Keener 13

Jerry Martin, the longtime chief engineer for WKMH/WKNR/WNIC passed away on New Year’s Eve, two days after his 92nd birthday.

Jerry began his career as a radio engineer in 1946, assisting in the construction of Keener’s predecessor, WKMH and holds the distinction of being the second employee hired by Fred Knorr at the station. His many accomplishments through the years include supervising the installation and construction of the present day transmitting facilities of WNIC-FM. Since retiring in 1985, Jerry worked as a consultant and co-authored the operating information for what is now known as the Emergency Action System (EAS). He was a life member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and Certified Senior Broadcast Engineer. Earlier this year, The Michigan Association of Broadcasters Honored Jerry with the Carl Lee Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award.

And.. He built that incredible reverb unit that gave WKNR its distinctive sound. Continue reading “Jerry Martin 1916-2008” →

A gem from Saga’s Steve Goldstein:

By now you have seen all of the salutes in the trades about Bill Drake and “Boss Radio.”  But what did it sound like?  Why did it win in market after market? 

I asked our resident broadcast historian, Ed Brouder to assemble a little taste.  In addition to co-hosting the morning show on WZID, Manchester, Ed has his own production company.  “Man From Mars” has a  remarkable library of radio history- some 4800 airchecks –all searchable at his website www.manfrommars.com and he was kind enough to share  the enclosed montage.  It is 6 minutes of radio heaven.  Enjoy.

Listen Here

In 2004 we produced a podcast on radio’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination, including air checks from KLIF in Dallas and Keener’s documentary on the 1st anniversary of the event. By request, here’s a link to that podcast.

Ken R. Deutsch is THE jingle authority. We met back in 1970 when we were both trying our hand at being disk jockeys at Ann Arbor’s WPAG. Even then, his jingle collection was mouth watering. He was kind enough to take pity on a kid with a passion and made me several 7″ reels filled with nuggets from his treasure trove.

Later, Ken would single-handedly rescue the PAMS jingle masters from certain destruction, write two classic books about the jingle art, and contribute the defining piece on WKNR’s jingles to our website. For many years, his company was licensed to re-sing the PAMS catalog, and he became the quintessential aggregator of classic jingles, selling CDs filled with pristine copies lifted from original masters.

But in the beginning, he was a wide-eyed jingle fan, who dreamed of having the famed PAMS singers cut a custom, just for him. Here’s the tale of how it happened.

Link: Jingles from the USA, No longer a big export.

Philip T. Yarbrough died on November 29, 2008 at age 71. When he worked as a DJ at Atlanta’s WAKE, he chose the air-name Bill Drake since it rhymed with the station’s call letters. From 1965 until 2006, he was a prominent radio programming consultant. As the 60s decade came to a close, his Drake formats dominated the airwaves and became the model for much of what radio has today become.

Those of us hard-core Keenerfans like to blame Bill Drake for WKNR’s demise.

It wasn’t his fault. Continue reading “Remembering Bill Drake” →

Just when we think we’ve totally mined all the existing WKNR memorabilia, more treasures appear. This picture of Keener’s mellifluous Ted Clark came to us from  John Maher, WKNR’s superlative newsman during the glory years. John discovered some photos he took the height of Keener’s popularity. We took advantage of his generous contributions as an opportunity to migrate much of the Keener13.com photo gallery to Flickr. Head over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/keener13/ and you’ll discover pictures from the WKNR best high school principal contest, along with shots of Erik Smith, Mike Wilton and Tom Ryan.

Miriam Makeba earned international notoriety more for her political involvement than for her music, but in 1967, her recording about “Pata Pata“, a South African dance loosely translated as “Touch Touch” had a 5 week run on the WKNR Music Guide, peaking at number 9. Her husbands included trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and later black activist Stokely Carmichael, and she worked with a diverse cadre of artists from Harry Belafonte and Dizzy Gillespie to Paul Simon. Makeba died November 10th of a heart attack after collapsing on stage at the end of a benefit concert.

Not only is Bob Berry a Contact News special correspondent, he’s also a fellow Detroit radio, rock n roll and pop culture enthusiast. He knows of which he speaks with over three decades as a broadcaster, heard in Motown on CKLW and WDRQ. Great on-air talent is an endangered species in the era of voice tracking, but Bob is still at the top of his game on Orlando’s Sunny 105.9 FM. He’s also the host of This Week in Rock and Roll, taking Chuck Leonard’s retro-rock feature from the 70s to a whole new level of sophistication and class. If you haven’t added this podcast to your regular listening agenda, do it here. Its the most useful water-cooler rock n roll information you can cram into your brain in sixty seconds.

Not sure exactly where or when these things were part of Keenerania, but Tim Caldwell got his hands on a bunch of them and was kind enough to supply us with one to scan for the archives. Want your own? You can write to him at tmc313@att.net. Click the image to see a larger version.

WKNR’s Scott Regen had a unique relationship with Motown. Early on, Berry Gordy, Jr. recognized the power that Keener had to break new music and many of the Motown stars paid a visit to the Scott Regen show. As Levi Stubbs notes in this air check, the Four Tops were Burger Club members.

But few people knew that Scott also tried his hand at lyricism, penning a song that was ultimately recorded by The Four Tops. He touches on this in his recent conversation with Sunny 105.9’s Bob Berry, mentioning a tune called “Yesterday And You”.

