My new book is limited to what took place inside Boss Radio during my "shift," from April 1965 through July 1969. KHJ made lots of noise both in the Los Angeles audience ratings but it also influenced many aspects of what is now called, thanks to Mike Harrison, Contemporary Hit Radio.

To Bill Drake and myself, who are the same age and started in radio at the same time in our lives, radio was AM only. The top 30 records were being sorted out and played on stations that realized the potential of the music that popped into the public consciousness with Bill Haley’s movie song, "Rock Around The Clock," in 1954.

I’ve always left to others to figure out who "invented" this simplest of all radio formats: Play the hits. There is no greater admirer of Todd Storz and Gordon MacLendon than myself. But when they were doing their thing, I was out in the Pacific in my hometown of Honolulu trying to put it together. I first became a Program Director in 1958, when I was 20. The year before, Tom Moffatt and I played rock music on KHVH, Henry J. Kaiser’s new station in Waikiki. It did what is now called afternoon drive. Truth is, there wasn’t that much traffic on the island of Oahu then. Statehood was still two years ahead.

To me, what I did was obvious. Took the only hit chart in Billboard Magazine — it was called "The Honor Roll of Hits" — and played songs from that tabulation of the top 100 records in the country for three hours every day. What to play? What to play when? What not to play? What to play more often? Less?

About the same time Bill Drake, as he would be later known, was spinning the same records in the box office of a terminated movie theater in a ridiculously small town in Georgia. He was faced with the same decisions. As we both realized intuitively while in our teens, all deejays are dealt essentially the same deck. It’s how you play your cards that matters, the difference between winners and losers. Of course there’s much more to it. But to extend the analogy, all the other concerns focus on the cards. The dealer and her moves, the hully-gully in the casino keeping the participants excited, no outside distractions, a distinct identity created by the ambiance and motif of the setting, the illusion of Win-Win-Win!

"To make a long story short" — and I attempt the full version in my book — "as fate would have it," Drake and I were destined to fight skirmishes in the trenches in preparation for our big battle in 1963.

It sounds pretty cool, Drake climbs out of the Okefenokee Swamp and I out of the jungles of Nuuanu and collide at a romantic midpoint to test our threories in the Mother of All Radio Battles. However, we would not collide at Gettysburg, fight for possession of Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima or endure that bullshit nightmare that was Viet Nam.

Uh-uh. We clashed in "The Agribusiness Capital of the World," the then-farm town of Fresno, California. If you were there at the time and of an age where you couldn’t get enough of Joey Dee & The Starlighters, the Shirelles, Chubby Checker and, of course, The Man, Elvis, you heard some primal radio. Crazed jocks battled like Mel Gibson himself to fight one another and escape alive to Hollywood.

More about that in the book.

The veterans of the Siege of ’63 regrouped. Bill Drake and I then respected one another as only you can when you’ve kicked each other’s butts around through timeless Hooper ratings. Somehow there is no more than six kilocycles of separation from the Fresno warriors to the KHJ crew that proclaimed they would climb out of the soggy bottom of the L.A. radio barrel and wipe out the 30 or 35 stations ranked higher than KHJ in May 1965.

"KHJ: Inside Boss Radio" tells that tale in the two distinct sections of the book. First, an oral history as told by many of the players, with, hopefully, credit given to all those who were backstage doing all the heavy lifting. Second, a few hundred of the deejay memos I spewed out while I was P.D. at 5515 Melrose. Never needed memos in Honolulu, San Berdoo or Fresno. Never tried to coordinate the efforts of dozens of people working in a three-story fortress with all the good stuff available in one of the two biggest markets in America — and the only town where Johnny Carson or George Harrison or Faye Dunaway or Bill Cosby might be listening to your station on their way to or from work.

