Prologue
Rarely had anyone seen Mel Karmazin so angry. Before him on his nearly bare desk, open to a page of dry statistical columns, lay the latest Arbitron ratings. They showed that WKTU, a station that barely had a pulse the previous summer, was now, just days before Christmas 1978, the number one station in New York.
And they did it garnering an astounding 11.3 share.
Nobody but nobody, Karmazin well knew as the general manager of WNEW-FM, had seen a double-digit share in the city since WABC-AM's post-Beatle dominance of the market in the mid-1960s.
It seemed wholly unbelievable. Disco, a genre of music most of WNEW's listeners despised, had suddenly made WKTU the hottest station in the nation's most competitive market.
Worse, and the reason he was nearly quaking with rage, was the ratings for his own station appeared at just this moment to be in a state of stomach-churning free-fall.
While WKTU was ascendant, WNEW had slipped from a 3.9 share a year earlier to a paltry 1.7 -- a rating that dropped it to 20th in the market, one tick below WADO, a Spanish-language station, and one above WQXR, the city's fine but largely neglected classical music outlet.
The rage he felt was first evident on his face. His thick brows arched and eyes had grown dark and his chin was locked in consternation. As his temperature rose, he fell into his old habit of working a finger between his neck and shirt collar and repeatedly tugging at it, as if looking to escape a noose.
Incredulous, Karmazin at last reached for his phone and called George Meredith, WNEW's outside advertising and marketing guru.
The two men had known each other since 1968, when Karmazin, all of 23, was selling radio spots for WCBS-AM, and Meredith, a 27-year-old Chicago native, had just landed his first job in advertising in Manhattan.
They had remained friends ever since, their separate careers following complimentary upward trajectories.
"I can still remember when they made Mel general manager of WNEW-FM in 1974 or something like that," Meredith said years later, on the eve of his retirement from the ad business.
"When I heard the news my first thought was, 'That's bizarre, Mel doesn't know a rock from a roll' ... but the thing is, and history proved this, he was the best radio station manager, maybe ever."
Such was his respect for Karmazin that when Meredith started his own ad agency, Gianettino & Meredith, in January 1977, the first call he made was to his old friend.
"Mel said, 'We don't have to talk, you can have my account,'" Meredith recalled, adding that Karmazin warned him that actual jobs from the station would be few and far between, if they came at all.
"He said, 'We don't advertise, but if you want to put my name on your account list, that's fine.'"
Two days later, Karmazin called Meredith back, asking him to come into Manhattan for a meeting.
"He said, "You know, I forgot about this. I have this trade deal for a full page ad in the Village Voice and I haven't used it and it's going to run out this week.'"
The problem was what to advertise to get the most bang out of the choice free advertisement.
"We've got a live concert broadcast with the Grateful Dead at the Capitol Theater, maybe we can advertise that," Karmazin said.
"The next day I came back with a rough," Meredith said. "In the top left corner it said, 'Rock fans rejoice!' and an illustrator friend did a wonderful drawing, overnight, of a skeleton with a guitar leaping into the air and clicking his heels."
"I met Mel at a midtown restaurant and he signed off on the ad on the hood of my '67 Pontiac. I then raced down to the Village Voice, delivering it just in time. That was in April 1977 and that was my start with WNEW," he said.
For Meredith, creating the advertisement was the closing of a spiritual circle.
He'd arrived in Manhattan in the fall of 1967 with "$200 to my name ... child support payments to make and no job whatsoever," booking a room in a $40-a-night hotel near midtown.
With no immediate prospects, save a job application he wanted to fill out in the morning, Meredith went to his room, randomly tuned his clock radio to an FM station playing a bit of jazz, and promptly fell asleep.
When the alarm went off the next morning, the radio was tuned to the same station, but instead of music, he found himself listening to "one of the funniest shows I ever heard."
Somehow, Meredith failed to catch the call-letters of the station or the names attached to the irreverent voices that kept him laughing quietly as he prepared to set off in search of work.
Returning to his room that night, Meredith switched on the radio to once again find music playing.
"The disc jockey played The Who and then he played Frank Sinatra ... and this was delicious to me because what was being played covered all the music I liked," Meredith recalled.
