Boston Tests New Music & Flunks Out: WMEX and WRKO Battle for Radio Listeners
BOSTON—The Boston radio war is over.
It was only a five-month battle, but it was a great show while it lasted. The war was started by John H. Garabedian, the program director of WMEX, a bottom-of-the-heap Top 40 station. With the tactical abandon of an underdog, John H. innovated right and left, doubled the station’s ratings, and nearly outflanked the forces of WRKO. But WRKO, firmly entrenched as Boston’s No. 1 Top 40 station, adopted some of John H.’s changes, geared up for a major offensive, and fought to stay on top.
Almost everyone enjoyed the radio war. The public liked it because the two stations started playing better music and became sensitive to popular tastes. Even the general manager of WRKO liked the radio war because “the competition kept my boys from getting stale.”
The radio war promised to go on forever, but a fluke of fate cut it off in its prime. Maxwell Richmond, the 57-year-old owner and manager of WMEX, died suddenly. A new manager arrived, swept away most of John H.’s changes, and precipitously fired John H.
Now WMEX is somewhere on its way back to the cellar, but John H.’s innovations live on in an ironic fashion; they are being carried on by WRKO. Not only has WRKO become a better station thanks to the radio war; it has even passed on the improvements to the 11-station Drake chain, of which it is a member. Furthermore, just as things were beginning to look stalemated in Boston radio, a new challenge has appeared on the horizon in the form of FM rock stations. On the strength of spectacular gains made by FM stations in recent surveys, some observers are confidently predicting that Top 40 AM will make its Last Stand well before the end of the decade.
Radio trends have always showed up early in Boston, and it has always been a pretty decent town to be trapped in with a transistor. From 1958 to 1967, when WMEX was the No. 1 pop station, you could listen to Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg, one of the legends of Pre-Sincere radio. “And Adventure Car Hop is serving the Ginsburger on a record which you get to keep for your very own if you say ‘Woo Woo Ginsburg’ with your order …” Arnie would barrel through the jive copy in an endearingly adenoidal voice and then play yet another great record. For nine years, no one could touch him in the ratings.
When Arnie left WMEX, he was succeeded by Dick Summer, a person so ostentatiously sensitive that Rod McKuen would have looked callous beside him. “Have you felt an orange today?” Dick would wonder out loud on his show, which was called “The Loving Touch.” As WMEX’s program director, Dick instituted a format called the “Human Thing,” which consisted mainly of playing album cuts instead of singles. A good idea, but Dick played the wrong album cuts. The Human Thing bombed miserably and Summer left WMEX in 1970.
Meanwhile, back in 1967, WRKO had changed management and joined the Drake chain. A young program director named Mel Phillips came in and cleaned up the sound of the station according to Drake ideals—a minimum of ads, a minimum of DJ talk, a minimum of anything irritating (including wah-wah guitar) and a maximum of sales-certified singles played in rapid succession. The Drake sound proved to be the most successful sound of the late Sixties, and nowhere more so than in Boston. Within three months, WRKO had walked over WMEX and all other Top 40 competition, had grabbed a mammoth 25 percent of the radio audience, and had settled in for a four-year term as the leader in the field.