular, Maximum R&B, a fairly large one, and they had dozens of band listings and club listings of all these unknown bands. So what I would do is I would list off three real, actual band names, and then I’d add one that I had made up. You know, like of these four… Hitler’s Pencil Box, Sandy Duncan's Eye, Thurston Howell’s Boner and The Dumpster of Avalon… which is bogus? The Dumpster of Avalon was the bogus band. Listeners loved guessing. And Thurston Howell’s Boner became my favorite band name, and still is to this day. (laughs) I actually spent like five bucks to get one of their singles, some mail order, and oh it was God awful. Thurston Howell’s Boner didn't get a rise out of me. But that was just a fun contest. Lee Abrams liked the contest so much, he syndicated around the country. He had a weekly sheet of ideas for promotions and things like that. And it became a draw at Abrams stations around the country, as long as I would supply them with insane band names, which I happily did.

How many years at 98 Rock?

Oh, God, I don't know. I think a year, maybe two. Because I later got fired there. Yeah.

But you're so tight with them and in good graces, doing good work, and then you're fired?

Well, I was fired by a guy named Neil Mirsky. When I got hired Mike Lyons was program director. Mike was probably my best friend. Unfortunately, Mike died of pancreatic cancer about, oh, some 20 odd years ago. He was a big fan of mine. He was a Firesign Theater encyclopedia.

Oh yeah.

You couldn't say any of the lines without getting the proper comeback or breaking up. So we jelled, we loved the same music. We liked the same Marvin Gaye singles. We liked Delaney & Bonnie and Friends On Tour. So Mike is program director, but he got fired somehow, and Music Director Neil Mirsky becomes program director and I rubbed him the wrong way. Although we're pals now, friends now, it’s water under the bridge. But after a year I got fired by Neil! And a little later on, both Debbi Kelton and Bob Stroud were also fired from 98 Rock as part of “The Brock Whaley Conspiracy.” That's how they put it. 

Sounds like a bogus band name, by the way. 

Thank you. Thank you. (laughs) But it’s not Thurston Howell’s Boner.

Well I'm always curious about this stuff, firings. Was it some last straw of you doing something on the air? Or doing regular shows but there are politics swirling above you…

Yes. A personality clash with who I was working with.

So starting at Underground Railroad in 1971, 71 to 78 that's seven years, and that's four stations. It shows the nomadic nature of a radio career, like the old WKRP sitcom theme song. Pretty much every year and a half, you get comfortable, and poof. It sometimes doesn't even matter if you're doing good work…

It doesn’t. It was politics that got me fired from 98 Rock. I probably deserved it. I wasn't being very cooperative with what the Program Director wanted me to do. But yeah, so my Tampa career lasted a total of seven years.

And that was your last day on Tampa radio. Did you have a chance to say goodbye?

I didn't have the chance to say goodbye. I was just told that that was it.

I don’t like the radio evolution, but things change. Every business does. Broadcasting is almost a hundred years old. The golden age of great FM rock radio was fifty years ago. What I fell in love with really doesn’t exist anymore.

 

 

OTHER TAMPA STATIONS_________________________

Let's talk then about some of the other Tampa radio stations. What are your memories of the Tampa R&B station WTMP-AM?

WTMP started as WIOK. WTMP was originally owned by Robert W. Roundsville, who owned a group of R&B stations in the South and in the early 60s or mid 60s, he started to diversify. He sold WTMP so he could buy WDAE. But Roundsville also owned some well-known rockers like WFUN in Miami “Fun Radio 79.” TMP, I just remember they were always there. They played some rocking gospel music on Sunday morning. Jim Murray, I think, was the PD and afternoon drive guy. I met him once. Tom Hankerson was the morning drive man and music director. They were just trying to make it on their own. You know, Tampa didn't have that large of a Black population. Once Roundville sold them, they were kind of a standalone.

Was there a way at the time for the ratings service to discern what percentage of a Black station listeners were white?

No, not back then.

But we do know anecdotally that white listeners back into the 50s would turn to the Black station because they wanted better quality music, right?

