In 1943, as a student at Stanford University studying radio engineering while preparing to enter the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, an aspiring air personality asked the General Manager of a San Francisco radio station for a job. The GM’s response? “You’re too young, you don’t have the voice for it, and besides, you have to have an FCC license.”
The young man was prepared and pulled out three licenses he’d secured from the Commission. It worked — and was essential for KSAN-AM in San Francisco to operate legally, as all of its engineers had been drafted into the Armed Forces.
So began an incredible 79-year career in Radio for Art Laboe, who died on Friday (10/7) at his home in Palm Springs, Calif., at the age of 97. He was not retired, and the nonagenarian continued to host his signature Sunday night syndicated request and dedication program.
The show is perhaps the most emblematic way to remember a L.A. legend with a multigenerational audience across the Western U.S. who also paved the way for Latino recording artists to gain airplay in key Hispanic markets.
Laboe died Friday night after catching pneumonia, Joanna Morones, a spokesperson for Laboe’s production company, Dart Entertainment, told the Associated Press.
While Laboe may be wholly unfamiliar with East Coast media industry veterans and those who recently entered the business, to say he is a legend of Radio is hardly an understatement.
He was called “legendary” by former trade publication Radio & Records in July 1981, when Laboe got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Even more remarkable — Laboe was covered by R&R more across the 2000s than across the prior three decades the newspaper was in operation.
An October 2007 interview with then-R&R Publisher Erica Farber offered Laboe’s origin story. After getting hired at KSAN, he indeed served in World War II for the U.S. Armed Forces. Upon his return, he worked at a Reno, Nev., radio station until moving to Los Angeles in 1949. He joined KRKD-AM 1150, selling air time by day while simultaneously hosting the all-night shift. As part of his sales duties, he met an individual who owned a formidable chain of teen hangouts: Scrivner’s Drive-In. Paul Scrivner suggested to Laboe that he host a remote broadcast from one location. Given his engineering background, and the target audience, Laboe approached the team at the predecessor to KRLA-AM 1110 — early rock ‘n’ roll station KXLA — about the opportunity. They said yes, and he’d work the late-night shift for KXLA from 1949-1954, before “Earth Angel” by the Penguins or “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes became big hits. A February 1954 presentation from Laboe placed “Young at Heart” by Frank Sinatra at No. 1.
By 1956, Laboe had moved on to KFWB-AM 980, right before its identity as “Color Channel 98” made it a hugely successful Top 40 radio station in the late 1950s. He was making good money, but missed the drive-in atmosphere. And, he didn’t really dig playing Frank Sinatra records or his chief role of hosting Hollywood interview shows with the likes of Lana Turner or Gary Cooper.
As such, he went to KPOP-AM 1020 in Los Angeles to do afternoons. “I was probably the first one to play Elvis,” Laboe told Farber. “I started the show by saying, ‘Mothers, gather your daughters, here comes Art Laboe and his devil music.’ And of course, the kids went crazy for it.”
DEVIL OR ANGEL?
While KPOP would only last until 1960, Laboe’s influence and its battle for listeners against KFWB was perhaps the first Top 40 radio battle in L.A. And, management was not exactly fond of Laboe’s approach to bringing in teens and young adults.
In an October 2003 R&R interview conducted by now-RBR+TVBR Editor-in-Chief Adam R Jacobson, Laboe recalled, “In 1956 there was one time I was playing 15 minutes of Elvis at noon on KPOP. The station didn’t want me to do it, but I did it anyway. They got some complaints, but they liked me, and I continued to do it. They had even put on these announcements warning people that the next 15 minutes would contain subversive material that was bad for children to listen to!”
The result? Laboe’s KPOP earned a 34 share in the Pulse ratings, the industry standard for 1956.
