March 23, 1974: WPHD is reborn

 

All across the nation, underground FM rock radio started coming above ground as the mid ‘70s approached. Here’s a look at what was happening in Buffalo. 

March 23, 1974

WPHD – A Station Rises From Ashes 

FOR MORE than six months last year, listening to WPHD was like running into an old friend who was going through a personality crisis.

          This was in the wake of that sudden coup d’etat by the rating-sensitive McLendon corporate powers in Dallas. The old identities went a-packing. Trauma set in.

          So what was once this city’s most musically adventurous signal emerged from the purge re-dressed as a pristine vision of the sound-alike programming that clutters up radio dials from here to Tierra del Fuego.

* * *

THIS, DEFENDERS of the new faith pontificated, is the wave of the future. FM shall become AM. AM shall become heaven-knows-what. I started hankering for the good old days. When ice cream cones were a nickel, kids were idealistic and rock ‘n roll was here to stay.

          My aversion ultimately spread to the FM radio in the car. The button once reserved for WPHD zeroed in on WBFO during the Watergate hearings and stayed there. Better a talk show or a classical hour than a bunch of worn-out hits in clear-channel stereo.

          Other folks, like WPHD mainstay David Cahn, grinned hard and stuck with it. The hallmark of the true radio professional, said Cahn, is being creative even within the most stifling of formats. This was a temporary phase. Someday it too would pass.

          The first indication that Cahn’s prophecy would come true was the appearance on a friend’s bulletin board last fall of a wallet-sized piece of paper. It was WPHD Loyalist Card No. 7156.

          “A WPHD Loyalist?” I declaimed. “How can you stand to listen that much?”

* * *

“THEY’RE GETTING BETTER,” was the reply. “Check them out sometime.”

          A Loyalist, it turned out, was something different from a Listener. Listeners always seem to have to hang out by the phone or the radio, keeping a lonely vigil in case they get called for a contest. A Loyalist belonged to something.

          There were advantages. The first caller with a card, say, with two threes on it might win a record album or a $5 bill.

          In February, the prize was a trip to the Bahamas. There was a party to celebrate. Not for the winner, but for everyone who didn’t win.

          Another harbinger of change was the way WPHD kept popping up in those magazine ad lists of progressive stations carrying syndicated radio shows.

The National Lampoon Comedy Hour Saturday nights. The King Biscuit Flour Hour’s live Sunday night concerts. That live New Year’s Eve show from San Francisco with the Allman Brothers Band.

Cahn, now the station’s promotion director, was buoyed enough by such developments to call last month and proclaim that the trauma had lifted. No, it wasn’t the old era returning. It was a new one coming in.

* * *

A COUPLE WEEKS LATER, Cahn and program director John McGhan, newly imported from Rochester’s WCMF-FM, are still buoyant as they outline WPHD’s rise from the ashes.

          There are little comedy squibs, the Sunday afternoon hour of consensus cuts chosen by the staff from new material, a mail-in dedication show, commercials refitted to the station’s mood, beefed-up news under L. B. Lyon and twice-a-day commentaries by, of all people, conservative Paul Harvey.

          The Loyalists (there’s some 10,000 of them) were Cahn’s inspiration.

          “I was aware,” he says, “that our listeners are primary listeners. That is, they’re loyaler to us than to other stations. The changes we go through affect them much more personally.

          “So this was a way to say thank you for listening loyally. We get things here, we try to pass them along. That trip to the Bahamas was given to us, but rather than me or John going, we gave it away.”

          “Our target audience,” McGhan says, “is 18 to 34 years old, but we got a call from a 41-year-old printer the other day. He’s a Loyalist. And there’s a 48-year-old woman who was in the running for the trip to the Bahamas. She was out at our losers’ party.”

* * *

MAIL COMES in from as far as Pennsylvania and Canada’s Georgian Bay. There are a lot of letters from Attica State Correctional Facility.

          “We got one,” McGhan says, “from a man getting out of Attica March 29. The night before, he wants us to play him some blues with some of the baddest harp playing.”

          It’s still all tied to the ratings game, of course. The old progressive philosophies, which tended to be of the this-is-our-music variety, are roundly condemned now as “serving an elitist segment of the audience.”

          The new theories are kind of a populist version of the old ones. It’s everybody’s music now. In fact, it’s everybody’s everything. “Special programming for special people” is the catch phrase. McGhan likens the whole thing to “what the general store was to a small town.”

          While it’s arguable whether last year’s un-anesthetized surgery was the only way to break the elitist mold, now that side effects have subsided, the station seems stronger than ever.

          Not only in ratings, which are up and promise to go higher, but also in corporate support and the quality of the on-the-air work. Things are crisper now, better thought-out.