Recorded at the height of Keener’s popularity, it never really caught on and disappeared into R&B oblivion. Until a couple of years ago.

Retitled as “Magic Mary”, the tune can be heard on the CD collection “Lost and Found: Lost Without You”. But if you listen closely, the mix is different from the version that got limited airplay on Keener.

When Bob Green sent me this rarity, I could hear a tone superimposed on the audio at intervals throughout the record. I remembered that when Keener got a song first, they would often mark it up throughout with tones or jingles so that competing stations couldn’t steal it. Bob explains, “It’s so funny how, when we had a new ‘exclusive’, perhaps 10 minutes before WXYZ or CKLW or WJBK, we’d get it on the air IMMEDIATELY…with either a tone every 10 secs or a filtered “Keener-Exclusive’ line under. At least WE thought it was a big deal anyway.”

By Scott Westerman – Curator – Keener13.com
When you think of the great Motown male voices, Levi Stubbs stood alone. Few could emulate the plaintive wail of Edwin Starr, and while both David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks had solo careers, they are forever linked with the Temptations. Stubbs literally defined the Four Tops sound, so much so, that when he voiced the carnivorous venus fly trap in the film version of “Little Shop of Horrors”, the faithful instantly recognized him.

I saw the Tops twice, once under the stars in concert with the Jacksonville, Florida Symphony Orchestra and once up close and personal when they headlined an intimate event at a cable TV convention. On both occasions, they could sustain a nearly two hour program of sing-a-long classics that inevitably had us all dancing along. Lawrence, Duke and Obie each contributed to the Tops magic, from choreography to harmony, but it was Levi who’s unlikely baritone stamped the auditory brand on the Four Tops. Continue reading “Levi Stubbs – Tops at Motown” →

By Scott Westerman – Curator – Keener13.com
My first 45: Limbo Rock by Chubby Checker. My first LP: Shut Down Vol II by the Beach Boys. LPs who’s grooves I wore out with repeated play: Crosby, Stills & Nash, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Earth, Wind & Fire. The number of LPs and 45s in my library now: 672

Remember the sound of putting a needle to vinyl and waiting for the first track to vibrate out of the grooves, through the cartridge and the pre-amp, across the amplifier’s power transistors (after adding appropriate bass and pressing the ‘loudness’ button) and along the two pairs of copper wires towards those expensive speakers that were the heartbeat of that stereo system that cost almost as much as your first automobile?

In the day, exploring an album often meant discovering a deep track, about three cuts in, that would never be selected as a single, but touched something at your emotional core (Quatermass – Good Lord Knows is one of my faves). If the LP was Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon, it meant 45 minutes of bliss, interrupted only by the amount of time it took to flip the disk to side two. If it was The Firesign Theater’s “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pilers”, it was something you replayed until the Adventures of Porgie and Mudhead were burned, line by line, into your long term memory.

Vinyl was an experience you shared. Listening to the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP while exploring the heights of passion with a half dozen other junior high couples in the dark corners of a friend’s basement. Wondering what the heck the obscure band was that the guys at Discount Records always liked to play while you and your testosterone charged buddies were trying to sneak a peak at banned Jimi Hendrix “Electric Lady Land” album cover. Or running Funkadelic’s “I Got A Thing” over and over so your band could learn the nuances of a bass line, a wah wah peddle, and some drum licks in a hopeless attempt at imitation.

Vinyl, when mixed with the 12AX7A vacuum tubes that powered your stereo created a warmth that added an indescribable something that the best digital Pro Tools plug-in could never recreate. The LP’s cover became a work of art in itself. Sgt. Pepper’s cover launched a hundred analytical dissertations, fed the Beatle rumor mill and became fodder for trivia buffs who memorized the names and faces of every image thereon.

Vinyl, in the hands of the right disc jockey became an instrument that could create a symphony where disparate artists came together in a seamless harmonic whole to take you on an emotional roller coaster ride.

Then came one turn of the evolutionary road, where it was thought that Vinyl was as anachronistic as a pterodactyl, technically deficient and ultimately too fragile to be a permanent part of the audio archive. CDs and their successor, the MP3 were pure digital storage devices that could be identically cloned without the generational losses inherent in the magnetically arranged iron filings on strips of Mylar or the vibratory bands encircling black plastic.

For three decades we’ve believed that digital perfection was the be all and end all. But now, it seems that everything old is new again. Even as CD sales continue to decline, vinyl is in a renaissance.

The Chicago Tribune quotes Ken Shipley, co-owner of the Numero Group, a Chicago label that specializes in reissues of underground soul music. “We’re seeing the (vinyl) resurgence in all walks of life: from 50-year-old guys who want high-quality product to match their high-end stereos to 19-year-old kids who are sick of the minimalist Ikea design that has plagued dorm rooms for the last decade..Vinyl is the new books.”

Pressing plants are being brought out of mothballs and limited edition vinyl box sets are selling out, at price points that would make CD manufacturers salivate. Bill Gagnon, senior vice president of catalog marketing at EMI Music told the Trib that he expects vinyl to eventually make up about 4% of EMI’s revenue. As with everything else, its the younger generation that is driving the demand.

Will the LP supplant digital? Nope. The pure ease of carrying your entire record library around in a cigarette box that renders it perfectly and pristine first time, every time ensures a digital future.

But like the Keener generation, new audiences are discovering the same magic we remember from that first time we put needle to groove.