"Eventually the disc jockey identified himself as Jonathan Schwartz, and the station, of course, was WNEW-FM," he said.
Meredith moved to a much less expensive hotel the following day -- "$32.50 a week with a bath, which was rare in those days," he said.
But from that first night forward, he added, "That was it, WNEW was my station."
Karmazin knew this history, knew that Meredith loved the station almost as much as he did, and so once they began their professional relationship, he turned to his old friend whenever he needed something, usually in a pinch.
"Shortly after the Grateful Dead ad ran in the Voice, Mel called and said he wanted me to design a special napkin for an upcoming show at The Bottom Line, and then he contacted me about doing the [WNEW] calendar," Meredith said.
"He'd done one in black and white the year before, printed it, and then discovered almost all the dates were wrong," the ad man said. "[That calendar] got a bath in the East River somewhere, but from that point on, we started doing them together and [those] calendars were a really big deal and set the tone for quite a few years."
Now, in his moment of distress, in a moment when he was demanding action, Karmazin knew Meredith would answer the bell.
"Get down here, first thing tomorrow," Karmazin barked before hanging up.
Ten minutes later, Meredith's phone rang again. This time it was Scott Muni, WNEW's program director, sounding uncharacteristically rattled.
"You've got to get down here," Muni said. "Mel's talking about changing formats."
Fortunately for both men, Meredith already had an idea.
By the time Karmazin demanded the hastily-convened meeting of his brain trust, WKTU's rise was the stuff of local radio legend. In July 1978, David Rapaport, station manager of what was then a failing soft rock station at 92.3 on the FM dial, called his program director into his office and held out the company credit card.1
Rapaport's directions were simple. Go to the nearest record store and come back with a stack of disco records. And don't spend more than $400.
That night at six, Rapaport nodded to the jock in the studio, a transfer from WKTU's AM sister station WJIT named Manuel Navarro, and with the dropping of a turntable needle, WKTU became New York's disco station. Two weeks later, it was a juggernaut.
Soft rock WKTU had an anemic .9 percent share of the metropolitan area's radio audience the night of the change, July 24, 1978.
By the middle of August, it was up to a 4.7 share, and Navarro, who had most recently hosted a Salsa show at WJIT using the name Paquito Navarro, was now “Paco” Navarro and quickly becoming the sultry voice of new WKTU sound.
In December 1978, Arbitron, the be-all-and-end-all of radio-ratings, showed the station had far surpassed all of the competition, pulling four points ahead of New York's longtime ratings monster, WABC-AM.
To some, this series of events seemed like a bolt out of the blue. The reality was a bit different.
Disco, as a musical style, had been percolating on the margins of city life since the mid-1960s. As rock became ever more sophisticated, and evolved into something to be pondered rather than danced to, it left behind a subculture of working class kids, gays, Latinos and blacks that still wanted to move.
Gradually, beginning in the early 1970s, a new R&B sound combining funk bass lines with extended arrangements and an insistent beat began to gain traction with these young people. And it gained a new level of sophistication as producers started to flesh out their new dance tracks with lush strings or prominent horns.
With ever more venues, large and small, devoting their attention to rock, and a new generation of hard rockers coalescing downtown at clubs like CBGBs and Max's Kansas City, devotees of the fresh dance sound began gathering at house parties and in makeshift "discotheques."
In New York, a club deejay named David Mancuso kicked the scene into high gear by hosting a weekly members-only disco club in his home. By 1974, the groundswell around the genre was big enough for WPIX-FM to premiere the nation's first disco radio show.
Top 40 AM radio, a shadow of what it had been 10 years earlier, capitulated next, willing as it was to play anything that could be a hit and burnish its ratings. "The station's philosophy has been, and is, a mass-appeal format," a WABC spokesman told Rolling Stone at the time. "If country music were to become the most popular music, that's what WABC would play."2
Sales of disco records in record stores around the city had been trending up significantly since the early 1970s, and soared to unimagined heights after the release of the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack in late November 1977.
