A Radio Side Chat with Lee Abrams

By Ben Fong-Torres

The first and last time I met Lee Abrams, in 1984 in San Francisco, I wanted to reach across the table and throttle him. That’s what I wrote in my pop music column in GQ.
I was a radio nut and, while at Rolling Stone, often wrote about the medium. I’d also been a weekend DJ on the pioneering free-form station, KSAN, which switched to country in 1980, giving in to more formatted album rock stations. I blamed consultants for streamlining FM rock and killing eclectic stations like KSAN, and here was the top gun, within throttling distance.
Abrams argued that it was the stations’ fault, letting jocks play whatever they wanted, including blues, jazz, country and comedy. Not to mention Ravi Shankar and Frank Zappa. Rock fans wanted more familiar music; more consistency. Abrams was right, and his latest format, aimed at Boomers, was applied to KFOG, which switched from “beautiful music” to his blend of older and newer music, from the Beatles to Stray Cats, along with drop-ins featuring Rodney Dangerfield, Don Pardo, and soundbites from vintage TV shows. It worked.
I did some specialty shows on KFOG and continued to mix writing and broadcasting. Lee Abrams went on to consult for every major radio group, pioneered XM satellite radio, leapt into other media, including television and newspapers, and his first love, music. (He played guitar in his high school years.) He produced a hit CD by Eric Johnson and consulted for various labels and artists. When I heard about his latest venture, Lee Abrams Mediavisions, with four enterprises (at last count) aimed at various media platforms, I wanted to have a chat, do some catching up. Safely sheltered in place in Chicago, he was happy to oblige.

BFT: So, what’s the state of radio today, and in your view, how did it get there?
LA: Well, I think it’s in a creative crisis. At a time when there’s so much competition from streaming, satellites and probably new, yet-to-emerge listening technologies, they’re stuck in some ‘80s focus group hell. At a time when they should be creatively on fire, the playbook hasn’t been updated in 40 years. You still hear the same slogans, same features, the same types of playlists, and it’s really sad, but a tremendous opportunity for somebody, on streaming platforms, for example, to bring back the magic of radio. A lot of people blame (the state of radio) on the economics, and “They don’t have the people to do that.” But it’s not an economic thing; it’s a brain power thing.

BFT: That leaves the door open for a Lee Abrams.
LA: Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking. Instead of whining about something, it’s time to do something.

BFT: I know you fell in love with radio in the late ‘50s, when you were about seven or eight.
LA: I was always fascinated by radio, but the real turning point was December 10, 1962 when my mom gave me a radio. From the second I heard WLS (in Chicago), I was just hooked. It was unbelievable. The theater of the mind, and, of course the music, but the magic between the music was equally intoxicating…the love affair began.

BFT: Around then, I had met Gary Owens. He was in Oakland, on KEWB, and that summer I got a weekend job there and became friends. So I was into radio, too. But back to you: When did you decide you wanted to get into radio?
LA: Yeah! In the mid-‘60s, I was managing bands in Chicago; I was pretty heavily into music, and all the bands played the same songs, “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” “Midnight Hour,” “Louie Louie,” and me and my friends thought, “Is that all there is?” We started doing research outside the VFW halls and sock hops and discovered that a lot of guys between 14 and 18 were rejecting the Top 40 songs. They said, “Don’t play that WLS shit; we want to hear the Yardbirds, the Animals and the Stones,” and the bands started playing that and became successful. And it evolved; by ’66 you knew who Jimi Hendrix was, and about a band called Cream. ’68, things got heavier, and by ’69 all hell broke loose with the musical and cultural revolution. I’d always thought about a radio format that played the cool stuff, the Moody Blues, Hendrix and Cream, and in 1969 I put a format together, and it was aimed at what I called “vulnerable Top 40 listeners.” Back then you had underground radio at night, but still there was a huge audience of people who listened to WLS and WFCL, but like every fourth record, but couldn’t handle Herb Alpert and Gary Puckett and all that stuff. The idea was to change the familiarity factor, which is historically critical to reaching a mass audience, by changing the song, which every Top 40 station is known for, too familiar artists. With Santana, for example, instead of just “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va,” we could pretty much play their entire catalog. Same with the Stones, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull and all those bands.

