CHAPTER 8

They came to that far flung place as an ensemble of sorts. Jim White was PD. He brought along Dallas friends, Randy Hames, Christopher Haze, and Eric Chase. Bill Stephens was hired by Burkhart and Steve Seever was a holdover form the former staff. They were very creative individually and collectively. Just as many people in our generation had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, they had come to the desert to create a new sound on what they considered a "national" radio station. Somewhat progressive, somewhat alternative, somewhat top forty is how I describe it. The GM didn’t like it. He had recruited some heavy hitter sales people from San Antonio. They were getting murdered by the salespeople from KELP, the traditional top 40 , KHEY, an extremely strong country station, and a Spanish AM in the market. The GM wanted Top 40, period.

I was greeted with caution by the air staff. I knew I risked losing them all unless I handled them delicately. I included them in the process of overhauling XEROK. There operation schedule was different. With two "air" studios, 24 hours of programming could be recorded in 12 hours. I don't think anyone recorded their show at the time it played on the air. By 6:00PM on Saturday night, the programming for the weekend and Monday was done. Most evenings, the office and studios were deserted. The guys switched around to accommodate their lives. It didn’t matter as long as the tapes were ready by 10:00AM the following day. There was no news, no time checks, no weather and few public service announcements. Twice per hour, the station had to be identified in Spanish. The traffic director had recorded the identification and a segment of "Yellow Submarine" was the background music. It was most unusual, and actually made the station distinctive.

The first problem I tackled was shifts. I asked the guys how they could relate to what was going on during the time period they were "on the air". if the show was recorded at a completely different time. My theory was that we had to operate just like a "live station". They would record an hour, rest a few minutes, then record the next hour. There was no flow or continuity. "No more", I said. The morning show began at 6:00AM and better be over at 10:00AM. At shift change, the next jock would have to be in the studio for some banter with the jock going off the air. This would tie the sound together. They seemed to understand my reasoning. Haze had come out of KAKC in Tulsa and was more familiar with my "Drew influenced" programming style. His cooperative attitude helped me win the confidence of the other guys. I wasn’t dealing with small market rookies. Many of these guys are successful major market on-air talents, today. The object was to make the station sound "live", when in fact, the show had been taped 24 hours earlier. Since the weather in El Paso was predictable, we began doing "general weather"; no current temps, but enough to give XEROK more life. Randy Hames started doing approximate time; "it’s about a quarter past" or "it’s almost half past the hour". I didn’t want him to be any more specific, because of possible problems with the tapes on the Juarez side.

My days were long the first few weeks. I’d be in the station all day, then at night I went out and did "research" as Gerry Peterson used to call it. (In Boston, we’d go across the street from the RKO building to a little bar, wait for the traffic on the Mass turnpike to lessen, and do research, usually with girls from the station) I actually was trying to get a feel for the city or cities I should say. The combined population of El Paso and Juarez was over a million people. I kept noticing something at almost every bar or club I frequented; soul music was immensely popular on both sides of the border. There was no R&B music on XEROK, current or oldies. Needless to say, I was delighted. I reworked the oldie library to include the top R&B oldies and added current R&B hits to the playlist. The GM, sales people, and jocks thought I was crazy. Steve Crosno was a former XEROK jock and very popular with the Latino kids. He did a show on the local cable channel every Saturday ."Disco Teco" featured Americano dance music. I had a hunch that we could score big with the teens with a fast moving danceable music format.

Steve Crosno, 1940-2006

While in Boston, I listened to WVBF, the Framingham FM giving WRKO headaches. The top of the hour ID was "WVBF, Framingham- Boston, The Electric Streaker". I borrowed WVBF’s idea and made it local. I had used Gary Gears from WLS in Chicago to do IDs for me at WAVZ. He was THE voice. El Paso billed itself as the Sun City. Voila, "THE SUN CITY STREAKER (comet sound ) X-ROCK 80 EL PASO" was born. We needed a contest. I asked the sales manager if we could trade out some prizes. A VW dealer wanted to do a promotion around the VW "Thing". It was an ugly convertible Volkswagen that looked like a throwback to World War II. I didn’t have much of a cash budget, so I decided to rework "Don’t Say Hello" and use the "Thing" as the big prize. While we were doing the contest, we had the use of the vehicle. It was orange and we painted the logo all over it in tempera, so it would wash off after the contest. We nicknamed it "The Sun City Streaker". It made appearance at remotes. The XEROK 80 remotes were a little different. The breaks were pre-recorded and inserted in the taped show as if they were live. Funny, that's the way many stations handle remotes today. Sponsors didn’t care because everywhere we went, people showed up.

I mentioned rewriting the General Instructions in an earlier chapter. For XEROK, many changed due to the unique circumstances. Request were handed differently. We did a top nine at nine each evening tabulated from requests. We had a "request line chick" (not a politically correct moniker these days) who tabulated the requests each night. The daytime jocks answered the request line while they were on the air and wrote down requests, when they remembered. Time checks were non-existent. Weather was three words, four at most ("sunny today and tomorrow"). I did jock critiques just like always and production shifts were just like a "live" station. Contests had to be write in for the most part. We did manage to pull off "Don’t Say Hello" using the phone. I don’t remember how listeners had to answer their phone. Winner promos weren’t so quick to get on the air. To kick off the ratings period, listeners were instructed to count the number of times "Sister Mary Elephant" by Cheech & Chong was played over the weekend, then mail us a post card with the number. The winning entry received $500.00 cash. I think that was my entire cash budget for the book. My "no promotion budget" experience in Cedar Rapids came in handy in El Paso. We received over five thousand entries from seven states for that little weekend promotion. Over seven hundred had the correct count. I could sense we were on the right track.

