Rosalie Trombley, music director at cklw in Windsor from the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, earned her nickname because of her uncanny ability to pick which songs would, or wouldn’t, be hits. The station dominated the trend-setting Detroit market and Trombley launched the careers of diverse artists, being the first to play Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen and The Guess Who’s These Eyes. Little wonder The Stones, Iggy Pop, Lou Rawls, Dionne Warwick, The Osmonds, and Diana Ross all felt it necessary to visit the station. Heartland rocker Bob Seger even wrote the hit song Rosalie about her, singing in his soulful voice, “she’s got the tower, she got the power.”
But while the rockers mingled with Rosalie and the station’s long-haired deejays, a different kind of celebrity was watching from Ottawa. They had arrived with Pierre Trudeau from Quebec, and preferred well-pressed suits and manicured haircuts — people like Gérard Pelletier, and Pierre Juneau who would soon head up the newly formed Canadian Radio-Television Commission (crtc). They had forged their credentials as cultural nationalists in Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and were now determined to protect English Canadian culture from American domination. One of their first targets was cklw, a station the crtc would soon claim was American masquerading as Canadian. In the words of one crtc official of the day, they intended to “repatriate” it, a move that triggered a national debate over artistic freedom that echoes today and still enrages Trombley, who remains in Windsor. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” she groans, her voice rising as she recalls the showdown with Trudeau’s cultural czars. “They had no idea! Retired teachers, nurses, and accountants, telling me about the music I should be playing. fuck the crtc!”
cklw’s success was built on the work of a handful of radio pioneers. After seeing teenagers playing the same songs over and over on jukeboxes, they created the Top-40 playlist, used promotional stunts, and developed the concept of deejay as a “personality.” But in California it was Bill Drake, a deejay and program director turned consultant, who finally pulled it all together into a powerful format dubbed “Boss Radio.” His target audience was baby boom teenagers crazy for rock ‘n’ roll.
Working from a “hot clock” that divided an hour into segments, Drake, whose real name was Philip Yarbrough, set his newscasts at twenty minutes before and after the hour (dubbed “20/20 News”), which meant his deejays could “sweep” three or four songs back-to-back to catch the attention of those surfing the dial. More controversially, Drake insisted that his jocks talk less and play more music. He was famous for showing them how to say in eight words what they’d previously said in twenty-four. “The deejays, at times, sounded as if they were broadcasting at gunpoint,” recalls David Carson in his book Rockin’ Down the Dial.
cklw’s American owners watched the Drake formula breathe new life into moribund stations across the U.S., and in 1966 decided their Windsor operation, which began in 1932 as ckok, had to catch up with the times. They turned to Paul Drew, who had worked with Drake. An indefatigable bulldog of a man, Drew spoke in a nasal monotone and practiced management-by-intimidation. He cleared out many of the old-time staff, hired fresh talent, and trained them in the Drake style. To make sure they stuck to the format, he went everywhere listening to cklw on a transistor radio with an earplug. He also controlled the “Batphone” in the studio, which was connected to a red, one-hundred-watt light bulb in the control room. When it flashed, Drew was calling, usually with a criticism. One deejay lasted only four hours before being fired.
Drew also had a broader strategy. He knew that kids in Windsor and Detroit of every race listened to black music. So at a time when most pop stations skewed toward white artists, he tilted cklw toward soul, and rhythm and blues — not hard to do in a market that was home to Berry Gordy’s celebrated Motown Records. It all came together, and Tom Shannon, then in his early twenties and one of cklw’s stars through the late 1960s, remembers that within two months of the April 1967 launch of what was now called the Big 8, everyone knew the station was a winner. “We were getting more phone calls than ever before and the record company promoters were suddenly very interested in us,” recalls Shannon, who now hosts a drive-time show at whtt, an oldies station in Buffalo. “We’d get onto a record that nobody else was playing, and there would be incredible sales peaks.”
As the station’s popularity grew, Trombley, a divorced mother of three, who started out as a station receptionist, continued to meet with a steady stream of rock stars and promotion reps who arrived each week to hype their artists. Not only could she intuitively sense which songs might be hits, she backed it up with research, part of which involved phoning a network of fifty record shops in Windsor and Detroit to find out what was selling.
From the 100 to 150 records she received each week, Trombley chose no more than six to add to the playlist. “If there was a record I wasn’t that interested in but they [the reps] believed in, I’d say, ‘Show me,’ ” says Trombley. “I’d tell them, ‘Take it out to Grand Rapids or Flint or Lansing. See if you can get some airplay out there. Get the thing started, if it’s gonna start.’ ”
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