"Good Just Barely Morning ... "

How WNEW in New York Remade Radio and Became the Place Where Rock Lived: Chapter 23

“This is Swingin' 77 in New York ... WABC ... right now Ed Thompson ... this is an All-American sound ... You must remember this from the year 1957 ... it's called, ‘For Your Love’ ...”

— WABC-AM disc jockey Jack Carney broadcasting from the Freedom Land amusement park in the Bronx, N.Y. on June 6, 1961.

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Harold L. Neal, Jr., had a straightforward mandate when he arrived in New York from Detroit in 1960: To repeat his success at the Motor City's WXYZ — then the only money-making station in the ABC radio network — and end the market dominance of Murray the K and WINS.

Prior to Neal's arrival, the network's flagship station languished on the edge of the top 10 in a crowded radio market. In retrospect, this was due to the station's lack of a defined personality.

During the 1950s, WABC-AM’s programming ranged from weekend Metropolitan Opera broadcasts to Martin Block, who brought his “Make Believe Ballroom” to the station in January 1954, to Alan Freed, who arrived four years later with boxes stuffed with the latest rock and roll and rhythm and blues.

Neal, who had been the announcer for “The Lone Ranger” and “The Green Hornet” during the heyday of radio serials, had a much more singular approach in mind. On December 7, 1960, he rolled out the station's new, virtually full-time Top 40 format.

The change came two months after Block's retirement, and after Neal and a programming consultant named Mike Joseph had spent weeks conducting surveys of radio listeners throughout the city.

“The station will back its new jockey staff with extensive consumer and trade promotion and advertising,” Neal told Billboard for an article that appeared in its November 14, 1960 issue, adding, “The jocks will be invited to make recommendations on new releases, but final decision on which new discs are played will rest with a management panel.”

In fact, the New York radio market was entering into a dogfight the likes of which it had never witnessed before. Only months earlier, New York had been virgin territory for the Top 40 radio format.

Soon, several stations on the New York radio dial would be employing variations on the same theme to corner the market.

They would make their disc jockey’s top personalities in the region, employ their own freewheeling news operations to offer plenty of on-the-spot local news coverage, and use every sound gimmick they could devise to keep their station ahead of the competition and jumping at all times.¹

The first disc jockey hired by the new regime at WABC was Herb Oscar Anderson, who received his Top 40 baptism in 1956 when the station he worked for in Minneapolis, Minnesota was bought by Todd Storz, the originator of the concept.

Anderson was holding his own at WDGY when Storz arrived, but his career took off after he hit on the idea of encouraging his female teenage listeners to trade knee-high socks with their friends and wear a blue sock with a white sock.

It was a goof, but it caught on. In no time Anderson was the top disc jockey in the market and the station's ratings improved by some 350 percent.

Two years later Anderson was in New York, where he worked briefly for two of the city's other Top 40 stations, WMGM and WMCA, before being scooped up by WABC and installed as its morning drive-time personality.

He would remain in that timeslot until December 1968 and become such an institution that the real mayor of New York City, Robert Wagner Jr., dubbed the disc jockey the “Morning Mayor of New York."

Anchoring the format wasn't the only critical role Anderson played in the early days of the new WABC, however. Shortly after his arrival, he suggested Neal talk to a friend of his who was then between jobs. That friend was Scott Muni.

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Muni’s steady passage to New York began almost as soon as he returned home to New Orleans from his stint in the Marine Corps. It was 1952, and after he arrived back in the Crescent City, he immersed himself in the city's exploding rhythm and blues scene while charting out what to do next.

As a stop-gap measure, he enrolled at nearby Louisiana State University, but saw his academic career cut short by a serious auto accident.²

To get back on his feet both figuratively and literally, he cast about for work, and was promptly hired by WSMB, a popular station then occupying the top floor of the historic Maison Blanche department store building on Canal Street.

Today the building is the New Orleans Ritz-Carlton hotel, and its third-floor lobby includes a jazz club that for years featured the jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, patriarch of the world-famous Marsalis family, and Charmaine Neville. Back in Muni's day, the department store occupied the lower half of the building, while offices for a myriad other businesses filled the upper floors.

WSMB went on the air in April 1925 and quickly established itself as the city's premiere radio station, its main competition coming from Loyola University's slightly older WWL.

Its breakthrough came in August 1926, when the station provided all-night coverage of an approaching hurricane — a first for the city’s residents.

