Those D.J. Shows: country radio in late 60s Victoria

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That joyous early Supremes song Those D.J. Shows strikes a chord with me. It's about getting out of school and racing home to listen to a Top 40 record show. YouTube Spotify

Even in country Victoria, where I grew up, it wasn't unusual to find a late afternoon radio show aimed at teenage pop fans. Maryborough station 3CV even had one called DJ Show.  

Further north, in Swan Hill, it was the 1330 Show on 3SH (1330 kHz) which held phone-in polls that seem quaint from this distance: Are you a rocker or a jazzer? or Mods versus surfies! Remarkable, considering that this was around late 1963, when the afternoon and evening highlights on 3SH included 4pm Back to the Bible, 6:45 Dad and Dave, and 8:30pm Old-time Dance.

The 1966 ad for 3CV (above) is from the teenage pop magazine Go-Set, showcasing 3CV disc jockeys Rod Batchelder, John McPhee and Graham Lever. It reflects how I remember some country radio from the late 1960s. The graphics are groovy, and the music format is Top 40. 

Like some other commercial country stations in the late 1960s, 3CV was following the big city trend of programming Top 40 music hosted by disc jockeys. I was a teenager who was picky about both music and radio, but I never hesitated to listen to 3CV Maryborough or 3SH Swan Hill as alternatives to the capital city Top 40 stations. (One or the other was always nearby, depending on whether I was away at school or back home at my parents' place.) A bonus was that you could hear some great songs that weren't being played on the big city stations.

My memory of a golden era of country pop radio might be a little selective, though, as I saw when I looked up some of the Country Radio guides in Melbourne's Age newspaper. 

At that time, in 1966, traditional content still dominated across the 13 commercial stations* in regional Victoria. Listings like these hardly suggest wall-to-wall Top 40: 11:40am Friendship Club (3SR), 10:15am Singalong (3SR), 3:15pm Variety Fair (3BO), and 8:30pm Bible Speaks To You (3HA).

Several serials were still on air across the state, including Dr Paul (3BO, 3CV, 3HA, 3NE, 3SH, 3TR). The serials were disappearing from Australian radio, and in the capital city Melbourne by this time only 3DB was still airing them. The networked radio quiz shows - Quiz Kids, Winner Take All, Pick-a-Box  and all - had already folded or migrated to TV which came to Australia in 1956.

When I looked at 3CV's schedule in the Country Radio guide around the time of the  Go-Set ad, I was surprised to see that it doesn't mention deejays Batchelder, McPhee and Lever, nor does it name the programs from the ad. 

Batchelder's Big Breakfast Show is easy to spot - 6am Breakfast Show - and you can guess that McPhee's Big 100, or Lever's Go Go Show fitted in somewhere to 2pm Hits, 4pm Teen Beat, and 7pm Music. Not as exciting as the THE GREATEST SHOW IN VICTORIA the Go Go Show, though. (3CV's DJ Show came later.)

In the capital city radio guide in the same paper, top-rating Top 40 station 3UZ had for some time listed most of its programs as deejay shows - DON LUNN - Breakfast session, STAN ROFE SHOW, KEN SPARKES SHOW -  so I had expected something similar.
 
In fact the only on-air name to appear in the 3CV schedule is 11:30am Binnie Lum, the notable women's broadcaster who had been dropped by Melbourne station 3XY in 1964 but survived on the regional Victorian Broadcasting Network (VBN).

Certainly, there's nothing much in the Guide to suggest that 3CV was THE STATION THAT'S GETTING THE COUNTRY GO-GOING From Victoria's Swingin' Centre. Perhaps it was a lack of space, or perhaps the writer of the Go-Set ad didn't coordinate with whoever typed up the schedule for The Age. Even so, I do remember listening to deejay shows on 3CV, but I suppose I would have twiddled the dial when anything else came on.

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Up on the Murray River at 3SH Swan Hill in 1966, some of the station's on-air personalities were starting to appear in the printed schedule. The ubiquitous 10am Dr Paul serial is still there, and so is 11:30am Binnie Lum (VBN again) along with networked cooking celebrity 11:15am Graham Kerr. But there are also some local names: 9am Alan Kidd Ladies' Show, 12pm Mal Sutton and 4pm Bob Taylor. Still hanging on were early evening serials 6:45pm Dad and Dave and 7:15pm Three Brothers, and that country radio fixture from the USA, 9:30pm Back to the Bible. 

By 1968, though, it was wall-to-wall disc jockeys at 3SH. (The 3SH ad above is from Go-Set in June 1967). No serials, no specified "ladies" show, and no American evangelism (not in the program guide, anyway); just 5am Denis O'Kane Show, 9am Mal Sutton Show, 12pm Barry Bissell Show, 4pm Bob Taylor, 7 pm John Browne, with news at least hourly. This looks a lot like the DJ oriented schedule of 3UZ. The entry for 3SH in the Australian Radio Almanac (1967) uses the phrase strictly top 40 format.

3SH's Barry Bissell became a legend of Australian radio, best known through his years at FOX-FM in Melbourne and as founding host of the national Take 40 Australia. 