Yeah, yeah. They played a lot of records first before they crossed over to pop. They were a tight sounding radio station, a straight down the road R&B station, although I remember in the early 60s, they did play jazz on Sunday. They had a DJ named George C who played jazz and did afternoon drive, they played gospel music Sunday morning, and then they played jazz music the rest of the day.

Wasn't Tampa among the largest markets to not have a Black FM station at the time?

Yes, it was. It was one of the last to get a Black R&B FM station. And before Tampa got an R&B FM station, it first got a disco FM station, the old WTAN-FM in Clearwater. But yeah, Tampa was one of our last markets to get a full time R&B station on FM. For decades, WTMP-AM had the market to themselves. 

Do you remember them in, say, the top 10 station rankings?

No, they never ranked that high. Their original competitor, WZST “Zest Radio 1550” (laughs) got out of the R&B business and went country WYOU. But WTMP was pretty much left alone until WRXB 1590 St Pete Beach came along.

I want to talk about that. Let’s suppose WTMP is maybe15th in the market. Why did WRXB come along and think… we’re going to be competitive with the 15th station and make some money that way?

That's a good question, except for the fact that there's really no other formats on the dial left to spin. Also they were more Pinellas County oriented. They had a very weird radiation path, when they were operating correctly, with a null towards Orlando and West Palm Beach, and Key West to the south. They had a very weird pattern. They only had 1000 watts. They were a daytime-only radio station, and they were mostly staffed by disaffected WTMP people who originally went over there. Jim Murray originally went over there.

But they sure played great music, to me. It was probably the funkiest Tampa radio station I can recall. Maybe there was some added entertainment value in the old-school sound of the commercials. But I just thought they rocked and they got down. I just loved that station. 

They did get down, and they were old school, and there would be stretches of afternoon drive where you would hear 20 minutes of music without an interruption, just 20 minutes of strong R&B music just segued together. And then the few commercials they had were mostly local. They weren't on any national buys. At least WTMP was around long enough to get some national ads like Coca Cola and Triple S Tonic. “Here's James Brown for Triple S Tonic - S S S !!” I would say now, with what I know about the business, WRXB was just barely making their way. Those people weren't paid anything. 

I remember one weekend you and I said, “Let's drive down there and find them.” And we didn't even have much of an address other than somewhere near the north end of the Skyway. We spotted their towers and then a tiny brick building… a true “radio shack.”

Right, a nondescript shack. We found two towers that needed painting and maintenance. We found a DJ, who looked like a dazed Chuck Berry, having a pretty good time doing the Sunday afternoon show in a tiny tiny cinder block studio. But what I remember most is (starts laughing) that… Look, you need two towers to be directional. You need two towers to keep your license with the FCC. Otherwise you have much further reach but you interfere with other AM1590’s, a big violation. And one of the towers was just disconnected! It just wasn't… where the cable is supposed to meet the tower it was just gone, (laughs) like it had been cut. I remember asking the DJ about it. I forget the guy's name, but he said (low voice) “We only need one tower.”

That’s wild. But just for the record, he was doubling his listenership by doing that. 

Yeah. He was going all the way to Key West! 

I too remember that cinder block building, let's say 20 feet by 10 feet with three rooms, transmitter in the left room, the UPI teletype machine in the middle of the room, and then the “studio” in quotes that would have been ten feet by six feet. Resting on the audio board board for the official time was a tiny dime store clock. There was no sound proofing, and right by the mic was a room air conditioner humming loudly. Yet they sounded tremendous on the car radio. 

(laughs) And great albums and 45s scattered everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

I clearly recall that DJ was looking for a certain oldie. He had a stack of 45s in his hand, shuffling through them faster than a card shark… and just mumbling to himself, “So fucked up, so fucked up.”

