Michael Ray Fitzgerald - Boss Jocks: How Corrupt Radio Practices Helped Make Jacksonville One of the Great Music Cities: An article from Southern Cultures 17:4, The Music Issue

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Southern Cultures 2011 Center for the Study of the American South

Published by the University of North Carolina Press

ESSAY
Boss Jocks

How Corrupt Radio Practices Helped Make Jacksonville One of the Great Music Cities

Michael Ray Fitzgerald

The Jacksonville-area music boom was sparked by a handful of radio disc jockeys and owners who made extra money promoting local and regional shows. In 1964, WAPEs owner Bill Brennan presented his coup de grce: he brought the Beatles to Jacksonville. Hurricane Dora hit the city the day before the concert on September 11, but it did not stop 23,000 Beatlemaniacs from flocking to the Gator Bowl. The Beatles, upon their arrival in the country, 1964, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Tom Register is a good-ol boy with a gift for storytelling. Eating our barbecue at Lou Bonos on Beach Boulevard in Jacksonville, Florida, Register and I reminisced about the days when the areas music scene was one of the most fertile in the South. More than one hundred nationally signed acts have emerged from the Jacksonville, Florida, area. Pat Armstrong, president of Orlando-based PARC Records, thinks that statistic is extraordinary: Of course, major music-industry towns like Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville can beat that, and probably so can Philadelphia and Detroit. But Jacksonville would certainly be in the top ten.1

What made an out-of-the-way southern city like Jacksonville such a booming music town in the 1960s and 1970s? Of course, there is never a single cause for these things, but the biggest factor was the demographic tidal wave social scientists dubbed the baby boom. Teenage boomers developed into a huge, new market for entertainment. To parents, it must have looked as if they were taking over the worldand they were. Soon a crop of young hustlers the likes of Register, Joe Giles, and Sidney Drashin emerged to capitalize on this burgeoning youth market with their teen dances.

The Jacksonville-area music boom was sparked by a handful of radio disc jockeys and owners who made extra money promoting local and regional shows. While disc-jockeying seemed glamorous, it did not pay well, and many DJs sought to augment their salaries. Radio and concerts were symbiotic industries. In the mid-1950s, Jacksonville DJs Marshall Rowland and Glenn Reeves, at country stations WQIK and WPDQ, respectively, began promoting live shows by big-name national acts who stopped through town. Mae Axton (Hoyt Axtons mother and co-writer of Elvis Presleys first million-selling single, Heartbreak Hotel) was involved as well, as a concert promoter and publicist. This was perfect synergy: the stations would schedule a concert and then begin to hammer the acts records, thereby increasing ticket sales. They could also get the acts cheaper because they could offer the benefit of guaranteed airplay. It amounted to free advertising for both the acts and the concert promoters, who also happened to be the DJs themselves a conflict of interest, certainly, but a practical one. Everyone benefited: the station, the act, the record label, the fans. What is more, none of this was illegalat least until 1960.2

In 1960s Jacksonville, corruption was part of the landscape. Prior to the 1967 city-county government consolidation, there was such widespread corruption that what went on in local radio seemed inconsequential by comparison. University of Florida political scientist Richard Scher called Jacksonville a cesspool, where kickbacks from government vendors, jobs for cronies, sweetheart deals for contractors were commonplaceIt may have been the most corrupt city in America. Jacksonville and Duval County had a county board, as well as two city boardsa commission and a councilwith a stunning one hundred and thirty-three elected officials. As Scher observed, The more decision centers you had, the more places there were to hand out goodies.3

ENTER BILL BRENNAN

WAPE-AM came to Jacksonville in 1958. The Big Ape, as it was nicknamed, was the fourth in a small chainowners were limited to five stations thenrun by Bill Brennan, a hillbilly-talking, Harvard-educated electrical engineer, who piloted his own private plane between stations in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Jacksonville. The Big Ape went on-air on October 23, playing pop, country, and rhythm and blues. Within months it became the areas top-rated station, thanks mostly to this diverse programming and its slant toward the burgeoning youth audience.4

Brennans masters thesis at Harvard consisted of a plan for a powerful, water-cooled transmitter that could carry a 50,000-watt signal for hundreds of miles. Brennan was twenty-six in 1947 when he and his younger brother Cyril built the transmitter for Birminghams WVOK by hand. Their father, a dairy farmer, invested in the enterprise and helped with business operations. Six years later they built WBAM in Montgomery. In 1958, Bill Brennan formed Brennan Broadcasting and started scouting locations in Florida for another high-powered blowtorch (WAPE began with 25,000 watts but increased to 50,000 in the early 1960s).5

Brennan was a sharp guy, Register says. There were other 50-kilowatters, but Brennans transmitter was a hot-rod. He used tricks to make the signal travel fartherand get it louder. He built a spider-web of copper wire underground directly under the towerthat would reflect the signal. He also put his tower near a swamp, so the water would reflect the signal too.6

Brennan chose WAPEs site, about twenty miles south of Jacksonville on U.S. 17, primarily because of its proximity to the oceanan AM signal can travel farther over salt water. Brennans plan was to shoot the signal along the Georgia coastline up to the Carolinas. WAPEs signal was so clear and strong it could be heard all the way to Virginia Beach. The stations transmitter was designed by Brennan and built by his brother Cyril and Billy Benns, who was a partner with the Brennans in Chattanoogas WFLI-AM. The Big Apes transmitter was cooled by a water tank that also fed a fountain and a large, kidney-shaped swimming pool, which ran under a glass wall into the stations lobby. A visitor could swim from the front of the station, under the glass, right into the lobby.7

The station hosted pool parties on weekends, welcoming local teenagers, particularly bikini-clad girls, adding to the stations youthful ambiance. In fact, the employees called the station the radio country club. Brennan would fly his Cessna into Imeson airport on Jacksonvilles Northside, where he kept a blue Cadillac convertible with Alabama plates and WAPE emblazoned on the side in shocking-pink letters. The car also sported a horn that blared a simulated ape call, taken from a 1956 record by Nervous Norvus (Jimmy Drake) titled Ape Call. Brennan would drive to the Big Apes offices near Orange Park, where he could be seen poolside, directing operations in his swim trunks. A 1959 profile in Time observed that [a]n outsider would have thought that Hugh Hefner had built a Playboy-Mansion annex on U.S. 17. A glass window opened up on the studio so visitors could watch the Big Apes jocks, called the In-Men, in action. The stations offices also included Brennans private apartmentwith a secret entrance that might have impressed Hefner. It had a full bar, a state-of-the-art hi-fi, and a frosted-glass wall with mood lights that throbbed to the beat of the music. Brennan called it his Play Pretty.8

ENTER UNCLE DINO

Sheldon Dino Summerlin, a twenty-three-year-old DJ at tiny, 1,000-watt WGNI in Wilmington, North Carolina, often tuned to the Big Ape to see what the competition was up to. In 1963 Summerlin decided it was time to move to the big leagues. He submitted a tape to WAPE and was immediately hired. Within months Uncle Dino became the hottest on-air talent the Big Ape ever had.9

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