It was, as I remember, late spring 1965, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I was in my room after school. In the background the radio was playing something from that week’s Top 40.
In Tulsa at the time there were two Top 40 radios stations that were popular with ‘the kids’. Both were AM stations, FM as a popular broadcast medium was almost a decade away.
The two stations were rivals, particularly in the 1960s. Rivals for audience and rivals for advertising sales. The latter being the official reflection of audience listenership, i.e., ratings and the basis for the price of advertising time. The advertising term is ‘cost per thousand’, it was used to determine the ‘advertising rate’ one could command for a ten second, thirty second, or one minute commercial.
KAKC 970 AM was the big dog in town, especially with teens.
When my father took over as General Manager of rival KELi 1430, in the early 1960s, the competition got serious.
In the broadcast medium, stations lived or died by the quarterly Neilson ratings periods: winter, spring, summer, and fall.
With my father’s entertainment, business and sales savvy KELi soon began to weaken the ratings hold of KAKC on Tulsa and surrounds as #1.
Assured that the KELi’s audience was growing and KAKC’s was waining, to a degree, my father commissioned me (free of charge) to do what he called, “dashboard surveys” in between ratings periods.
What’s a “dashboard survey” you ask? For those old enough to remember cars at first included an AM radio as an extra when you ordered or bought a new car. By the fifties and especially the 60s the in-dash car radio was ubiquitous—every car had one. And the ‘radio dial’ as it was called was analog and linear, that is to say on the left the AM broadcast band was calibrated in kHz (kilohertz frequencies) starting with 5.4 kHz and ending on the right with 1700 kHz, separated by 10 kHz.
With KAKC 970’s kHz spot on the dial being toward the middle and KELi 1430’s kHz spot on the far right of the dial, the ‘pointers’ were easy to spot through either the driver’s or passenger’s side window—especially if the sun was illuminated the dial.
As you can see by the graphic below it was not hard to determine, with a quick glance, which of the two local rock-n-roll radio stations the car’s driver or passenger had been listening to.
So I would be dropped off in a large shopping area’s parking lot to walk between the cars, clipboard in hand putting a hash mark in the KELi or KAKC column for the place on the dial that car’s radio was set.
Little by little, KELi’s totals began to climb and eventually surpassed those of KAKC. Besides, who else had a radio station in an earthbound flying saucer on the Tulsa Fair Grounds!
As you can image there are many variable as to why any one car’s radio dial was set where I found it. Regardless of the factors, it was an immediate snapshot or barometer of audience preferences for however many cars (100, 300, a 1000) were counted in any one location around town.
By now you’ve asked, what’s all this got to do with Jerry Lee Lewis.
My father understood there were two major music venues teens—in the 60s in Tulsa Oklahoma—liked to attend: concerts and dances. For example KELI sponsored Diana Ross and the Supremes in concert, which happily I was given tickets to attend. And dances, where sponsored bands would play such as Herman’s Hermits, which I again got to attend with a date on a sponsor’s tickets.
Booking agents and promoters would call my father about brining in entertainment groups, wanting the station to sponsor the group’s appearance. How much such sponsorship cost the station upfront I don’t know but the group got ‘free’ advertising for their appearance. Needless to say, my father did not ask me or my sisters for our opinions of what bands, etc., we would like to see.
Such was the case when The Beatles invaded American in 1964. He was given the opportunity to book/sponsor and bring them to Tulsa. He passed, thinking they wouldn’t be able to fill the auditorium! Imagine my chagrin and disappointment when I learned he had the opportunity to bring The Beatles to Tulsa. Which of course meant that I would have been able to wrangle a backstage pass to meet The Beatles!!! Ouch!…
So I’m in my room, it’s late afternoon, the folks aren’t home. I hear the announcer come on about the upcoming ticket giveaway for Friday’s dance KELI was sponsoring. The headliner was to be Jerry Lee Lewis.
Now, because my father was the head of the station, two things reigned supreme in our household: 1) we only listed to KELi and, 2] the entire family was barred from entering any contest or giveaway on KELi.
My father had not mentioned that the legendary bad boy of rock and roll, whose nickname was “The Killer” was coming to town, much less his appearance was to be a dance sponsored by KELi.
When the KELi DJ’s call-in request to ‘name that song’, came over the airwaves, without thinking I picked up the phone and called the station’s DJ line—something I had never done before.
The DJ answers and declares I was the tenth caller (or whatever the number was) and he asked the question, I had to answer to win. I answered correctly. Then he asked, off air, “Who is this?”
I almost slammed the phone down—I was not allowed to participate much less ‘win’ a contest on my father’s station!
But before I panicked I said, “Keith Mackie.” I knew what was coming in moments. He said, “Hold on, so I can get your address.” That sent me scrambling—I knew how to get to his house—but I didn’t know my best friend’s address, off the top of their head?
When the DJ came back on the line I rattled off Keith’s address, that I had just found in the phone book. The DJ said. “Your tickets will be in the mail in the next day.”
I hung up… and now in a real panic, I called Keith and told him what I had done and of course swore him to secrecy. I asked him to hold the tickets for me so I could take my girlfriend to the dance on Friday.
I (we) went, danced ourselves into a lather, watching JLL. ‘The Killer’, who was now thirty years old, and I, a little more than half his age. I had been listening to his riveting music since I was nine and he was twenty-one.
To me the music was ageless, but now Jerry Lee was thirty and seemingly over-the-hill, compared to The Beatles.
But here he was signing—to use a Chuck Berry line, he was “campaign shoutin’ like a southern diplomat”—and playing the piano like a mad man.
He played all his hits! Pounding the keys with fingers, knuckles, fists and occasionally with the back of his right heel!
[ Photographer unknown, uncredited ]
That National Guard Armory was hot and rockin’ that night!
And no, I never told my father and none my father’s DJ’s there recognized me that night, so I was home free!
That was the Secret Jerry Lee Lewis Incident.
You lucky, lucky man. :-)