March 31, 1973: WKBW's Great American Talent Hunt
KB radio at the top of its game.
March 31, 1973
WKBW Finds a New DJ in an Unusual Way
IT’S FEB. 19,
Jack Armstrong’s next-to-last night on WKBW and he’s wailing through a
commercial, stretching the 30-second spot into what he calls “my 90-second
thirty” and embellishing the written pitch for shoes.
“I wanta get a date with a girl from
Yes, Jack misses sometimes, but he never falters. He comes
on so fast you scarcely have time to groan. He’s energy, pure adrenalin, and he
can make your blood dance the boogaloo.
* * *
HIS TRIUMPH
comes when he closes his show with a two- or three-minute rap that screeches
and sails like a cyclone.
You follow it off-balance. Up, down, in, out, fast, slow,
way, way up for the very end to where you can scarcely breathe, then POW! And
you fall back weak and panting as Ron Baskin comes in with the news.
“Jeff wants me to hit the news on time, but I’ve only done
it four or five times in two years,” he remarks in his somewhat deeper off-mike
voice as he swivels around in his tall stool, a variance he won to Jefferson
Kaye’s policy that all KB deejays must stand.
“Actually, he’s been very, very considerate,” Jack says.
“Jeff is a very smart program director. He hires people who can take care of
business and then he lets them do it.”
Jack’s departure for WPIQ,
Just before the 9 p.m. news this next-to-last night (he
hits it one minute late), the engineer hands him a yellow card. Apparently his
wife called. The first words are: “Settlement is unfair.” Jack excuses his
visitor, says he has to make some phone calls.
Routinely when a radio station replaces a deejay, it
advertises for deejays from other stations to send in audition tapes, which are
made up of the beginnings and ends of songs interspersed with the guy’s patter.
* * *
IF, HOWEVER,
the new man is taking over for an enormously popular personality, the audience
just as routinely rejects the newcomer and looks elsewhere on the dial.
“Audiences are a funny thing,” Jeff Kaye said, sitting in
front of a desk calendar covered with elaborate flower doodles. "They listen by
habit. Jack being a strong personality could come in and create a great deal of habit.”
Though it’s doubtful WKBW would lose its high area rating
for Armstrong’s 6 to 10 p.m. slot or the voyageur audience that catches its
50,000-watt signal up and down the Eastern Seaboard, Kaye knew the departure
would hurt.
Instead of accepting this dismal prospect, Kaye decided to
take a risk, a gamble that appealed to his love of radio production. If it
worked, it would turn a disaster into a gold mine and, at the same time, it
would ease the new man in. If it worked.
* * *
IN PLACE of
audition tapes, he would have the prospective deejays – 10 of them – come in
and try out on the very show they would take over. The listeners would vote on
their favorite.
There was no precedent for this kind of contest. As far as
Kaye knew, nobody had done on-the-air auditions before. And the possibilities
of something going wrong were great.
The embarrassment of a flop would not only cost them
listeners, but also make them the butt of radio jokes all over town. And it
wasn’t as if KB were some tiny station making a grandstand play. Seventeen
states and at least two nations would know.
* * *
NOT JUST ANY old
record-spinner would do. What Jeff Kaye was looking for was someone who would
fit in with the station’s format. There aren’t many who can.
“Time and temperature deejays are a dime a dozen,” Jeff
Kaye was saying in mid-March. “There’s a box full of their tapes at your feet.
If we could hire on how well they enunciate the call letters, we’d’ve had a guy
last week.
“This is personality radio. There’s few other stations like
it. And personality radio is me. It’s my taste. It’s what I cut my teeth on. I
found it here when I came in 1965 and I think it’s most entertaining. I think
deejays should be funny, give people a lift.”
There was no time to advertise for audition tapes. Kaye
relied instead on industry gossip, record promo men, whom he calls “the
employment agents of radio,” and tricks out of spy movies when deejays had to
be sought out at their stations.
Kaye, rather than be stymied by indignant program
directors, would leave the name of a promo man. His secretary, Barbara, found
one man’s address by saying she was checking his credit rating for a store
credit card.
