Lady - In the beginning

[styxfanNH]

copied from a friend.

http://chicagoradiospotlight.blogspot.c ... smith.html

Rick Kaempfer (Chicago radio legend) interviews Jim Smith (Chicago radio legend). If you've heard the story of the program director at WLS who said he was going to play Lady until it was a hit, that was Jim Smith. He remembers the story a bit differently though.

The whole interview is very cool, if you're interested in learning something about how radio used to work and reading some fun anecdotes.

Here's the Lady story as told by Jim Smith:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick: Part of the excitement of being a music director for such a big time station must have been helping out up and coming acts hit the big time. I was in the room the day Dennis DeYoung of Styx saw you for the first time in nearly twenty years and he still gave you full credit for giving them their big break. Talk about that decision to play Styx for the first time on the Big 89.

Jim: Truth be told, it was always more important to find the song which the audience would like. Giving a "big break" to the artist was secondary. That said, here is the full story of "Lady" by Styx on WLS.

But one Wednesday morning, Skip Pope, the local RCA guy -- with no warning to me and for no apparent reason -- brought along one member of a group which was on the RCA-distributed Wooden Nickel label, a fellow named Dennis DeYoung. Not a problem, but ironic in the timing.

Skip, with his usual level of hyperbole, told me how great Styx was, how Dennis and the group were looking for a break, how many wonderful songs of theirs had been aired during my BBM-FM days, and how cool it would be if someday they could develop one of their songs to the point where an AM station like WLS would play it.

I waited until he finished his spiel, then calmly went into a meandering explanation of how WLS was always interested in being hip for the nighttime 12-24 audience, but without straying so far into AOR territory that we were no longer perceived as a hit radio station. I explained the concept of the "album-cut oldie" and how a song like "Stairway" was well enough known that we could feel comfortable playing it. (I have a feeling, from the looks on their faces at this point, that they either thought this was all either an impolite change of subject or else a lead-up to a total rejection.)

I then concluded by saying that this new category was being introduced on the air at 6:00 that night, that "Stairway" was one of the songs, and that "Lady" was another. No surprise, they both were jubilant.

How often would it play? I told them the average frequency that each song in that category would come up.

How long would we play it? I remember my exact answer: "Until it becomes a hit; and then it would go into regular rotation. Or until it has run its course in this category and we replace it with something else."

Dennis, of course, only heard the first part and has told the story innumerable times, then and since, that "Jim Smith says WLS is going to play "Lady" until it becomes a hit!" Uh, not quite.

Or was it? What happened next was beyond my expectations and possibly theirs too. Styx did have a local fan base, and they knew how to dial the telephone. Very soon, the song was one of our ten most-requested despite being in a very limited rotation.

The record company re-serviced the record and one of two things happened; either it started selling, or else they persuaded an extraordinary number of record stores to lie to us, week after week. We saw the growth pattern, "Lady" qualified for "playlist consideration" despite a total lack of national chart action, and we moved it onto the regular playlist, where it initially would come up every three hours.

That by itself isn't what made the song a national hit, though, and the unsung hero in this story is Bud Stebbins. Bud was the regional guy for RCA. His marching orders from his bosses at the national level were to push the "priority" records that they had determined. "Lady" was not on their radar screen. Bud basically ignored them.

He took the record to our supposed competitors -- the fading WCFL, the consistent but non-threatening WIND, and the struggling FM WDHF (or were they WMET by then? hmm, don't recall) -- and got them all to add it. More importantly, he worked the record at top-forty stations in the other markets in his region, getting airplay throughout the territory as far east as Pittsburgh.

We played the song, but it was Bud who "broke" the record. "Lady" soon charted nationally. And RCA soon fired Bud for ignoring their priorities. Within about a year, Styx changed record companies.

But again, the reason we played the song in the first place was for the listeners. It had nothing to do with making a record company happy or launching the career of a local group. Those are delightful consequences but irrelevant to the radio station's goal: Play the hits.