Laboe refused to take credit for helping launch the careers of the many artists he’s played on the air throughout the years; however, there are two artists he was closely associated with just before they broke on a national scale. “Sam Cooke recorded ‘You Send Me,’ and I started playing it before it became a hit,” he said. “I don’t like to take credit for launching his career because I was a DJ, but his record did break here in L.A.,” Laboe says. “It was the same story with Barry White, who recorded here at Original Sound.”
Laboe was referring to Original Sound Records, a company he founded in 1959 on Sunset Blvd., that was still going strong in the 2000s.
Meanwhile, Laboe in 1958 took a cue from Dick Clark by hosting a localized take on American Bandstand that aired for two seasons on KTLA-5 in Los Angeles.
In 1960 Laboe departed KPOP for on-air duties at another early Rock ‘n’ Roll radio station in L.A., crosstown KDAY, where he stayed until 1961. Laboe then decided to say “goodbye” to radio and focused his efforts on the “golden oldies” of the 1950s, the hallmark of his fledgling record business.
The concept came to Laboe at KPOP. With the hit cycle putting “I’m Walkin'” by Fats Domino at the top of the station’s hit parade in April 1957, there was no guarantee that it would still be aired come November 1957. But, what if listeners still wanted to hear it? Laboe began to compile the favorite “oldies” of the teenagers he met during his daily radio show. Rather than add them to the playlist, he instead put them on a single album.
“I put out a list at the drive-ins, asking people for their top 20 songs and a few oldies,” he told Jacobson. “The oldies at the time were from The Penguins and Big Joe Turner. Then I started getting more and more requests for the oldies but goodies.” Laboe’s first collection, “Oldies but Goodies, Volume 1,” was initially intended for release only in Los Angeles. The record was given national distribution, however. It ended up spending 3 1/2 years on Billboard’s Top 100. With the success of that release, Laboe concentrated on his record company — he would even produce the Preston Epps surf rock classic “Bongo Rock,” a top 15 hit in 1959.
Across the 1960s, Laboe would find success as a recording industry entrepreneur. Once the 1970s began, he found himself dabbling in radio again thanks to a reignited interest in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll — Laboe’s calling card.
“In the early 1970s I taped a show that ran from midnight to 3am on XPRS out of Mexico, right after Wolfman Jack‘s show,” Laboe told Jacobson in 2003. At Original Sound he worked with a young filmmaker named George Lucas to place music in a movie about 1950s teen culture. It was American Graffiti.
The success of that movie led Hal Rosenberg, the individual who ran KRTH-FM in Los Angeles for RKO Radio, to visit Laboe at a nightclub he had opened in 1972 to cater to fans of “oldies but goodies” music. The success prompted Rosenberg to adjust the underground focus that was behind the name “K-Earth” and instead make it a “total Oldies” station. Laboe hosted a show for KRTH. Then, a bigger return to radio would take place.
FAVORITES AND HITS
By the start of 1976, KRLA “was going out of business,” Laboe said. Well past its 1960s Top 40 success, KRLA had been operating under an interim license for some 12 years; it was taken away from former Los Angeles Rams owner Jack Kent Cooke in 1964. With the likes of Bob Hope fighting to own KRLA, station management in March 1976 hired Laboe to program it and direct the sales department.
Was that the right move? He told Jacobson in October 2003, “In less than one year we beat everybody except KABC, which was the big Talk station in town. We were the ones that started [crosstown Top 40 rival] KHJ’s slide, and that was done with a format that mixed oldies and currents. We played all of the ballads from the black groups: The Stylistics, Bloodstone, Delfonics. All of the Motown stuff. Everything that was big before Disco.”
The boom and bust of Disco wouldn’t diminish Laboe’s KRLA. From Spring through Fall 1980, KRLA led a six-station battle for pop music supremacy at a delicate time for Top 40. Jack Roth, Program Director for KRLA at the time under now-VP Laboe, told Radio & Records, “KRLA is a very nostalgia-oriented station without the synthesizer and slick window dressing that most L.A. stations have gone in for.”