Having gained listeners attention and trust, throughout its early years, the station presented live performances by Al Jolson and Will Rogers, as well as the Saenger Grand Orchestra led by Castro Carazo, who was said to be Governor Huey Long's favorite band leader.³

Network affiliation with first, the National Broadcasting Co., and later, the American Broadcasting Co., diversified WSMB’s programming, but by the mid-1950s, the station was relying on “homegrown” disc jockeys spinning the popular records of the day.

Ed Brooks, the Times Picayune's radio columnist, announced Muni’s hiring on February 19, 1954, a few items below his lead, which focused on an upcoming roast of George Jessel, then known as the “toastmaster general,” at the Friars Club in New York, with Jack Benny acting as master of ceremonies.⁴

Of Muni, Brooks wrote, “He’s now 24 years old and his professional experience includes radio correspondent duties in the United States Marine Corps and staff broadcasting with WJBO in Baton Rouge and WKAN, Kankakee, Ill.”⁵

He also noted that while Muni was stationed as a Marine on Guam, “a typhoon blasted the island and he stuck to his ‘mike’ throughout.”⁶

Muni worked a split shift for most of his tenure at WSMB, spinning records late afternoons and again, late at night. During the day, he was simply Scott Muni, disc jockey. Depending on the hour, his direct competitors included various detective shows, “Amos and Andy,” “Fibber McGee and Molly,” and Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts.”

At night, however, as host of “The Shangri-La Record Show,” the youthful disc jockey gained a significant following playing “mood” or “still of the night” music, sounds intended to accompany young love, at a time when the competing stations in the market were broadcasting Edward R. Murrow and Red Skelton.

To keep things lively, Muni frequently did theme shows — a favorite was talking about current movies and movie music — and ran frequent contests, the most regular of which was a “Scavenger Hunt” during which he would bestow prizes on lucky listeners.

Occasionally one of these contests might have elaborate requirements, but for the most part they reflected and acknowledged the basic humanity of his audience.

For instance, on April 8, 1955, Ed Brooks informed his readers that, “Miss Johnnie Frost, a student nurse at Charity hospital, wrote the winning letter on the ‘Why I want a new hairdo for Easter’ contest Scott Muni conducted on WSMB.”⁷

Such notices were not unusual in the Times Picayune, as Muni's evident rapport with the newspaper's correspondent resulted in his being a staple of the radio column during the mid-1950s.

In one, readers learned Muni would do his “Tops in Town” disc show, another of several gigs the young jock juggled at the station, from the window of a store on N. Rampart and Dumaine.⁸

We also know, courtesy of Brooks, that Muni and John Brown, a fellow WSMB disc jockey, spent the entire afternoon of New Year's Eve 1954, reviewing the hits of the year on the “New Orleans Hit Parade.”

Brooks also included Muni among the disc jockeys he featured in the often corny end of column quote-of-the-day.

For instance, Valentine's Day 1955, had Muni opining that “married life would be much easier for husbands if wives tread as lightly on their pocketbooks as they do on bathroom scales.”⁹

A few months later, amid Cold War fears stoked by the signing of a mutual defense treaty between the Soviet Union and seven other Communist Bloc nations — the Warsaw Pact — Muni is quoted expounding on why didn’t believe the Russians would ever invade America.

“They couldn't afford to live here,” he said.¹⁰

But by far the longest piece on Muni's tenure in New Orleans radio was a column the Times Picayune published on Dec. 2, 1954.

The WSMB disc jockey, the paper said, had “stirred a minor tempest” on Tuesday, November 30, when he locked himself in the station's master control room and proceeded to play the same record — Vaughn Monroe singing “Good Night Mrs. Jones” — over and over for his entire two-and-a-half hour show.

Columnist Ed Brooks reported Muni fulfilled his obligations to the station by doing his commercials and station breaks as scheduled, and that the disc jockey explained his actions, when asked, by saying he simply liked the record.

Brooks noted that Muni had just started a new nightly show that Monday, and observed this wasn't the first time a disc jockey had garnered a good deal of attention by playing the same record all night. In fact, Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins had recently done the same thing at WNEW-AM in New York.

But if it was attention Muni wanted for his new show, attention is what it received.

Brooks said one woman who called the paper believed the station had “locked that poor man” in the control room and gave him only one record to play. Another listener called in to complain Muni stopped playing the record when his shift ended at midnight, the man evidently having become enamored with it himself.