By the following summer, when the film itself saw its initial run in 650 theaters nationwide expanded to 1,700, "Fever," the album, was outselling Billy Joel's colossal hit, "The Stranger," three-to-one and was well on its way to spawning seven hit singles.
But most rock musicians and fans alike continued to turn a deaf ear to disco, considering the music silly and predictable, and the beat downright monotonous. There was also, given the music’s origins in the urban subculture, an undeniable element of racism and anti-gay animus at play in the quarters.
Yet some major acts, in a bid to stay fresh and stay relevant, began by the mid-1970s to dabble in the new beat.
Most notable among these was the Bee Gees, who worked subtle elements of disco into hit singles like "Jive Talkin'" and "Nights on Broadway" before going all in on “Saturday Night Fever.”
When Mick Jagger brought forth an embryonic, but clearly disco-influenced "Miss You" during the sessions for the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" album in the fall of 1977, the rest of the band had not been thrilled by it.
"It was "Aah, Mick's been to the disco and has come out humming some other song," Keith Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography "Life."
"We just thought we'd put our oar in on Mick wanting to so some disco shit," Richards added.3
But then, something clicked in the studio. By the spring of 1978, the single was number 1 in the United States, and an extended, "special disco version" was eventually released as the band's first dance remix.
Because it was the Stones, and, truth be told, it was an astoundingly good record, the on-air staff at WNEW lavished aggressive attention on "Miss You" during the summer of 1978, particularly that June, when the band played sold-out shows the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, and the Palladium in New York City.
They also gave extensive play to album tracks from "Some Girls" that they, the station and its listeners considered more palatable alternatives to the hit, songs like "Shattered," "Beast of Burden" and "When the Whip Comes Down."
With that, the die was cast. WNEW's approach to "rock' had always been eclectic. In the weeks before "Miss You" arrived, the station had featured a week-long tribute to the Beatles "A to Z," healthy doses of Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, and Santana, solo Roger Daltrey, tracks by Bob Welch, Bread, and Johnny Rivers, and even "You Make Me Feel Like Dancin,'" a pop-disco confection by the British singer-songwriter Leo Sayer.
But there was a bridge too far.
Everybody understood that record companies were now pressuring even seasoned rock acts like the Kinks to cut more "club-friendly" tracks, employing a euphemism to make the demand more palatable. But hardcore, bass-thumping disco was not going to be countenanced at stations like WNEW.
Instead, they doubled down on featuring acts like Little Feat, Supertramp, Meatloaf, Styx and Billy Joel.
The only way anything even close to disco could get on the air was if it was virtually transformed into something else, a feat the Stones had accomplished with the interplay of Richards and Ron Wood's muscular funk guitar riffs and the insistent blues harmonica of guest player Sugar Blue, a musician Mick Jagger had reportedly found busking on the streets of Paris.
The station wasn't about to "mess with the magic," as Karamzin might say, simply to jump on a passing trend. Then the autumn '78 Arbitron ratings came out.
"Mel was just really upset," Meredith said. "WKTU had scored a higher rating than anybody had seen in years ... and everybody else's ratings had plummeted.
"The weird thing was, even as Mel was talking to me, my mind was somewhere else," he continued. "Literally the first thing that came into my head was 'Byrd Lives.'"
The phrase was made famous by Ted Joans, a Beat poet, who when he learned of the death of jazz great Charlie Parker in March 1955, responded by writing "Bird Lives" in chalk on many buildings and streets around the city.
"It's believed to be the first graffiti ever done in New York," Meredith said. "The next thing I knew I was reaching for a pad and wrote down 'rock lives.'"
Later, after receiving Muni's call of distress, Meredith went down to his art department and told them to work up a two-sided rendering. On one side, it was to be emblazoned with the words "Disco Sucks"; on the other, with "Rock Lives."
The next morning, he hustled over to WNEW's offices in midtown Manhattan to present it to Karmazin and Muni.
"Mel paused for a second and said, 'Let's do it," Meredith said. "Within a week we had billboards up and Day-Glow bumper stickers bearing the 'Rock Lives' logo being distributed all over the city."
At this point, the adman went silent.