In a 2019 Swan Hill Guardian interview, Barry recalls the change from “very old school” programming to a "hits format" soon after he joined 3SH in 1967 when he was still a teenager. He says, “There was a box of 45s (records) in the studio, and an A, B and C list, but I cheated all the time and played my favourites; which everybody did.” This sort of personal input might help to explain my impression that the records on a country station could depart from what was heard in the big city. 

In 1968, 3TR Sale* was also listing deejays' names as program titles: 5am Laurie Miller, 9:30am Sam Gales, 2:30pm Keith Wells, and 5pm George Danes.  

Other stations list only one or two on-air names, but to be fair there are programs scattered throughout the Country Radio schedules that were probably filled with Top 40 music. Apart from the generic 2pm Music (3NE but common across the board), they include the aforementioned  5pm DJ Show, plus 7 pm Top 40 Hits in DJ Show to Midnight (3CV), 6pm Teentime (3HA), and 5:45pm Latest Hits from the Charts (3UL). There could even be some pop hits behind the neutral 7:30pm Evening Show (3HA), and although 4pm Music for Moderns (3CS) is an ungroovy name, the timeslot is right for an after-school deejay show.

Other examples don't really scream "Top 40": 10:30pm Jazz Club (3YB), 10:40pm Armchair Melodies (3BA), 7:15pm Light and Lovely (3GL), and 8:30pm Serenade (3SR), so the trend wasn't unanimously followed. 

Although I remember the music, country radio was full of other content. Country stations served their local communities in the way that the local newspapers did. As Barry Bissell says, it was "market reports, funeral announcements, dedications to those in hospital". They aired networked content and syndicated shows distributed on discs, but they had a full roster of local announcers from opening to closing.

There were shows for children such as 4:35pm Children (3NE) and (I'm guessing) 4pm Sunshiners' Club (3MA); and women's shows 2pm Women's Corner (3BA), 9am Women's Mag (3GL). In their heyday, some women's shows had active clubs with an off-air presence, as the 3SH Women's Club had with its own club-rooms. A surprising number of religious programs were aired, especially but not necessarily on Sundays: 3:45pm Christian Science (3BO), 5:30pm Religion (3BA), 9pm Salvation Army (3NE).

These days, it's sad to see multiple stations carrying identical lineups from a distant hub, sometimes with only one or two local announcers. Increasingly, this happens in a town where the local paper is struggling or has closed down. On the bright side, many country towns now have a thriving community radio station, including 99.1 SmartFM in Swan Hill and Goldfields FM in Maryborough Vic.

Back in the day, regional commercial radio could even do proper local news coverage. One night in Swan Hill in 1963, when it seemed half the town turned out to see a fire that had broken out in a timber yard, we were joined by 3SH's Ken Guy with a portable recorder, covering the story for the next day's News. 

I shared that with Ken on a Facebook thread not long ago. He said he didn't remember it, but it sounded right. It's good to know that not all my memories of country radio are faulty.

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Those D.J. Shows
Right now, I'm in school
But as soon as the homebell rings
I'm gonna run to my locker
And gather up all my things
Then out the door
Running home I'll go
Faster than a new jet plane
And then turn on my radio
I'm gonna listen to those D.J. shows
I'm gonna be diggin' that rock 'n' roll
If I don't I'll go insane

This was an early Supremes track written and produced by William "Smokey" Robinson. It didn't make their first album Meet The Supremes and remained unreleased until an expanded edition of the album in 2010. [Also on Spotify]

Patrice Holloway also recorded a version, also unreleased until years later. YouTube

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3SH was clearly serious about promoting its on-air personalities, as seen in the Go-Set ad for 3SH (above, in text). Of all the Victorian country stations listed in the 1967 Australian Radio Almanac [view here], it has the biggest entry. Note the phrase strictly top 40 format. .

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Click here for all posts at this blog about 3SH (or mentioning it).

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VBN: the Victorian Broadcasting Network, 1965 trade ad.

 

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The Victorian commercial country stations listed in the Country Radio guide in The Age in the 1960s, with their call-signs and frequencies at that time.^†

3BA Ballarat 1320 kcs (kHz)
3BO Bendigo 960
3CS Colac 1130
3CV Maryborough 1440
3GL Geelong 1350
3HA Hamilton 1000
3MA Mildura 1470
3NE Wangaratta 1600
3SH Swan Hill 1330
3SR Shepparton 1260
3TR Sale 1240*
3UL Warragul 530
3YB Warrnambool 1210

3LK Lubeck 1090, near Horsham (now 3WM), was mainly a relay station for 3DB Melbourne and wasn't listed in the Country Radio guides.

*3TR: From 1930 it was in Trafalgar but moved to Sale in 1932 then to Traralgon in 1989. Even earlier, in 1929, it was an amateur station 3FB owned by Frank Berkery.

^†Australian AM stations were changed in 1978 to space them at 9 kHz intervals instead of the original 10 kHz.

Toppermost of the poppermost: the charts

Occasionally a visitor to my website emails that they are not happy about the chart placings that I list for Australian records. They are usually people who are heard on those very records. That is is to say, artists.

