KRLA’s Switch to Talk Will End Rock Era on AM Dial in L.A.

Listen closely just before talk-jock Don Imus takes the air the morning of Nov. 30 on KRLA-AM (1110). You’ll hear the sound of an era breathing its last gasp.

With the station’s shift to a full-time talk and sports lineup, it will mark the last of rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm & blues on the AM dial in the Los Angeles area. It closes the book on a legacy that started when the station was KXLA, playing country music with such deejays as Tennessee Ernie Ford and humorist Stan Freberg, housed at the Huntington Sheraton Hotel in a Pasadena, and continued on a path consistent enough that it’s considered the longest-running format on one station in L.A. radio history.

Surviving financial disaster after being taken away by Federal Communications Commission action from owner Jack Kent Cooke in 1962, KRLA was the first here to hop on the swelling wave of Beatlemania, gaining the upper hand in the youth wars with KFWB’s “Color Radio” and KHJ’s “Boss Radio.” Kids huddled beneath their bed covers, listening on transistor radios to such inimitable personalities as Huggy Boy, Humble Harv, “Emperor” Bob Hudson, Dave “The Hullabalooer” Hull, Casey Kasem and Johnny Hayes. This was the station that brought the Beatles’ historic Hollywood Bowl concerts in 1964 and ‘65, promoted by then-deejay Bob Eubanks, who literally mortgaged his house to stake the enterprise.

“I was fortunate enough to be in on the most glorious time, which was the discovery of the Beatles invasion,” says Hayes, who was at KRLA for 27 years beginning in 1965 and now works afternoons at oldies station KRTH-FM (101.1). “I’m approaching 40 years in the business, and I have never seen a station before or since where kids were not only allowed but welcome to come to the station. Hundreds of kids were at the station from the moment they got home from school until 10 at night. They knew what minute a jock would arrive and run to his car hoping to carry his briefcase. [Deejay] Dick Biondi would sit on the steps and help kids with homework and discuss their personal problems. It was the most exhilarating experience of my life.”

Fortunes varied as rock listeners fled to superior-sounding FM in the early ‘70s, but after a series of tamperings with the operation, the station again emerged under the guidance of “Golden Oldies” entrepreneur Art Laboe in 1976 as the station of choice for the largely ignored Latino audience by emphasizing R&B; and soul favorites. That got another boost when Greater Media--later consumed by CBS--bought the outlet in 1985, moving it from the Pasadena hotel (which was being closed at the time for renovation) to the Wilshire district and hiring back a lot of the deejays from the glory days.

The Right Move, Commercially

But the audience soon thinned, and what was long inevitable or even overdue, is finally happening.

Surprisingly, those close to the legacy are not shedding many tears.

“From a commercial standpoint, it’s the right move for KRLA,” says Laboe, a veteran of the KXLA days who had a stint at the station as recently as last year. “They have hockey and baseball games already now.”

Still, he can’t help but be a bit sentimental and sad, thumbing through photos he has of drive-in broadcasts he did with such performers as Ricky Nelson and Chuck Berry, swarmed at the site by swooning teens and scoring now-unthinkable 33-share ratings.

“If you’re anybody who grew up in L.A., you’re married to the days when radio was like that,” he says.

Huggy Boy--Dick Hugg, who was barely out of his teens when he became an L.A. radio fixture broadcasting R&B; records from the sidewalk-window vantage of the famed Dolphin’s of Hollywood music store--says that, indeed, KRLA to the end remained a real family affair among radio listeners. Literally. To this day, when he makes public appearances--especially in East L.A., where the station’s most loyal following remains--he’s struck by the clusters of grandmothers, children and grandchildren who turn up.

“There’s not any one kind of music they can play for all ages and groups anymore,” he says. “There’s no real Top 40 that crosses generations and culture. But this still does that.”

But the truth is that the golden oldies the station has survived on for the second half of its existence--”Duke of Earl,” “Cowboys to Girls,” Motown favorites--are just a ghostly echo of a heyday long passed. The coming switch, says L.A. radio historian Don Barrett, author of “Los Angeles Radio People,” is merely a belated pulling of the life-support plug, a mercy killing.

“The station died in 1971,” he wrote in an open letter on his https://www.laradio.com Web site last spring, as speculation increased that a format switch was in the offing. “Please shoot the animal and put it out of its misery.”

With it actually happening, Barrett remains sanguine. “It should not be looked at with nostalgia or sadness,” he says. “The fact of the matter is, times have changed. FM, whether oldies or any other kind of music--there’s no comparison from AM. It was doomed a long time ago, and it was clear management was not promoting it at all. Time had passed it by.”

Actor-writer Michael McKean came on board at KRLA just as times began to change in 1970, when he joined the comedy troupe the Credibility Gap, founded as a satire news team by Harry Shearer, Richard Beebe and Lou Irwin. The act was the product of the freewheeling spirit of the times and a natural evolution of the irreverence that was key to rock ‘n’ roll radio. But real rock radio was already making the move to FM.

Permanent and Predictable

“I remember being 21 then and thinking, ‘I don’t really know much about show business, but I perceive that radio’s different than anything else,’ ” he says. “Nothing quite as strangely impermanent and scary as radio.”

The irony is that, in trying to retain its heritage during the last 13 years, KRLA became as permanent and predictable as anything on the air.

“I realized the other day that I probably hadn’t gone to 1110 on my car radio in five years,” McKean says. “I said, ‘I wonder what they’re playing--probably a Four Tops song.’ And there it was, the Four Tops, ‘Reach Out.’ ”

But the story may not be over. KRLA General Manager Bob Moore, who came on board in 1985, says the Four Tops song and all the rest in the library are being packed up for storage, ready for use if someone wants to resurrect the station someday.

“KRLA is not dead,” he says. “It’s resting.”

But Johnny Hayes isn’t so sure. “It’s already had more than nine lives.”