The Man Inside the Radio

Radio hosts drinking whiskey and coke at six in the morning, news stories from the Hollywood bowling alley, and the musical lifeblood of highschool for surfers, stoners, and straight laced teens looking to join the ride. It was the peak 70s in Los Angeles, the height of rock radio power, and KMET and KLOS were all over the billboards. UnFictional host Bob Carlson talks to some of the radio kings he listened to when he was in high school in a personal appreciation of radio in two parts. A story of L.A.'s rock radio history, and his own experience when the wild fantasy became reality.

JIM: So hi.

Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus on Warner Brothers Records, now just 5.69 the tape 5.99 at Licorice Pizza

JIM LADD: This is 94.7 KMET, Los Angeles. It’s about two minutes before midnight…. Two minutes before the change of the day….

RADIO HOST: Hey!

JIM LADD: But you’re just a number, that’s it, just a number, just a digit on some tape somewhere. So it bothers me a lot you know, and it bothered Bob Sieger enough to write this song called Feels like A Number. So as I play this song, I’m going to light up a number. Just for the cause, I figure we’d remove em, we remove em one at a time. And sooner or later if everyone burned two, three numbers a day, pretty soon there won’t be any left. Anyway this KMET Los Angeles. I think that’s right.

Levi’s chord flares, and Levi’s denim flares are made to last….

AD: at Mervyn’s back-to-school sale today. ‘At Mervyns today, Mervyn’s today!’

ACE: News and surf at nine, more at ten. I’m Ace Young, you’re up to date. As KMET informs Southern California… now KMET rocks Southern California… rock and roll Tuesday morning and Jeff Gonzer.

GONZER: …and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers...KMET

GONZER: I’m Jeff Gonzer, it’s finally a Friday on a Thursday from the Country Club.

GONZER: LA’s own answer to the two stooges: Flo and Eddie.

FLO (or EDDIE): Are we really on the radio now?

GONZER: And as far as drinking goes, the waitresses who worked the night before, whoever it was at the Country Club, would stick around until six o'clock in the morning because the tips were infinitely better from our audience than they were from people who were coming to see some band.

BOB: From your perspective, what was the KMET listener like at the time? I was, you know, a suburban kid who drove in from the South Bay.

GONZER:Well, they were you guys, they were people in their 20s, there were people who were looking for a soundtrack of their lives. Our listeners were people looking for something to identify with that wasn't kind of plastic and prepackaged, and something that was very relatable: getting stoned, surfing. It was that ultimate Southern California lifestyle.

[KMET clip]

ACE: It’s 10:06 and a half, I’m Ace Young you’re up to date. As KMET informs Southern California… now ladies and gentlemen KMET rocks Southern California…..

ACE: You know, it's too noisy in the background. And by the first hour, I'm not going to do the news anyway. People are passing around way too many things.

GONZER:... alright we’ve done, Ace we’ve done 3 hours already, can you believe it? We’ll be back… KMET rocks the hell out of Reseda. Woowhaa

‘When you want a sound that’s clear and high, and you wanna kiss the hiss goodbye! BASF Pro II chrome!

KMET: ‘Pro II chrome!’ BASF Pro II chrome cassettes, at The Federated Group.

it’s a beautiful day, waves they’re breaking one to two feet, aoooo… for the South Bay this is The Flamer for Redondo Chart House...

From Horizons West surfboards in Santa Monica, this is Jennifer. We have another warm sunny day and the fifths are about one to two feet with fair shape…

ACE: The idea was that we would have correspondents all over the country, all over the world. So in London, this is so and so for KMET news, it was so cool to do that. And whenever we did some great coverage, if it were a local story at the end of the story, it's KMET ahead of the times.The Times of course, being the reference to the Los Angeles Times.

And Ace Young hired Pat Paraquat Kelly as the afternoon news guy. He was part of the idea of making news fun and interesting, rather than something you’d just tune out.

Crisco’s landing up in western county reports 23 angeleurs, nine hook nosed necrophiliac carp, 45 psycho-somatic….

