Before WABC Became WKKK

The Seventies saw the beginning of the deterioration of AM radio. The station which all of us will remember as the greatest example of this was WABC. During the 60s and through the mid-70s WABC was the most popular "pop" radio station in the area, featuring colorful DJs who played Top 40 songs. Since Top 40 back then could mean anything from soul to metal to country, this made for quite a variety. True, the disk jockeys talked too much, and they blathered on well into the beginning of each tune, but at least they played a good variety of music. WABC was also infamous for its way of counting record sales in order to determine a song's place on the charts; no serious music fan took them seriously.

Why did people continue to listen to AM when there was so much great stuff happening on FM during the 70s? One major reason was that most car radios at the time only had AM radios, as did a fair number of the cheaper portables. And since kids spent a lot of their time hanging out in cars, they had little choice. In addition, AM signals, while of poorer quality, traveled further than FM. Finally, there really weren't any Top 40 FM stations for most of the decade, so if that was what you wanted to hear, you had little choice but to use AM and put up with the static, the mindless chatter of DJs speaking through simulated reverb and very limited playlists.

Talk radio had long been a feature in our town. WOR had an all-talk lineup that included everything from "Rambling with Gambling" in the morning to humorist Jean Shepherd in the evening. WPLJ FM had Alex Bennett's late night show through the middle of the decade, as well as Father Bill, a priest who was close friends with Harry Chapin, and who interviewed many celebrities on Sunday mornings. And of course we had the all-news stations. What just about all these guys had in common was that they were rarely offensive. Barry Farber may have been pretty conservative and Alex Bennett very liberal, but they were still tame, and usually polite. Farber liked to boast that he had been good friends with Malcolm X.

But it was WMCA that started the trend towards a format where listeners calling in were the major feature. For whatever reason, it was a hit. Then WOR started a late night show featuring Bob Grant, a rather crotchety man who would often yell at listeners. It was clear that a lot of people liked listening to extremists who not only voiced their opinions, but ridiculed others. When WABC went all-talk, their ratings, which were falling due to the increasing popularity of FM, soared. They tapped into a vast amount of anger and frustration which many mostly white, working class New Yorkers were feeling. But rather than discuss issues intelligently, WABC's hosts found that vulgarity and arrogance seemed to win the biggest shares of the audience. In time, some would dub the station "WKKK."