Feb. 20, 1971: George "Hound Dog" Lorenz

 

This radio legend went to that big studio in the sky only 15 months after I had lunch with him, but his legacy lives online. The theme songs, the photos, the voice, they’re all at hounddoglorenz.com. 

Feb. 20, 1971 

The Man Who Created Rock ‘n’ Roll 

There’s a tan Rolls Royce, one of the new models, in the parking lot as you leave the Club Thirty-One on Elmwood Avenue and for a minute you’re ready to believe it belongs to George (Hound Dog) Lorenz.

        The osteomyelitis he had as a boy still bothers him when it’s cold, so he sort of limps through the slush and says something to the waiting chauffeur. Ah, yes. Then Buffalo’s rock ‘n’ roll pioneer unparks his own 1968 convertible and the Rolls glides in nearest the front door.

        Inside that front door the atmosphere keeps humming with importance. It’s one of the places where Buffalo biggies wheel and deal over Spanish omelets and The Hound’s been coming around there since the mid ‘50s.

* * *

THOSE WERE the days when pre-rock WKBW would stop its grey-flannel programming at 7:14 p.m. and one minute later a funky voice would announce: “The Houn’s Aroun’.” Those 50,000 watts would leap to life and so would Buffalo.

        Radios everywhere would bay at the moon, parents would dive for shelter, that boogie woogie piano would start playing The Hound’s theme – “The Happy Lonesome” – and his gravelly tones would come in over the theme to assure Hound Doggers that things would be moovin’ and groovin’ until 9 too-night.

* * *

THE HOUND’S still around (“I’m the oldest living active rock ‘n’ roll deejay in the business,” he’ll tell you), but unless you grew up in the ‘50s or you listen to WBLK-FM, you probably don’t know about him. Or about how he was present at the creation of rock ‘n’ roll.

        It happened in Cleveland in 1953 when The Hound was on WSRS from 9 to 11:30 p.m. and WJW had Alan Freed from 11:15 to 1. The music they played had been called “race music,” but they had a better name for it.

        “You know what rockin’ and rollin’ used to mean?” The Hound asks. “That’s right. And when all the hip black people heard what we were doin’ on the radio, they went crazy. That’s where rock ‘n’ roll, as everybody knows it, started.”

        The two jive-talking deejays captured Cleveland in less than a year and the offers came rolling in. Freed went on to WINS in New York City. The Hound came to WKBW to be near his ailing mother.

        He had the Hound Dog Hit Parade Saturday mornings and he came on late at night for Mother Goldstein’s Wine (“It’s in the sniff,” he’d proclaim into the echo chamber).

        But mostly it was 7 to 10 at the Club Zanzibar on William Street. Fans would pack in every night to peer in the windows of a booth called The Dog House where The Hound and his engineer, Easy Ernie Bohrk, were wailing.

* * *

THE HOUND DOG fan club signed up more than 66,000 members at 25 cents apiece and Hound would fill the old Plaza Theater or Memorial Auditorium with stars like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Platters, Bill Haley & The Comets, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

        “It was a new thing, a new form of music, a new way of living,” he says. “The old people said it wouldn’t last six months. That’s because they couldn’t understand it. They couldn’t get the afterbeat.”

* * *

THE HOUND and Alan Freed teamed up to put on rock shows up and down the Northeast. Toronto radio directors came to ask him how to go rock and get those big ratings.

        And local imitators appeared. A succession of Guy Kings on WWOL and Hernando on WXRA (later WINE). But the guy who dethroned The Hound wasn’t a deejay.

        He was a program director named Dick Lawrence and he had perked up WBNY with what was to become known as the Top 40 format. Fast-talking deejays, quick jingles and the biggest hits over and over and over. WKBW hired him in 1958 so they could go all rock.

* * *

THE HOUND didn’t fit. Easy talking, loose commercials and two or three records in a row. Definitely not Top 40 style.

        The Hound wound up at WINE and when he lost a bid to buy the station in 1960, he retired to a studio on Delaware Avenue and wailed on tape for stations from Hartford and Newark to Manila and Kuala Lumpur.

        Then in 1965 he resurfaced with his own radio station in new studios in the Rand Building – WBLK-FM, the last FM frequency the FCC had allotted for Buffalo.

* * *

THE WBLK Funky 40 sheet bills it as “the only full-time black-music station in New York State outside New York City” and at first a few old-fashioned FM fans didn’t think it was such a good idea. Callers would harangue The Hound for “ruining” the FM dial.

        There were a couple shaky years financially too, but now The Hound feels he’s ahead of daytime-only WUFO, the other black-music station, and he thinks he’s got a good staff.

        “A couple years ago,” he notes, “if I’d taken a day off, I couldn’t look at myself for a week. I had to worry about this thing every minute.”

* * *

BEING the white owner of a black-oriented station still puts him in a sensitive position, but he contends he’s “always been straight” with blacks and his station does “far more than any of the other stations in the area.”

        He points to Ron Baskin’s “Express Yourself,” a nightly phone-in talk show. Carroll Hardy’s Saturday night jazz show. Hollis Tillman’s Sunday specials. Announcements and church news. Sunday religious shows, plus a Muslim hour.

        He adds that he goes out regularly and talks to people on the streets and in the shops. But even so, some of his young black listeners wonder why he has to come on with the echo and talking like that and all.

* * *

STILL, it’s the music that makes the difference. Things like Johnny Taylor’s “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone,” which burn up the soul charts and get ignored by the Top 40. Or things like the new Aretha Franklin single, which gets aired weeks before Top 40 picks them up.

* * *

THE HOUND also hopes to build new glory in the shadow of the old. He mentions that some of the white kids at UB are digging the show and maybe FM will be as big as AM some day.

        And he’s thinking these days about an autobiography, about resurrecting his old tapes for oldies records and about putting on a big live show later this year.

        “But I don’t want to lose the common touch,” he cautions. “If you become too smart or too educated or too great a musician, that’s when you lose it. And when you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.” 

The box/sidebar: 

Always Glib of Tongue 

        George Lorenz learned to love black music in the late ‘30s and ‘40s when he was a night club emcee, introducing acts and doing impersonations of Roosevelt and Edward G. Robinson.

        He’s 50, he says, and he was born in West Seneca or Cheektowaga when it was open territory out there. He came to Buffalo in eighth grade and attended South Park High School.

        He got into night clubs because, he says, “I was a natural for it. I was always glib of tongue. I thought I might have become a lawyer.”

* * *

HE CARRIED his glib tongue and his love of black music into radio, starting at Batavia’s WBTA, and soon found the broadcasting world was full of college-educated, well-modulated announcers who were digging Patti Page.

        Nobody was ready for something like “Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward & The Dominos. Stuff like that cost Lorenz his Saturday “On The Avenue” show on WXRA here in the early ‘50s.

        But WJJL, Niagara Falls, said they’d let him play his music if he’d do the morning coffee-break show right after Ramblin’ Lou’s country wake-up program. He did and “On The Avenue” went from one to three nights and Lorenz got a nickname.

* * *

“IT WAS pinned on me by the black people,” he says. “One of the jive expressions at the time was if you were hangin’ around the corner, you were doggin’ around. So I’d come on and say: ‘Here I am to dog around for another hour.’ That’s how they got to call me The Hound Dog.”