"I look back on those days and sometimes it feels like it was only yesterday," he said after a moment of reflection. "Then sometimes ... well ... it was a long, long time ago.
"But there really was no other station like it," Meredith said. "I have been writing all my life and advertising for over 40 years, writing millions of words in the process, but I'm known for those two -- 'Rock Lives' -- and I wrote them in a flash of inspiration while on the telephone."
The coda to the story came almost exactly four months to the day later.
Dave Herman, host of WNEW's "Rock and Roll Morning Show," had always been one of the more adventurous of the station's disc jockeys, routinely acting on impulse and on his love of jazz and rhythm and blues.
Despite being well aware of the genesis of the whole "rock lives" campaign, he'd become enamored in April 1979 with "Hot Stuff," the new single from disco diva Donna Summer.
The song was the first single off Summer's seventh studio album and represented a significant shift for the singer and her producer, Giorgio Moroder, in a rock direction. Among other things, the record featured a searing guitar solo by Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, formerly of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.
So Herman began playing it. Every morning.
"Now, playing Donna Summer on WNEW-FM in the era of ‘Disco Sucks’ was regarded, by some, as complete blasphemy," Herman said. "You have to remember at the time there was a real war going on between those who liked disco and those who didn't, especially the rock fans who made up our audience.
"To them playing 'Hot Stuff' on our station was heresy," he continued. "But I just thought 'Hot Stuff' was an unbelievable record and that Baxter's solo was tremendous."
It wasn't long before the station was besieged with angry calls and letters.
"The station was getting a lot of shit for what I was doing, but I persisted," Herman said. "I told the listeners what I was doing and why I was playing [the record], and I said, 'Stop labeling music. This is a great record.'"
Herman maintained that a lot of his listeners agreed with his position, but mail kept coming into the station and the incessant complaints found their way to Karmazin's office.
Eventually, Herman was called in to see the boss.
"What are you doing to me?" Karmazin said, rifling through a pile of envelopes on his desk. "What are you doing? What's going on here with this Donna Summer record?"
He then showed Herman another stack of as many as 85 or 90 more letters, all beseeching the station to stop playing Donna Summer.
"They're killing me," Karmazin said. "Should we be playing this?"
"I said, 'Mel, it's a great record. It sounds great. It's great on the radio. It's a huge hit.'"
With that, Karmazin buzzed for Muni, who shuffled in a moment later.
"What are we going to do with him?" Karmazin said as soon as Muni arrived.
"Should we really be playing Donna Summer?"
Muni considered the scene before him.
"Well I wouldn't play it, but if Dave thinks he should be playing it, then Dave should be playing it," Muni said.
"Okay, he's the boss," Karmazin said, nodding to send Herman on his way.
"And I kept playing it," a delighted Herman said more than 30 years later.
"And you know what happened? At the end of the year, Rolling Stone, which then was the bible of rock fans, declared that 'Hot Stuff' by Donna Summer was number one on its list of the top 100 singles of the year."
Late 1978 and the whole of 1979 and 1980 would prove to be a pivotal time for both WNEW-FM and the history-making AM station from which it both took its name and got a leg up in establishing its legacy.
In the eras of their greatest respective influence, both incarnations of WNEW served as something akin to being the Facebook, Twitter and Tik Tok of the day, communal campfires around which their listeners could hear the newest music, keep up with their generation’s latest news and forge a bond with faceless fellow congregates they didn’t know, but somehow felt were just like them.
Both stations reasserted these identities as the 1970s merged into the 1980s, with WNEW-AM re-embracing the sounds of the big bands and Great American Songbook on which its reputation had been founded after several years of floundering in an ill-advised quest for "relevancy."
And with Meredith's help, WNEW-FM reminded listeners that 102.7 on the FM dial was, in Scott Muni's words, "the address for rock music in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut."
But ironically it was during this same period that the seeds of both stations’ destruction were sown. What happened to them is symptomatic of the triumph and ultimate tragedy of the radio industry.
Nineteen-seventy-nine was the year FM finally went from being the bastard stepchild of AM to listeners' preferred radio destination for music, talk and entertainment.
