Radio Days

In my youth I was a radio and pop music junkie. It began in the early 50’s with “No School Today” a Saturday morning program broadcast from Cincinnati. The show was innocuous; I listened as I lay in bed, waking slowly on the day when my brother and I could sleep in. Big Jon and Sparky prattled on until “Teddy Bears Picnic” closed the show. It was the music that got me:

If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise;
If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise.

My addiction to the airwaves was budding, and in the next few years was further advanced by Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which my mother tuned in every morning before school started at Louise Van Meter. Little of the content of that show affected me; it was for adults, much as the Today Show is now. It was the sounds of the “Breakfast Club” filling our kitchen each morning, at once settling and exciting, that attracted me. While I watched the griddle atop our O’Keefe and Merritt range begin to smoke, the bacon start to sizzle, and the eggs finally curl and dance on the stainless steel, Don McNeil was connecting with his tribe of housewives and I could feel the lure of broadcast sound. I associated the ubiquitous Chicago transmission with the world opening up before me each morning. These were days when I relished the prospect of getting out the door in time to play an hour of work-ups before the first bell, enjoying every step through grassy trails to the baseball diamond. The “Breakfast Club” was a part of that rising expectation, and it was priming me for future broadcast experiences.

I don’t recall just when I first started listening to rock and roll. There are pointless disputes about when rock even began and what it is, but for me a visit to a music store with, of all people, a teacher of classical music, is one indicator. It was in 1956, and I recall like yesterday stepping out of Mrs. Giskin’s new red and black Mercury sedan (with clear plastic covers to protect the seats) on North Santa Cruz Ave. and into the store where she was looking for some sheet music. I went to the recording section, and while Rudy and his mom were with another clerk, I ventured a choice for a disk and paid for it myself. When I was back in the car with them, she clearly suspected I was concealing something and demanded to know what it was. Hesitantly, I displayed a 78rpm recording (all of the 45s were gone) of Elvis Presley’s “Don’ Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,” then endured her brief but scathing condemnation of my selection. I had then met the crossroads that began years of fascination with the sounds of Top 40 radio and the development of what came to be rock and roll music.

Soon I was encircled with the mesh of do-wop, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, gospel and catchy novelty nonsense that constituted early rock and roll. My radio station of choice was KYA, whose program manager Bill Drake pioneered the sound sequences that would become the standard for rock broadcasting everywhere. In the morning, the indelible jingle “KYA Radio... 1260!……Saaan Fraaaan-cisco!!” would wake me and I would begin listening to the early artists, the Platters, the Del-Vikings, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Dion and the Belmonts, Gene Vincent, the Diamonds, the list goes on. The sounds were presented by DJs who were mostly refugees from Payola scandals in New York and Philadelphia, and brought with them voices tinged with hip brogue and polished by studio experience. The names are so familiar that I would still expect to hear them if I tuned in today: Seamus O’Hara, Bobby Mitchell, Peter Tripp, Tony Tremayne, Tommy Saunders, Gene Nelson – and the hippest of the jocks, “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue, who went on to start underground radio at FM-KMPX. They are the gentlemen who galvanized my pop radio addiction. They were with me wherever I went, even to sleep - there were school nights when I took Russ “The Moose” Syracuse’s “All Night Flight” into the wee hours, falling asleep while his baritone timbre faintly thrummed on.

I hardly listened to rock lyrics; they were mostly clumsy and trite. It was the rhythm and intonation that infected me. In one of my favorites, “Mr. Lee,” sung by the Bobettes, the title phrase is repeated no less than 45 times, a penchant for repetition since unsurpassed, even by the “Dreams” of the Everly Brothers, or by Bill Withers’ 26 notorious “I knows” in “Ain’t No Sunshine.” If the lyric was unmemorable, it might have been because it was indiscernible. In another favorite of mine, the Coasters “Searchin’,” mumbling the lyrics is clearly so much a part of the presentation that the song would lose its character if at once understood. It took hundreds of takes for me to get this far:

Well Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade
They got nothin’, chile, on me,
Sergeant Friday, ole Charlie Chan and Boston Blackie;
No matter where she’s hiding, she’s gonna hear me a comin’
I’m gonna walk right down that street like….”

What’s the finish? Who? It’s lost in the falsetto, which is more important than the lyric. I’ve looked on the Internet at lyric sites, and the answers range from “Bogart Camino” to “Bulldog Drummond” (a character from a 1929 Ronald Coleman movie). I always thought it might be “Ole Man Trouble,” but it doesn’t matter now and it never did. Far more important was the Coasters style, a migration from do-wop to the new rock tempo. It was infectious. When you could understand the lyrics they were always fun:

Just tell your hoodlum friends outside,
You ain’t got time to take a ride.
Yakety yak, you don’t talk back.

Yakety Yak

She comes on like a rose,
And everybody knows;
She’ll get you in Dutch.
You can look but you better not touch.

Poison Ivy

She did a triple somersault and when she hit the ground,
She winked at the audience and then she turned around.
She had a picture of a cowboy tattooed on her spine,
Saying Phoenix, Arizona, nineteen forty-nine!

Little Egypt


It was the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the two white guys from Baltimore and Queens who met in Los Angeles in the early 50’s, that fueled the onslaught of early rock songs being broadcast when my addiction was raging. They wrote nearly all the songs recorded by the Coasters, and have since been immortalized in a Broadway musical “Smoky Joe’s Café.” By melding rhythm and blues sounds with Tin Pan Alley, they bridged the gap between what was formerly known in the industry as “Race Music” and the mainstream Hit Parade. During most of the late 50’s and early 60’s, they seemed to have written nearly every other song that made the top 40 charts. They wrote songs recorded by a bewildering range of artists, from Barbara Streisand (Honey Can I Put On Your Clothes) to Big Momma Thornton (“Hound Dog”). They wrote many of Elvis’ best songs, including “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t,” “Loving You,” "Love Me Tender" and “Treat Me Nice,” and classics recorded by scores of artists including “Stand by Me,” “On Broadway,” and the rock standard, “Kansas City.” There was a time when it seemed the release of this music would never stop; it just kept getting better and better.

I’m not sure just when my pop/rock addiction began to fade. It was certainly after enjoying all of the Beatles years, and of course, Motown which itself was an outcrop of music by Leiber and Stoller. For some of us, there came a time when we began to take ourselves seriously and we turned to music we thought would serve that purpose, to Bob Dylan (a rocker disguised as folk singer) or others whose music was more spiritual and who spoke of ideals. Quite naturally we moved on to the more sophisticated sounds found in jazz and classical music. But sometimes, like Dylan at Newport, many of us still reach back for the tempo and rhythm that started our addiction, which only rock and roll can provide:

Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music,
Any old way you choose it;
It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it;
Any old time you use it.
It’s gotta be rock and roll music,
If you wanna dance with me;
If you wanna dance with me.

Chuck Berry



Doug Pulling