(laughs) Well that's real radio, that's real. Let me tell you, there was a cat…There was a time when WPDQ Jacksonville on 600AM went from Top 40 to R&B, and Jacksonville was a big R&B market with two R&B stations already. I was driving up to Jacksonville to see Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon tour with Bill Mims and probably Laurie, maybe Steve Nader. And we’re driving and we hear this guy, on WPDQ, playing “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango. And I hear this DJ, and he uses the air name, Larry Jones. I later tried to track him down. This Black cat Larry Jones was the fastest talking jock I ever heard in my life, faster than Jack Armstrong, he was fast. I said, hey, we got an hour or so before the show. Let's find WPDQ, and let's see this guy in action. And we passed another joint and it seemed a good idea. So we go to downtown Jacksonville. Somehow we find WPDQ, the studios and offices. It's a fairly nice building. Station had been there for years as a top 40 station, running against the “Big Ape” WAPE. We introduce ourselves, saying we’re from Tampa, we work in radio, and we wanted to know if we could see Larry Jones in the control room in action. And this Black guy says, “Sure, follow me." And we go right into the control room, and it's a nice control room. Things in order. The music has all been dubbed to carts. There are hardly any records, plenty of cart machines though. And we see and meet Larry Jones, and we watch him doing his show, and he's got a weather forecast on an index card. He's halfway through the forecast, and he's flipped it, and he's on to the next card, which is a local ad for something. He finishing the ad. He puts in a cart. He's got pre-recorded drop-ins on these carts. “It's the Larry Jones Show,” that's one cart. He pushes the next button. (female voice) “Do it, Larry!” (man’s voice) “Oh, I sure ’nuff be doing it for you, baby.” (back and forth) “Oh, baby. I love Larry Jones!”  Next cart. “Oh, and I love you too, Mama!” “Ooooh. Larry!! Play my favorite record!” (laughs) He’d have all these inserts of women's voices on, like, double stacks of cart machines, like six of them. And he was just bang, bang, bang. And while he's doing a bit or reading an ad, he's reloading the machines without even looking at the cart labels, and they're all correct. They're all correct. “You like Marvin Gaye honey?” “Ooh, I like him!” Larry had recorded all these female voices, and he was just… it was just a joy to see him live. 

So years later, after Laurie and I got married, we go to the city of New Orleans for our honeymoon. And as I'm tuning the radio dial driving into New Orleans, I hear WXEL Slidell, Louisiana, a 100,000 watt FM station, long out of that format now. And who should be on WXEL that afternoon, but Larry Jones! And how do I know it’s Larry Jones? ‘Cos he's talking fast and because I hear, “Ooooh Larry! No one can do it like you.” “Oh, you know you're right, baby! Nobody can!” He took all the carts with him. The same woman. It was a Larry Jones show just transferred from Jacksonville, to beautiful Slidell. The station's still there on 104.5, or something like that. But man, that kind of Black radio I love. That's the kind of Black radio I would hear on WRDW in Augusta, the station James Brown owned, when I could faintly pull them in some evenings from Tampa. Just wild, crazy, fast talking, jive jocks. There was also the Crown Prince on WRBD, in Fort Lauderdale, they called it “The Rockin’ Big Daddy WRBD.” The Crown Prince had inserts too. “South Florida and the Bahamas, you're rocking with the Crown Prince!” (female voice) “Ooooh, do it for me, Crown!” (male voice) “I’m doin’ it for you, honey!” “Ohh, Crown!!” I could just see him hitting the carts, as he does his thing. 

Someone sent me an aircheck by an Atlanta DJ, Doug Steele, on WAOK in 1971, a Mixcloud post, and he is a relentless fast talker.  https://soundcloud.com/bobjlv/waok-atlanta-doug-steele-7-28-1971 I just wonder how those people did that for five hours a day. It must have been exhausting, I can't imagine.

Not only doing it, but setting up your lady friend, recording all the carts, and hitting them in the right order as you're carrying on.

And usually no one thought to record one second of it. I mean, it's gone.

It's gone. Larry Jones from WPDQ and WXEL is gone. I'm sorry to say that. Somewhere I had… and I lost it in ’73 down visiting in Lauderdale… I had a reel-to-reel machine, and I made air checks of Y100, and all the big stations, and then I recorded a whole day of WRBD Fort Lauderdale. And I got Joe Fisher in the morning. He was a PD, and he did live spots. (slowly) “If you're looking for a good clean, usable car, then you're looking for Car Circus.”