BFT: Kind of a pioneer of Deep Tracks!
LA (laughing): Yeah, that’s what it was. It was familiar, but we called it the “Oh, wow” factor. So that’s when I thought I’d make this a career…and I went for it.

BFT: You were a programmer right away? You didn’t work at a radio station?
LA: I was a gopher in summertime at WQN in Miami, where we used to vacation a lot, and I was always more interested in the programming side. My first radio gig, I was a jock, but also music director, and I was more into that. That was 1970. I’d already put this proposal together for this format and sent it to all the big broadcast companies, and one company called and said “We’re buying an FM station in Miami.” They didn’t accept my idea, but they offered a job. Shortly after that, ABC called and said, “We’re turning our FM stations more into album rock. Would you like to run our Detroit station?”

BFT: And then you got your format onto an FM station in Raleigh, North Carolina. Was there a name for it? LA: Just “Album Rock.”

BFT: You were only 18 or 19, and you met a radio veteran, Kent Burkhart and formed a consulting company with him in Atlanta, where he lived.
LA: That’s when we gave the format a name: Superstars. It took off immediately. He had all these connections. We were signing stations right and left.

BFT: And that’s separate from Superstars 2, which is when I met you circa KFOG.
LA: We’d noticed by the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, the album rock audience was splitting in half. You had the younger side that was more into the newer hard rock bands, and the older side didn’t really care for Foreigner, Styx and REO that much. But loved Steely Dan, Traffic and all that. So that’ when we designed Superstars 2, which never really took off. Kind of became “Adult Alternative.” But KFOG was great.

BFT: And then came deregulation and consolidation. Corporations gobbling up hundreds of stations. For a lot of radio people, Clear Channel and, later, Cumulus Media, were seen as villains. Were they?
LA: That was the beginning of the end, creatively. Consolidation is when bankers, who were good people, but didn’t have a passion for radio, started controlling more and more of the markets. They became more research oriented and took fewer chances. Simultaneously, satellites and streaming and digital downloads started happening, and radio was paralyzed by the Wall Street mentality. Radio should have been at its peak, doing innovative, amazing things to stay relevant. Instead, they stopped doing that.

BFT: I think mainstream media, by and large, didn’t understand what was happening. Newspapers and magazines also resisted the idea of web sites!
LA: Tell me about it! And now we’re in an era that’s very similar to the late ‘60s, with social revolution and cultural change, and technology changes, and radio-TV news are just so out of sync. They remind me of where AM radio was in 1969.

BFT: Part of the new competition for radio in the ‘90s was satellite operations, and you were there for that. LA: Yes, I was actually the first employee at XM back in ’98. I’d heard of this thing called satellite radio and thought, “Wow.” The more I learned about it, the more I thought it could be very powerful. I told the backers, it could reinvent radio listening. We got a blank slate to reimagine it for this new platform, and the ability to create every kind of format.

BFT: I was one of the first subscribers. Terrestrial stations would say, “Yeah, but they can’t offer local news, weather and traffic.” So XM had a channel just for local traffic and weather.
LA: The interesting thing about terrestrial radio is they claim to be local, but so few stations actually are local.

BFT: With all the voice-tracking DJs from other markets.
LA: The hub-and-spoke system, where it’s all coming from … wherever. There’s a lot of denial going on in terrestrial radio about “Spotify’s a fad and nobody really listens to that,” and “they’re not local.” Nobody cares. They’re just going after the best experience.

BFT: The only real local stations are news and sports.
LA: Yeah. That’s what I listen to.