I had been MD at BBM-FM for three years (1970-1973) before going to WLS. That was during a period when [1] WLS had pretty much stopped its 60s practice of supporting local acts, unless forced to play one, [2] WCFL did some of that, but often played songs seemingly for what some people politely called "non-musical reasons", and [3] the progressive FMs (WDAI, WSDM, WGLD, and WXFM and WXRT at night) didn't yet have enough listeners among them to have broken much of anything, so [4] BBM-FM tried to continue the tradition by going early on Ides of March "LA goodbye", New Colony Six "Roll on", Aliota Haynes Jeremiah "Lake Shore Drive", Styx "Best thing" and "Lady", and a zillion others which probably nobody remembers.

I started at WLS in 1973. John Gehron joined us in 1974. One of the ongoing concerns we shared, early on, was how to keep nighttimes "hip" without straying from the hits. We discussed putting some non-single tracks from the currently biggest-selling biggest-artist albums, but that didn't happen until the following year.

What we did first was to sprinkle in a few songs from catalog LPs, "album-cut oldies" so to speak. Some were easy choices; you may have heard of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to heaven" -- a whole separate story! -- which some AM top-forty stations had already played, but WLS had not. (Heck, merely getting "Layla" on the station was a previously fought battle with unnamed outsiders.)

I wanted to include at least one with a strong local following. Of the ones mentioned above from the BBM-FM era, WLS by then already had "LA goodbye" in the regular oldies category. "Roll on" hadn't come through enough to hit, and the group, good as it was, didn't really have the hip image we wanted for this category. I gave serious consideration to "Lake Shore Drive", a strong song but by an act which at that point hadn't really developed a following.

So it basically came down to almost a mental coin flip between "Best thing" and "Lady". I thought that either could do well for us, and each was well-known to the group's local following. My personal preference actually was for "Best thing", but "Lady" got the nod for basically one reason: A couple of the FM's were playing "Lady" -- not much, but more than zero.

(The PD at WDAI was not local and didn't really have a good grasp of Chicago music. "Best thing" probably would have been a better song for them, if he had known that it existed, but who's counting. WBBM-FM, on the other hand, did have a PD -- Bob Johnston -- who had a good musical sense and who fully understood the appeal of local acts. But unfortunately, corporate had hijacked that radio station and had taken it softer. They still played "Lady" but, to the best of my knowledge, had completely dropped "Best thing" by then.)

Anyway, the process of pulling all this together took literally several weeks. John okayed my initial list, and we agreed on how we would handle this nights-only batch of tunes on the air. It wasn't going to be a fanfare sort of thing -- no special jingle, no "Omigosh, we're finally playing this one", or anything like that. The songs would simply work their way into a particular rotation and would stay there until either they had run their course or else we came up with something better.


(One more aside: Jeff Davis at about that time had just joined the station. He did a couple of weekend airshifts, did vacation fill-in on some weeknight shifts, and helped me during the week with store calls, music-library tasks, and other fun stuff. He was from Alabama by way of Virginia and probably didn't know Styx from Megan McDonough, but he heard "Lady" in a club or at a dance and he liked it. He came to me touting the song while this song category was in the deliberation phase. I was sworn to secrecy and didn't dare even crack a smile that he had stumbled onto one of the choices which would soon air. To this day, he thinks that he caused it to happen. Not so, but let's just say g.m.t.a. and give him benefit of the doubt. Photo: Jeff Davis with Tommy Shaw of Styx)

What happened next was one of those serendipity moments, never to be forgotten. We had kept the idea quiet -- not even, as noted above, telling airstaff what was coming.

Our new playlist of currents was ready Tuesday evenings. Wednesday morning was when the record promoters came in to see me. They would push their happenin' hits, stacks o' wax, platter picks, [insert favorite cliche here]. I would explain why we added what we did and, if asked, why the other songs didn't make it this week. Sometimes the local promoter would bring along the regional or national counterpart. I often didn't know in advance that that would happen, not that it really mattered.