But I recorded hours of Alley Pat, the outlandish DJ in Atlanta who I did a documentary about. It’s on Vimeo and I know you’re a fan. He’d already been on the air 25 years when I started recording him, and 10 years after that I used those crazy tapes to make the film. It came in First Place at the Atlanta Film Festival in 2011. 

 

Vimeo Documantary: Alley Pat The Music Is Recorded

https://vimeo.com/65016982

I don't know if I ever told you this, but everywhere I would show that film, I would tell people how it was my intention to blend my collection, my shoe box collection of Alley Pat air checks, with other people's collections and with the Atlanta History Center, and so on. I'll merge all these collections together. And I find out I was maybe the only guy recording any of this. It’s funny, you know, sometimes it takes someone outside the culture to capture the culture, right? Many years after a white woman came forward with another 10 hours of hilarious air checks, just to prove me wrong… 

Back to Tampa radio… WALT was the bomb, but you didn’t click with WFLA in its Top 40 era

WFLA was too middle of the road. They had two five minute newscasts every hour. Who needs that? Too middle of the road-ish. WLCY was middle of the road too, at least middays. Although I do recall getting ready for school in 1968 or so, it was eighth grade or whatever, and the morning man played “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil”

by The Jefferson Airplane. This was a mid-charting record at best, but it was on AM drive time rotation on WLCY. This was after WALT has switched formats, and I was pretty impressed. Back then, the hippest station - that was very hard to receive in Tampa - was WYND in Sarasota “Surf Row 1280.” The problem of 1280 was there was also a station in Lake Wales on 1280, and the Lake Wales station seemed to come in stronger. So it wasn't until I built a loop antenna at an early age and could null out Lake Wales to get WYND. That’s where I heard the long version of "Crimson and Clover,” the long version of “Monterey” by The Animals, I mean they were kind of a WFSO before there was an FSO.

ORLANDO AND CHICAGO______________

After I was fired from 98 Rock, I didn't know what I was going to do, but a guy called from Orlando who had heard me driving through town. There are two “driving through town” stories in my career. Guy heard me from Orlando said, why don't you come up and do voice work for Disney? And Disney World had an entire studio underneath in the basement (of the Magic Kingdom) where you'd see people walking around with their goofy heads, you know, in their hands…

In a hurry. (laughs)

Really kind of surreal. We could see all the closed circuit cameras in the thrill ride. We would just see people scared to death on Space Mountain or whatever, you know, whatever that thing. It was really a cool environment. So I went to Disney, and I primarily did regional television ads. You know, “HEY! It's 19 degrees in New Jersey, but it's 80 and sunny at Disney World!” You know, those kinds of things, “ HEY New Jersey! Come on down” radio spots. And Bill Mims, who I had worked with at QSR, oh and WUSF as a matter of fact, was working at WORJ, legendary ORJ, although it isn’t so legendary anymore. But he hired me when he knew I was back in town. So I started doing nights at ORJ, and eventually I get to move to mornings, just like what happened at QSR and at FSO at times. I'm back doing mornings, which I absolutely hate. I did not like getting up at 3:30 or 4am. Remember, I'm still drinking back then. I mean, I was drinking till ’93, so I was detoxing on the air. But the ratings were good. Mike Cooper became my news man, my old friend, Mike Cooper, who's in Atlanta. I spent only about nine months at WORJ before I was hired away again… The program director of KAZY in Denver was driving through town down to see his mom in Boca Raton or something. Heard my morning show on the way down, on the way up, took a liking to me. I got a call from Denver. How would you like to come to Denver? And I'm thinking, Well, I've been in Florida all my life. I really want to get out of here. I like Denver. I've been there before. I had gone to Denver on a school bus with Dave Ellman of the (Tampa hippie-era) Co-op Garage and some friends. A couple years back, we were in Aspen. We were in Aspen the week Claudine Longet shot Spider Sabich. So it was quite, quite the time to be at Aspen. The city was alive.

Spider wasn’t. 

