#12 Geo’s Media Blog (Who Dat?) New for 7/27/20

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Come September, I’m making a bucket list trip on the train across America which will begin in LA and end up back here in West Palm Beach.
First, I’ll fly from West Palm to Burbank, and then after checking into the Marriott, I’ll have dinner there at the Daily Grill with my daughter Candis and my grandson, Nathaniel.

The last time I ate at the Grille was fifteen years ago when I had flown in to be there for my grandson’s birth. Shortly after checking in to the hotel, I got a surprise call from Candis saying that she was coming by to have dinner with me. The reason her call was kind of surprising was because I knew that her Doctor was going to induce labor the very next morning.

After dinner, she surprised me again when she asked me to take her back to work so she could finish up one more project. Her husband and her mother had refused to take her and said, “Enough of work already, you need to focus on becoming a mother.
Considering that Candis has never heard the no from me, I didn’t think that this would be the best time to start, so off we went.

When we arrived at Warner Brothers where she was the licensing Director, she went into her office and while I waited for her, I wandered around checking out all the gold records and posters that were hanging on the walls. Very cool for an old rocker like me.

A few minutes later out she came carrying a box set of CDs. When she handed them to me, with a tear in her eye she said, “Dad, your grandson is going to be so proud the day he discovers that his grandpa was a Rock Star.”

The CD collection was titled “Nuggets II.” (see on top) What made this collection so special, was that it contained a track by my band, The Jury called, “Who Dat?” which we recorded before before Candis was born.
941443_10151878371704307_282448850_n The next morning at the hospital, we were told that the induced labor thing wasn’t going well, so they decided to go the cesarean route.
As her Doctor said to me, “Mr. Johns, your daughter is much too tiny to be giving birth to a big guy like this.”

Thankfully, it all went well and I soon got to welcome my beautiful grandson Nathaniel into the world. (pictured above with his mother and me)

The next day, I headed back home to Florida where I could hardly wait to tell the new aunty about her new nephew.

When I picked Cami up at school the next afternoon and told her all about Nathaniel’s birth, I also told her about the gift her sister had presented me with.

When I asked if she would like to hear it and she excitedly said yes, I slipped the CD into the player and hit play.
As Terry’s thundering fuzz guitar intro filled the car with sound and I began to sing along all of a sudden, Cami tapped me on the shoulder. When I asked her what she wanted, she asked if it was almost over? When I asked why, she said, “It’s not very good, Daddy!”

(To hear what Cami heard, click on the link near the bottom of the page.)

GEO’S LIFE-LINES
Adversity awakens the talent inside you.

The only men I know who refer to it as a vagina, are Doctors.

Is it just me or have you also that noticed that the growth in positive cases of the Coronavirus seems to be just keeping pace with the growth of the number of people they’re testing?

Scarcity is what gives things value 
 
Going slowly is ok, it’s the stopping that ends everything. 
 
The client isn’t always right but our job is to never let them know. 
 
If you don’t set your own goals you’ll be working on somebody else’s. 
 
I think that the DOJ is just as irrelevant as the FCC, what do they do? 

When the companies who don’t have any debt start making cuts, you know their f*cking ya!
 
Nothing is perfect. 
 
What have accountants invented or created? 
 
When people tell your story, what will they say? 
 
Half of all fiction is true. 
 
As a nurse told me, “You have the power to heal yourself, the Doctor is merely your assistant, pick a good one. 
 
The rich are just another minority who need the government’s help. 
 
Patience is an activity that goes unnoticed. 
 
The mere Passage of time changes a lot of things, including minds.
 
COMMENTS
Josie Thomas: Geo. Who is this Tyler? Sounds like his description fits him to a tee. Maybe he should stop spewing his nonsense and make a more sensible comment. I enjoy your words of wisdom.
Sincerely, Walking in Memphis (The Genius)

Doug Chappelle: I have no idea who Tyler is but his post shows what he is. I think he may be an accountant 🙂 (The Genius)

Ron Hamilton: Tyler, At least have the cojones to write your last name, totally disagree with you about George. For the record, my name is Ron Hamilton and George knows what the hell he’s talking about! (The Genius)

Nick Alexander: You wrote, “You sure know when the New Yorkers are in town. Nothin’ but horns!” Here in Texas, we have a different kind of horns: we bow to burnt orange and say “Hook ‘Em”. :o) (The Genius)

Mark Masley: Great hearing the WVBF clip, some great jocks passed through there. My favorites were Frank Kingston Smith, Ron Robin, Harry Chase, Dale Dorman, and Bill Stephens. I have met them all but Harry. Man what a voice. All these guys were terrific talents and wow what a great radio station that was!
I would still be listening if they were still around! (WVBF Boston 1974)

Mike McVay: George: As someone who built a large radio consultancy myself, and learned much from listening to your stations, you are undoubtedly the father of Adult Contemporary.  You also taught us all how an AC could perform stronger than the then-dominant Top-40 stations of that era by building big entertaining morning shows. The model you created continues to be a huge part of the “Best Practices” of Radio today.  You and I had some great battles that drove the overall shares of radio upward. We grew the audience by competing. In the words of Sun Tzu … “When the elephants fight, the ants take a beating.” (The Birth Of AC Radio)
Geo: Good hearing from you Mike. I’ll never forget attending a George Burns conference when he spotted me, he pointed me out which I thought was very nice of him. However, when my companion leaned over and asked, “Did he just refer to you as the Grandfather of AC radio?” I said, “Nope he said, Godfather.” Well, that’s what I heard and I’m stickin’ to it.
We did have some great battles, Mike, and the radio industry was the better for it. You’re always better when your competing against the best.

