FM (36 page)

Utz had gotten wind of my discussions with Chernoff and called me. I confirmed that I was seriously considering making the move. What would it take to keep me, he wanted to know. I gave him a number and he said he’d get back to me. Weeks went by and I didn’t hear from him. Meanwhile, Mark was upping his offers slightly and pressuring me for a decision. Finally, I called Utz with an ultimatum: I gave him a figure that topped Mark’s final offer by ten thousand dollars and said that if I didn’t have an answer by the close of business the next day, I would leave.

I was uneasy with the strategy. I felt like a traitor to the station that had given me a start in New York radio and nurtured me through some hard times. But Chernoff kept my FM career alive by continuing to ask me to do fill-ins while I was working on
The Sports Connection.
I owed him a debt of gratitude for that. But I wasn’t sure about what working with Stern would mean either. All in all, I hoped Utz would accept my terms and keep the status quo.

Thankfully, he did. In all, I’d gotten a 25 percent raise, which made life very comfortable. I wasn’t making the kind of money I’d made doing mornings, but my weekdays were free—most of my shifts on WNEW-FM and WFAN were concentrated in the forty-eight-hour weekend period. I could envision riding out the rest of my career that way, under the radar of management.

Chernoff’s next move brought in Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan to do afternoons. The pair had recorded under the name “The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie,” but were better known as the main force behind the band the Turtles, who’d enjoyed several hit records in the late sixties, most notably “Happy Together.” They were quick-witted and very entertaining when being interviewed in their musician days, so Chernoff had the inspiration to use them as occasional fill-ins, where they performed well. But the ability to be entertaining during a short guest stint and to fill four hours daily was a gulf they were unable to bridge. They talked a great deal, often pointlessly, and Muni frequently cleaned their clock with his minimalist approach.

At WNEW, Utz had enough personal dominion to hold off the massive changes that Legacy had originally wanted, and was able to keep Pollack’s influence at bay. He had brought in Dave Logan from KFOG in San Francisco to be his hands-on program director, with Ted calling the major shots. During this period, no jock was fired although there was unrest and dissatisfaction among the staff with what they perceived to be a tight music policy. A clandestine meeting was called by Scott Muni and held at my brother Dan’s apartment, at which the staff openly revolted against the way the station was being run. Some recall the meeting as a vote of no confidence for Utz, but the outcome was that Dave Logan was fired as program director two days later. Opinions differ on why this happened. The majority felt that Logan was not diplomatic enough with the staff. Each member had their idiosyncrasies, especially Muni, and had to be delicately handled. Each was thought to be more valuable than any program director, and thus they had to be cajoled into performing as opposed to being ordered. Logan admits that upon taking the job initially, he had much to learn about what made the station special, in addition to holding off the consultants who wanted to fire the whole staff. He wasn’t well versed in the music that was popular in New York but not on the West Coast, where he’d spent the majority of his time in programming. An example of that was when Muni was playing Squeeze’s “If I Didn’t Love You” one afternoon. As the song is about to close, the band repeats: “If I . . . if I . . . didn’t . . . didn’t . . . love you . . . love you, love you.” Logan came bursting into the studio screaming that the record was stuck. That incident served to illustrate to the staff that Dave didn’t know his music, although Squeeze was a band whose popularity was confined to pockets along the East Coast and he couldn’t be expected to be familiar with all their work.

He was also placed in the impossible situation, like I was years before, of creating order out of chaos without being given the necessary tools and authority to do so. If Muni disagreed with a Logan directive, he could always appeal to Utz and the chances are that Logan would be overturned. In a good cop–bad cop scenario, Utz could play the benefactor, coming down on the side of freedom, while Logan was given the dirty work, the task of cleaning up sloppy mechanics or correcting programming transgressions.

There is an alternative view that Utz used Logan as a scapegoat, fearing that he was in danger of being replaced by Group W as general manager. He took over the programming chores himself so that he would have a job when the reins were handed to his successor. In any case, Logan was the unfortunate victim of circumstance.