Yep. So Dave Van Dyke is his name. We're still very good friends. He was the program director. He said, How'd you like to come out to Denver? And I said, Sure, why not? I flew out there, was interviewed, met the general manager, Sam Jacobazzi, an old Italian guy. Sam Jacobazzi says, “So Mr. Whaley, you think you can entertain the Denver market?” We signed a contract right on the spot, came back to Florida, moved all my shit to Denver. Debbi Kelton, who I was living with at the time, followed me out there. And I'm put on mornings at KAZY and I really like the people I'm working with. I like the station. We’ve got good promotions. We own the streets. We're in a battle with four other AOR stations, album oriented rock stations, with varying degrees of tightness. KBCO in Denver was loose as hell. KFML in Denver was loose as hell. Our main competitor, KBPI “Rocks the Rockies,” that was our main competitor. There was another one as well. Really took a liking to my morning partner, the late Mark Zabansky, who greeted me by throwing firecrackers at my feet. This guy's crazy. We're going to have a good time. He said things that were just outrageous. Later I got him to work with me in Chicago. Just to give you an idea, he would read the news and would say something like, “Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev died yesterday. But all is not lost at the Kremlin as they plan to lift him upside down and use his eyebrows as a street sweeper.” (laughs) And then he’d go on to the next item. That's just the way he did straight news, yeah, so we got along. 

So I went to Denver, I was very happy at that radio station. I worked with some wonderful people and under great guidance. And the only reason I didn't stay is because I got an offer to go to Chicago.  And I'm not going to turn that down.

So I left KAZY Denver and I moved up to WMET Chicago. Bob Stroud, who I worked with at QSR, and who I taught production to, became the production director there, had rang me to say they needed someone in afternoons, and Bob recommended me. Once again, I did the flight from Denver to Chicago. Get in late on a Saturday night. They're gonna audition me on the air Sunday morning at 6am, 6 to 10. So I do this Sunday morning show, and I’m just crazy that I’m on Chicago airwaves. I can't believe it. I get done with the show, Bob Coburn, on the program director’s line, calls me into his office, where he's rolling joints on a Frisbee. I got on that plane back to Denver, not really knowing if I had a gig or not. I was so zonked (laughs) from my visit with Bob. But he loved the audition, and I got hired. And then the very day that Debbi Kelton and I arrived in Chicago from Denver, my new boss Bob Coburn announced he was leaving WMET in Chicago, go to KLOS in Los Angeles. And the general manager, Bruce Holbert, came up to me and he said, “Don't worry about a thing. You’ve got a gig.” That was very reassuring. And I just have to say that my happiest radio times that I've had, truly happiest, despite my long run in Honolulu, was at WMET in Chicago, because the staff was so great. We beat our competitor. We were fucking ruthless with promotion. Just ruthless. Bob Stroud is such a creative production director.

I’m guessing the biggest irony for you in Chicago is that you're up against your DJ hero John Records Landecker on 50,000 watt clear channel WLS-AM…

Who I became good friends with I have to say.

And did you dare tune him in during long songs to see what he was doing? 

Oh, no, I was more worried about Steve Dahl over on The Loop WLUP, who was a Howard Stern before he became Howard Stern. No, John Records Landecker and I became friends, we got along great from the start, he had airchecks of me. He knew the bits I was doing. He was very keen on the competition in town. He told me I was an extremely worthy competitor. He wished that he could play the records that I played. I told John I remembered him throwing the Donna Summer cart against the glass of the WLS studio. He said, “One of my proudest moments, ‘That’s Last Dance… and the last time we'll be hearing that.’” 

I loved John Records Landecker always dogging out Debbie Boone’s, “You Light Up My Life,” mocking it every time.

He worked at the Stone Container Building. And I was at 444 North Michigan. So it was a five-minute walk  where he worked, yeah. And he invited me up there a few times to see him in the WLS studio. 

Nice. That must have been something to see. He was in such a big market that he had his own engineer to do all the record cuing. 

Yes, his engineer tightly following the hand cues from Landecker, yeah. And Landecker didn't miss a beat, as you well know,

Well, there's a film of him from the 70s, an educational “career” film on YouTube now, that is just a great snapshot of how it was done back then.

