Few things in life trigger more vivid memories than classic radio. The crackle of the needle on an LP. Shelves of well-worn records. The local voice of a generation calling through the airwaves to a city humming with restless youth. A voice that connects strangers in the wee hours of the morning, when no one else is around. Radio has always been there for the faithful—first dates, wild parties and long Saturday night drives with no particular place to go. In Louisville, few radio stations have provided those memories to generation after generation of young folks as the legendary WAKY.
WAKY signed on to its original AM frequency of 620 in late July 1958, taking over for WGRC, which had been talk radio. WAKY was a Top 40 station at a time when rock ’n’ roll was in its infancy. The first day it signed on the air, it immediately became a thing of local legend when it played Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater,” which was at the top of the charts that week, nonstop for 24 hours.
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was sliding down the charts. At the same time, early WAKY disc jockeys like Larry Aiken were introducing Louisville to future legends such as Buddy Holly and Jiles Perry Richardson Jr. (better known as The Big Bopper), as their songs “Think It Over” and “Chantilly Lace,” respectively, were climbing the charts. And songs by established artists like Johnny Cash’s “I Guess Things Happen that Way” and The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” were at their commercial peak, lingering somewhere near the bottom of the Top 10.
It was an exciting time, but something wicked this way came. Elvis Presley, whose grandparents lived in Louisville’s South End, had joined the military that March, got sent to Germany, and wasn’t making records for the foreseeable future. Jerry Lee Lewis had been admonished for marrying his 13-year-old cousin. The following winter, only seven months after WAKY’s arrival, fate took three of Top 40’s and WAKY’s most promising young stars in a single day. On Feb. 3, 1959, Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper perished in a plane crash. And when you consider Berry’s 1959 arrest, the raging fire that rock ’n’ roll had set ablaze only five years prior suddenly seemed reduced to embers.
“Ironically, in that time period, there were no rock ’n’ roll-dedicated stations in Louisville. They were all Top 40 stars,” said Johnny Randolph, WAKY disc jockey and program director during the ’60s and ’70s. “So it was stations like us that took that hit.”
Over the next few years, the station’s airwaves were awash in a sea of bubblegum, crooners and pop music that had taken over Top 40 in rock ’n’ roll’s absence, forcing Top 40 stations to push less edgy artists like Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon and Percy Faith. But rock ’n’ roll wasn’t going down without a fight. By 1962, energized by the emergence of an independent label out of Detroit known as Motown, folk artists like Bob Dylan, and California surf bands such as The Beach Boys, Top 40 and rock ’n’ roll were once again on the rise.
In 1964, everything changed. The world met The Beatles and, shortly thereafter, The Rolling Stones. “That’s when things got interesting,” said Randolph. “The British invasion changed it all. The cat was out of the bag, and teenage rebellion was here. And we were where Louisville’s kids came to rebel.”
Armed with the brilliant music of the late 1960s, WAKY found its identity at 790 AM. Former WAKY disc jockey Gary Burbank recalled walking into the station for the first time: “The lobby was full of people off the street; they were just dancing to the music. It was just wild,” he said. “I thought, ‘My God, is this some kind of cult?’ It was a party atmosphere.” Muhammad Ali was known to stop in some nights, hang around the studio and help DJs pick out records.
One of the faces off the street that hung around WAKY was that of a young Terry Meiners, who credited WAKY for his lifelong love of radio. Now a WHAS radio and television personality, Meiners wrote via email of his time hanging around WAKY’s studio: “My lifelong interest in radio leapfrogged after Coyote Calhoun let me answer phones for him at WAKY in 1974-75. Program director Johnny Randolph encouraged me to explore using the production equipment and learn the basics of broadcasting. I was able to put together an audition tape and took it with me to college, where I found a weekend job at WKQQ. My fledgling career had its roots in the kind people of WAKY letting a high school nerd hang around, watch and learn.”
The party wasn’t just reserved for the guys in the studio and on air. “Everybody in there—the whole station, they were just happy to be there,” Randolph said. “It was the first time I’d been somewhere where people were happy to be at work.”
That party environment would pay off in the long run. Last year, in an article in Radio Ink, WAKY was ranked the No. 13 Top 40 station of all time, in any market. “I also worked at the No. 1 ranked station on that list, WKOW in Detroit,” Burbank said. “And to be honest, I don’t think any station has ever done it like WAKY. I’ll tell you what: If it came to a battle between those two stations, I would put my money on WAKY.”
Most agree the station flourished for two reasons, with Randolph’s direction being foremost. “I think Johnny Randolph should be ranked as one of the Top 20 program directors of all time,” Burbank said.