Tim Moore: Well, as a 27-year-old VP at TM Productions, the career leap of a lifetime thanks to Jim Long, Tom Merriman, and Jerry Atchley, I arrived from Michigan a “Northern radio Snob.” It’s not that I lacked respect for DFW radio; I simply hadn’t heard it. So shortly after occupying my office on Regal Row, I kept hearing staffers make references to “KVIL” and “Ron Chapman.” So I asked my top sales guy Mike Baer, “What is it about KVIL? I hear it mentioned all the time” He looked at me as if I was a Martian and asked. “Have you LISTENED to them?” I assured Mike I would, and for the first 2-3 days said to myself, “well, they’re really solid and the morning show is very good, but…” Then, after two weeks I said to myself, “This is the most incredible interpretation of AC on the face of the Earth. Chapman and his cast are incredible; everything the station does is relevant to the target and purposeful!” From there forward I coached KVIL’s packaging and atmospherics. The trouble was (and still is), so few can “hear it” much less execute it. (KVIL Jingles)
Geo: I love the word atmospherics, Tim. 🙂

Geo’s Media Blog is an inside look at Radio, Music, Movies, and Life. For a sneak peek at some upcoming Blogs or to see some that you may have missed, go to Geo’s Media Blog @ GeorgeJohns.com. On Twitter @GeoOfTheRadio. Sharing and commenting is appreciated.
 

3 thoughts on “#12 Geo’s Media Blog (Who Dat?) New for 7/27/20

  1. Regarding Tim Moore’s comments on KVIL. I can remember many staff meetings where discussions would be held about how many out of town radio types were coming to Dallas to listen to KVIL to try to figure out the secret to its success. Occasionally, we’d hear stations who tried to imitate it, only to smile amongst ourselves at the very significant elements to the strategy they’d miss. The truth is, it wasn’t THAT complicated. Most of them started with the music. Sure, they could find our playlist and copy that. But what they missed was the music wasn’t the star. It was a concept that baffled many in the industry. The music was the easy part. A carefully tuned ear could instantly recognize a song we’d either play or not. No chart position or record company hype EVER entered the conversation. Simple. The promotions could be copied word for word. Some of the marketing perhaps, if you had the budget (most didn’t). The one thing they could not duplicate was the PEOPLE at KVIL. Not just the on air legends that occupied the various time slots. Literally at every position, from receptionist to engineer. Sales to management. News to board ops. Each person in that position was hired because they were the very best person to accomplish that job. At every level, you were working with passionate, driven and talented individuals with one goal. To do and be the very best. It was no accident and really there wasn’t a lot of luck involved. Literally everything in that building was purposeful. Almost all of it contrived by the brilliant mind of Ron Chapman and a laundry list of very talented people, with second on the list George Johns. (no offense George). How dedicated was management to the task? There was a full time salaried person whose only job each day was to create a one sheet “Daily Sheet”. It listed all of the various local events and topics that were top of mind awareness for that day. Air talent used it seamlessly on the air to relate to listeners. One might think that could be a task assigned as an add-on to perhaps an administrative assistant or DJ. It could have been, but it would have been a secondary task for that person resulting in secondary effort. It might surprise many to learn that the daily sheet was as important as any air talent, promotion or billboard management spent money on. I can’t imagine a scenario in which any other Program Director would be able to go to management and say we need to hire someone to do the daily sheet and pay them equal to an air talent. KVIL did. There were a lot of BIG reasons KVIL was enormously successful. There were probably a lot more SMALL things that created the magic as well. Quality control at every level was uncompromised. Most could never decipher it from listening to a couple of hours of recording of the station. But that’s cool too!

    • Jim Hilliard often said that the Daily Sheet was responsible for at least half of KVILs ratings. The beauty of the sheet was, if you read it on air as it was written, you’d sound like an idiot so each jock had to rewrite it in their own style. It sounded brand new every time you heard it on the radio because it was. Bill Gardner became so addicted to the Daily Sheet that whenever he worked in other markets, he wrote his own. At one point Bill went to work for my brother Reg in Toronto, and after being held up at the border, he barely made it on time for his first shift. However, as Reg said, he sounded more Toronto in that show than any of his other jocks. Geo

  2. An accountant (or business manager) handles the details, tracks the expenses, pays the bills, cuts the checks and tracks to purchase orders. Accountants listen to the radio station, but don’t program it. I always found that if the office staff (including traffic) did not listen to the radio station(s) for whom they work, the radio station is in deep trouble. It also means that very likely, the sales department could care less about the station(s) either. It is up to the sales and general manager to build back morale within the off-air staff. The program director has to keep his or her eye on the program staff to make them fully excited. When I became program director at WHO-AM in 1984, nobody inside the station listened to the radio station anywhere except for the Iowa football and basketball games. Even the program director’s office in this magnificent relatively new palatial building could not monitor the radio station or receive the 50,000-watt AM signal because of all of the steel in the building ! No wonder nobody cared. It took me the better part of a year to begin to turn the old battleship around, starting with running a pair of monitor speakers into my office ! Once I had my monitor speakers, then the G.M. and Sales Manager wanted to know what was going on so they could hear the changes that were happening to WHO !

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