I learned a long time ago that, "Communication is the chief problem in the communications business." We had no Email or Xerox machines or cell phones or satellite networks — you get the idea. All we had in that, the end of the Analog Era, was our wits and our collective spirit as a team. We shared the same motivation: To vaporize any radio station that got in our way. With memos I was able to distribute the game plans to do just that while holding up the morale of a group that was never in the same place at the same time.

From the front of the book: The Real Don Steele, radio’s most electrifying deejay, tries to put his creative process into words. KHJ’s Boss engineers, Bill Mouzis and Jon Badeaux, tell of what it was like to ride shotgun with The Real for his daily three-hour radio adventures in soulful music and Delgadoism. A short take by Bill Drake on the one thing Steele had in common with the other heavyweights of AM radio — just a taste — the first one’s free. Art Astor talks about selling Steele’s airtime and spending his spare time. A rather different view of Robert W. Morgan as seen by Carol, his first wife. My hero, Chuck Blore, with his first reaction to KHJ’s dynamite drive-time duo. And deejay Tom Murphy’s short comment on Steele’s scattershot style after which fellow Boss Jock Frank Terry shares some syncopated tricks of the trade and how he taught them to Steele.

If I remember correctly, this part is called a Teaser. I hope it has done its job and has you wanting more.

Aloha from Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii, where this was written on Twos Day 2-20-2002 by Ron Jacobs.

But after six months it was just getting to be too much. I couldn't get the job done, couldn't get the production done for the other RKO stations that were using our stuff. I said, "Hey, I've gotta get off the Steele show, you gotta get me off of there." Within a week I was off the Steele show and they brought in a guy by the name of Jon Badeaux. He had worked on the air in San Bernardino or somewhere. He had an engineering background and he also did board work. So they assigned him to the Steele show and Jon did it the rest of the time.

Jon Badeaux: Steele was amazing. He had an incredible sense of timing. He could hear things in the music that I never noticed. He taught me how to pick out the rhythm guitar, the catchy piano riff. Before each shift we had lunch together at Nickodell's. We rarely talked about doing anything special that day because the magical stuff just seemed to be there. He'd tell me at lunch, on many occasions, that he was off his mark. "Cover me, man!" I doubt that any listener or pro could actually tell that he was having an off day. He was strong enough to carry the worst moment.

Carol Morgan: Robert wasn't real fond of making public appearances. There was always kind of an edge about doing any of those. I remember going to a number of them. Once we got there it wasn't so bad. The beach party for the Big Kahuna, that was wild. But Robert actually hated public appearances. It was like an ordeal for him to have to go to them. He would do them and he did them well and he would feel terrific afterwards — usually. But that wasn't one of his favorite things, being out in the public.

Johnny Williams: In 1959 I was Dapper Dan, The All Night Man, at KIMN, Denver. There was a chain of restaurants called the Holiday Drive-Ins. I would go out there dressed in a tuxedo and one of those formal top-hats. I would carry a walking stick. They had a little booth set up for me, right in the drive-in restaurant. I would play Top 40 music all-night long from that restaurant, midnight to six. I hated it. I loved the radio part of it and I loved the music but it was really tough going to school. I would work all-night there and then drag my ass over to Denver University and fall asleep in my first class in the morning. And that was really tough. I was never thrilled with working all-nights and I always hated the public appearances.

Chuck Blore: After Boss Radio came on KHJ, I tuned in on The Real Don Steele for the first time one afternoon. First Morgan, now I was given another ticket to Wonderland. New guy, new approach and new respect. Don Steele wasn't at all like Robert. But he too, had it put together in a way I could never have imagined and made the whole thing work like magic.

The Real was just really a wild man on the air. I mean, you can listen to air checks of him and it’s great. But when you listened to him when he was on the air, what you imagine, envision, of what was going on in that studio, shit! I’ll you, it wouldn’t be like watching CSPAN today ... TO BE CONTINUED ...  If you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, click here

Coming next ... Excerpt 2 from "93 KHJ - Inside Boss Radio" by Ron Jacobs