Mark Chernoff wasn’t finished raiding. Vin Scelsa was back in radio after his sabbatical following the formatting fallout in 1981, and was doing a Sunday morning show at K-ROCK. But the big prize was still out there. Dave Herman was unhappy with Ted Utz at WNEW, despite the fact that Utz had resisted Legacy’s order to replace Herman in the mornings immediately. Ted urged patience, insisting that Dave’s ratings would improve if he could implement some formatics, like he had done with John DiBella’s
Morning Zoo
in Philadelphia. Dave was uncomfortable with the changes Ted was suggesting and felt underappreciated. They had had a particularly ugly incident in Berlin (of all places) that created more bad blood.

Part of Utz’s strategy to build the morning show was to promote Herman through high-profile events. One of these was a trip to Russia immediately after Boris Yeltsin took over the presidency. Ted traveled to Moscow with the morning-show staff and personally supervised all the details. The struggling new economy had yet to emerge from chaos, and hotels and food were a problem as the citizenry shook loose the bonds of communism. But being there at that historic time raised the show’s profile and brought revenue into the station as they were able to obtain a premium sponsorship from Absolut vodka. The next big promotional trip took place a year later as Pink Floyd celebrated the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Ted brought along his new girlfriend, and rather than mother-hen the whole operation he left the minutiae to Logan and the show’s producers while he took in the sights. But Dave and Ted were never on the same page as far as arrangements, formatics, or anything else about the trip. Whether it was Ted’s lack of attention, or Dave’s expectations of more deferential treatment, tensions mounted between them as the week continued. It finally exploded in the lobby of a Berlin hotel as Herman tried to attack the larger, younger, and more athletic Utz with his fists. No one was injured, but starting a fistfight with the boss is not a recommended way to win points within an organization that isn’t labeled WWF.

So when Dave’s contract was scheduled to expire later that year, Utz wasn’t too eager to respond to his agent’s request for more money. The personal dislike between the two men was a palpable presence at the station. Utz knew that there was nothing anyone could do to beat Stern in the morning. People who wanted music and a friendly, familiar voice found that in Dave, but Stern had become a must-listen to anyone wanting outrageous entertainment. No one could beat him on his own terms—Stern stretched the T&A envelope as far as it could be pushed. The best anyone could hope for on an AOR station was a ratings share in the mid-three range, which underperformed the rest of the day by as much as a full point. More talk—humor or information—only drove listeners away. Only a music-intensive program with impeccable formatics could even hope to hold the ratings steady.

Dave’s initial posture was for a 33 percent raise and a three-year guarantee to do mornings. Utz brought the proposal to his superiors at Group W and they rejected it out of hand. They proposed a slight decrease in pay, with an incentive package that, if achieved, could bring Herman into the monetary ballpark he sought to play in. They would only offer a one-year assurance of mornings, however.

Group W wanted to make this the final offer, but Ted convinced them to go along with a one-year extension for mornings at Dave’s current salary, something in the $300,000 range. He believed this to be a fair tender and felt it would be accepted in the end, but was prepared to go in another direction if Dave balked. Ted believed that any veteran New York jock with the respect of the audience could pull the same numbers that Dave had. There was no chance of hitting a home run by bringing in a shock jock from outside, and any attempts to shake the current formula would only alienate the audience.

To Ted, this limited Dave’s value to the station. So in the final days of the negotiations, when Dave’s agent advised him that Herman would not work past the end date on his contract, Utz took this as an idle threat. Who would hire him to do mornings for more money? Utz played hardball, and although the contract was set to expire the following Friday, Ted took a scheduled vacation to the Caribbean beginning that Wednesday.

Word had gotten out to Karmazin that negotiations were not going well. Much like any other business, it is considered tampering to discuss an offer with another station’s talent while he is still under contract. But it happens, like when Cousin Brucie jumped from WABC to WNBC, and as long as the contact goes undetected, it’s hard to prove and few lawsuits are ever filed. But Karmazin believed in playing by the rules, so he waited until after Herman’s final show to officially call Dave’s agent, Don Buchwald. He said that if Dave wasn’t on the air Monday morning, he’d assume the contract had expired and he’d be free to forward an offer from K-ROCK. With Ted out of town until the end of the following week, there was no one to deal with at WNEW.

Monday morning I was rudely awakened at a quarter to six by overnight man Ken Dashow. He’d rung Dave for his traditional wake-up call and had been told that Herman was not coming in. He’d informed the station—no contract, no work, and he meant it. There was also no Utz, and since I was the guy who did Dave’s show in his absence—would I come in and do it? I hastily dressed and hurried into the city.