* * *

“IT’S PART OF THE EVOLUTION of progressive radio,” Cahn explains. “When I started, I was entertaining myself in front of an audience. Now it’s a matter of taking the ego from out front and putting it behind your talents. I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve been here four years and I’ve never been happier.”

          “We want to stop people from thinking it’s an acid-rock jukebox,” McGhan says. “We’re trying to compete, of course. We’re just offering such a variety. I played Morgana King the other day right after the James Gang. And it fit.

          “Steve Lapa, our music director, was at WCMF too, and he’s a strong afternoon man. He keeps telling Sandy Beach and J. J. Jordan to watch out, ‘cause he’s gonna bury them.”

          Beyond Lapa, the lineup these days is Randy Hock mornings, McGhan middays, Cahn early evenings, Hank Ball at night and Ron Reeger from Rochester’s WEZO pinch-hitting on weekends.

          Ironically, the symbolic hero of the old WPHD returned to the studios this week to do the late evening show, two years after he quit on the air in one of the station’s first philosophical upheavals.

          It’s Gentleman Jim Santella, he of the beard, the cowboy hat and the low, low voice. But elitists shouldn’t get their hopes up. Santella’s done time on the graveyard shift at a country music station. Seems he’s become a progressive populist too.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTOS: John McGhan, left, and Steve Lapa.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: WPHD’s rebound didn’t last. Later that year, the station got a new owner, Bob Howard, who tossed out the format and changed the call letters back to WYSL. John McGhan left. The jocks either quit or were fired.

          McGhan found a new home a few doors up Franklin Street at WGRQ-FM, where he became program director in early 1975 and repeated his success. He hired most of the WPHD jocks and brought in consultant Lee Abrams to introduce a Top 40 album rock format. As 97 Rock, it quickly became the city’s leading FM rock station, helped along by McGhan’s tireless outreach as a concert emcee and station ambassador. 

          He left for Pittsburgh in 1977, where he did it again at WDVE-FM, pushing it to second place in the market behind KDKA and first place in its target demographic. He also promoted Pittsburgh musicians, including one of my favorites, the Iron City House Rockers. 

          McGhan was lured to New York City in 1980 to help NBC start The Source, a 76-station syndicated national news and feature service tailored to rock stations. He also played a major role in developing NBC-TV’s Friday Night Videos series.

          In 1984, Ted Turner hired him and sent him to Los Angeles to launch Turner’s Cable Music Channel. Designed to compete with MTV, it sank before the year was over and Turner sold it to MTV, which turned it into VH1.

          McGhan stayed in L.A., took acting classes, appeared in an episode of L.A. Law. He also started his own radio production company and provided interviews via satellite that let deejays ask questions directly to celebrities. He died of AIDS in Los Angeles in 1990.

          David Cahn is still with us, alive and well in Buffalo’s Southtowns. He has a music-related company called Witness Protection Music.

          Steve Lapa, according to his lapcomventures website, became general manager at WGRQ, the youngest GM in the nation at the time, then went on to “upper management positions at 28 radio and TV stations for public and privately held companies from South Florida to San Francisco.” He and a financial partner also bought and sold a number of stations. Now based in Florida, he develops and syndicates radio shows and podcasts through Lapcom Communications.

* * * * *

PERSONAL FOOTNOTE: After he settled in at WGRQ, McGhan invited me to lunch with Lee Abrams at Mulligan’s Café on Hertel Avenue, where Abrams extolled the virtues of the tight music format he was introducing. I pointed out that it was way too restrictive, suppressed the rise of new artists and merely fed people stuff they already knew. Would they play Joni Mitchell, I asked. Abrams didn’t think so.

Later in 1975, McGhan, ever enthusiastic and persuasive, invited me to submit pre-recorded reviews that would play on the morning show, which was hosted by Jim Santella and newswoman Mary Van Vorst. I always wanted to do something on radio, but I told McGhan that The News would never give me permission. He had an answer – why not do it under another name? He even made one up. Dempster Bucks.

Dempster Bucks delivered reviews that were considerably meaner than the ones I wrote for the paper, so mean that one rock band (Uriah Heep) called the station wanting to have a few choice words with Dempster. After a while, I didn’t keep my secret identity much of a secret, just enough so that management at The News didn’t become aware of it until the summer of 1977. And they found out in the worst possible way.

When McGhan departed for Pittsburgh, I recounted his accomplishments and impact on the city in a guest radio-TV column. This triggered someone even meaner and nastier than Dempster Bucks – Jim Baker, who was then the media writer for the rival daily, the Courier-Express. When the editors at The News read about my subterfuge in Baker’s column, I was promptly called on the carpet and suspended. Fortunately for me, this happened less than two months after the launch of Gusto, our Friday entertainment magazine, and I was needed there. After a week without pay, I was back at my new desk in the Features Department.