There is a long-standing legend that when the Beatles and other British artists took America by storm in 1964, Pittsburgh radio programmers covered their ears and preferred to do the doo-wop songs that quickly went out of style.
Terry Hazlett says that’s just not true.
Weekly surveys of what Pittsburgh radio stations were playing 57 years ago show that radio listeners in this region were just as hungry for every note the Fab Four played as their counterparts in other parts of the country.
“The British invasion was as popular here as it was elsewhere,” said Hazlett. “If you look at the polls, there’s a fair amount of doo-wop going on. But they mixed it up with the British invasion and no one thought about it. “
The persistence of this myth inspired Hazlett to compose the book “Survey Says: The Hits of the 1960s in Western Pennsylvania”. The self-published band explores what was popular in the region in the 1960s on the then top 40 radio stations such as KDKA, WAMO, WBUT in Butler, WIXZ in McKeesport and WJPA in Washington, week after week. In those days, radio stations published weekly polls in stores like National Record Mart and GC Murphy that customers could view and read for themselves.
Newspapers such as the Observer Reporter, The Pittsburgh Press, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also printed lists of popular songs on local radio.
Hazlett piously picked them up when he was a young music fan who grew up in McMurray and has stuck to them over the years. For “Survey Says,” he made compound lists for each week of the 40 most popular songs for each week of the 1960s, beginning January 4, 1960 and ending December 29, 1969. The book highlights the enormous changes that popular music has undergone In this turbulent decade, Percy Faith and Chubby Checker dominated the charts at the beginning, and The Rolling Stones and Steppenwolf made for hits at the end.
“I have at least a few hundred of these,” said Hazlett, disc jockey at WJPA in Washington and former manager of Canonsburg. “I would go every week even if I had nothing else in the store and get the free surveys.”
The polls have been “a tremendous promotional tool,” said Hazlett, and now provide a glimpse of how a city’s musical tastes have changed over the past decade.
But even if the journey from Lawrence Welk to Led Zeppelin in the 1960s was dizzying, Hazlett’s book shows how diverse the music genres were on pop music radio back then. In the week of June 23, 1969, to take just one example, Henry Mancini, Marvin Gaye and Creedence Clearwater Revival were tightly knit on the charts.
“It was called ‘Top 40 Radio’ because it played pretty much the top 40 songs of the day, no matter the genre,” said Hazlett. “I listened to a variety of top 40 stations, so I wasn’t really aware of whether there were more specialized genre stations.”
In the 2020s, commercial radio will be segmented and controlled by format. Most likely, you are tuning in because you want to hear a certain type of music, not because you want to hear a certain disc jockey. Hazlett points out that radio was personality driven in the 1960s. The listeners tuned in to one or the other radio station because they liked or trusted the disc jockeys. And these disc jockeys had a little more leeway to let their own tastes and preferences shine through. While staying within the parameters of the channel format, they were able to rotate some personal favorites that were ignored elsewhere.
The national charts were seen as a guide rather than something set in stone for local programmers and music directors. Also, many disc jockeys played records at dances outside of opening hours, and if a song caught on, they added it to their playlists.
“There hasn’t been a lot of research on music compared to now, either,” said Hazlett. “Many of the top 40 stations were programmed from gut instinct, and the most popular disc jockeys had at least something to say about which songs they played.”
In the course of his research, Hazlett found that some local disc jockeys were involved in some form of triple-dipping – they played songs in the air that they wrote or co-wrote and were released by their own record labels.
“There were disc jockeys in Pittsburgh who would do this all the time,” said Hazlett. He also pointed out that the way the charts were put together was a little less than scientific.
“The influence of retailers on the charts was immense, with broadcasters calling record stores every week and answering whoever answered phone rate sales of certain records. Unfortunately, the clerk who answered the phone sometimes gave high marks to songs he liked even when they weren’t selling, and sometimes the clerk was apparently told to give certain songs high marks because the retailer had too many copies or bought the song just didn’t sell. “
By the late 1960s, however, radio stations had “been doing more research into which songs to play,” Hazlett explained.
Whether it was the radio landscape in Pittsburgh that Hazlett and others fondly remember, or Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit or any other American city, commercial radio 50 years ago had more personality than it does today. In the 2020s, its formats and announcers are largely interchangeable from city to city, devoid of the personality that made it so distinctive in the 1960s.
“Radio took its personality out of the radio,” said Hazlett.
“Poll Says: The Hits of the 1960s in Western Pennsylvania” is available from Amazon, the Guitar Gallery on Route 19 in North Strabane, and from WordAssociation.com.
