From the MCRFB NEWS archive: 1960
Jockey Clay Lays Opinion On Line; Exhorts Trade
NEW YORK — Now that the payola crises has abated, many displaced deejays have relocated — and at least one — Tom Clay of Detroit — is aggressively rooting for the old days when a disk jockey was king and could make or break a record.
In a letter to the trade, Clay (fired from WJBK, Detroit, last November on payola charges and now spinning records at WQTE, Detroit) lamented, “What’s happening to the day when we were really deejays and we would really make rounds of distribs for new records, get exited and predicted overnight smashes, make the charts instead of following them, play a record seven times in a row, and get people to buy the record the same day? So we had a little trouble in our biz. Are we going to crawl up in a shell and sit on our fat fannies and let the deejay die?”
Clay addressed special pleas to top jocks like Bill Randle, WERE, Cleveland; Howard Miller, WIND, Chicago; and Frank Ward, Atlanta. “You could tie the city in knots again,” he told Randle, “Forget teaching school. Teach the Cleveland deejays what real deejays are.” To Miller he said, “Remember when you got kicks doing shows? Are you getting too much rich making what you are doing now?”
Addressing the trio as a whole, he added, “Let’s swing again — a bunch of deejays that made their mark going out on a limb, predicting records. Now wait for it to show up on a chart… Forget your pretty voices and prestige — let’s get some excitement back in radio.”
Clay, who apparently evinces no sensitivity over his payola-headline days, concluded his letter to the trade (headed “Detroit’s No. 1 Deejay Has His Say”) with the following line: if you have any records you’d like auditioned send them. Remember, I too, was a “record consultant.” “Am I being funny? No.”
Although WQTE had said it was taking programming out of the hands of the deejays when it launched it’s new “Fabulous 56” format this June, Clay claims he is programming his own show. At any rate, he said he played Tommy Leonetti’s Atlantic waxing of “Without Love” for “45 minutes straight,” and predicted it would be “a smash hit.”
Clay exudes complete confidence in his ability to predict hits, undaunted by the fact that in a recent newsletter he informed Colonel Tom Parker that Elvis Presley’s second post-GI single was a complete bomb. The disk in questioned — released three weeks ago — is now No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Meanwhile, other displaced deejays have also relocated, but are somewhat more reticent about the whole thing. Alan Freed and Mel Leeds, ex-WINS, New York program directors, are at KDAY, Los Angeles. Chuck Young, ex-KYW Cleveland music librarian, is presently working for Cosnat Distributors in Cleveland.
Stan Richards, ex-WORL, Boston, is at WINS in New York. Joe Smith, another ex-WORL spinner, is sales promotion manager for Hart Distributors in Los Angeles. Joe Finan, ex-KYW, Cleveland, is rumored to be returning to that city at WHK. Peter Tripp, ex-WMGM, New York, is reportedly set to go to KFWB in Hollywood. END
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(Information and news source: Billboard; August 8, 1960)