YouTube Clip: John Records Landecker - A Profile Of A Disc Jockey

And to sit in there and see how it's done, and see 20 phone lines, request lines all blinking, knowing that the 50,000 watt signal easily could be heard in Muncie Indiana, or Kalamazoo, Michigan, or, for that matter, Tampa Florida. 

Now you are major market, 3rd largest in the country. You probably emceed some big concerts.

Some shows in Chicago were the best entertainment rock shows I've ever seen. But… I’ve seen a lot of bad ones. Shows I had to see because of the job. Show I “had” to be happy about, yeah. I remember The Cars. Wouldn't recommend them to anybody. Shows I had to see because of the job. You know, “Ladies and gentlemen, The Cars!” and oh God, they just stood there. Same with Foreigner, they just stood there playing this god-awful corporate rock, barely in tune. It feels like the first time you're playing the goddamn song, I thought to myself.  But I saw a few that surprised me. I met a very young John Mellencamp, when he was starting out. He was very courteous. And it wasn’t an interview. I was invited by Paul Natkin, the famous Chicago rock photographer to a rock shoot. Said, “I think you'd like to meet this guy. I think you'd get along.” And I got along great. We liked the same music, owned many records in common. I was surprised he even knew the obscure songs by The Faces songs that I liked. He liked kick ass rock and roll. I was surprised. 

But yeah, there were some I had to do. In Chicago there was a dilapidated theater downtown called “Paradise Theater.” They had it restored, coincidentally around when Styx had an album called Paradise Theater (1981.) And because it was a Paradise Theater and Styx, we were doing three fucking nights with Styx at some big arena in Chicago, and I was chosen, yours truly, to be your friendly WMET-FM emcee for the evening. And every time I did speak to the huge crowd (laughs) to be honest with you, in the back of my mind I kept hearing that old Albert Brooks routine about being the comedy act opening for Richie Havens and the crowd going, “Richie! Richie! Richie!” 

You know, I worked with a lot of DJs and there were a few were what I’d call star fuckers. They wanted to meet the band. They wanted their picture with a band most importantly, maybe in a trade magazine, to hang on their wall in their office, shaking hands with Springsteen. 

I’m guessing you haven’t saved many pictures then. What's your archive like?

My archive isn't that large. My archive has, oddly enough, photographs of ex wives. (laughs) My archive has a few of me in radio stations that are primarily already on Facebook, although I’ve found a few more. The only concert pictures I have that I cherish are of Bonnie Raitt. First time I emceed a Bonnie show and met her, I had a copy of she did a song called “Too Long At The Fair” on her second album, and it was released on one of those Stan Cornwyn Warner Brothers “loss leader” double LP samplers. (Days Of Wine and Vinyl 1978) But they had taken the song and had compressed the hell out of. It didn't sound anything like the album version. I loved the compressed version. Then a special DJ single came out with a fold out jacket booklet on Warner Brothers, and inside was something like “Soon you'll be hearing a lot more from Bonnie Raitt.” And it was “Too Long At The Fair” but it was a third version. It was a slower version, different version than the other two. So years later I get to go backstage after her show and meet her, and she sees I'm holding this record, and she points to it and laughs and says, “You've still got one.” And I said I wanted to ask you about the three different versions. And she says, well have a seat. And we talk. She was really pissed off at how they compressed and remixed it for the sampler loss leader album, and she never got an answer on it. “Why did you guys do this?” She never reached the loss leader producer to find out why they did this to her record. It wasn't Dick Watermark her producer. And then the label said we are going to send out an introductory package on you, Bonnie. We want you to re-record “Too Long At The Fair,” she said okay, I’ll record a slower version, less strings, less what's on the single. And that's the story I got from her. And then she asked someone,”Does anybody have a magic marker?” And she signed it: “To Brock, Don't stay too long at the fair. Love Bonnie.” That single has traveled with me, everywhere that I've been or moved, and of all the records that I've kept or given to my son, or sold on eBay, the acetates and stuff, I kept that one. There you go. 