“But the most significant complaint we heard was from the record distributor,” Brooks wrote. “His beef was that the record hasn’t been officially released yet, and he did not have a single disc of it for sale ... and all those plugs.”¹¹

The article evidently struck a nerve with other local disc jockeys. A few months after Muni's notorious night, a pair of jocks at WNOE in nearby Belle Chasse, Louisiana, attempted to recreate the stunt by playing a single record, “Shtiggy Boom” by Fabulous Joe Houston, over and over during their 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. show.

The meager response the duo received just served to illustrate that timing is everything. According to Brooks the only notable response the two received was from a woman who complained their antics pre-empted the station's regular broadcast of the “Queen for a Day” program.

An interesting footnote to Muni's time at WSMB comes via a tiny, unsigned item in the March 3, 1956, edition of Billboard, which heralds the formation of a new vocal group in New Orleans called the Five Stars.

The group was headed by WSMB's Sid Noel and was composed of fellow disc jockeys Marshall Pearce, Jim Brown, Roy Roberts and ... Scott Muni.

“The lads already cut a tune, ‘Take Five,’ to be released by Atco,” the magazine said.¹²

Several years later, when Muni was already established in New York, Noel, whose real name is Sidney Noel Rideau, hit pay dirt with his creation of “Morgus the Magnificent,” a mad scientist character who would host late-night science fiction and horror movies in the New Orleans market for decades.

In 1956, Noel's goal was a bit more modest. The song referenced in Billboard was actually the B-side to a novelty song he wrote called “Humpty Dump.”¹³

Credited to “Sid Noel and the Five Stars,” the bouncy doo wop number features such lines as “This humpty dump is so fine ... the cats all hand her a line ... the way she dances ... makes my heart thump” and “She's got a figure so neat ... her lines are strictly all-reet (the word "alright" sung to rhyme).”

The verses end with the declaration “I'd walk a country mile just to linger awhile ... she's my humpty dump.”

It was, you might say, a different time.

However well the record did locally — copies still occasionally sell on Ebay — by the time it was released, the Five Stars — and New Orleans for that matter — were in Muni's rear-view mirror. In November 1956, the disc jockey went on the air at WAKR in Akron, Ohio.

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Ten years earlier, the station had hired an unknown Alan Freed to host a jazz show playing danceable tunes for a young audience, and the program proved to be a big success. In 1950, however, a bitter contract dispute ended with a court order preventing Freed from working for a cross-town rival.

That lawsuit was the catalyst that sent Freed to Cleveland and WJW and eventually led to his embracing rock and roll.

On Nov. 17, 1956, Billboard reported Muni was doing an all-night show at WAKR, and “wants artists to call him any time from midnight to 5 a.m. to participate in on-the-air phone interviews.”¹⁴

“Because of what Alan had done [it was] a radio station where you could play rock records,” Muni said. “I got to play Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker ... [and] I just blossomed. And the more that came my way, the more I was able to absorb and really get involved in it.”

And Muni would be pulled into the older disc jockey's orbit in other ways. He became a regular on the high school dance circuit, a frequent stop being Massillon, Ohio's Jackson Memorial High School.

Between April and October, the high school hosted at least three dances, where, the local newspaper reported, “Scott Muni of an Akron radio station” spun the records for dancing and “pizza and soft drinks” were available.¹⁵

The experience stood him in good stead. When Freed returned to town to present one of his giant rock and roll shows at Akron's National Guard Armory, Muni was one of only two local disc jockeys asked to emcee.

The event, called “The Big Beat,” was actually two shows, at 4:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., presented on Wednesday, April 30, 1958. Among those Muni rubbed shoulders with as he ushered acts to and from the stage were headliner Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

The up-and-coming disc jockey was 28 years old. And he was beginning to get an inkling he was destined for better things.

Muni's dissatisfaction at WAKR stemmed from the station owner allowing his wife to determine what music was suitable or unsuitable for the air.

At first, the woman would place Scotch tape across the groove of the offending record. But as she discovered that more and more of these pieces of tape were “falling” off and the records winding up on the air, she came up with a more permanent solution: gouging them with a can opener.

The situation was a dilemma for Muni, who had to find records to play on the air, and who, like all disc jockeys, prided himself on picking hits.

“Finally, one day, I heard ‘April in Portugal,’ an instrumental by Juan García Esquivel, the Mexican bandleader, and I knew it would be a hit,” he said. “But back came the record, worked over with the can opener.”¹⁶

When Muni vowed to quit, the station owner couldn’t understand why. “He wouldn’t believe the reason I’d given him,” Muni said.

