Keener original, Robin Seymour, has written a long awaited autobiography. “The DJ That Launched 1,000 Hits” is a fascinating read and a required addition to the library of every true Keenerfan. We caught up with Robin, now in his 90th decade of life, for a taste of the treasures to be found in his extraordinary memoir.
— Christmas Memories From the Soundtrack of Your Life —
“THE ANDY WILLIAMS CHRISTMAS SHOW“
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Aired on the night of December 18, 1966 on Detroit NBC WWJ-TV (Channel 4), 10:00 p.m., 54 years ago, on this day. Guests: Andy and his brothers (The Williams Brothers), Bob, Dick and Don. His wife, Claudine Longet, and The Osmond Brothers.
(Source: Detroit Free Press; Sunday, December 18, 1966)
THE ANDY WILLIAMS CHRISTMAS SHOW * NBC-TV * SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1966
The long anticipated WKNR book by Scott Westerman in print and available!
MOTOR CITY MUSIC!
At long last, the Keener legend is available and in print (published in 2019). It’s a tale 56 years in the making and 4 years in production, with biographical sketches of many of the original WKNR personalities, popular culture highlights from each year of the Keener era and scans of 9 years of WKNR Music Guides.
Motor City Music – Keener13 and the Soundtrack of Detroittells the story of Keener’s birth and how Bob Green, Dick Purtan, Jerry Goodwin, Robin Seymour and others found their way to the Detroit airwaves. There are classic tales of Keener and the Beatles, a contest that almost landed WKNR in court and the station’s power to raise a half million dollars for charity during a newspaper strike.
We meet two of the men behind the scenes, program director, Frank Maruca and chief engineer Jerry Martin, a duo who help craft both the sound and the vibe that made WKNR jump out of your radio and into your heart.
Music guide buffs will love watching their favorite hits ride up and down the charts, watching how the promotional pictures of the announcers morphed over the years and remembering some of the products that Keener helped sell to thousands of fans across the Motor City.
Motor City Music is a true trip down memory lane, a required reference for those of us who followed the music and a loving tribute to the talent that transformed a 5,000 watt AM station that barely covered the market into a powerhouse that became the soundtrack of our lives.
Above article is courtesy freep.com newspaper archive. Copyright 2020.Newspapers.com.
The above featured Week’s Top Singles article was clipped, saved, and imaged from the credited source by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
“These are the week’s top 45 rpm singles, as selected by Detroit’s top disc jockeys and the consensus of sales in Detroit and the U.S. as reported by Billboard, international recording news weekly.”
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“Sleigh Ride” was covered by the American girl group The Ronettes. The Phil Spector-produced recording has become the most popular version outside the traditional pop standard genre, charting yearly in Billboard’s Top Ten U.S. Holiday 100 and was #26 in 2018 in the Hot 100. It features the well-known “Ring-a-ling-a-ling, ding-dong-ding” background vocals, and the clip-clop and the whining of a horse at its beginning and end.
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(Source: Wikipedia)
— Christmas Memories From the Soundtrack of Your Life —
‘The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album’ is the seventh studio album by the Beach Boys, released in November 1964. It contains five original songs and seven standards on a Christmas theme. The album proved to be a long-running success during subsequent Christmas seasons, initially reaching number six in the US Billboard 200 chart in its year of release and eventually going gold. Music historian James Perone wrote that it is “regarded as one of the finest holiday albums of the rock era”.
While leader Brian Wilson produced and arranged the rock songs, he left it to Dick Reynolds (an arranger for the Four Freshmen, a group Wilson idolized) to arrange the forty-one piece orchestral backings on the traditional songs to which the Beach Boys would apply their vocals. One single was released from the album, the original song “The Man with All the Toys” backed with the group’s rendition of “Blue Christmas”. “Little Saint Nick”, a single which had already been released the previous year, was included on the album.
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(Source: Wikipedia)
— Christmas Memories From the Soundtrack of Your Life —
Click on (COMPLETE LP) for the complete track listing from this album.
THE BEACH BOYS * THE BEACH BOYS’ CHRISTMAS ALBUM (COMPLETE LP) * 1964
We are pleased to announce on this page we added a brand new link to former WJR producer Kevin Collard and his current podcast show, ‘A Soul Encountered‘ to the site’s blogroll.
Kevin Collard was first hired at WJR in 1993. According to Kevin, he worked with over 30 hosts at WJR (not to mention Mike Whorf) including: Paul W Smith, Ken Calvert, David Newman and wrapping up his career there working with Frank Beckmann in 2009. Kevin also stated he did production work for Larry Patton, John McCullough, Kevin Joyce, Mitch Albom and other luminaries affiliated with Detroit radio as well.
