BLACK RADIO BATTLES WARNERS WITH A BOYCOTT

Black music . . . white music.

Black charts . . . white charts.

Black radio . . . white radio.

At a convention last week of the National Assn. of Record Merchandisers, celebrated record producer Quincy Jones asked for an end to musical apartheid.

But it was only the latest if loudest outcry against blatant discrimination on a national scale, according to some in the radio broadcast business.

Twenty years after the March on Selma, executives of the nation’s 280 radio stations that cater to black listeners feel that they’re still sitting in the back of the record industry bus.

When it comes to promoting major artists like Prince, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, record companies see to it that giveaway albums, free concert tickets, T-shirts, exclusive interviews and the broadcast debut of new records go first to the nation’s 1,400 Top 40 stations.

“If there’s anything left over, we get it,” said KJLH-FM (102.3) Program Director Jim Maddox.

Rather than continuing to brood quietly over such policies, three Los Angeles black stations lit some protest candles three weeks ago. It seemed like a timid effort.

“All we wanted to do was light a fire . . . send a signal,” KACE-FM (103.9) Program Director Alonzo Miller told Calendar.

But by last week, KACE, KJLH and KGFJ-AM (1230) were sitting in the middle of an inferno of controversy over their decision to ban Warner Bros. recording artists from their airwaves until company Board Chairman Mo Ostin sits down at the negotiating table with them.

Ostin agreed to the meeting and the boycott was lifted as a sign of good faith, KACE General Manager Jim Blakely told Calendar last week. Ostin hadn’t set a time, place and date for the meeting as of Tuesday, and the three stations were threatening to reinstate the ban.

But, at press time late Wednesday, Blakely said that Warners officials had agreed to meet the next day with Blakely and Miller to set an agenda for a negotiating session. Officials of all three boycotting stations were then to be invited to the negotiating session, tentatively scheduled for Monday, Blakely said.

In an ingenious way, the stations have continued the boycott, even while they awaited their meeting with Ostin. They have refused to report any Warners record airplay to trade publications such as Billboard or Radio and Records, Blakely said. Trade papers combine radio airplay reports with record store sales reports to compile weekly popularity surveys, such as Billboard’s Hot 100.

By refusing to report Warners airplay, the stations hope to hurt Warners’ sales by indicating an artificial drop in their artists’ chart popularity. The likelihood that the three stations might significantly affect the charts is remote, trade paper sources say. But if other stations join in, it could begin to cause problems. KDAY-AM, which chose not to boycott, also is formatted for a black listening audience.

The initial temerity over challenging a monster-sized company like Warners has changed dramatically since the boycott started March 20. The stations’ refusal to play records by Prince, Madonna and other Warners stars brought to the surface pent-up resentment against major record companies from other sources. The anger over alleged discrimination throughout the music industry apparently had been building for years.

Though the three stations have resumed playing Warners records, Pandora’s box is now wide open. A long-standing pop music phenomenon known throughout the radio and record industries as “crossover” is being debated in every major radio market in the United States.

“We (black stations) are a laboratory for the record companies,” Maddox explained. “They try an artist out on our audiences and, if he makes it here, then he crosses over to the (Top 40) stations.”

Black stations never protested this “laboratory” status, in part because they didn’t think it would do much good: “Twenty years ago, instead of calling it ‘crossover,’ they called it ‘passing,’ ” Miller said.

De facto segregation persists--and it is so pronounced that there are separate record charts for black and white music, separate radio networks, separate trade papers and even separate record company departments to promote black recording artists and white recording artists.

For example, on the Billboard magazine charts last week, the No. 1 “Hot 100 Single” was “One More Night” by Phil Collins. The No. 1 “Hot Black Single” was “Nightshift” by the Commodores.

Billboard also has a “Hot 100” columnist who writes a regular column called “Chartbeat” and a “Hot Black” columnist who writes “The Rhythm and the Blues.” Other trade publications, including Radio and Records, appear to have a similar editorial policy. When black singers “cross over” to the “Hot 100” charts--as Prince did following the success of his movie “Purple Rain”--they also cross over from the black columns of the trade papers to the “Hot 100” columns like “Chartbeat.”

Ironically, it was Prince--one of the biggest crossover successes to date--who finally brought on the current revolution.