When tempers cooled, Muni agreed to stay on. All along, however, he knew he was only marking time.

"When you start out in this business, you never in the world think it will be a career, much less that you'll spend so many years in one place,” Muni said later to David Hinckley of the New York Daily News. “You have to remember that when I started, adults assumed we were all black and that I wasn't just a rebel but was a freak and stupid. Freed was my mentor. I'd play The Drifters. The Clovers. Ruth Brown. I remember fighting to get ‘Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On’ played, because my owner thought it was dirty.”

Not long after the Armory show, Muni visited his brother, who lived in New Jersey, and began plotting his entry into the New York market. Freed, he knew, had been working in Manhattan for four years. Since he was in the neighborhood, Muni arranged to meet his mentor for a drink. As they spoke and drank and continued to do so over the next few days, their friendship deepened.

“We had a lot in common ... because we both had active minds about music,” Muni recalled. “That [association with Freed] was my break ... because I didn't even take an audition, and I realized my dream of coming to New York and making it.”¹⁷

“Alan Freed was my inspiration,” Muni said on another occasion.¹⁸ “I took over Freed's show when he left Akron, Ohio and came to New York, and with it, I inherited the right to play black music, rockabilly ... and then, a year and a half later, I followed Alan to New York, and we became friends.”

“The thing about Freed was that had a very unique and yet simple approach to things," he continued. "He loved music and wanted people to hear it.”

Muni would tell a somewhat different story of his coming to New York to Peter Fornatale.

In this version, Muni inherited Freed's chair in Akron, but was next offered a job at WIND in Chicago, then the top pop music station in the country, which he accepted.

“I wasn't supposed to come to New York,” Muni said. “But after I spent some time with the man [H. Leslie Atlass, Jr.] who was running the station, he said, ‘Your background is perfect for something else I have in mind. Would you rather work here in Chicago, or would you rather go to New York?’

“Well, that was a ridiculous question, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was it was mid-February, and an icy wind was blowing off Lake Michigan,” Muni said.

“So, I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ And he explained that he was an advisor for a station in New York that was paying him a lot of money to help it change to over to a popular music format.”

Atlass, who had been WIND's program director until the station was sold in the mid-50s, had by this time became a director on its board and a well-compensated radio consultant with clients all over the country.

He told Muni the station he was talking about was WMCA.

“It's more money,” Atlass said. “And it's also New York. What do you say, are you interested?”

“And I said, ‘Well, let me think about it. Yes,’” Muni said, laughing at the memory.

He told Fornatale the next thing he knew he was on a plane heading to New York with both Atlass and Howard Miller, the top hit disc jockey in Chicago at the time who would later become a notoriously conservative radio commentator.

“The idea was that they were going to lay out the new music policy for WMCA, cutting its playlist down to something like 50 records at any one time, and placing a lot of emphasis on playing the latest hits,” Muni said.

Regardless of which account was the most accurate — and certainly the reality could easily have been a blend of both — in 1958, Muni joined the independent, family-owned WMCA-AM in New York just as it was beginning to evolve into a full-time Top 40 rock and roll station.

© 2013

1. Unsigned. The NY Radio Slugfest. Variety. October 19, 1960.

2. Unsigned bio. Central Park Music Festival program. July 1969.

3. Kolb, Carolyn, "Broadcasting From Atop The MB Building." New Orleans magazine. May 2010.

4. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. February 19, 1954

5. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. February 19, 1954

6. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. February 19, 1954

7. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. April 8, 1955

8. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. Nov. 1, 1954

9. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. February 14, 1955

10. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. July 1, 1955

11. Brooks, Ed. The Column on the Square. Times Picayune. Dec. 2, 1954

12. Unsigned. '5 Stars' New Vocal Group. Billboard. March 3, 1956.

13. Street, Julia. Julia Street with Poydras the Parrot. New Orleans magazine. April 2012.

14. Bundy, June. Vox Jox. Billboard. Nov. 17, 1956.

15. Unsigned. The Massillon Ohio Evening Independent. Thursday, April 4, 1957

16. Baer, Atra. Meet Mr. Deejay. Spinning the hits with Scott. New York Herald American. Saturday, March 18, 1961

17. Terry, Ken. "Muni Tends Flame of Progressive Rock." Variety. October 28, 1987.

18. Muni, Scott. Scott Muni's Twentieth Anniversary. December 18, 1987.