The New Talk Jockeys

In Los Angeles, a woman phones in to announce that she is turned on by butchers and visits three a day. In New York, a woman brags that she helps her husband seduce his girl friends. In San Francisco, a woman introduces her singing dog, complete with piano accompaniment. What is this--entertainment or therapy? Perhaps both. In any case, it "is enough to keep millions of Americans chained to their radios for hours every day and night. In a time when some of the TV talk shows are suffering from ratings problems, radio's talk shows are grabbing ever larger audiences. Their secret is simple: people like to hear themselves talk, and to feel that somebody, somewhere, is talking to them.

Telephone talk shows began in the early '60s, but most of them died with the decade, victims of various technical problems, high costs of production and, most important, audience ennui. Now bolder, brassier talk jockeys and new approaches have not only revived the shows but often make them the most important part of a station's programming. By switching to an all-talk format, Manhattan's WMCA has jumped from 20th to seventh among AM stations. "Just in the past few months," says Robert Henabery, director of program development for ABC-owned radio stations, "the potentialities of talk have begun to be realized. I can see new programs centering on specific interests like food, sex, sports--anything that attracts a group of advertisers."

Anything goes so long as enough people listen to it. Some of the new talk jockeys--or t.j.s--still play music, but it is always subordinate to their dialogue with listeners. Others, like Don Imus of New York City's WNBC, subordinate even the dialogue to their own versions of zany nightclub comedy. Chicago's Larry ("the Legend") Johnson has made a success out of calling odd people or faraway places to entertain his estimated 120,000 weekly listeners on station WIND. What's the weather like in Miami? Larry the Lege will call the Miami weather bureau and find out. Do the papers say that Princess Margaret is taking a salary cut? Call Buckingham Palace.

San Francisco's Russ ("the Moose") Syracuse attracts an estimated 50,000 listeners from midnight to dawn with KSFO's on-the-air lonely-hearts club. "This is Love Line," he announces. "Use your index finger and dial this number. Radio romance can be yours for the price of a phone call." A few of Syracuse's callers only want a weekend date, but not many. He claims to have fostered 13 marriages and twelve engagements. "How many disk jockeys," he asks, "get that kind of satisfaction?" Quite a few, if they measure satisfaction in terms of the emotional response they evoke from their listeners.* As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, radio is a "hot" medium, involving more listener participation to complete its communication than such "cool" media as films or TV. "The people feel they possess you," says Ellen Morphonios Rowe, a criminal court judge in Miami who runs a late-night show on WKAT. "They really feel you belong to them."

Judge Rowe is an archconservative. At the other end of the spectrum, both ideologically and temperamentally, is Martha Jean, "the Queen," Detroit's 1,000-watt soul sister. "You are livin' with the Queen," she tells her mostly black audience on WJLB. "And that's pretty good livin', I betcha. All you got to do is be touched by the Queen and everything will be all right."

Up Kilimanjaro. Robert E. Lee Hardwick, a talk jockey on KVI in Seattle, has a different audience, the white middle class, and a different approach. He has taken a group up the slopes of Kilimanjaro and guided an expedition of gem hunters to the wilds of Idaho and Montana. Along the way, he has started a mock fan club of 15,000 for Seattle Pilots Shortstop Ray Oyler, who had the next to the lowest batting average in the American League one season, and he has led angry taxpayers to Olympia, the state capital, to press for tax reform.

Few of the talk hosts are so openly political. Sex remains a staple theme. In the past year, a show called Feminine Forum, on which women tell the world their most lurid adventures or fantasies, has rocketed Los Angeles' KGBS from 26th to third place in the midday ratings and spawned imitations from New York and Miami to Cleveland and Toledo. "It's like electronic voyeurism," says Allan Hotlen, program director of the New York imitator, WHN. "It's hard for a man not to listen." Feminine Forum is even piped over the public address system of the Los Angeles police headquarters.

No wonder. Host Bill Ballance and his 400,000 daily listeners regularly get an earful of erotica that would have titillated Freud and Krafft-Ebing. One woman confessed that she let her husband think that he was hypnotizing her during the sexual act. Another said that she solved her daughter's marital problems by going to bed with her son-in-law. "That's a melter, Vicki," cooed Ballance. "I think that's neat." Not quite neat enough, however. Next day the daughter called in enraged. "Oh-oh," Ballance said. "And did your dad hear her on the air?" "He certainly did," said the daughter, "and so did his whole construction crew."

Like several of the other jockeys, Ballance himself is often the object of attention. "My name is Linda," said one caller, "and I love you." Most of the t.j.s, in fact, are too busy to do much but read and gear up for the next day's show. "No matter how far out a subject might be," says Judge Rowe, "I'll wager someone will call up and discuss it." Beyond hard work and a gift of gab, however, the t.j.s have little in common. Though they usually try to create the impression that they are young and sexy, several, like Ballance, are 50 or more. Few have completed college, and most started out on small stations where they were heard by a dial-hopping big-city exec.

Interpersonal Glue. Immediacy is the key--the listener who calls in wants to hear himself now, not tomorrow--and the programs are tape-delayed only the seven seconds that allow the t.j. to blank out any obscene words. Rarely does a t.j. lack for callers--a specter that haunts them all. More often the problem is how to curtail long-winded callers, and all the t.j.s have a stock of turnoff lines like, "Lady, my desk is on fire."

Who listens to the talk shows? More important, who calls in? Mostly the sad, the sick and the lonely. Dr. Norton Kristy, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, calls some shows a kind of interpersonal glue, something people these days need, with the spaces between people being so much greater and with the fragmentation of the family." The Bill Ballance sex show, says Kristy, has "tapped a rather powerful personal and social desire on the part of young women to express all their frustrations. Ballance is providing the social acceptance and respectability for female sensuality and sexuality that Playboy magazine did for men 15 years ago."

Adds Dr. Salvatore Maddi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago: "Loneliness is an endemic problem of our time, and there are many people who literally have no friends. A disk jockey, particularly one who seems interested in his listeners, fulfills a need--he's a substitute friend."

* If they measure satisfaction in more conventional terms, top talk jockeys are paid up to $200,000 a year on big stations.

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