Art Laboe Helped Parlay Radio Rock ’n’ Roll Into Something Bigger
Discussing early rock ’n’ roll deejays has always been a peculiar conversation because even among serious radio fans there’s often very little common ground.
New Yorkers bring up Alan Freed or Jocko. Pittsburghers talk about Porky Chedwick. Chicagoans recall the wild man Dick Biondi or Herb Kent “The Kool Gent.” Because radio was a local medium and that’s who they heard.
So when you talked to someone who grew up out West, like the late Don Imus, he’d tell you the names that mattered were the likes of Wolfman Jack or The Real Don Steele. Or Art Laboe.
That made Art Laboe one of the last of a breed when he died of pneumonia October 7 in his Los Angeles home. He was 97.
If nothing else, Laboe deserves his spot in the Radio Hall of Fame for sheer longevity. He got his first radio gig in 1943 at the age of 18, on KSAN in San Francisco, and his team’s final syndicated show aired the week he died. That’s 79 years of active radio broadcasting, a number approached by only a tiny handful of other broadcasters like New York’s Hal Jackson.
On the air, Laboe didn’t grab listeners by the lapel in the manner of the Wolfman or Imus. In many ways he followed the classic tradition of the radio hosts, then called announcers, on whom he was raised. He was amiable and upbeat, measured and calm.
He said in a 2014 interview with Music Connection magazine that his favorite part of radio was talking with listeners, from whom he took compliments and dedications. Which is where Art Laboe begins to stand out in the radio host game.
He may not have been the first host to take dedications on the air, but there weren’t many before him, because when he started, as he recalled, there was no technology for putting a caller on the air. So back in Frisco in ’43, he would take the call and repeat what the caller said. “Kay says she would like to hear a song by Benny Goodman.”
By the time Art Laboe wrapped up his radio career, no one was calling in for Benny Goodman records. His Sunday night show aired on a station heavy on hip-hop. He was fine with that. The live shows he still regularly hosted might have Melle Mel, Coolio and Sir Mix-a-Lot on the bill with Evelyn “Champagne” King and Blue Magic.
He was less a champion of rock ’n’ roll, though he said in the 2014 interview he still loved it, than music radio in general. He invoked the mantra of all music radio: play what people wanted to hear.
Toward that end, he is widely credited with popularizing the phrase “oldies but goodies.” He hosted dances around Los Angeles in the late 1950s — more on that in a minute — and what he noticed, he said, was that many of the songs the dancers requested were older songs.
That’s a relative term. In 1957, an older song might be the Penguins’s “Earth Angel” from three years before. But early rock ’n’ roll radio, like much of music radio always, was inclined to forget about a record once it slipped off the charts.
Nonetheless, that realization about the enduring appeal of former hit records inspired Laboe to start a record label whose albums compiled some of those vintage songs. Original Sound Records didn’t only produce compilations of oldies, but those were its most successful product. The first album in that new series, “Oldies But Goodies,” went to №12 on the Billboard album chart and stayed on the chart for 183 weeks.
The collections also inspired a song, or at least a song title: “Those Oldies But Goodies,” a 1961 hit for both Nino and the Ebbtides in the Bronx and Little Caesar and the Romans in L.A.
These were, remember, the days when to play a record you had to own a record. Laboe provided a way for fans to own the cream of those older records without having to scrounge up a dozen 45s.
And then there was, arguably, Laboe’s most enduring legacy: helping expedite the integration of Los Angeles popular music.
The music itself had always been integrated, of course. Black, white, Latino, Chicano, Asian, Mexican and other artists had always listened to each other and borrowed, pinched or shared. Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba” makes that clear in two minutes and 54 seconds. But the delivery platforms — radio, music clubs, dances, etc. — separated the audiences in L.A. just as they were separated almost everywhere else.
Art Laboe didn’t set out to change that. He let the music do it.
Like a lot of 1950s deejays, notably including Freed, he produced live events that either started as or evolved into dances.
In Laboe’s case, it began with live remotes from Scrivner’s Drive-In on Sunset Boulevard. Mostly white kids would show up and have a sort of flash party, which triggered deep suspicion among city officials, most prominently in the police department.
In effect, they tried to discourage these gatherings by treating the attendees like juvenile delinquents and making their night as unpleasant as possible. So at a certain point Laboe moved the party, which had evolved into a dance, to the El Monte Legion Stadium. The stadium was outside city limits, which removed L.A. police jurisdiction and also enabled Laboe to circumvent another Los Angeles rule: that the Board of Education had to approve any dance designed to attract high school students.
It’s not an overstatement to say the El Monte dances became legendary around L.A., and a significant part of their appeal was that they drew not just the white kids from Scrivner’s, but black and Chicano fans. Thousands of them.
Laboe, for his part, kept doing what he did all along, which was to play music from all the cultures. Okay, and he also sometimes wore crazy emcee suits.
As usually happens with pop culture phenomena, the El Monte dances didn’t continue for decades. Generations turn over fast in pop culture, and the next generation always wants to gather in its own way.
But the El Monte dances set a standard, and they were memorialized in one of Frank Zappa’s first songs, “Memories of El Monte,” which he cowrote with his friend Ray Collins.
“Memories of El Monte,” a wistful remembrance of the dances wrapped around a salute to a half-dozen artists who had sung there, was recorded by the Penguins in 1963 and has remained a favorite among R&B vocal group fans for the last 59 years.
In that Music Connection interview, Laboe talked about how satisfying it was to see fans from different backgrounds and cultures realize they had common musical ground. That isn’t a bad start to appreciating what New York’s late Mayor David Dinkins called the gorgeous mosaic.
Some people march in the streets. Art Laboe, a radio guy, marched over the airwaves.
