KAZZ-FM's "personality"

The KAZZ-FM Pepper-Tanner jingles

Radio in the '60s featured DJs with strong personalities, placing as much emphasis on what they said between the records they played as the music itself. Often the DJs' patter was the only way to distinguish one top 40 station from another, since all top 40 stations played essentially the same list of current hits. Gordon McClendon's "Texas Triangle" -- trend-setting top 40 AM stations in Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and San Antonio -- set the "personality" gold standard for local stations throughout Texas. Mac Hudson on KILT in Houston (a McClendon station), Woody Roberts on KONO (which was not a McClendon station) in San Antonio, Art Roberts on WLS in Chicago, and Charlie Tuna on KHJ in Los Angeles demonstrated that projecting a strong and witty persona on the air built and maintained a loyal audience. Still another way to establish a station's personality was through jingles, used as station IDs sprinkled throughout each hour to remind listeners just what station they were listening to.

The Pepper-Tanner commercial jingles library filled dozens of indexed LPs

Even though Austin's KAZZ-FM broadcast in a block format -- covering almost every type of music across its broadcast day -- each of its DJs had a distinctive personality that matched the music he played. The jingles KAZZ selected to project its image also reflected its block programming philosophy and personality. The package, from Pepper-Tanner in Memphis, Tennessee, included jingles that spanned pop to jazz to light rock. The package was a "trade", and came with an extensive commercial production library on several dozen LPs, with Pepper-Tanner; in exchange for a relatively low license fee for customization of the jingles for KAZZ, KAZZ provided Pepper-Tanner's ad agency affiliate with an inventory of 30 and 60 second spots that Pepper-Tanner used for its national and regional advertising clients. This trade-out saved KAZZ a significant amount of money, since custom station ID jingles from other major suppliers, such as PAMS of Dallas (which produced rival station KNOW's jingles), were quite expensive. And, with the production library, which contained generic jingles for almost every kind of business, KAZZ was able to produce professional-quality spots for local advertisers.

We're pleased to present an assortment of KAZZ's jingles, which the station first began using in late '65 and continued to use until the station shut down in January '68. The jingle package included general station IDS as well as news, weather, and time intros, special purpose jingles (the "Holiday Radio" jingle that opens our presentation is a good example), and a longer jingle saluting the University of Texas Longhorns. Even DJ Rim Kelley had a custom jingle for his top 40 show on KAZZ.

Before KAZZ bought the Pepper-Tanner jingle package, Rim attempted to record two or three custom station ID jingles locally, enlisting his former high school's choir. The choir's a capella attempts didn't come close to professional quality, both in performance and recording, and were never used on air.

KAZZ-FM air checks

Not surprisingly, KAZZ-FM air checks are rare, although one of KAZZ's biggest fans during the '60s, Ralph Michaels, made many of them for his personal library; unfortunately, we've lost touch with Ralph, who might still have some gems on reel-to-reel. Most of the air checks we've found over the years are of KAZZ's live remote broadcasts. Although we've provided three of these air checks elsewhere on Sonobeat.com, we've gathered them together here and added a new air check of a 1967 Sweetarts live remote broadcast from a downtown Austin night club.