When the pint-sized rock-’n’-soul gymnast did nine Los Angeles-area concerts last month, Top 40 stations had scores of tickets to give away to listeners, say the black broadcasters. The four black stations in town, they said, received no more than 30 tickets apiece, even though Prince’s music had been a staple of their formats for at least three years before he crossed over to Top 40. Maddox of KJLH said his station’s tickets were for matinee seats “in the rafters” at the Forum while KIIS-FM was giving away tickets for seats “down in the front rows.”

“Last year, before the Jacksons’ (“Victory”) tour started, we at KACE made a conscientious effort to bring the ‘Prince Phenomenon’ to the forefront,” Blakely said in an angry Feb. 13 letter to Warners exec Ostin. “We initiated two Prince promotions at a time when Michael Jackson was on the lips of most everyone across the country.”

The station gave away two purple motorcycles, a purple motor scooter, his and hers (Prince and Apollonia) stage attire, albums, posters and an all-expenses paid trip to Prince’s opening concert in Detroit last fall.

“We also gave away over 600 passes to see ‘Purple Rain’ at the Baldwin Entertainment complex,” Blakely said.

Executives of the boycotting stations alleged that Prince and Warners jilted them when he got to L.A.--and it wasn’t the first time. Fleming is still sore about the Jacksons and their label, CBS Records, which similarly (he said) ignored black stations when the “Victory” Tour arrived at Dodger Stadium last December.

Bolstered by the surprising reaction to their boycott, the executives say they intend to make an example of Warners and even Miller, Maddox and KGFJ Program Director Kevin Fleming are awed by the broad support they’re getting.

Lee Michaels, program director for WBMX-FM in Chicago, wrote them, “We do not have to take this, not in 1985. Just as black radio made these artists into superstars, we can make new ones. And if they begin to forget where they came from and who was there from the beginning, we can stop the support and make new stars.”

The Philadelphia-based Black Music Assn., boasting 2,300 broadcast and record industry members nationwide, will take up the boycott at its quarterly board meeting in May, according to its president Huart Abner.

“I do think it’s nationwide,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just a local phenomenon. But I don’t think Warners is any more or less guilty of these practices than any other major record company.”

Cautioning that he doesn’t speak for the other 27 members of his board, Abner said he personally approves of the boycott because “anything that is done to call attention to an inequity in our industry, I support.”

TV’s “Soul Train” producer Don Cornelius also wrote a letter of support to Billboard’s black music columnist Nelson George and 11 black radio programmers, including Maddox, Miller and Fleming.

Radio and television producers “who have chosen to expose black artists” are simply discarded as a rung on the ladder to Top 40 success, once an artist has crossed over, Cornelius said.

“Those of us who labor in this industry are all naturally very proud whenever an artist crosses over since we were usually there in the beginning,” Cornelius said. “The problem we’re facing now is something akin to amnesia.”

For its part, Warner Bros. has remained largely mute since the boycott began.

The company’s official spokesman, Bob Merlis, said last week, before Ostin and Warners black-music promotion director Tom Draper agreed to sit down with the boycotting stations, that the company tried to make peace with the three stations.

“Just like in the Bell Telephone commercial, we reached out but they haven’t responded,” Merlis said.

Blakely said Ostin called on March 29, but did so in order to postpone meeting with Blakely.

“He said Tom Draper would be calling to set something up, we exchanged some niceties and that’s the last we heard from him,” Blakely said.

Warners’ only public statement about the protest was a two-paragraph press release issued on March 22 expressing “shock” at the boycott and apologizing for any “isolated instances in which well-intentioned employees” may have discriminated against black stations.

“KACE, in its current editorial, charges that discriminatory treatment of black urban radio stations is not limited to Warner Bros. records,” said Merlis, reading from the release. “It is therefore difficult to understand why KACE has chosen to single out this company to focus its campaign.

“It has always been the practice of Warner Bros. Records to treat black urban and pop radio equally. The employees of Warner Bros. Records have been instructed to follow these standards of fairness. . . .”

A meeting between Warner and black station executives “in a good-faith effort to find a resolution to this unfortunate industry situation” would be scheduled sometime soon, Merlis said.

Meanwhile, the same promotional problem that initiated the boycott persists.

