Before leaving Chicago for South Florida, in October of 1974, I had prepared tapes to send ahead of my arrival so program directors could hear my intros and outros of Miles Davis, the Grateful Dead, and groups like Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I had it down pat.
Or so I thought.
Reality has a habit of intruding into the best of plans.
South Florida radio bore little resemblance to Chicago radio.
South Florida radio was in transition—actually, it was in several transitions. For years, AM radio had been king, not only in South Florida but all over the country. AM radio carried sports, news, and country music. It also turned rock ‘n roll into the powerhouse that young people flocked to. Every car had an AM radio. Few car radios had
FM. The FM dial was just beginning to flex its muscles.
A 100,000-watt FM station could cover South Florida from the upper Keys to Palm Beach and beyond. The trick was to get enough people to listen to it. Several stations went to the length of handing out cheap FM tuners that could be plugged into the current AM set-up in most cars.
The other transition was happening with the audience. South Florida’s population growth was changing the area’s character from agricultural and retirement communities to urbanized towns and cities with different tastes in music.
Of course, money would play a big part in how this worked out.
Years before the massive shift from AM to FM, several people bought FM licenses for small amounts of money. Some did it to concentrate on the audience that owned expensive radio sets that sat like cherished furniture in their upscale homes. The stations would play classical recordings to this select group and urge them to eat at fancy restaurants and buy expensive clothing. Though the audience verged on the miniscule, it didn’t take much to break even. The formula consisted of hiring minimum wage kids to cue up records and identify the station each hour. Sell a few ads for expensive goods and the formula worked.
What was also working was the owners knew that eventually, someone with big bucks would come to South Florida and offer them a bucket of money for their one-hundred thousand-watt station, which could cover all of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
I would end up working for one of those companies with big bucks.
The encounter would be memorable.
Stay tuned.