Randolph was experienced enough to know that, when it came to disc jockeys, sometimes the patients needed to run the asylum. His approach worked, attracting an on-air cast of characters like Lee Masters, now better known by his birth name, Jarl Mohn. Mohn later would become general manager of MTV and VH1, an architect of the E! Network and the CEO of National Public Radio. Other DJs who came on board were Weird Beard, Mason Lee Dixon and the aforementioned Calhoun.
“I’m kind of average on the air,” Randolph said. “My philosophy as program director was always to hire disc jockeys who sounded better than me.”
“Randolph let us run pretty freewheelin’,” said Calhoun, an all-around radio icon who worked at WAKY early in his career. “It wasn’t real strict or stringent as far as what we did on the air, as long as we were FCC compliant. He gave the personalities an opportunity to shine and flourish on the air and in the community. The on-air personalities became larger than life.”
Calhoun laughed as he recalled a high school visit Randolph scheduled for him. “We were screening a film called The History of Rock ’n’ Roll. We took it to Mercy Academy, and at the time, I was like 20 years old. We showed it to the junior and senior class. I walked into that gymnasium, and I swear it was like The Beatles walked in. They kept coming up to me and asking for a kiss. And if I gave them a peck, they’d say, ‘No, I want a good kiss.’
“These teachers were staring at me with these stern looks on their faces. By the time I got back to the station that afternoon, Randolph takes me in his office and says, ‘I just got a call from Mercy Academy, and you are barred from that place forever.’ ”
Of those larger-than-life on-air personalities, none was larger than that of the late Bill Bailey. When his name comes up, everyone seems to hide a devilish grin, because a slideshow of wild stories just clicked through their memory in lightning speed. The consensus seems to be that most Bill Bailey stories are unfit for print.
“Our studio was downtown, but our tower was in J-Town,” Randolph began when asked for a Bill Bailey story. “There was a fire at the tower one night, so the news man came on and said there was a fire at the WAKY transmitter facility. Bailey, who had just come on for his morning shift, starts praying on the air. It was this very warm, sincere, heartfelt prayer. ‘Dear Lord, this fire may consume our tower. I’m asking you, with all of your might, to please let this rock ’n’ roll sewer burn to the ground.’ ” Randolph finished the story with a deep, throaty laugh.
Another time, Bailey claimed to have a twin brother named Rev. William F. Bailey, and then proceeded to host a fake Easter service, creating a frenzy for tickets among listeners. He once even tried to play a country ham on the studio’s turntable.
Bailey was well known as a hard drinker with an affinity for whiskey. Burbank recalled a story he was told by Bill Hennes, a former employee of WAKY’s top competitor, WKLO. “Bill Hennes started leaving a bottle of whiskey at WAKY’s door every morning for Bailey, when he’d come in at 5 a.m. to do the morning shift,” Burbank said. “Bill liked a drink of whiskey now and then—well, 5:30 a.m. was both now and then.”
It was a clear attempt by their competitor to get Bailey so drunk that he couldn’t finish his shift. “Hennes told me that, after a week, he stopped leaving the whiskey because Bailey only sounded better on the air the drunker he got,” Burbank said.
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This brings us to the other key factor in WAKY’s success: The station had a worthy adversary in WKLO. “WKLO was a great station. They kept us on our toes, and we never ever took them for granted,” Calhoun said. That competition often garnered a healthy rivalry between the two stations.
“With [WKLO] on our heels, we had to be great,” Randolph said.
“Once things got going, I went out and bought a used Cadillac convertible,” Burbank recalled. “I drove it to work that first day I had it, and Randolph jumped in the passenger seat and said, ‘Drive over to WKLO.’ So I did. They were just around the corner from us. And I pulled up next to the studio window that looked out onto the street, and Randolph pointed out to whoever was on the air: ‘My DJs drive Cadillacs!’ ”
When The Beatles came to Chicago for a press conference, every station in the region scrambled to get an interview. Randolph flew up to cover it for WAKY, while WKLO sent a less experienced DJ named Ken Douglas. “We were there at O’Hare airport—tons of people. Ken didn’t know how to work his tape recorder,” Randolph said. “So I showed him how to use it, except for how to turn off the safety function, which cuts the mic. I stepped back, and when he wasn’t looking, I picked up his microphone and recorded, ‘WKLO, John Randolph here. Never send a boy to do a man’s job,’ and then turned the safety back on.
“He thought he was recording the whole time but really never got any of his interview on tape. I got mine, though.”
By the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall for AM stations across the country. Due to the emergence of the FM frequency, which was less prone to interference and carried better sound quality, music was not going to last much longer on AM. The station fell on hard times, ad sales dried up, and the on-air talent fled to markets all over the country. By the mid-’80s, WAKY on 790 AM was limping to the finish line. For the first and final time after nearly three decades of 24-hour-a-day programming, WAKY signed off on Aug. 31, 1986.