Top-rated local pop station KIIS-FM, with an estimated 1 million listeners tuning in each week, has been giving away dozens of concert tickets every week. Lucky listeners who win a pair get to see Warner Bros. recording artist Madonna perform in her concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre, beginning on April 26.

“We paid for ours,” said KIIS promotion director Steve Rowland. “We paid for our Prince tickets too.”

Though it has about one-tenth the audience of KIIS, KJLH is the top-rated black station here. KJLH (which, ironically, is owned by black crossover star Stevie Wonder’s Taxi Productions Inc.) had no Madonna tickets to give away.

“We’d like to be giving them away, if we could get any,” Maddox said.

According to Maddox, Warners could make Madonna tickets available to his station, but it discriminates against black stations in favor of promoting its crossover artists on Top 40 stations.

“KIIS may have bought their tickets, but KIIS got first right of refusal on how many tickets they wanted to buy,” Maddox said. “We would have bought them for Prince too, but by the time they got to us on the Prince concerts, we couldn’t trade or buy them. I guess we were so low in the pecking order, there were no tickets left to be had.”

Though the Prince saga represents crossover success, Madonna is what Maddox calls a “reverse crossover” superstar who represents the ultimate in record-label discrimination: a white pop star who first succeeds on black radio and later crosses over to Top 40.

Eighteen months ago, before she broke into the Billboard magazine Top 10 with the hit Warner Bros. single “Borderline,” Madonna was already a star on black stations. KJLH loyally played the 24-year-old singer’s first real hit, “Holiday,” even though the song was virtually unknown to the primarily white Top 40 audience.

“ ‘Holiday’ had a groove beat,” Maddox said. “It had a Motown sound and I believe it made it to No. 1 on the (R&B;) charts. She’s kind of moved out of that now, but 18 months ago, black stations were the only ones that played her.”

Now, assert programmers like Maddox and Fleming, Madonna ironically lives up to her stage name: She is sacred to white stations and untouchable to black stations.

Fleming traced the beginning of the boycott to two North Hollywood women who publish Radio Hotline, a weekly newsletter for black radio stations with a national circulation of about 1,500.

Radio Hotline first published Miller’s open letter to Ostin, charging his company with ignoring those stations that broadcast Prince’s music 3 1/2 years ago after his disastrous debut as opening act for the Rolling Stones. Though he was booed off the stage then, Prince remained a staple of black radio, Miller pointed out.

“It’s been a serious problem for a long time, but until now it’s always been assumed it was happening in smaller markets,” said Christol Clay, one of Radio Hotline’s co-publishers.

“You see, programmers used to say ‘this is only happening to me because I’m in Memphis . . . or New Orleans.’ When they found out it was happening at black stations in Chicago and New York, that’s when programmers got together and said enough is enough,” she said.

Besides being shortchanged on giveaway concert tickets, black stations have been slighted by recording companies in several other ways when an artist attains crossover status, Christol said. She cited:

Refusal of sponsorship rights.

“James Brown was sponsored by KRLA when he played the Beverly Theatre, even though KGFJ is the major station that still plays James Brown regularly, not just his oldies,” Christol said.

Inaccessibility for on-air interviews.

“When Teena Marie was with Rick James, the only stations that would play her were black--even though she’s white. That’s because Rick’s black,” Christol said.

Since Teena Marie recently had a Top 10 hit, she has become as inaccessible to black stations as Prince, the Jacksons, Ray Parker Jr. and dozens of other black artists who could once be counted upon to at least do phone interviews with deejays, if not in-studio guest interviews.

“They still talk to Top 40 stations, but they’ve forgotten who supported them in the beginning,” she said.

Denial of requests for special promotional items.

Key chains, record albums, buttons, knapsacks, umbrellas, posters, shirts, jackets . . . all sorts of promotional items are usually shipped to stations as part of a record album or concert tour campaign. In a classic quid pro quo, stations get more listeners by giving away a shirt with, say, Prince’s name on it while the concert promoter gets valuable “free” advertising for a concert targeted at exactly the audience most likely to buy concert tickets.

“If they have 100 jackets to give away, all the jackets go to the Top 40 stations,” Christol said. “The record company is responsible, but the artist has to take some of the blame. The artist has got to know this is going on.”