Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8 | movie | 2004 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

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Examination of the international social, political and musical impact of radio station CKLW during the 1960s and 70s. CK | dG1fV3o3NDktUTBsTWM

Transcript

00:00It was the beginning of a revolution.

00:04The BOSS radio format was fast, fresh and seamless.

00:08I used to think of it kind of as a fine precision watch.

00:11It was a set of gears that just meshed together all the time.

00:15And we had to train and rehearse weeks before we actually changed the format.

00:20The new format was so tight it took two people to make it work.

00:23The jock, who did the talking, and the board operator,

00:26who orchestrated the mix of jingles, commercials and music.

00:29So anytime you wanted the next element in the set,

00:32you would press the cue button and he would fire whatever it was,

00:35whether it was a commercial or jingle or a song.

00:38The object was to fit 18 songs into each hour.

00:41So the songs were played back to back,

00:43and the DJs did their announcements over the run-up.

00:46The music at the beginning of the song is the run-up or the intro,

00:49and those were clocked with a stopwatch,

00:51and boom, you've got to stop talking before the artist starts singing.

00:55C-K-L-W, the big A, with Teddy the truckin' bear,

00:58spreadin' out in the nighttime, baby!

01:00Remember when we used to say, get your motor runnin'?

01:02Now it's get your modem runnin', right?

01:04Oh, hey, John Kay steppin' up on the big A.

01:07Get your motor runnin'.

01:10Head out on the highway.

01:13And you just kept the tempo going, you never really stopped.

01:19C-K has your kind of music.

01:23In the old days, jingles could run anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute long.

01:27The Drake jingles were rarely longer than three seconds,

01:30and each one served a special purpose, to keep things moving.

01:34There was fast to fast, more music, C-K-L-W.

01:37More music, C-K-L-W.

01:40There was fast to slow, more music, C-K-L-W, sung in a nice slow ballad.

01:44More music, C-K-L-W.

01:49There was a slow to fast, a very pretty, melodic singing of...

01:55More music, C-K-L-W.

01:58And then a big, powerful C-K-L-W to take you into things like

02:01The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again and stuff like that.

02:04Prettiest radio jingle ever sung was the Big Eight ballad,

02:08played up against things like Gladys Knight's It Should Have Been Me,

02:11or something, it'd bring a tear to your eye.

02:15The format was carefully constructed around a hot clock,

02:18an hourly programming guide that dictated what got played when,

02:21in order to maximize excitement and minimize tune-outs.

02:25It's a flow chart. It's the programming of the radio station,

02:28the sound of the radio station, which you're constantly tweaking, by the way.

02:32There are a lot of factors go into determining

02:34why that song played at five minutes after ten.

02:36The hot clock was so effective that Les Garland took it with him

02:39when he went to television, as the first program director of MTV.

02:43We did the very same thing at MTV.

02:45The rotations were exactly the way we set them up in radio.

02:48MTV was C-K-L-W. It just had different letters.

02:51The architect of the new format was Paul True,

02:54a U.S. programmer with Drake-format experience and an ear for detail.

02:58He's famous, of course, for having an earphone in his ear 24-7, 365,

03:03and if there was ever a flaw on his radio station, it was pointed out.

03:06We had what were called the bat phone.

03:08If that phone rang, everybody froze.

03:11Garland, did you hear what just happened on your radio station?

03:14Paul, you're in California. It's 11. I'm sleeping.

03:17And he created a situation where 30 or 40 or 50 people came to work every day

03:22knowing that we were going to win today,

03:25that today we were going to kick some serious ass.

03:28After six months of preparation, planning and training,

03:32Drew and his troops were ready to kick ass.

03:35On April 4, 1967, C-K-L-W became a big eight.

03:39C-K-L-W, hit bomb!

03:44And the rest of the industry didn't know what to do with it.

03:47They'd never heard anything like this. Neither had the audience.

03:50I knew the first week and a half to two that we had a winner.

03:55W-K-N-R, Keener 13, it's bomb!

04:01Keener at the time, before C-K-L-W became the big eight,

04:05they dominated the airway.

04:07And the amazing thing to me, in 90 days,

04:10we totally ruined that radio station and became number one.

04:13It came along at a time when people were, I guess, getting tired of the long-winded DJs.

04:18They wanted the quick, concise, talk-over-the-music,

04:21the rapid-fire jingles and the excitement of the 50,000-watt monster that was C-K-L-W.

Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8 | movie | 2004 | Official Trailer

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