Was that an (unintelligible) rainbow trout…? Yes it was, rare… I’d like to ah, fry those right up in a pan… So rare… With some punjo pudding.

PAT KELLY: Ace Young is somewhere in Washington DC.

GONZER: The biggest heyday for KMET, when we influenced an awful lot of people and the industry and was kind of a template for rock and roll radio stations, was 1976 to 1984. Then it was kind of struggling, and as soon as the company started dicking around with the format and bringing in consultants, it was the beginning of the end.

Plus KMET had competition. Their rival rock station was KLOS, but the stations also traded staff back and forth as fortunes changed.

JIM: I mean, we've talked about KMET quite a bit in this conversation, but KLOS was also really good at that time. So you had two really good rock and roll stations in Los Angeles when we were in high school and college.

BOB: Can you describe how you looked like in those days?

JIM: Yeah, I had shoulder length hair and always had a beard and was always wearing jeans or shorts and tennis shoes and definitely a rock ‘n roll t-shirt. I'm sure I had, you know, long dangling earrings. I was living the lifestyle, so I looked like somebody who probably worked in rock and roll.

And for about a year I, short hair, button down shirt, slim jeans, lived the rock ‘n roll lifestyle as an intern at KLOS. I was a fly on the wall as rock ‘n roll characters passed through the studios. I saw the dudes who sang that Radar Love song, and the dudes from Journey, Tom Petty was there, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Stevie Nicks looked at me this one time.

But it didn’t exactly feel like a clubhouse. By this time rock radio was a cut throat business: one close eye was always kept on the ratings. The morning man was Fraser Smith who was now direct competition to Jeff Gonzer at KMET

BOB: I always remember, cause when I was coming in, they would be finishing. And he was always in show mode.

JIM: He’d walk through there to go in and have his meeting with his boss, so that was what was on his mind.

BOB: And it was a very, very, very, very, super long hallway as I recall, we were at one end of the hallway and then there’d be studios

JIM: which were about halfway down on the left. Yeah.

BOB: Occasionally when you’d go into the DJ booth, because it was all vinyl records... so the DJ booth had to always have the most pristine copy of each record. So occasionally you’d have to walk from the programming office and hand deliver a fresh copy of a vinyl record to the DJ. I was always crazy nervous, like; am I gonna open the door at the wrong time, am I gonna cough?

Our main job was to maintain the LP vinyl records that were in the current play rotation of KLOS. If the records got scratched, we got to call the record companies and get new copies.

BOB: And this is where you got a little bit of a sense of power as an intern. You got to just call the record company from the Rolodex and ask them to send another one and they would.

JIM: Yup, we need five more copies of Boston's debut album, please, and five copies of Fleetwood Mac Rumors, and five copies of Led Zeppelin III.

But this was a whole different time for music, 1983. At this point a lot of listeners were tuning into the more punk and new wave KROQ, and in the KLOS programming department there were discussions of what even constitutes rock ‘n roll.

JIM: You know, where do the Bangles, where do where do a Flock of Seagulls, or ABC, or the Thompson twins fit on the spectrum of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen... and Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Great White. So you almost had the old guard, which wasn't really that old at the time… the classic rock that is now known as Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne, etc.

JIM: Wow! I had not remembered that until you brought it up. Yeah, that was weird.

Managing producer: Carla Green  Production assistance, musical saw and vocals: Krissy Barker Episode graphics: Alex CerrillaDigital content: Drew TewksburyWeb support: Christopher HoSpecial thanks to Kristen Lepore of the Independent Producer Project

Theme Music by Alex Weston, with music help from Joe Augustine and Narrative Music.Theme Music by Alex Weston, with music help from Joe Augustine and Narrative Music.

"This season of UnFictional is dedicated to my KCRW colleague and close friend Matt Holzman… who was born on Halloween and died on Easter 2020... of cancer. He was a great audio producer, motivator and educator; and he liked to have fun" - Bob Carlson