 

 

There's three others I always made sure I had a copy of. One is the original Small Faces mono single on Immediate because the flanging/wooshing is different, a lot more noticeable, yeah. The other is the Bob Dylan non-album single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” with “you” underlined in the title.

Are there any of your own air checks in your archive?

I didn't hold on to any air checks. I have a few tapes from WFSO. The other ones are online uploaded by others. I know a guy that's got a few that and I just haven't asked him for them. Dave Elman at the Co-Op Garage used to record hours of me, slow speed 1 7/8 IPS on a German Tandberg machine. Ohhh, he had a Tandberg. Oh, my Lord, yeah, that was quality. But no, I have not kept that much memorabilia. Most of the memorabilia I actually have is from Chicago, okay, because we printed a lot of stuff, did a lot of handouts, did a classic rock book, did a lot of things. 

Oh, and I do have one picture, I must say… I'll give you just a quick story. It’s a a picture that I still cherish. I may have told you the Rodney Dangerfield story, maybe not. Rodney Dangerfield is coming to Chicago. This is Rodney at his height. He’s doing movies. He's on Carson every six weeks. You tune in when Rodney is on. I have to admit I'm as much a fan of Roddy Dangerfield as I am of the Firesign Theater. I just got it. I just thought, here's a comic that's thinking on his feet. He's got his next line. (low voice) “Oooh, my wife, I wanna tell ya.” He's a machine, just jumping out all over subject after subject after subject. 

So we're having a promotions meeting at WMET-FM. Rodney is coming to town, and I say, what is Rodney known for? Everybody says no respect. And I say, that's what we ought to do. We ought to do a no respect giveaway. The winners will have to pay their own fucking parking downtown. Pay your own parking. You meet us at the Billy Goat, the famous down-and-out “cheeseburger cheeseburger” place on lower Wacker. Get no respect there. The station will buy you one cheeseburger and one beer. We ain't buying you chips, just a cheeseburger and beer. Then we're putting you on this unheated bus, and we're driving you up from downtown Chicago to Evanston, Illinois, to Northwestern University, where Rodney is about to perform. And once we get to Northwestern University, you're going to find that your tickets are in the last row! 

And this is a contest? 

Yes. And following the concert, we will put you back on the bus, take you back down to the Billy Goat and give you your own WMET NO RESPECT T shirt. That was the deal.

It must have been a great promo spot. 

I forget the mechanics of how we made it work, but we filled up the bus quickly. Let's just say that. People loved the idea. People laughed at the idea. Bob Stroud and I were able to do really tongue-in-cheek promos, editing in real Rodney lines. “No respect, I tell you. The bus has no heat! Talk about no respect!” (laughs) Anyway, so Rodney’s in town and he hears about it, I don't know from where. I'm sure he wasn't listening to WMET, but Rodney hears about it. He loves it. He says he'll come down the day of the concert for a 15 minute live interview, and it's going to be on my show. I'm pinching myself because I don't have to ask him how's the gig going. All I have to do is say, “Hey, Rodney, how's your wife?!” And he'll start. You just feed him a straight line and let him go. “Hey, Rodney, how's your doctor?” “Ohhhh, my doctor my doctor, letmeitellyouBrock…” What I remember that from the interview was he remembered my name. “Oh Brock I tell ya, if you had a wife like mine…” 

And I had decided, because of what his attire was known for, everyone at the station, including the women, wore a white shirt and a red tie, because that’s what Rodney wore on the Carson Show. Rodney gets off the elevator, walks into the WNET receptionist office. I'm on the air in the back in the studio, but I am told by Bob Stroud and Sue Bax and those who are up front that Rodney did one of his classic neck-twists. “Ooh! Look at this! I've been doing too much blow!” (laughs) Everybody wearing the same thing. Anyway, I got a picture of Rodney and me standing together with our arms around each other, and our red ties. It's a picture I cherish, because that day went so well, and he loved the tour.

And wasn’t game show legend Art Fleming on with you one day? 