BFT: Speaking of news, what did you learn from your time with Tribune Media, where you’re consulting with newspapers as well as TV and radio properties?
LA: That was a fascinating experience. The TV side was OK. The newspaper side? 70 percent of the people really wanted it to succeed; 20 percent were ‘What are these guys talking about?’ And ten percent were just violently opposed to these radio people coming into their holy temple of journalism, and created problems. There were some people who were pissed off that some pages were in color. I felt like the drummer in Metallica playing with the Chicago Symphony. Square peg/round hole. The resistance was just incredible. There were some newspapers that were very open. The one in South Florida; Baltimore was pretty good. Others were just like, “How dare you?” They had this holier than thou attitude. I remember one time someone said, “We are the kings of investigative journalism.” I said, “You know, 60 Minutes does a pretty good job.” He said, ‘That’s not news. That’s garbage. That’s television.”

BFT: Speaking of print media, you also consulted with my old magazine, Rolling Stone, around 1986.
LA: I reached out to Kent Brownridge (publisher). He said, give us a living, breathing overview of the Rolling Stone reader and what needs to happen. We did this pretty exhaustive report for him, painting a picture of the Rolling Stone reader and the potential RS reader. He took a lot of the things pretty seriously.

BFT: At Mediavisions, you have at least four new ventures, and one of them is a documentary?
LA: Yes, it’s called “Sonic Messengers: When Music and Radio Changed the World.” It starts in the ‘50s with the birth of Top 40. It talks about the great American soundtrack of radio and music working together and rolling with the cultural changes that happened in this country, and explaining the good, bad and ugly, you know, talking about the corruption as well as the magic. It gets into those great stations and how they helped change the world. It’s a 90-minute documentary, and we see it as being on Netflix or Apple.

BFT: Has it been produced?
LA: No. We’re just pitching it now, and we hope to have it in production this fall. There’s so much hunger for programming, and my partner in this, Spencer Proffer, who’s done documentaries (Coltrane, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix), thinks placement will be pretty easy.

BFT: The only concern is how long a documentary takes to get produced.
LA: Yeah, probably eight months to a year.

BFT (laughs): That’d be fantastic. There’s a documentary being made about me (Like a Rolling Stone by Suzanne Joe Kai) and it’s into its eighth YEAR of production, and just getting finishing financing!
LA: I guess we’re being optimistic.

BFT: Another project of yours is Radio Free Earth, a format for the digital age?
LA: It is reminiscent of the great days of radio, but clearly in 2020 terms. It’s aimed 40-plus, it’s very dense theater of the mind production, with really intelligent hosts, many of them well-known during the golden age of FM, and musical depth. It’ll sort of be like the early KFOG was. FM terrestrial people would never understand it, and that’s why I’d love to have it on Apple or Amazon. One of the major streaming players. But it’s something you’d like.

BFT: I like the fact that you’re going full circle with the idea of theater of the mind, and full circle with what you did with KFOG and other stations.
LA: It’s a thought-out channel. It’s live, 24/7, and it’s got a lot of daily features that will turn into the new generation’s trademarks, the way “Psychedelic Psupper” and “10 at 10” did. And it’s programming that embraces the core artists. (Examples: The Beatles, Hendrix, The Clash and Nirvana.)

BFT: You’re also writing a book, Solutions for a Creatively Starved Planet. It doesn’t sound like a memoir.
LA: Oh, yeah, I’ve been working on it for awhile and would love to have it out next year. It’s tales from the trenches. It talks about how to lead creative teams, how to think differently, how to re-invent. How to create magic in a buttoned-down, economically driven world.

BFT: Well, Lee, I’m just sorry to hear that you’re so lazy, wasting time, going over your old Top 40 surveys… LA: I still have all that stuff. Happy about the past, but excited and charged about the future. It’s just beginning, and it feels really good.



Ben Fong-Torres, former writer and senior editor at Rolling Stone, was also a DJ on KSAN and, later, did shows on KFOG, KFRC-FM, and Boss Boss Radio. He programs Moonalice Radio online and does a DJ show, 9 to 12 a.m. and p.m. Fong-Torres, a real life character in the film, Almost Famous, is director of content for Music City Hit Factory in San Francisco.