Examination of the international social, political and musical impact of radio station CKLW during the 1960s and 70s. CK | dG1fV3o3NDktUTBsTWM
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00:00It was the beginning of a revolution.
00:04The BOSS radio format was fast, fresh and seamless.
00:08I used to think of it kind of as a fine precision watch.
00:11It was a set of gears that just meshed together all the time.
00:15And we had to train and rehearse weeks before we actually changed the format.
00:20The new format was so tight it took two people to make it work.
00:23The jock, who did the talking, and the board operator,
00:26who orchestrated the mix of jingles, commercials and music.
00:29So anytime you wanted the next element in the set,
00:32you would press the cue button and he would fire whatever it was,
00:35whether it was a commercial or jingle or a song.
00:38The object was to fit 18 songs into each hour.
00:41So the songs were played back to back,
00:43and the DJs did their announcements over the run-up.
00:46The music at the beginning of the song is the run-up or the intro,
00:49and those were clocked with a stopwatch,
00:51and boom, you've got to stop talking before the artist starts singing.
00:55C-K-L-W, the big A, with Teddy the truckin' bear,
00:58spreadin' out in the nighttime, baby!
01:00Remember when we used to say, get your motor runnin'?
01:02Now it's get your modem runnin', right?
01:04Oh, hey, John Kay steppin' up on the big A.
01:07Get your motor runnin'.
01:10Head out on the highway.
01:13And you just kept the tempo going, you never really stopped.
01:19C-K has your kind of music.
01:23In the old days, jingles could run anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute long.
01:27The Drake jingles were rarely longer than three seconds,
01:30and each one served a special purpose, to keep things moving.
01:34There was fast to fast, more music, C-K-L-W.
01:37More music, C-K-L-W.
01:40There was fast to slow, more music, C-K-L-W, sung in a nice slow ballad.
01:44More music, C-K-L-W.
01:49There was a slow to fast, a very pretty, melodic singing of...
01:55More music, C-K-L-W.
01:58And then a big, powerful C-K-L-W to take you into things like
02:01The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again and stuff like that.
02:04Prettiest radio jingle ever sung was the Big Eight ballad,
02:08played up against things like Gladys Knight's It Should Have Been Me,
02:11or something, it'd bring a tear to your eye.
02:15The format was carefully constructed around a hot clock,
02:18an hourly programming guide that dictated what got played when,
02:21in order to maximize excitement and minimize tune-outs.
02:25It's a flow chart. It's the programming of the radio station,
02:28the sound of the radio station, which you're constantly tweaking, by the way.
02:32There are a lot of factors go into determining
02:34why that song played at five minutes after ten.
02:36The hot clock was so effective that Les Garland took it with him
02:39when he went to television, as the first program director of MTV.
02:43We did the very same thing at MTV.
02:45The rotations were exactly the way we set them up in radio.
02:48MTV was C-K-L-W. It just had different letters.
02:51The architect of the new format was Paul True,
02:54a U.S. programmer with Drake-format experience and an ear for detail.
02:58He's famous, of course, for having an earphone in his ear 24-7, 365,
03:03and if there was ever a flaw on his radio station, it was pointed out.
03:06We had what were called the bat phone.
03:08If that phone rang, everybody froze.
03:11Garland, did you hear what just happened on your radio station?
03:14Paul, you're in California. It's 11. I'm sleeping.
03:17And he created a situation where 30 or 40 or 50 people came to work every day
03:22knowing that we were going to win today,
03:25that today we were going to kick some serious ass.
03:28After six months of preparation, planning and training,
03:32Drew and his troops were ready to kick ass.
03:35On April 4, 1967, C-K-L-W became a big eight.
03:39C-K-L-W, hit bomb!
03:44And the rest of the industry didn't know what to do with it.
03:47They'd never heard anything like this. Neither had the audience.
03:50I knew the first week and a half to two that we had a winner.
03:55W-K-N-R, Keener 13, it's bomb!
04:01Keener at the time, before C-K-L-W became the big eight,
04:05they dominated the airway.
04:07And the amazing thing to me, in 90 days,
04:10we totally ruined that radio station and became number one.
04:13It came along at a time when people were, I guess, getting tired of the long-winded DJs.
04:18They wanted the quick, concise, talk-over-the-music,
04:21the rapid-fire jingles and the excitement of the 50,000-watt monster that was C-K-L-W.