This week marked the anniversary of Casey Kasem’s birth. Bob Shannon’s excellent book about radio (“Turn it Up”) has entire chapter about the radio legend. Today we present it to you as a free excerpt…
|Casey Kasem: America‘s Top Countdown Host
He was working at KEWB/Oakland-San Francisco. It was 1962 and he was the night jock. His name was Casey Kasem and he was a “wild-tracker.”
The show was scripted. It had to be for the engineer to keep up. He used audio drops – funny stuff, clips from movies, TV, records – anything he could get his hands on and bounce off of. He was as fast as a brakeless cable car; so frenetic that he drove one of his engineers to drink; yes, it’s true. Some nights Kasem would get to work, look at old red-eyes and know he was in trouble. He’d been doing the show for about a year and a half when the General Manager asked to see him.
“Casey,” said John McRae, “I’m changing things and I want you to stop wild-tracking.”
Kasem stared. “What do you want me to do, John?”
“Be a regular disc jockey.”
Kasem didn’t need to be told that the other wild-trackers at the station had been fired. He needed some direction, though. “Talk about the artists, the music,” said McRae. “And, by the way, start doing it tonight.”
“I figured I’d do time, temperature and weather,” he says, “and be out of a job the next morning.”
He was 30 years old and thought his career was over.
Kamal “Casey” Kasem wanted to be a radio actor. George Shapiro, the Radio Club’s sponsor at Detroit’s Northwestern High, was skeptical. “Do you have any idea what the average radio actor made last year?” he asked.
Kasem answered, “No.”
“Fifty dollars,” replied Shapiro.
Kasem was between high school and college. He’d done a sports show over the high school PA system – he still has the scripts, he says – but he wanted to do more radio, even if it didn’t pay.
“Shapiro recommended me to WDTR,” he says. “I became the chief sound effects man and did some drama, too.”
In the early ’50s, radio drama was still alive. “Detroit was the home of a few network shows,” Kasem says. “The Lone Ranger was on ABC and Challenge of the Yukon was on Mutual. And they both had the same cast.”
In 1950, because of a part he played on WJR/Detroit’s “Scoop Ryan – Cub Reporter,” – a 15-minute show presented by the Wayne State Radio Guild – Kasem was invited to audition for “The Lone Ranger.”
“I had the voice range to play anyone from 12 to 20,” he says. When he got the part, his national debut, were his parents impressed? “No,” says Kasem, “They just expected me to be successful. But, I do remember my Grandmother saying, ‘Maybe one day you’ll be like Arthur Godfrey.’”
In 1952, Kasem was drafted and sent to Korea.
Believe it or not, the Army actually gave him a broadcasting assignment. “There were nine radio stations,” he says, “and I created a production team at headquarters to do comedy and drama.”
Then destiny reared its head. “There was a Saturday night Top 10 countdown show and they asked me to fill in,” he explains. All was going well until he hit the #1 song, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s Vaya Con Dios. “I said, ‘here’s the song that’s #1 in America from coast to coast: ‘Go Buy a Dose.'” (Casey assures me it was funnier than it reads.)
Out of the Army and back in Detroit, Kasem re-joined The Lone Ranger cast, went back to college, started acting – he did summer stock with George C. Scott – and dabbled on the air at WJLB and WJBK/Detroit. He says he really didn’t want to be a disc jockey. “I just fell into it.” But, when he filled in on a popular night-time show and the ratings sky-rocketed, he stayed. Within three months, he was the #1 disc jockey in Detroit.
What happened next may surprise you.
“I quit,” says Kasem “I left at my peak and went to help my parents in their grocery business.” The family needed help and so, he worked 17 hours a day, 7 days a week – stocking, packing, and mopping. “I did it for a year, but it paid off. We quadrupled business and I was able to go to New York to become the serious actor I was hoping to be.”
It was June of 1958.
Today, Eugene Victor Walsk is a successful New York Producer, but back then, he was just another Wayne State graduate starting his career. When Kasem arrived in New York some Army buddies threw him a welcoming party. Walsk was there.
“I’ve got to be able to audition,” Kasem told him. “Do you know of anything?”
Walsk sent him to audition for the part of a “drunk, gay Russian” in the #1 off-Broadway play that season, “Ivan of.”
“I did really well,” Kasem remembers. “The guy I auditioned for was so impressed that he called others in to see me, and I did it again. I knew I was going to get that part.”
He didn’t.
Thirty years later he discovered he lost out to Ed Asner. “I didn’t get it, but I feel better now that I know I lost it to a guy who’s won six Emmys,” says Kasem. .
He went in for another audition, but it was over before it began. Kasem took stock of his situation; he had no money, not even enough for a cup of coffee. “After six months I put my tail between my legs and went home.”
When he says “home,” he means Detroit. He could just as well have meant “radio.”
Back in Detroit, Kasem started looking for work. “I put feelers out and sent off some tapes,” he says. “Milwaukee wanted me, but then the people at WJBK heard I was back in town.”