Mel Karmazin awoke that morning to my voice instead of Dave’s and correctly assumed that a contract had not been signed. He and Buchwald met, and an offer was extended for afternoons at K-ROCK. The money was actually less than WNEW was talking about, but the term was a guaranteed three years. Mornings were out of the question because of Stern. Herman still wasn’t sure. He’d done mornings on and off for twenty years at WNEW. Afternoons against his old friend Muni weren’t an appealing prospect, but the security was tempting and he wasn’t even sure that he was wanted at the old place anymore. He called Muni and explained his dilemma, but how could Scott know if the offer from Mel was real or just a gambit to raise the stakes? Money was still solely the general manager’s province, and there was no general manager to be found, although Ted was available by phone if the crisis dictated.

The next day, Mel upped the offer slightly but added this proviso: The contract must be agreed upon by the close of the business day or it was off the table. Dave was torn by his loyalty to Muni and the call letters and his distaste for Utz. He also realized that mornings against Stern would be a chronic losing proposition. Pacing the floor of his apartment like a madman, he vacillated from one position to the other. Minutes before the deadline he called Buchwald, who advised him to accept Karmazin’s offer. A bird in the hand and so on.

Karmazin was playing the game with the acquiescence of Chernoff and Chuisano. He could have forced the issue with them, but didn’t want to strip them of their independence. Both agreed that Dave would be a welcome addition in the afternoon but gulped when they saw the size of the offer. Even though the salary and terms were generous, Mel argued, they paled at what the station could expect to take in if it could become competitive with Muni in the afternoons. One thing Karmazin never hesitated to do was to “overpay” for what he considered to be “oceanfront property.” His track record shows that if there is an acquisition that he projects will benefit his interests, he’ll pay whatever it takes instead of lose the deal so that he can be known as a tough negotiator.

Buchwald called to accept the offer, and now all that remained was to negotiate away the noncompete clauses from Dave’s prior contract with Group W. Noncompete clauses mean simply that upon the termination of a contract, a jock could not work for a direct competitor for a specified period, generally 90 to 180 days. These clauses have been struck down by the courts almost every time they are challenged, but stations continue to place them in contracts in the hope that they’ll discourage valued talent from abdicating for greener pastures. In Dave’s case, it took thirty days before he could join the staff of K-ROCK.

For me, it was another opportunity to be thrust back into the spotlight.

Believing as he did that mornings were limited at WNEW-FM by market forces already in place, Utz allowed me to work until a permanent replacement was found. When the morning ratings actually increased under my watch (I was making less than a third of what they had paid Dave), Group W saw this as win-win for their station and I was handed the job permanently. (Well, as permanently as any job in radio is.) However, within two rating periods, afternoons were highly competitive between Herman and Muni. My morning increases had not come at Stern’s expense, so Chernoff saw the deal as win-win for him.

The Legacy–Group W transfer and its resulting disruptions had now seen Chernoff, Herman, and Fornatale cross over to the competition, seriously weakening WNEW’s depth. And like a football team that loses its stars to age and free agency, the effects might not be immediately visible on the scoreboard. But the core of quality players erodes until the intangibles that differentiate the winners from the losers deteriorate, so slowly as to go almost unnoticed. And by the time anyone does notice, it’s too late.

Despite those problems, the Ted Utz era, from 1989 to 1992, saw the ratings and revenues reach record heights. Cash flow increased by 15, 12, and 15 percent under Utz’s leadership, and ratings maintained a consistent level approaching 4.0 12+. In the key twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-old demographic, WNEW thrived in all the day parts, and combined with the heritage image the station still enjoyed, Madison Avenue subsidized it heavily. The lineup was solid—I was doing mornings with Ken Dashow as sidekick, Pat St. John in the middays, Muni in the afternoon, and Carol Miller, my brother Dan, Jim Monaghan, and Marty Martinez at night. All the jocks had come to terms with the music, and since we had DJ Select back again on the computer, our hands weren’t completely tied. The station sounded consistent all day, and was still the place to go for new music. Despite K-ROCK’s 12+ victories, they were largely Pyrrhic since most of the advantage came as a result of Stern’s posting double digits in the morning. As Infinity was later to learn, the prime Stern listeners were the type who didn’t want classic rock during the rest of the day, but were into the emerging grunge movement from Seattle and all it entailed.