But the station that meant so much to so many didn’t go away without its due. The last six hours of on-air programming were one big tribute and farewell party to the station. Everyone showed up to say goodbye; former employees and DJs returned for the final broadcast, including Randolph, who had left the station in 1978.
As the clock inched toward midnight, the evening’s host, Mark Strauss, captured what everyone was feeling. Speaking for those in the room with him and for an entire generation of Louisvillians who grew up with WAKY, he began: “We’re at the point in the evening where we don’t want to believe what we’re about to do. It’s an idea whose time has come … There’s a lot of people in the studio right now feeling the same emotion as me. We’re not here to mourn the passing of an old friend; we’re here to toast a radio station that has been many things—our babysitter, our jukebox, our guiding light and, many times, our only friend. Let’s raise the glasses high and say farewell to WAKY radio.”
And just like that, WAKY was gone.
The year after WAKY signed off for good, radio man Bill Walters entered the Louisville radio market, when WASE 103.5 FM signed on the air. By the mid-’80s, the young rebels had all grown up, the songs they loved as kids were a couple of decades old, and rock ’n’ roll had been around long enough to have an “oldies” format. So Walters pounced.
“That’s the impact of music. There are some songs we play that I can hear and I remember exactly where I was, who I was with, what we were talking about, the clothes that I was wearing, everything,” Walters said of the oldies format. “As I see it, our station harkens back to when music was music. Obviously, it brings back memories to those of us who grew up with it when it was made. But once we became parents, we played it in the car for our kids. Now that generation grew up listening to the music that we play as well. It’s beautiful, really.”
WASE thrived on the beloved music of yesteryear for the next two decades. But industry deregulations in the mid-’90s dismantled the world of local independent radio, and nearly all local stations were bought up and gentrified by massive corporate conglomerates.
Walters and WASE hung on. But by 2007, it became increasingly difficult to compete with the money that massive corporations could throw into the market. That’s when it occurred to Walters that rather than try to sound like those big guys, the station should go in a more local direction. The Top 40 of WAKY’s heyday was now the music of WASE’s oldies format. So he tracked down the storied WAKY call letters, which had landed with, but were not being used by, a station owner in central Kentucky named Steve Newbury. “I called him and said, ‘Steve, I need those call letters,’ ” Walters recalled. “I had to pay dearly for them, and even though they were expensive, they were totally worth it.”
In 2007, WAKY was ready to be reborn, but on the FM dial this time. “Just like any kid of my generation, I grew up listening to WAKY,” Walters said. “It was the radio station I loved. It belonged to everyone, and it still does. It’s their station. The soundtrack of them growing up. The memories and the fun of it all.”
Walters knew it couldn’t be inauthentic, or it would look as though he were trying to capitalize on the iconic call letters. The station had to feel like WAKY. The first two parts of the puzzle were already in place: the music and the fact that it was locally owned. “We’re not part of a conglomerate,” Walters said. “We don’t care about market tests; we care about our audience.”
Next was the sound of WAKY. Walters and company dug up air checks, jingles and on-air bits from the old days, dusted them off and put them back on the air. Suddenly, the beloved voices of decades ago once again filled the air.
By July 2007, Walter was ready to relaunch WAKY—nearly 50 years to the day from when it signed on for the first time. At 4 p.m. on a Friday, WAKY was back. What was the first song played? “Purple People Eater,” of course, with a then-retired Johnny Randolph introducing it. Randolph showed up at the station, said the call letters for the first time and introduced the song. He then shook some hands, got in his car and left for a Florida vacation with his wife.
The following afternoon, while the couple was lying on a beach, Randolph answered a call from Walters, who offered him a permanent position to once again be program director of WAKY. “I thought he was crazy,” Randolph said, “and Walters told me: ‘I didn’t call for you to tell me I’m crazy. I called because I want your help.’ ” Randolph accepted the position.
“The letters are just letters; everything has to be right,” Walters said of the decision to bring Randolph back. “The music, the jingles … we had to recreate the aura of what the station was, and part of that was Johnny Randolph. There is no one like Johnny Randolph, and it’s because of him that, to this day, we still have the most talented on-air staff of all the stations in Louisville combined. We are the only personality-based station in Louisville.”
As for the station’s future, Randolph smiled and said, “WAKY has to grow with its audience. It always has, and it always will.” He quoted the station’s mantra during its first evolution: “ ‘The station that you grew up with has grown up with you.’ ” However, he was quick to add, “But there’s no need to rush growing up.”