There are two sources of disappointment: The Legendary International Hit and My Record Did Better Than That! The quotes below are not real examples. I'm improvising around the theme of emails I've had over the years from artists about the insultingly low chart placings I've listed for their records from the 50s, 60s, or 70s.

1. The Legendary International Hit
• Our manager definitely told us we were #10 in Los Angeles.
• We were shafted by the Aussie music business, but our record charted Top 20 in Pennsylvania!
• Oh yeah, we were big all over the world. #1 in Sweden, Greece and Czechoslovakia.

These claims are nearly always wrong, and I usually know that before I've checked the sources. 

You can also see statements like these in old newspaper stories. Back then, who was going to check any of this? There were no obsessive smart alecs like me who would go online and dig around till they found an answer. There was no "online", for a start.

If you said in 1965 that a record was big in Hungary, how would an Aussie music journo or the work experience kid from Go-Set know anything different? In any case, the effort and resources needed to do a fact-check would be ridiculous for a harmless little claim like that.

I wouldn't suggest that the artist made it up, because they seem sincerely to believe the legend. It's more likely to have originated with a creative publicist or journalist. Or a manager.

My favourite hypothesis is that somebody mailed a chart (in an envelope, with a stamp) from an obscure locality in the US where our artist was racing up the chart at the local radio station, and everyone jumped to the wrong conclusion. (How about a chart from WNRI Woonsocket, Rhode Island, say?) But more later on radio station charts.

Honourable mention In 1976, Sydney singer Jeff Hilder  told The Sun-Herald that he was back in Australia after living in Venezuela where he had been on the local charts. 

Yeah right, thought this smart alec. We'll see if that stands up to 21st century fact-checking. 

Well, it's not easy to find archival Venezuelan charts, but I found Jeff at #6 in Venezuela in February 1972 with a song called Mañana será otro día. Sorry I doubted you, mate.

2. My Record Did Better Than That!
• But we were #5 in Melbourne! Here's the actual 3DB chart that I clipped from the newspaper.
• How could I have been only #16 in Adelaide when I was #5 in Australia overall?

This is more complicated, partly because people have such faith in The Charts of the past. It's as if they were handed down in stone by some all-seeing data collector in the sky, who knows exactly how many 45s were sold in any week in 1965. So if they see #5 printed somewhere, it must be #5. Read on to see why not.

Retrospective charts The charts that we consult today for Australia in the 50s, 60s and 70s have been retrospectively compiled from whatever data is available from those years. This pretty much means radio station charts, also known as surveys. (It makes sense, given that the rise of the Top 40 chart, and the loose genre of Top 40 music, came from American radio in the 1950s.)

Each station with a music format would publish its own chart, distributed as a leaflet by music stores, or printed in the local paper. 

In larger cities there could be several charts, and they would all be different.

It wasn't until the 1980s that Australian record charts began to be based solely on reliable sales figures, when the national ARIA chart was established, initially using data from Kent Music Report. In 1997 ARIA started collecting data electronically, direct from music stores, giving rise to the modern concept of a music chart being based on hard sales data. Set in stone, you could say.

The pool of radio station charts would change over the years, as stations changed their formats or stopped publishing charts. For example, Gavin Ryan's Melbourne chart book uses 1967 charts from the 3DB Top 40, the 3AK Top 100, and 3UZ's Official Top 40 (officially 3UZ's, maybe, nothing more).

Radio charts Back then the radio charts were compiled from a number of sources. If a chart did list its sources, it might include record sales, listener requests, or audience surveys. For example, charts from 2UE Sydney and 4BK Brisbane in the 1960s cite "public survey" as well as sales. Public survey could mean anything, and would allow leeway in constructing a chart to reflect the station's playlist and its listeners' preferences.

It's not uncommon to find a song that charted at one station but not at another in the same city.

As chart collector and compiler Tom Guest puts it, At times 'hits' were played on one radio station only and thus appeared on their own charts and not on those produced by stations who, for various reasons, did not include the songs on their airplay lists.

Sales figures and radio charts Sales figures were based on samples rather than comprehensive data from every outlet in town. Wayne Mac, in his radio history Don't Touch That Dial, writes: To compile the 40 most popular songs, stations telephoned selected record stores in their area which reported sales figures on records and sheet music. In addition to raw sales figures, the position or ranking of the week's 40 most popular songs was also subject to overseas sales trends and a station's own predictions...

I don't believe the collection of sales data was always a rigorous process. The ring-arounds to local record stores could be as informal as asking what was selling. One of my reliable correspondents, who worked at a capital city record store, says that it depended on whoever happened to answer the phone, as it wasn't unusual for that person to boost their favourite records.

Retrospective charts can disagree The job of the latter-day chart compiler is to apply some kind of statistical method to reconcile the differences and come up with plausible charts for a city. 

At my website I use Gavin Ryan's charts for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. For two cities there are alternatives: Tom Guest's Melbourne chart book (Thirty Years of Hits) and Top 40 Research's chart book for Sydney (The Book).