Joel Denver, then R&R‘s Top 40 Editor and today owner of All Access Music Group, recalled in 1980 how one of the more popular day-to-day promotions was KRLA’s on-the-street Oldie dedications. “A listener is taped and then the song and dedication are played back later. In a market as big as L.A., KRLA is trying to give the impression it’s everywhere.”
In July 1981, Laboe became a permanent man on the street. Then a VP of KRLA, he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
FAVORITES AND HITS
Nineteen years ago, Laboe still ruled the roost. In fact, there were more articles with Laboe as the subject across the 2000s than in any previous decade of Radio & Records‘s existence.
Fast forward to January 2007, when Radio + Television Business Report shared the news that syndication company Dial Global would team with the L.A. radio legend as the exclusive rep for “The Art Laboe Connection” and “The Art Laboe Sunday Special.”
That latter show was launched in 1991 and airs Sunday nights from 6pm-midnight Pacific Time. Laboe described the arrangement as follows, “It’s a live show, and I’m sitting with a computer that has about 35,000 songs, and the phones are ringing. It’s treated like a talk show. I have a call screener and an engineer. It’s not an oldies show. I include hip-hop and Latin hip-hop.”
Neglecting Laboe’s championing of Latin recording artists at KRLA would be a disservice to the history of Los Angeles radio. In fact, it is Laboe’s decision to play records such as “Suavecito” by Malo as an “oldie but goodie” alongside “Angel Baby” by Rosie and the Originals that perhaps made Laboe an institution in the East Los Angeles County cities populated by Chicano audiences, which made the Whittier Blvd. corridor a hub for “Ridin’ Low” while listening to classics from War and enjoying songs such as ““Sitting In the Park”“, GQ’s 1980 single that reached the KRLA Top 10 in June 1980. That week’s No. 1, displacing Lipps Inc.’s end-of-Disco anthem “Funkytown” — “All Night Thing” by The Invisible Man’s Band. It reached No. 9 on the R&B chart for the act formerly known as The Five Stairsteps. For KRLA listeners, it was a golden nugget.
As of last Sunday, when Laboe’s show was on the air as usual, Meruelo Media-owned KDAY-FM was it’s on-air home.
Meruelo Media CEO Otto Padrón shared his thoughts with Streamline Publishing’s Radio Ink. “Art Laboe to us is our Vin Scully of radio,” he said, referring to the legendary baseball play-by-play announcer who died earlier this year. “Art was a colossal presence in LA and an irreplaceable part of the 93.5 KDAY family. Meruelo Media, KDAY Nation, and our sister station Power 106 send our deepest condolences to Art’s family. His passing leaves a huge hole in the community, and his legacy of connecting to generations of Angelinos with heartfelt dedications connected to the soul of LA, which cannot be replaced. Rest in Peace, Art Laboe.”
Art Laboe’s team will continue to produce his current nightly request and dedication syndicated radio show, which is heard on KDAY-FM 93.5 each Sunday from 6pm-midnight, and weeknights from 9pm-midnight on KOCP/Oxnard, KQIE/Riverside-San Bernardino, KMRJ/Palm Springs and many stations throughout the Southwest.
At Local Media San Diego, XHRM “Magic 92.5” paid tribute to Laboe online and on the air, noting that in 2019 the station presented him with a lifetime achievement award in front of 10,000 of his fans at a Super Love Jam concert. Laboe could be on Sundays from 8-10pm on Magic 92.5.
Today, tributes to Laboe were seen across the spectrum of broadcast and print media. Santa Monica College’s tastemaker KCRW devoted the entire first hour of its “Morning Becomes Eclectic” music program to requests and dedications in a homage to Laboe, with hosts Anthony Valadez and Novena Carmel reminiscing following a short audio retrospective of his decades of work. Royce Stevenson produced a tribute for Benztown, downloadable at https://soundcloud.com/
With Laboe in the spotlight in the city of angels, there’s likely more than one person that’s dedicating “Angel Baby” to him today.
