KGRB AM 900
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I left the 92.7 FM frequency assigned
to Avalon (KRCI-FM) to become the last General Manager
of KGRB-AM 900 before it was sold to the Spanish group.
KGRB was never operated for much of a profit over it's 35
year history. It was put on the air in the early 1960's by Bob
Burdette (hence the FM sister call letters KBOB), who was
a sound engineer at KTLA-TV in the early days of television.
Mr. Burdette specialized in remote sound from places like the
Frosty Frolics, the bandstands at various piers and ballrooms &
most notably the LA County Fairgrounds in Pomona. KGRB
got it's call letters from his wife Gloria R. Burdette & the little
500 watt AM was located in a residential house in it's city of
license, West Covina. The garage even had Bob Crane's old remote
board from his KNX days.
At the end we tried to reinvigorate the station by using
a temporary authority to raise the power at night & adding talk
from NBC/TalkNet/CNN & the Tom Snyder "Late, Late Show"
simulcast from CBS Radio in the evening to the Big Band daytime
programming. I was the first to operate KGRB 24 hours-a-day.
We leased time to college sports teams in need of an LA outlet
& used the money to buy a CD library, three CD players & the
parts to repair cart machines. (They had been playing 78's and
albums since the day KGRB signed on!) The old Gates board
was replaced by a 15 year old production mixer & two reel-to-
reels just to play the Sunday religious shows and whatever other
programming we could get for next to nothing.
The staff was kept on, but sadly, with my additions of new adult
standards and cleaner CD recordings of Big Band music, the long-
time morning host quit in a fit of technological frustration. The very
survival of KGRB was dependent on sprucing up the airsound, and
the airstaff fought tooth & nail to keep the original 78's and
unstructured playlist intact...even with only one working turntable, an old
microphone dangling from the endpipe of a long studio boomarm and no glass left
in the control room windows!
"AM 90 NBC!" was born from the ashes of "Dial 9"/"900 AM KGRB".
I made a deal with JAM Productions in Dallas to record new jingles
that would reflect our affiliation with NBC Radio, top of the hour news
from NBC and the other Mutual/Westwood One & NBC shows for
the late nights and weekends. Early October 1994 the new stuff came
in from JAM & the equipment suppliers. I contracted with Shadow Traffic
to provide full-service traffic at the :15 & :45 slots (to
counter-program KNX & KFWB which were always doing Sports at :15 & :45), and during the daytime hours Shadow also did local headlines & a quick tease story at :30 past. It was my adaptation of a KMPC-like Full Service Big Band
outlet that started to get us some much needed press & industry
attention.
There were rumors that NBC had bought KGRB, when in fact, all I did
was secure permission from GE in New York to file for the KNBC-AM
call letters and use our radio affiliation with NBC to put those chimes
on with those wonderful jingles. As part of the "NBC Source" affiliation we
got the use of the legendary Don Pardo (Jeopardy; Saturday Night Live) to voice station I.D.s, host liners and other special introductions. AM 90 NBC was still running on a shoestring, but we were getting listeners calling again. They were told that KGRB had to modernize or they would go Spanish like so many other AM outlets in Los Angeles. Except for a few folks who expected KGRB to be their personal record players, the listeners agreed and we got real letters of support.
I hired the "World Famous Tom Murphy" for middays & I did afternoons
myself. Lyman Jay was on at night & Bob Stone did the morning show. We had Bill Ballance assemble a "Best of..."Feminine Forum" for air on Saturday mornings, radio archivist Frank Bresee loaned us a complete 6
hour broadcast of NBC New Year's Eve programs from the 1940's & 50's
featuring band remotes across all the time zones which aired 12/31/94
into 1/1/95.
The conservators, who had no broadcasting experience, wondered how we
were able to secure barter programming. They thought we were making our
own money deals when they heard spots (live reads during Shadow Traffic
& network spots on the talk shows), so they fired me & started the
motions for the deal to sell to the Spanish programming group...which was
already rumored to be a backdoor done deal before I came aboard the Titanic of
Los Angeles radio stations.
Over the years KGRB was never strong enough to compete with KMPC, but Beautiful Music stations like KPOP and MOR outlets like KMPC & KRKD shared a lot of listeners with the little station at 900 AM.
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