Excerpt #40 from the long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ...

www.chuckblore.com

Okay, Okay I Wrote the Book

Don Richman and I seemed to be the perfect compliment to each other. Don was a better writer than I was and I was a better director than he. Matter of fact, I think Don was a far better writer than anyone doing radio commercials at that time, and I was trying to top Orson Welle’s War Of The Worlds with every sixty second radio spot that I produced.

Neither of us had studied advertising or had created commercials. We didn’t know the rules, so we invented our own. One of which had to do with one of the best, if not THE best commercial announcer ever, Danny Dark, screwing up a piece of copy. Or rather, not screwing up a piece of copy.

We were doing a spot for Rosarita Mexican Foods. The client wanted to sell the fact that this was authentic Mexican food. He wanted us to capture the romance of Old Mexico. One of the spots started with the line ... “There are still places where, if you listen real close, you can hear history in the wind ...” This, of course, was all scored with a group of Mexican guitars and the sound of a hot desert wind. We hired Danny’s velvet voice to add the romance.

As an aside, it’s important to add that a few days before this, Danny had been recording a spot and something caused him to stop in the middle. I opened the talk back and shouted “Goddamnit Danny!!! I’ll tell you when to stop! You don’t stop until I say stop! No matter what!”

So now, at the Rosarita session, Danny’s in front of the microphone. We rehearse a couple of times and I say to him, “ I’d like it to sound like you’re speaking very softly right into someone’s ear, so we’re gonna ‘mike’ you very close. Keep it down and quiet. Okay?”

“You mean like this ... ‘There are still places where if you listen ...”

“Prefect.” I said, “Great. Let’s do it. Take one. Go Danny.”

Danny started reading and about two seconds into it, something dropped in the hallway, outside the studio. We didn’t hear it in the control room, but Danny heard it in the studio. He didn’t stop. But what we heard in the control room was something like ... “There are still places where ... where ... if you listen real close ...” With that full, rich voice, the hesitancy and the repeating of the word ‘where’ sounded so real ... so honest ... Don and I looked at each other and said, “Wow ... wow.” Reality. Honesty. Until that moment, these things, as far as I know, had no place in radio commercials. But from that moment on, they were the hallmark of ours.

Even our comedy stuff, which, in the tradition of the time was mostly exaggerated, caricature voices, suddenly sounded like real people in funny situations. We even stopped calling them ‘Comedy spots.’ They became ‘Humorous commercials.’ We knew that people loved a good joke the first time they heard it, but the second time it was usually interrupted with, ‘I already heard it.’ Whereas, good humor could be heard and enjoyed over and over again. Ergo, our commercials had built in ‘longevity’ and ‘those other’ commercials had none. At least, that’s the way we presented it.

The first year Don and I were together, we won first place in radio in every major creative competition. We won the very first Clio ever awarded for a radio commercial. Two years later, one of the Clio judges called, surreptitiously, to inform us that we had won NINE Clios. So, Don went to the Clio presentations in New York. He took both of his kids with him. His daughter, Heidi, went to the stage with him to accept the first four statues. His son, Josh, helped him carry off the next four. He accepted the last one by himself, so that he would have one hand free for all the hand shaking he was expecting, and of course, for the champagne. Nine Clios. There were pictures in almost every trade publication, of Don, holding one statue, Heidi, with four, and five year old Josh trying valiantly to balance the other four.

Chuck Blore and Don Richman had become advertising celebrities and suddenly we had clients waiting at the door. We had the top talent in the business begging to be on our spots. And all of this, smack dab in the middle of those remarkable years full of flower children and free love. What a time to be a celebrity ... even an advertising one.

All through my radio career, my wife, Cath, had contributed big time. My career and my ambition were an important part of her life. She was always there, always encouraging, always ready to help in whatever way she could. Then, the success itself became a problem. With Color Radio working so well, there was very little need for her help in that area and that left a pretty big hole in her life. She began to fill the hole with religion. She became a follower of Vedanta, a religion which conflicted with a lot of what I believe, and with what I needed from her. Eventually we parted, going our separate ways, while still maintaining a genuine friendship and respect for each other. Matter of fact, she continued to be the primary female voice on my commercials for many years. She was a major talent.

About that same time, Don Richman was having his ‘Peas or carrots’ problems. Moving his office out of his house was a precursor to his moving out altogether.

All this and all that ‘free love’ too. And all those pretty ladies wanting so desperately to be on commercials. What a time to be wife-free.

It was about this time that my good friend, John Wolfe, who was one of the best of the KFWB salespeople had become sales manager for KIIS AM. They were an MOR, ‘Middle Of The Road’ music station. They had begun to make an advertising impact on South California with billboards everywhere. The boards featured a beautiful lady’s face with long blond hair flowing across the entire billboard ... and just two words, ‘LISTEN” and ‘KISS.’ John came to the our office and asked us to do a TV spot for them. TV?

Don and I said together, “You want to advertise a radio station on TV? You can’t do that!”

“Why not?” said John.

“Well,” said Don, repeating something I had said to him ...”There are only so many broadcast dollars for any given market. And of you buy TV, you wont buy radio. And if you buy radio...”

“That’s a bunch of crap.” said John, the radio station sales manager.

“But even so, John, we don’t do TV.”

“Oh, c’mon.” said John, “It’s just like radio. Only with pictures.” That sounded simple enough. So we agreed to do it.

I guess Don and I had been thinking about TV for a long time. Only one thing held us back. We didn’t know how to do it. But now, we actually had a TV job. One thing we knew for sure ... it had better be damn simple.

Don said, “Let’s just put the billboard on TV. Show that beautiful face and have the radio station playing in the background.” That sounded good. All we had to do was find a cameraman who knows how to shoot beautiful woman. ‘Shoot’ in this case, meaning, photograph. Good. Case solved.

Then I got to thinking about the radio station playing in the background and the fact that we only had thirty seconds. You sure as hell can’t show off a radio station in thirty seconds. Yeah, that’s a problem. But, maybe if we just showed off the ‘hot spots;’ A deejay with an identifying phrase, a key line from a station promo, a station jingle, and tiny bits of the music they play. We had a meeting with Will Scott, a master audio producer who was now running our studio. We explained what we had in mind. Can we do that in thirty seconds? Turns out we could. We got the material from KIIS and Will put it together into an incredible montage. The station never sounded better. The only problem was, Will did it in twenty one seconds. What the heck are we gonna do with the other nine seconds? “Well,” Don suggested, “We could have her give the call letters and say, Listen. Just like on the billboards.”

“I have a better idea.” I said. “She could say something like, ‘I want to tell you about a remarkable radio station’ and then all this stuff could actually come out of her mouth. She could lip sync it.” I was excited as hell. Boy! This could be good..

“That’s nuts.” said Don, “Nobody could lip sync all that.”

“Well, maybe she could. If not we could do it with lots of little cuts.”

We tracked down the billboard model and explained the lip sync problem. She said she thought she might be able to do the whole thing. “But, it’ll take me a couple of days to learn it.” She was back two days later and her lip sync was perfect. But even with the spoken intro, the spot was less than twenty five seconds.

“I got it!” I shouted, “We’ll do the whole thing in a Close Up on her mouth doing the sync. At the end, a voice says, ‘You have a remarkable mouth.’ Then, we’ll pull back to reveal her beautiful face and she’ll say ... ‘KIIS is a remarkable radio station.’”

And, a whole new industry was born.