That meant there was money to be made in FM, lots of it, and soon stations like WNEW-FM found themselves fending off, to a greater or lesser degree, the attention of corporations who suddenly took an interest in FM radio like never before.
With the suits came consultants armed with what WNEW disc jockey Pete Fornatale always dismissed as "dubious science," who pressed the FM rock giants of the day to be less free-form and experimental, and more formatted and homogenized.
By April 1979, wholesale changes were underway at the place where rock lived. Scott Muni, an industry legend whose career began in the 1950s, was bumped “upstairs” and replaced as program director by Richard Neer, a longtime WNEW disc jockey.
Neer, who’d been one of Muni’s first hires, was steeped in everything the station was, but he also saw the writing on the wall for the kind of radio he, Muni and everyone else had been doing.
Looking back years later,4 Fornatale recalled that he was so spoiled by his experiences first in college radio, and then, during his first 10 years at WNEW-FM, that "the mere idea of interference with the programming of my show was really, really horrible to me.”
"That all began ... in the aftermath of WKTU's success," he said.
Muni, now the station’s operations manager as well as the anchor of its afternoon’s programming, was still the station’s potentate, its heart and its soul, but the sands beneath him were shifting.
In short order a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, was elected president, and former Beatle John Lennon was shot to death in Manhattan on his way home from a recording session. In between, Mel Karmazin quit.
"That [period] was when everything really changed," Dave Herman said.
Karmazin departed WNEW in anger, resigning in November 1981 after it became clear his path to even greater control at Metromedia, the station’s owner, was blocked by his critics and enemies.
He left after some 11 years with Metromedia, and six years as WNEW-FM's general manager to become president of a newly restructured entity called Infinity Broadcasting.
At his new company, he would initially oversee six stations, including two progressive rock stations -- WYSP in Philadelphia and WBCN in Boston -- and, ironically, WKTU.
In July 1985, with the popularity of disco faded, he would transform Disco 92 into K-Rock, eventually hiring several of the disc jockeys he'd left behind at WNEW.
Both WNEWs, AM and FM, initially saw something of a bump in their ratings coming out of this period of turmoil. In fact, five years later, WNEW-FM would enjoy its highest ratings ever.
But that success and the accompanying rise in value of the stations coincided with Reagan-era deregulation, a development that inspired many of the industry's owner/operators, those who built the nation's great media properties, to cash out and sell their stations to larger corporations or to hedge funds, which in turn would eventually cash out and sell the stations to somebody else.
In the case of WNEW-FM and its sister AM station, the outcome was as disastrous as it was predictable. Soon the talent and everything that was special about what they did was being eaten alive. It would not be long before WNEW-AM died, its place on the dial absorbed into the Bloomberg News radio network.
As for WNEW-FM, it would bounce between formats for much of the 1990s, completely losing its way. By the time the station did attempt a return to its former glory, inaugurating a format called "classic rock with classic jocks," WNEW was little more than a blip on the FM dial and the rift that had grown between what the station and those who had grown up with it was simply too wide to bridge.
A mass firing of the "classic jocks" followed and WNEW began its final death spiral.
Of course, no one saw it as that at the time. The plan was to inaugurate a new format, called "FM Talk," modeled on the success of the Howard Stern show. The stars of the new format would be Opie and Anthony, a raunchy comedy team who had been fired for their antics at a Boston radio station.
For a time, the duo got away with quite a lot, but when they broadcast a couple having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they brought the whole station down around them.
That, however, is the end of the story. First one need consider the beginning, the well from which the rest of WNEW's storied history would spring. It begins in the heart of a New York winter and with the ambitions of two men, titans in their respective fields, who were on the verge of trying something new.
© 2013
Unsigned. Disco station number one in New York. Rolling Stone. March 22, 1979.
Merritt, Jay. WABC-AM Moves to Disco. Rolling stone, June 14, 1979
Richards, Keith. Life. Little, Brown and Company. New York. 2010
Gil De Rubio, Dave. The last DJ; Pete Fornatale's Long Strange Trip Through the Radio Business. Long Island Press. July 7 2005.
Great read Dan. I was Program Director there from 1988-1991. Loved every insane minute of it!