You just don’t ask an announcer to take a day off work and
fly up to
Many that were contacted couldn’t make the trip. Their
program directors wouldn’t let them. Others put their jobs in jeopardy, taking
that 10-to-1 shot at KB while their bosses started looking for new prospects.
Five days before the start of the on-air auditions, which
Kaye dubbed The Great American Talent Hunt, the whole gamble looked like a
disaster. Only two of the 10 nights were filled and Kaye had “no tapes of any
consequence” to go on.
“At this point,” Kaye remarked later, “we thought we’d have
to cut the contest in half, run it only one week. There were just a ton of
things up on the wall. And we hadn’t even begun to think about the second week.
“Then Friday, about 4 p.m., people started dropping off the
wall. By then, we’d booked our first three and we had to scurry on Monday to
get the other two. After that, we had breathing room.”
Even so, Kaye and his staff had to piece things together
for most of the time the talent hunt went on. The last contestant, Supershannon,
wasn’t lined up until the middle of the week.
* * *
BECOMING a
deejay at WKBW is something like walking into a knife fight. You’ve got to have
your wits about you to trade insults with Danny Neaverth. Sandy Beach will look
for a weakness and play it for all it’s worth.
It took Jack Armstrong a while to get used to it after the
started in late 1970. He didn’t have the same razor wit, but he made up for it
with ego. He’d go into any interplay ego first, gullible and wide-open.
He took a lot of ribbing, but ultimately the other deejays
came to view him as a prodigal younger brother, vulnerable but extremely
talented.
This was the crew awaiting the 10 contestants as a WKBW car
met each of them at the airport, drove them to a downtown hotel and brought them
in to meet Jeff Kaye about 4 p.m. each day.
* * *
BEACH GOT TO
meet them all. He’d be tossing off jokes at the driving-home crowd in his
loose-jointed fashion as they’d come in to see the studio.
To a man, they were nervous. Most had plotted their shows
out. One hopeful the first week put on the earphones at 6:05 and forgot
everything he’d planned.
“He must’ve gone blank when he heard those 50,000 watts
humming in his ears,” Kaye remarks. “We tried everything to get him through
those four hours.”
When about 10,000 postcards came in during last week’s
voting, Kaye was pleasantly amazed. “This isn’t a mail-in town,” he points out.
Nicer
still was that the listeners picked a man that Kaye wanted. He’d been ready to
exercise his own judgment if the vote had gone to someone he thought wouldn’t
make it.
* * *
THE WINNER WAS
The Janitor, a 32-year-old screamer in the Jack Armstrong mold from
“He’s got a good background,” Kaye was saying in his
redecorated office last week. The calendar was gone. A tank of tropical fish
sat next to the visitor.
“He went to
“He was really quite poised.
* * *
“I TALKED to
him earlier today and told him and he was delighted and, a surprise, his
general manager was delighted too. He’s driving up here now with his wife. I
asked if we could use his real name, but he wants to be known as just The
Janitor.
“One side effect is we’ve had calls from several other
radio stations, ones in
“We’ve had some interesting plans for the young man. Some
old things and some new things. He’s gonna come in and say: ‘What do you want
me to do?’ And I’ll tell him: ‘Be yourself, we’ll discuss things you can’t do
as they come up.’
“I’d do it again, have the Second Great American Talent
Hunt. But it’s a basic flaw, I suppose, in my makeup that I haven’t been able
to impress anybody with the fact it was an open competition to the end. Our
minds were never made up. I really wanted to be as level and honest as I could
about it.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTOS: Top,
The Janitor. Bottom, Jeff Kaye.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: Jack Armstrong came back to the
Needless
to say, that wasn’t his real name. He was born John Charles Larsh in 1945 in
After his stint in
The Janitor’s real name is Warren F. Miller. He’d won
a Billboard magazine small market Air Personality Award in 1971 and says on his
website that he was “having more fun that people should be allowed to have.”
He didn’t stay long at KB though and, according to the
resume on his website, he was out of radio by 1982. Since then, he’s had a long
career in the computer industry in sales and marketing, mostly in
Jeff Kaye, real name Martin Jeff Krimski, took his
golden voice to WBEN radio as afternoon host in 1974, eventually replaced the
legendary Clint Buehlman on the morning show and was producer for the station’s
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