This could be confusing to a casual reader. If Gavin Ryan's Sydney chart book has The Rolling Stones' The Last Time peaking at #1 in April 1965, that's it, isn't it? Either The Last Time was #1 in Sydney or it wasn't. So how is it that the other Sydney chart book, The Book, has it peaking at #2? 

Sometimes the contrast is greater: down in Melbourne, Gavin Ryan has The Ray Price Quartet's A Moi De Payer (1962) at #6, Tom Guest has it at #24.

Clearly, these differences are partly down to differences in statistical methods. I'm not privy to these, but Tom Guest told me that he weighted his placings in favour of 3UZ, the highest rating Top 40 station in Melbourne during the 60s, something that makes good sense to me. Even so, Tom has The Groove's Simon Says peaking at #6, and it's Gavin who has it spot on the 3UZ peak at #4. (Add 3DB's #8 to the list and you have three different peaks for the song.)

Another variable is the availability of historic charts to each compiler. Some of them can be found in newspaper and magazine archives, but otherwise it depends on chart collectors. The compilers I know of started out as collectors, but there can be gaps in the charts they can access. Gavin Ryan lists his sources in each book, with a note to the reader: If anyone has further charts that are not listed above, I would be most appreciative if you could pass them on to me for future updates of this book.

Comparing radio charts In spite of these variables, and the presence of outliers in many charts, popular songs could follow similar trajectories in and out of competing station charts.

As one example, I looked at the chart history of an Australian record from 1967, Simon Says by The Groove, as it charted at 3UZ and 3DB in Melbourne. (Chart site ARSA has an uninterrupted run of charts from these two.) It shows up how the charts could differ from each other in detail, but it also shows how close they could be.

Simon Says was on the charts from September 1967 to January 1968. It did better on 3UZ than on 3DB.

3UZ: 18 weeks on the Top 40, 4 weeks in the Top 10, peaked at #4.
3DB: 16 weeks on the Top 40, 2 weeks in the Top 10, peaked at #8.. 

National charts Even the standard national Australian charts for these early decades, now published by David Kent, are based on radio surveys. As he puts it at his website, before rock'n'roll and in the earliest Top 40s, Hit Parade lists were compiled from sales of sheet music as well as records, plus other factors such as public requests and (perhaps) the opinions of radio stations’ personnel!

David Kent's own Kent Music Report provided the de facto official national charts from 1974 till 1983 when ARIA started its charts. Even then, Kent's data, which had increasingly emphasised sales figures over radio surveys, was licensed to ARIA until 1988. 

Go-Set's national charts An earlier national Top 40 had been published in Go-Set magazine 1966-1974 (now published online at gosetcharts.com). It was compiled by Ed Nimmervol using, according to chart historian Daniel Lowe, a combination of sales figures from retail stores as well as... data from the radio stations charts from around the country. 

Even so, in 1968 (for example) the Go-Set carts were simply headed with This chart is calculated each week from the most recent charts from the following radio stations: 2UW, 2UE, 3UZ, 3AK, 3DB, 3XY, 4BC, 4IP, 5AD, 6KA, 6PR, 6KY, 7LA, 7HO. 

(The earliest charts in Britain were also compiled by music magazines. New Zealand's magazine charts in NZ Listener were based on polling rather than sales figures and the same was possibly true of NZBC's early Lever Charts.)

What should we make of all this? So if the retrospective charts we have now are not strictly a reflection of how well records actually sold back in the day, but seem to be based on sources that were open to all sorts of biases, are they a pointless exercise? If #10 in 1967 doesn't necessarily mean #10 as we understand it from say, the modern ARIA charts, am I wasting my readers' time by including chart positions at all?

Well, no. And no. It's possible to be too cynical about these collections of playlists, selective sales figures, and whatever the radio stations wanted to type into their charts. 

Even if they were nothing more than a collection of radio playlists, they would provide a pretty good snapshot of what we were listening to at the time.

At the website of pirate station Radio London (The Big L), the compilers of the Fab 40 charts understand this. Not only are they explicit about the fact that the Big L charts were never compiled from figures supplied by retailers, but they consider this to be an advantage: These Radio London Fab Forty charts differ very much from the National or 'Official' sales-based charts of the time, in that they contain numerous entries from obscure recording artists. Those quotes around 'Official' almost look like a put-down.

In the 50s and 60s, we listened to radio. There was no Spotify or YouTube, no instant downloads or file sharing. There was radio, some TV, and some vinyl if you could afford it (I usually couldn't: most of my 45s were oddities from the cut-out bins). But mainly it was radio. Our generation had a transistor radio to an ear at every possible moment. We woke up to Top 40 radio and we fell asleep to it.

Listening in to Melbourne, I was a dial surfer, from The Greater 3UZ, over to 3DB for Barry Ferber, and on to 3AK or 3KZ as the whim took me. I became a fan of 3XY when it flipped to a pop format.

As a result, if I browse through the Melbourne chart books of Gavin Ryan or Tom Guest, compiled using charts from several stations, I am looking at a recognisable analogue of my teenage listening experience and, I assume, that of my readers. 

Remember too, that radio stations were in a competitive commercial industry. It was their job to tap into the tastes and preferences of their audiences, and I doubt that their playlists and charts were compiled offhandedly. A retrospective chart based around radio playlists still has credibility, even if its sources were not based strictly on sales data.