WJBK was owned by Storer Broadcasting and its sister station in Cleveland, WJW, had just flipped to a pop format and wanted Kasem, too. “I went there,” he says,”because they also offered me the Cleveland Bandstandshow.”
Cleveland is the city where Kasem started wild-tracking and calling himself Casey At The Mike. “I was looking for something to keep me on the edge of my seat,” he says. “Wild-tracks were the answer.” WJW was mostly a pop station playing artists like Perry Como and The McGuire Sisters, but at night Kasem leaned heavily on rhythm and blues. Smart move.
Within three months he was #2 in Cleveland, right behind WHK. This success took him to WBNY/Buffalo, but it was short lived, he says. “I was fired because I was insubordinate.”
Then Chuck Blore entered his life. Blore programmed KFWB/Los Angeles but had also taken on corporate responsibilities for Crowell-Collier Broadcasting, as it prepared to buy WMGM/New York, where Blore wanted to send Kasem. When the FCC killed the deal, Blore sent him to KEWB/Oakland-San Francisco instead.
There, in a trash can by the control room door, Kasem found something that changed his life.
Farley McLuth was the janitor at KEWB and he was running late.
“There was a big trash barrel wedged in the door that was piled high with reams of news copy,” recalls Kasem. “On top of it all was a magazine, “Who’s Who in Pop Music in 1962.” .
The magazine was full of thumbnail sketches – birthdays, first hits, favorite foods, etc. Kasem says he knew he was on his way. “I’d always teased upcoming records,” he says. But this was different: people, lives, feelings – storytelling.
“Coming up,” Kasem said, “the man who’s had more #1 records than anyone else since the beginning of the rock ‘n’ roll era.” Sound familiar?
“Ten seconds later and Farley might have moved that trash can,” says Casey Kasem. “It was supposed to be there for me to see.”
In May of 1963 Kasem went to work for KRLA/Pasadena-Los Angeles. Bill Drake’s and Ron Jacobs’ version of KHJ was two years away, so KRLA’s only direct competition was KFWB. “Within three months, I was #1,” says Kasem, adding that, for KFWB, things were heading from bad to worse. In the spring of 1964 KRLA embraced The Beatles and the British invasion, which KFWB ignored. “That was all she wrote for KFWB,” Kasem says.
He did mid-days at KRLA, but his real goal was to use the station as a launching pad for voice-overs, TV, even movies. In late ’63 KRLA had collaborated with LA’s Channel 13 to do a local music show. “My job was to introduce two people who’d died – Johnny Horton and Sam Cooke,” says Kasem. The script was rough, so he asked if he could ad lib his part. “I did them both in one take.”
Several weeks later, Kasem ran into Bob Lee, the producer of a new, as-yet-unnamed Dick Clark Production that would become “Shebang.” Lee told Kasem that the work he’d done on Channel 13 was terrific. ”We’d like you to come down and talk to us about hosting a new show we’re putting into syndication.”
Kasem did; they did a deal and production began, but the show never was syndicated nationally, although it did become a hit in Hollywood. “I did “Shebang” for two years. It went off and then, by popular demand, it came back,” Kasem says. Six hundred and fifty episodes later, he was established on Los Angeles TV.
Did I mention movies? Kasem chuckles when he recalls his first flick, Dennis Hopper’s “The Glory Stompers.” “I played a bad guy, a motorcycle bandit,” he says.
In 1967, at the insistence of his friend, record mogul Mike Curb, Kasem tried his hand at voice-overs. His first hit was as the voice of Robin in the “Batman and Robin” cartoon. “That was the beginning,” he says. “Eventually I did several other features, including “Josey and The Pussycats” and letters and numbers (a segment) on “Sesame Street.”
I don’t have to tell you about “Scooby-Do,” do I?
In 1968 Kasem became the voice of Shaggy in the cartoon series. The role lasted for 23 years and Kasem says there’s always talk it may come back. In 1976 he was hired by NBC television and, over a period of five years, he recorded over 25,000 promos for the network. But still, and always, there’s “American Top 40,” a national institution. According to Ron Jacobs, AT 40 is the most listened to program in the history of radio. “I can’t imagine it having done so without Casey’s energy and creative contributions,” he says.
On January 4, 2004 Kasem turned hosting duties for “American Top 40” over the Ryan Seacrest, the host of “American Idol.” As of this writing he continues to produce “American Top 20” and “American Top 10” for Premier Radio Networks.
Perhaps, more than anything else, Kasem’s success comes from his connection with his audience. “We’ve flown together,” says Marty Raab, a vice president at Premier Radio, “and people will stop and say, ‘Casey, I’ve listened to you all of my life,.’ or, ‘I remember a long distance dedication you did and the song you played.'”
Casey Kasem was given his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1981. Eleven years later, in 1992, he became the youngest broadcaster in history to be inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. Then, in 1997, two years after being inducted into the National Association of Broadcaster’s Hall of Fame, “Billboard” magazine awarded him its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award.
Kasem’s success is well earned. Perhaps it has something to do with the philosophy expressed in his optimistic “American Top 40” sign-off.
“Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”