Yeah, that was another day. We were an affiliate of The Source, the NBC Radio "Young Adult” Network. Long gone now. Ran hourly news but also “youth” features this and that. They had, like, a feature with a psychologist, and a health food person, and all this filler. So I imitated their voices as best I could, and with Bob's help, slowwwed or sped the tape up. And it sounded just like the real The Source features. We ran them all on April Fool's Day. The Source at NBC New York heard about it, requested a tape. We sent up a tape. They sent me a lovely letter about how I had parodied them perfectly. So being a Source affiliate, Don Pardo was our announcer. (mimics mellifluous voice) “It’s Brahhk Whaleee on WMET 95.5.” He’d do stuff like that.

 

 

So anyway, he was going to come to Chicago. We find out our promotions director, the great Jim Corboy, worked at the talent agency that represents Art Fleming. And I say, I know where Art is. He's down in St Louis. I hear him at night doing a show called At Your Service on KMOX, this 50,000 watt CBS station. It's the same Art Fleming who was the first host of NBC’s Jeopardy way back in the 60s, when Don was his announcer. So they contact Art Fleming, and they say Art would love to come up that morning, be reunited with Don Pardo, and he'll play Jeopardy with three of your listeners live on the air. So we decide we're going to do this and we're going to do it at the Billy Goat down on lower Wacker at seven in the morning. It’s cold outside. It's cold inside. We’re all wearing coats. But we got great pictures, great pictures that I cherish, we're dressed to the nines. So I don't remember how well the show went. The contestants were okay. But the humor came from when I got to write what Don Pardo was going to say about the contestants or the prizes. (laughs) And I thought I'd see if I could stretch it too far, too weird, maybe he just wouldn’t read it. “Next up, he's a dentist from Mundelein who enjoys pictures of gynoecological procedures and collects electric screwdrivers in his spare time.” And he read it just like I wrote it. It was my pleasure, not my job, but my pleasure, to write these things, put them on the index cards for Pardo to read. And I'll be damned if he didn't read them. Yeah, he was fantastic.

After WMET, I did return to Florida for a minute. I worked at WSHE in Fort Lauderdale, “SHE 103” for a miserable, and I mean miserable six months. And then I get the call from Bill Mims to come out to Honolulu Hawaii. And I talked to his general manager, and he said, Yeah, we'll move you out here. We'll move your records, and just promise to stay here for a year to help us get established in the market. And as you know, I stayed there for much longer than a year. Two decades in fact. 

 

 

No more “town to town, up and down the dial” as they sang on WKRP. 

I became a father. I was quite happy.

Coda: Facebook post 2012:

What if many offer an exceptional creative skillset that is no longer a piece of the 2012 economic puzzle? We don’t expect a filling station to check the oil or tire pressure these days. They once did. My son never experienced that, yet he still goes to a gas station. Just for gas only. Music radio once had programmers and DJ’s with real creativity and emotion. Great ones are around, but very few these days, and yet folks still listen to the radio. Just for hits or traffic reports, or ball games, and only when I-Tunes or Pandora isn’t available. Gas station owners now get by with much less service to their customers. Radio owners now get by with much less service to their audience. My son’s generation never knew the difference; they only know today’s reality. The bar of service or value in both these cases has been lowered. But, if that is today’s norm, and no one stops buying your gas, you stay in business with a lower overhead. Why pay for any extra experienced worker if the 2012 marketplace says you can get by with less? I don’t want to sound like a cranky old man, and I don’t like the radio evolution, but things change. Every business does. Broadcasting is almost a hundred years old. The golden age of great FM rock music radio was forty years ago. Too many talented, wonderful people from that era have been pushed to the curb. They now sit in the place once occupied by musicians for “Your Hit Parade” comedy writers for “Fred Allen” and staff announcers for “The Columbia Broadcasting System.” Those folks were taking their seats when the disc jockey arrived. Now in the age of corporate ownership, and computer automation realities, those disc jockeys, programmers, and those of us who considered ourselves “Broadcasters” must find another line of work, or be very humble and thankful we are still a part of a business we love. But what I fell in love with really doesn’t exist anymore. Too many people, whose talent brought real joy and pleasure to millions, are on that curb. Too many owners never knew what they offered. Today’s listeners don’t expect it.

-Brock Whaley