XEROK sponsored a "free" night at a drive-in theatre. All listeners had to do was show up. No limit on the number of people in a car. We would let everyone in free, until the place was full. I took several of the jocks to the theatre in "The Thing" and as we approached the drive-in we could see hundreds of cars lined up to get in. The State Patrol was there trying to unsnarl traffic. Cars were parked on the side of the road for a mile or so in either direction. We managed to get through the jam and up to the ticket booth. We had brought some prizes to give out to each car, but clearly we wouldn’t have enough for everyone. With about ten minutes before we opened the gates, we sat and listened as hundreds of car radios, tuned to XEROK 80, resonated across the dessert At the top of the hour the tape changed and the playback machine went into fast forward. THE SUN CITY STREEEAAAAKKKKERRRRRR...... wannie wannie wannie wannie wannie wannie wannie wannie (My impersonation of a tape going into fast forward. Try it, speeding up each wannie! This is not to be confused with Bobby Rich’s impersonation of a tape being cued, "were-gee-skweef" ). I ran to the nearest phone. The engineer on duty didn't understand a word I said except "Juan Elargo". I grabbed a Mexican kid and he translated. The engineer punched the "stop" button on the Ampex. The silence was deafening. He punched "play" and everything was normal. The whole thing probably lasted three minutes; it seemed like three hours. Not a single person asked us what happened. Phew!

Streaking was the rage and we decided to test the power of suggestion. Eric Chase made an announcement that went something like " The organizers of Friday nights streak at UNM (University of New Mexico) in Las Cruces ask everyone to meet at the student center at 11:00 PM". A day or so after that Friday, a newspaper report stated that "Friday night , there was a "streaking" at UNM, Las Cruces involving hundreds of students and faculty. No arrests were made. The incident was apparently inspired by an announcement on an El Paso, radio station". I got the bright idea of doing a one-sheet to send to our rep firm incorporating the newspaper article and a picture of streakers running alongside "The Thing". One of the jocks and his wife agreed to "streak". I hired a photographer to do the shoot out in the desert. That was my first run in with the GM. He was appalled at the stunt and my idea for the one sheet and refused to pay the photographer. I paid the bill and gave the pictures to the jock.

A national promotion man called me one day and invited me to come to LA for a birthday party at Bobby Vinton’s house. I accepted the invitation and a plane ticket. The promo guy picked me up and on the way to Vinton’s, we smoked a joint. I was a casual smoker at best and the joint was primo weed. I couldn’t make a fist. We got to Vinton’s and stayed for only a few minutes. I met Loretta Switt, I’m told. I’m not certain what happened the rest of the afternoon. Later that evening, a gate attendant at LAX jostled me and told me it was time to board the flight back to El Paso. My extra curricular activities were limited to one night a week which I called "Boys Night Out". I invited the jocks to join me at an emporium of female pulchritude (strip club) called the Hiphugger. We didn’t get toasted, just happy. The entertainers at the club got to know all of us by name and loved it when we came in. We even had a reserved table. Some of the wives didn’t like it, but their husbands/boyfriends made it up to them when they got home. One of the girls helped me welcome Wolfman Jack to El Paso a few months later. That little stunt has the dubious honor of R&R's first "topless" cover and my first "cover of the R&R".

When record guys came to town, we’d go across the border to Juarez to visit their entertainment venues. Everything was dirt cheap. We always parked at the boarder and walked over to avoid being pulled over by the infamous Juarez police . One night, a couple of record guys were in town, one of them black. There was a club at Zaragosa, Mexico, 10 miles southwest of Ciudad Juarez. We had to drive there. The club was famous for it’s unique shows. Inside, there were guys who looked like "banditos". We went in, sat down and ordered. There was hardly anyone there; we were getting a lot of stares. After a while, we began to feel uncomfortable. That changed to fear as the "banditos" seemed restless. Girl after girl had come over, sat down and talked only to my Black friend. It finally dawned on me, they didn’t like the women talking to a Black man. We watched over our shoulders as we headed for the border, and I don’t mean Taco Bell.

 With a 21.4 total share and a 48.9 in teens, we were the highest rated top 40 in the United States. We celebrated big time. Congratulatory telegrams poured in. The GM immediately published a new rate card, tripling the advertising rates. The headline story quoted Burkhart giving me praise for the accomplishment. The GM didn’t like it. My original staff had begun to break up right after the ratings period was over in May. When Hames left, I hired Paul Mayer (Leigh) from WLOB in Portland, Maine, a station I later consulted. I was warned about Mayer's irreverence on and off the air. I had no problems with Mayer, but his brusque personality was unappreciated by the GM. Mayer teased the GMs’ secretary unmercifully. Haze left for Dallas; I hired Jay Walker to do afternoons. Chase left for somewhere so R. W. "Catfish" Crouch came from Cedar Rapids to do nights. I was doing middays. I hired a kid from LA to do 10P to 2AM. His air name was Mark Thomas. He didn't stay long but went on to work at KHJ and more recently at an oldies station in Savannah as Pat Garrett. Rosalyn Frank came from WJDX in Jackson, Mississippi to be music director and copywriter. The only original staffer left was Steve Seever. Life was good in El Paso. The cost of living was very reasonable. I lived in Coronado on the side of a mountain. We had a live-in maid/nanny. She wasn’t a legal immigrant and hardly spoke English. Fortunately, my wife spoke some Spanish. There were plenty of great Mexican Restaurants, and shopping in Juarez was a lot of fun. Cigarettes were dirt cheap across the border. Other than being about a thousand miles from our family in Georgia, we were happy. Unfortunately, there was trouble on the horizon.

QSL Card for XEROK

CHAPTER 9

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