A final digression My habit of switching stations must have been common, because when 3XY changed its format from adult-oriented albums to Top 40 singles, it placed its news at 10 to and 10 past the hour, an innovation from America. The thinking was that kids listening to the established stations would twiddle the dial in search of music when the news came on at the top of the hour. At that time 3XY would be playing a record, so the kids might discover the station and stay... But maybe only till 10 past when the news came on!

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Toppermost of the poppermost are John Lennon's words, but you probably know that by now.

Sources I haven't used academic footnoting, but I've drawn on these sources.
• Daniel Lowe's informed, concise overview of the history of Australian charts. [Offline but archived here.]
• Detailed chart history at Milesago which covers Australia and other countries: Top 40 Radio and the Pop Charts
• The indispensable ARSA - The Airheads Radio Survey Archive
• Wayne Mac, Don't Touch That Dial: Hits & Memories of Australian Radio (2005)
• Gavin Ryan's Music Chart Books for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth 1953-2013, (2004-2007)
• Thomas J. Guest, Thirty Years of Hits: Melbourne Top 40 Research 1960-1990 (1991)
• Jim Barnes, Fred Dyer and Stephen Scanes, The Book, Top 40 Research Services (1986)
• Website for David Kent's Australian Chart Books (includes online store)
• Alan Smith's history of British charts at Dave McAleer's website [Internet Archive]
• New Zealand's Lever Hit Parades 1960-66 and NZ Listener Charts 1966-74 with brief commentary at Flavour of New Zealand.

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Collectors' Corner Here is my entire collection of authentic 1960s charts

:

Only in Melbourne (3) Al Wilson - Do What You Gotta Do (1968)

Only in Melbourne: tracks that didn't chart Top 40 in their countries of origin but did better in the capital of my home state, Victoria. See also: Only in Oz.

3. Al Wilson - Do What You Gotta Do
(Jim Webb)
USA 1968 
Soul City single (USA) #761.
Liberty single (Australia) #LYK-2111
Liberty single  (UK) #LBF 15044
Australian charts: #12 Melbourne (Ryan), #23 Melbourne (Guest) (#38 Australia).

Do What You Gotta Do has been recorded by many, but Al Wilson's version was the one I heard on Melbourne radio in 1968, and it remains the definitive version for me.

I probably heard it on 3XY which had recently switched to a pop format. If 3XY was pushing it, that might explain why it doesn't rate so highly on the chart collated by Tom Guest, whose data is purposely weighted in favour of the highest rating Melbourne station at that time, 3UZ.

Among Al Wilson's songs, Do What You Gotta Do hasn't always been easy to find. His four Billboard Top 40 hits appear often on compilations, especially The Snake (1968, #27 USA) and Show And Tell (1973, #1 USA), the songs he is perhaps best remembered for.

Once again, a song that sounds to me as if it should have been a big worldwide hit, but even in Australia, Melbourne was apparently the only city where it made an impact. A beautiful Jim Webb composition, produced by Johnny Rivers, it has everything: smooth, wistful soul vocals by Wilson - strong but gentle, sad but collected - and a flawless arrangement, with strings and horns by Marty Paich.

It was first recorded by Johnny Rivers himself, on his album Rewind (1967), and other musicians clearly appreciated the composition. Larry's Rebels had a #6 hit version in New Zealand in 1968, and at my page about the song I also list 1968 versions by Nina Simone, Bobby Vee, Clarence Carter, Paul Anka, and Ronnie Milsap, as well as later versions by B.J. Thomas (1970), Roberta Flack (1970), Tom Jones (1971) and Linda Ronstadt (1993). A version by The Four Tops charted #11 in the UK in 1969.

See also Strawberry Children - Love Years Coming, another Only in Melbourne song written by Jimmy Webb.

Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Melbourne chart book, and Tom Guest's Thirty Years of Hits 1960-1990: Melbourne Top 40 Research. 

5KA Adelaide: 1968 airchecks

Below are five audio clips from 5KA in 1968. They give you a good idea of how Australian commercial Top 40 radio sounded at the time.

5KA was an AM station in Adelaide (population then around 800,000), the capital city of South Australia. It eventually went to FM as KAFM, now Triple M Adelaide.

The mp3s were available for a while at the now defunct 5KA Reunion site (2001), along with dozens of other 5KA sound files from the 1950s to the 1990s.¹

An archived version of 5KA Reunion can be seen at Pandora, the Australian web archive. If you go here you will be redirected to the exact page. Fortunately, the audio files are still accessible: it's a treasure trove!

It's a shame that we have no thriving aircheck² sites in Australia. For the US there are many such sites, notably ReelRadio's Top 40 Depository where you can listen to hundreds of historic audio clips from all over the country (paid sub required). For the UK, for example, the Pirate Radio Hall of Fame has numerous airchecks from the pirate stations (including the voices of a surprising number of Australian deejays). 

[Update: The Radio Antenna blog has a growing collection of Australian airchecks from several decades, See also their Facebook page.]