Kevin Collard’s ‘A Soul Encountered‘ podcast page best describes what his podcasts is all about:
“A Soul encountered is a bi-weekly interview program focusing on spiritual matters, what has worked? what hasn’t? people of all kinds of backgrounds sit down and explain what they believe and why.
Hosted by radio veteran Kevin Collard and originating near Detroit, Michigan this broadcast strives to be high quality, compelling and thought provoking.”
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‘A SOUL ENCOUNTERED’ REMEMBERS CHUCK YEAGER
Featured on his podcast page today — and you may go HERE — in wake of Chuck Yeager’s passing just three days ago, Kevin Collard shares a brief WJR interview with the legendary record-setting jet pilot, conducted by the late J. P. McCarthy.
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— NOTES —
We are grateful and thankful as well, with his blessings, we will shortly be featuring on this site a two-hour tribute Kevin Collard created and produced in memory of WJR legend Mike Whorf, who recently passed away in November.
Good news! Kevin will be soon be donating his extensive WJR radio archive to this site as well. Many of his WJR memories and moments will be featured in future posts, here and to his credit, courtesy of Kevin’s generosity.
Detroit Dealers Frown on Detroit Radio Music Chart Value; Not Used as ‘Guides’
DETROIT – While local record merchandisers claim that area radio “Top 40 charts” are highly inaccurate, they say that they are able to live with the situation because no one in the Motor City market uses radio charts as a buying guide.
This lack of direct chart influence on record sales, according to dealers, is due to the relatively high number of competing Big Beat radio stations in the area – all offering slightly different formats and none having a clearly dominant influence as taste-maker in the Detroit pop market.
WKNR MUSIC GUIDE August 22, 1966
Sam Press, co-owner of the Ross Music Shops in Detroit, said that “There are actually three influential rock stations – two here and one in Windsor, Canada, competing for the kids’ attention, plus two very strong R&B stations. You have to remember that because of Motown, R&B is a stronger product here than it might be in other markets. So what you have is kids constantly switching dials between all these stations and not being dominated by any of them. A ‘Keener’ (WKNR) chart might have some of the most popular songs in the area on it but it will invariably be late in listing a big English hit which the kids have been hearing on CKLW of Windsor, and will likewise be late in listing a hot R&B number that has been exposed by one of the other stations.”
“What this means,” he said, “is that teenagers choose the best of several stations. For this reason we don’t have to buy according to anybody’s chart. The independent dealers in this town wait until they start getting requests before they will order anything – except something by a very hot artist.”
Asked if his customers would not seek out a competitor who already had the hits in stock, Press said: “The racks are even slower in getting current singles out – we can move faster than our competition.”
Not Used as Guide
Lou Salesin, a 35-year veteran of the business who owns Mumford Music Shop, said that he also does not use “radio charts as buying guides. I must ignore WKNR and the other lists; they are inaccurate for a number of reasons. Some of these inaccuracies could he eliminated -and I would like to see that happen, just for the principle of the thing.”
Sol Margolis, owner of the Ross Music Stores, told Billboard: “I only order what I get calls for, plus a minimum of new releases by established artists. To my knowledge, no Detroit dealer uses radio charts as any kind of a buying guide. We know better than to trust what those sheets say.”
Another dealer, who did not wish to be identified, said that “you simply cannot believe what the radio charts list. The trouble is that there are too many pop records being released. I think the manufacturers are working on some sort of percentage planning. They just keep churning the records out, hoping that 5 per cent or so will make money for them.
WXYZ SOUND SURVEY August 29, 1966
“As far as local charts are concerned,” he added, “we often see a record that hasn’t been shipped already on the sheet. Other times, we see stations keeping numbers on the charts long after they have stopped selling. They do this, apparently because they got on a record too late, and then refuse to admit that their influence hasn’t been able to keep it a hot seller. There are many complicating factors, but the end result is inaccurate charts. All the dealers know this, and they depend on requests and their own experience in the business to tell them how to buy.”
Chet Kajeski, of Martin and Snyder, a one-stop in Detroit, told Billboard: “I find frequent discrepancies on the radio charts. As far as I am concerned, they hurt jukebox operators in the area. By failing to list, and expose on the air, what is a legitimate ‘adult’ hit, they can cut down play on the boxes. This happens with a record that sells very well in the area, deserves to be listed on the charts, but doesn’t get listed because the stations don’t feel it is in their format.” Because such a record does not get the additional push of air play, its life on a jukebox is sometimes shortened.
“I don’t believe,” Kajeski added, “that many record dealers are affected by the charts in the Detroit area. By being inaccurate, these charts defeat their own purpose.” END
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Information and news source: Billboard; September 3, 1966
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