The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 9) payola isn’t dead. It always smelled like that (II)

The power of the DJ led to some of the more interesting courtship rituals in corporate America. The record companies catered to vices the DJs didn’t even know they had. “I had to get the broads to the hotel,” said Artie Ripp of his early days in the record business, “and then make sure the disc jockey who had just finished with the redhead knew that the blonde was down the hall.”

Joe Smith, who was a DJ in Boston before rising to the presidency of Elektra Records, knows about this practice from both ends:

A guy who will go unnamed was the music director up at WINS when Alan Freed was there. It was a hot radio station. The guy was making $125 a week as the music director. And he was living over on Sutton Place, wearing fancy suits, driving a fancy car, going off to Europe, on his $125 a week. The station manager, oblivious to all this, said, “You’re doing a great job. We’re going to promote you to the news department and give you $200 a week.” He begged him, “Please! Don’t do that to me!”

Payola was a modus operandi, a way of life in the golden age of rock and roll, in the ‘50s. In 95 percent of the cases, the best disc jockeys didn’t play records for money. They played records and they got money. A distributor or a label would give a disc jockey $500 a month or $1 000 a month, and you would pick from their records. If there was nothing there, you didn’t play it. Everyone was in such fierce competition for ratings and business that you couldn’t make up a program of stiffs, just because you got paid.

“Guys at the radio stations got money, of course,” Ripp agreed, “but the interesting thing was that most of them were taking money to play records they would play anyway.”

In its own way, this might represent capitalism at its finest, a study in supply and demand that even Adam Smith would admire. On the one hand, the disc jockeys and music directors wanted to keep that $1 000 a month coming in. At a time when a good salary in radio was $125 a week, that $1 000 nearly doubled what most made. However, to keep that money coming in, you had to keep the audience listening, and audiences know when a song sucks as well as the DJ, and probably even better. So it involved a delicate balance, and more than likely Smith and Ripp’s rose-colored version of the bad old days of radio on the take has a smack of truth.

In the late 1950s, however, the U.S. Congress took an interest in levelling the media playing fields. It started with hearings on “the TV game show scandal,” wherein a major winner revealed he had received the answers in advance of the show. When the congressmen saw the kind of media play this got them, they looked for another high-profile target, and found a way to kill two birds (or more) with one stone.

Neither the mainstream record industry or the performance royalty organisations, companies that collected money for the song owners and payed them (theoretically) every time a song was played, particularly liked rock and roll at its outset – especially ASCAP, which was still pretty snooty about who it let join (the reason one of the other performance royalty companies, BMI, represents so much early rock and roll). Since the major record companies had yet to finish milking the careers of the Doris Days and Frankie Laines, they let the independent companies break rock and roll, and these independents made a fortune.

Both ASCAP and the RIAA had been lobbying Congress about rock and roll. By convening hearings about radio taking bribes to play music, congressmen could answer these lobbyists and maintain their high profiles in the media at the same time.

It takes money to make money, and some feel that – especially at this juncture in the rise of popular music and rock and roll – payola actually helped level the playing field for the new performers. “Black artists got far more exposure than ever before,” author James Surowiecki noted, “and small labels put out records that everyone was listening to. I’m not convinced that would have happened without payola.”

The records that “had a beat and you could dance to” came out largely via the indies, and payola almost served to vet them. After all, a record company must have had the funds to get a record distributed if it had the funds to grease the DJs.

The major companies missed the point in a lot of ways, ignoring the emerging baby boom generation and the idea that these kids didn’t want to listen to the same music as their parents, that Patti Page and Perez Prado and Perry Como didn’t appeal to the kids who listened to their portable radios, bought the Coca-Cola the stations sold via advertising, and went to the dances and concerts the radio stations sponsored. They failed by not targeting the kids, the same way they would fail by only targeting the kids 50 years later – the further irony of this being that it was largely the same audience being ignored!

But subpoenas were dispatched and the radio and rock and roll record industries were summoned to Washington to testify. “I was out with Jimmy Van Heusen and Dick Clark was out with his wife,” Juggy Gayles recalled of the days before the hearings. “Clark and Van Heusen were impressed with each other. Clark told us that his lawyers told him to keep his cool. If they ask you a question they already know the answer.”

He watched the hearings and followed them. He saw Dick Clark handle the congressional hot seat with aplomb, basically telling the hearing that, as the owner of the several record companies himself, if such a thing as payola existed, he would probably pay more than he would ever receive. One of Juggy’s bittersweet memories involved his subpoena to appear before the payola hearings. It was issued for George Resnick, Juggy’s given name. No one knew George Resnick, so the summons didn’t get served, sparing Juggy the agony of testifying against friends and associates, like Alan Freed, who shot off his mouth like a bottle rocket in front of the committee.

“Alan could be his own worst enemy,” Juggy said of the late dean of disc jockeys, whom he helped lure from Cleveland to bring his inimitable style to New York.

George Furness and me, we got him brought to New York. When the payola thing happened, he was taken. He saw what Dick Clark did and thought, ‘I’ll show him headlines.’ He blew his cool and shot off his mouth. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He was a beautiful guy, a genius. He got taken by a lot of people. I never gave Alan Freed a dime in my life. He used to pick up the tabs when we went out