My tattered copy of the Australian Radio Almanac (c.1968), lists only Stuart Jay under 5KA. (The 5DN entry has details of eight announcers: maybe they paid up.) Mike Fewster, heard below on Breakfast at 5KA, is listed under 5KA's country affiliate 5RM in Renmark.

The 5KA Reunion site also had a page packed with jingles, including some from the 1960s created in the US by the PAMS organisation. Listeners to other stations around the world might recognise them, with the callsign of their local station substituted. I have posted one example from 5KA.

5KA 1968 - Mike Fewster [Breakfast].mp3
5KA 1968 - Jim Slade [Drive].mp3
5KA 1968 - Ian Sells [Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Stuart Jay [Late Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Lawrie Bruce [Midnight-Dawn].mp3

5KA jingle 1960s.mp3






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Footnotes:
1. At this YouTube page, Jim Slade recalls that the 1968 set of 5KA airchecks was prepared as a showcase for prospective advertisers. This explains the announcer who introduces each clip, but apart from that they do seem to be genuine recordings of on-air programs.
2. Aircheck: a recording of a radio broadcast (as opposed to a recording made for a broadcast). It can be, for example, a showcase for a professional broadcaster, or an unofficial recording made by a listener. Many CDs of artists of the past are taken from airchecks of live broadcasts. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry.

Lee Haig

Lee Haig was an announcer at 3SH Swan Hill around 1963. He later worked on-air at 3UL Warragul where I heard him one evening: his voice had matured, and he sounded great. After that I lost track of him.

Lee (Leyden) was our next-door neighbour's younger brother, so we often saw him at the time he started at 3SH. I was about twelve or thirteen, and he was probably about seventeen or eighteen, a cheerful, friendly, energetic kind of bloke.

My friends and I sometimes called him "Uncle Lee" because if he was on in the afternoons he would do the kids' show, so he would have to sign on as Uncle Lee. We were half-smart, cheeky young lads, and he must have found us pretty annoying.

Even so...

I was a radio nut: I used to stay up late picking up remote stations (they started to come in around sunset), and I would mark their locations on a map of Australia.

One Saturday I had a big length of aerial wire that I was trying to string up in the yard outside my window, but I couldn't get much height. Lee saw I was getting nowhere, so he grabbed the end of it and climbed up a tall pine tree, right to its skinny top so that he was swaying dangerously from side to side, and he tied my aerial up there. After that, I pulled in those after-sunset stations better than ever.

Two kinds of people: those who won't rest until they've solved the Whatever Happened To...? puzzle, and those who prefer to move on and stay pretty much in the present. I'm with the first group, who can't resist Googling old friends' names, or searching for them at FriendsReunited or Facebook.

Last week I was thinking about radio in the sixties, and about my aerial up the pine tree in the side garden. I wondered what had happened to Lee Haig, and I found him at the Herald-Sun's Tributes website. He died in Melbourne last October.

I was thinking: I'll write about him here, and anyone who ever Googles "lee haig" + 3sh or 3ul will easily find this page.

Bob Carmichael at 3NE Wangaratta

Earlier, I mentioned the opening of 3NE Wangaratta in 1954. Bob Carmichael, who was on air at 3NE from its earliest days, has a page of reminiscences at his website. [Now offline: here's a link to the archived version.]

And yes, there is a photo of Bob at a broadcast from a country ball: see also the radio memoirs of Frank Avis and John Pearce for anecdotes about this country radio staple.

"Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio"

A highlight of John Pearce's radio memoirs (see earlier post) is his remote broadcast from a country dance for 3SH Swan Hill, probably some time in the late 1940s.

I've just found another entertaining account of a country dance broadcast, this time from Frank Avis in The Ball Broadcast, recalling his time at 2LF Young in the mid-1950s. Avis, best known as a radio newsman, is publishing his memoirs as a blog at FrankAvis.com.

Frank Avis started in radio at 2MG Mudgee, and his latest post (15 February) takes his career up to 2DAY-FM Sydney in the 80s and 90s. Along the way, he's worked at 2LF Young, 3BO Bendigo, 7HO Hobart, 3UZ, 3XY, 3AK and 3DB Melbourne, 6PR Perth, 3MP Mornington Peninsula, and 2GB and 2MMM-FM Sydney.

Frank arrived at 3BO not long after the young John Laws left, and he tells a couple of good yarns about Laws's time at the station.

Great stories from a radio insider: highly recommended.

2QN Deniliquin

In the last post I mentioned 2QN Deniliquin, where John Pearce started in radio in the 1940s before moving on to 3SH Swan Hill.

When we lived in Swan Hill in the 60s, 2QN was one of the stations I could pick up clearly if I was roaming the dial looking for pop music. Another was 2WG Wagga Wagga. Like most country stations at the time, they had their moments of good Top 40 programming, presented by disc jockeys who could sound just as good as their big city counterparts. One of the 2QN announcers had an American accent, something unusual on Aussie country radio.

This Melbourne Argus story from 23 February 1945 (via the NLA's Australian Newspapers archive) shows how a financially weak 2QN nearly lost its licence to Wangaratta, a town in north-eastern Victoria. Click here for larger image.

Wangaratta didn't get its own commercial station until 3NE opened in 1954.

John Pearce at 3SH Swan Hill

[The Argus, 1932]

For the Love of Mike, the memoirs of Australian radio announcer John Pearce, were published online a few years ago. His radio career starts just after the War, when he chanced upon a job at 2QN Deniliquin after he was de-mobbed from the RAAF. He went on to 3SH Swan Hill, 7HO Hobart, and to 2GB Sydney, where he was one of the pioneers of Australian talk-back radio.

Pearce's site is no longer online, but fortunately we can still access the whole work at the Internet Archive [title page, table of contents].

Being a radio fanatic from way back, I find this insider's view of radio irresistible, especially the chapter on 3SH, our local station during my teenage years. Pearce seems to have been at 3SH around the late 40s to early 1950s.

Pearce calls 3SH a "fun station", a "happy station", and this comes through in his reminiscences. There are plenty of endearing characters and entertaining stories: the outside broadcast at a local dance (how quaint!), hillbilly amateurs on the Christmas Appeal radiothon, grappling with a local politician to make sure he stayed near the mike, locking the duty announcer in the outside dunny while a three-minute song was playing...

The station manager at 3SH was Harry Lithgow, still there when we moved to Swan Hill in 1961. I believe Chief Engineer Bernie Walsh was still around then too.

Since For the Love of Mike has disappeared from an active website, and does not seem to have been published as a book, I'm posting the chapter on 3SH, which gives a great insight into the workings of a country commercial station in the pre-rock'n'roll era.

Victorians to the North:

Chapter 7 of John Pearce - For the Love of Mike

In the days when broadcasting meant radio, and not television and/or radio, the Victorian Broadcasting Network consisted of a head office in Melbourne and three country radio stations.

The main one was in Hamilton, the second best was in Sale and what was left went to Swan Hill, way north on the River Murray, the dividing line between Australia and Victoria. I got a job as an announcer at the latter. I can't remember how I got it, not even how I learned about it. Read it in the paper, maybe. However, it was mine; and I arrived after the adventure of the drive in my vintage Hupmobile...

Continued here...

Chucklers Weekly (3): Pat Boone, Bob Rogers and make a book cover!

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers and comics.

Apart from the comics, Chucklers Weekly included short stories, puzzles, general knowledge features, pop music news, competitions and readers' advertisements (Exchange Corner and Penfriends). The content was wholesome, even educational, fare. (Crystals are interesting!) There was nothing here that would upset parents at a time when comic books had had some bad press.

The pin-up boy of Chucklers Weekly was Pat Boone, the clean-cut American crooner and movie star who had hits with whitebread versions of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs and otherwise occupied the lighter end of the pop spectrum. He even wrote an advice book for the youngsters called 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty that I remember being promoted through Chucklers Weekly. In fact, looking back, Chucklers Weekly was nuts about Pat Boone, almost an Aussie branch of his PR team.

Of the two white-collar-and-tie disc jockeys featured here, Bob Rogers from 2SM in Sydney was the most famous nationally. Five years later, by then with 2UE, he was embedded with The Beatles' tour of Australia, an arrangement that was continually crashed by 2SM's Mad Mel, a wacky deejay from America who would have seemed shocking in 1959.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

The Timeout Instrumental

At the end of the hour on Top 40 radio, just before the news, the last record would end, the deejay would talk for a bit, and then he would fade in an instrumental track that had been playing in the background. The instrumental would be cued up so that it finished right on the pips (the electronic countdown to the hour). This practice was common in the 60s, but it seems to have faded out during the 70s.

I asked radio historian Wayne Mac and former 2GB panel operator Gregg Sinclair if there was a name for it and they said, yes, it was called timing out, and the tracks were fillers or timeouts.

In my mind, these works have always formed an unofficial, unnamed sub-genre of the pop instrumental. Radio people in the 60s could identify it immediately, just by choosing something that sounded okay in between a bunch of hit records and the news.

I'm calling this musical sub-genre the Timeout Instrumental, just so it has a name.*

The Timeout Instrumental might have been something by Herb Alpert (right): maybe Bittersweet Samba or Up Cherry Street or Mexican Shuffle. It probably wouldn't be the latest Shadows hit, but it could be one of their B-sides or an EP track, something like The Miracle. You might have heard some album tracks, often by middle-of-the-road orchestras. I'm sure Dalilia, that space-age classic by Roger Roger & his Champs-Elysées Orchestra, would have been used: it was a favourite as background music on Australian radio and TV.**

As examples of likely Timeout Instrumental artists, Gregg Sinclair gives The Baja Marimba Band (associates of Herb Alpert), Bill Justis and Floyd Cramer. Raymond Lefèvre's Soul Coaxing is one track he recalls.

There was some skill in timing out: if the timeout track was 3 minutes long, it had to start playing, faded down, three minutes before the pips, while the last record was still playing. Gregg Sinclair writes:

The art of ‘timing out’ was made all the more interesting by the fact that most of the tracks supplied weren’t timed! Believe it or not, any panel operator worth his salt could look at a track and determine how long it ran. After a few years of experience, I could look at an album track and say: “that’s about a 2’45” job”! However, I always preferred to time them if I had the chance. Usually, I’d get in early and go through the ‘music log’ - radio talk for the playlist – and time the appropriate tracks prior to going on air.

There was a feeling in radio that using instrumental filler in this way sounded sloppy or out of date, so from the late 60s it was replaced by playing regular vocal hits up to the news.

For me, though, it lives on. Sometimes when I hear an old instrumental track I haven't heard before - maybe something by Cyril Stapleton or Sounds Incorporated - I find myself waiting for the pips, and I know I've stumbled on another Timeout Instrumental.

[For more on Timeout Instrumentals, see follow-up posts here and here.]

...................................................................................................
*As a genre, Timeout Instrumental is similar to Northern Soul in that (1) it is applied retrospectively and (2) works are included not strictly for being of one musical style. See also Bizarro Shadows World Down Under, which is applied retrospectively and is partly defined by geography rather than style.

**Timeout Instrumental intersects with what is now known as Space Age Pop (another retrospective genre). For more on Dalilia, see Only in Oz (9).

Billy J. Kramer, Del Shannon and The Beatles

The way I remembered it, the first Beatles songs I ever heard - before I’d even heard of The Beatles - were Do You Want To Know A Secret by Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas and From Me To You by Del Shannon. Both songs were on Australian radio around June 1963.

I first heard Billy J. Kramer's Do You Want To Know A Secret in the middle of the night, around 3.00 am, when I'd got up to fix a snack and had pulled in some distant Top 40 station on the kitchen radio, turned down low so I wouldn't wake up the folks. The station might've been 2SM, from Sydney, one of those stations that used to come in only after dusk.

I liked it in the same way I liked other melodic pop songs of the early 60s: George Hamilton's Abilene, The Everlys' So Sad, or Joe Brown's That's What Love Will Do.

I had no idea that Do You Want To Know A Secret originated with an approaching cultural hurricane, The Beatles.

I’ve always had this picture of myself, alone in the late-night kitchen and hearing - through the static and fade-outs of a distant station - a first breeze, a faint stirring of something greater, still unimagined.

This was a few months before the summer vacation of '63-'64, when Beatlemania would hit us properly, when I Want To Hold Your Hand and I Saw Her Standing There would be all over the radio. The Beatles wouldn’t really enter my consciousness until the Australian Spring of 1963.

Back in the winter, when I’d heard Del Shannon's version of From Me To You on 3DB, the announcer - Barry Ferber - had made it sound as if this was just another Del Shannon gem, and he’d added, "There's also a version of that out by Britain's Beagles."


Beagles? As in Donald Duck comics, the Beagle Boys? Ferber probably did say Beatles and I misheard him, but it gave me a picture of some eccentric English band who wore black eye masks and shirts with prison numbers.

Thing is, it didn't matter, because this was a Del Shannon record and, Beagles or Beatles or whatever, who would care if they covered one of Del's records?

Before the British Invasion, Del Shannon was already one of the greats, always on the radio, always coming up with pure, enjoyable pop, song after song: Hats Off To Larry, Two Kinds Of Teardrops, Swiss Maid.... and has Runaway ever not been on the radio since 1961?

We used to sing Here she comes (here she comes) from Little Town Flirt when we saw our English teacher, Miss Phillips, coming down the walkway. Even into 1964, the Year of Beatlemania, Del's churning versions of oldies like Handy Man and Do You Want To Dance added new life to them, updated them for the moment.

So I also liked to think that Del Shannon, with his cover of From Me To You, was a messenger who reached me with distant news of what was to come.

The other day, though, when I checked the Melbourne charts for 1963, I realised that my idea about Del’s cover version overshadowing the original was a mistake.

In fact, The Beatles’ From Me To You must have been the better-known version in Melbourne, entering the charts in May and eventually peaking at #4. There is no trace of Del Shannon’s version in the Melbourne charts. (It did chart in Sydney and Adelaide in June, alongside The Beatles. Billy J. Kramer charted in Brisbane and Adelaide, also in June.)

What’s more, The Beatles’ Please Please Me had already charted in Melbourne the previous month. It only got to #29, so maybe I wasn’t the only one it failed to make a huge impression on.

And I guess your memories of music are of what made an impression on you, of what you noticed at the time, and that might not be reliable music history. I must have heard the Beatles around April or May ’63, and some kids around me were actually going out and buying their singles, but until about September I wasn’t taking any notice.

It does turn out that Del Shannon's From Me To You was the first US cover of a Beatles song, and the first Beatles composition to chart in the US (it got into the 90s, a bit higher than the Beatles' own initial release), and he'd heard it while touring Britain with The Beatles. So he must’ve been the Beatles' advance scout for a number of Americans.

As for the supposed Beagles: there were at least three US singles by bands called The Beagles in the mid-60s, and at least two of them were Beatles-related. One was a 1964 cover of Can't Buy Me Love on the Hit label, the other was I Wanna Capture You, a 1966 Columbia single from an animated dog cartoon, a cash-in on the British Invasion.

At last, The Beagles!
Full story at Toon Tracker.