The Executioner

The Internal Revenue Service probably does not know what to make of Bill Drake. How can he run a multimillion-dollar radio consulting service out of his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles? And that inflatable plastic armchair and the swimming pool in which it floats -- are they taxable as luxuries or deductible as an executive suite?

Actually, the pool is just where Drake, who at 31 looks like a beach boy emeritus, gets his ideas. They are subsequently executed inside the $150,000 house. And executed is the word. He has a custom telephone hook up that enables him, by the dial of a code number, to monitor any of his ten client stations across the country.

Should he hear a disk jockey he doesn't dig, Drake gets on the blower (he has 21 phones around the house, including one in each of the five bathrooms).

"When that phone rings," says one old jock, "you know it's death time, man."

Such power comes to Drake for the simple reason that in the past five years every one of the stations he has advised has waxed bigger in ratings and revenues. Los Angeles' KHJ, for example, rose from twelfth to No. 1 half a year after he moved in. Tulsa's KAKC doubled its rating within two months, and in the last year has doubled again.

San Diego's KGB rocketed from lowest-ranked in town to the top on Drake's 63rd day as consultant. Small wonder that stations pay up to $100,000 a year for his services.

Plastic Voices. Understandably, with such a lucrative thing going, Drake tries to be as mysterious as possible about his technique. The basic rule is summed up by the promotion jingle of several of his clients -- "Much More Music."

At a time when most U.S. rock jockeys are screaming egomaniacs, Drake advises his stations to end the cult of nonstop talkers. Even Murray the K, the nation's best known jock, was forced out shortly after Drake's firm moved in at WOR-FM in Manhattan. Murray, noting his "plastic-voiced" successors and their less adventurous choice of records, predicted disaster for Drake. But in the eleven months since, Drake has doubled the ratings and put money-losing WOR-FM in the black.

Once new jocks are hired, they are drilled for a couple of months in the Drake style. The big idea is to unclutter and speed up the pace. The next recording is introduced during the fadeout of the last one. Singing station identifications, which sometimes run at oratorio length elsewhere, are chopped to H seconds on Drake stations. Commercials are reduced to 13 minutes, 40 seconds an hour--about one-third less than the U.S. average. Newscasts are scheduled at unconventional times, such as 20 minutes after the hour. Thus, when the competition is carrying news, Drake-trained deejays run a "music sweep" (three or four recordings back-to-back) to lure away dial switchers.

Motel Checks. Since, according to a Drake survey, 47% of the listeners twist the station dial if they don't like a tune, he considers music selection one of his key services. He, his record librarian, or a panel of 24 proteges at his stations around the country audition virtually every new U.S. release. Then, by weekly phone call, he discusses with each station what new "hit-bounds" to add to the repertory and what "golden oldies" to revive.

Drake's musical suggestions, he admits, are not necessarily "in a bag I personally dig"; they are based on studies of record sales and individual markets.

Sometimes he will go unannounced to the town of one of his clients and just check into a motel, dial-hop around the radio, and then decide how to beat the competition. For example, the program director of Memphis' WHBQ says that his Drake-ordered strategy is to go for "the schoolteacher who lets her hair down, forgets the Mantovani, and swings a little."

Edge of the Swamp. A lanky (6 ft. 5 in.), all-business bachelor, Drake himself is trying to learn to swing a little with the music set in Los Angeles. But it does not come naturally to a fellow who was born Philip Yarbrough (his assumed name, he says, "sounds better") in Georgia on the edge of Okefenokee swamp. What did come naturally, though, was the sound of music. At an early age, he was conducting a fantasy disk-jockey show at home, playing his favorites--gospel and country, Eddie Fisher and the Four Aces. By junior year in high school he was doing a teen program on Saturdays on the local radio station, and after a year at Georgia Teachers College, he plunged into radio full time. Seven years and four stations later, he teamed up with Californian Gene Chenault to go into the consulting business.

Drake-Chenault Enterprises, as the firm is still called, is not universally admired in the music field. When Drake proclaims a hit-bound choice, the prophecy is often self-fulfilling because he controls so many successful stations. But the hits he creates, such as Sonny and Cher's I Got You, Babe and The Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville, can seldom be described as creative new works. A Los Angeles underground paper called Drake "a monument to public tastelessness." For better or worse, Drake is going to have more influence before he has less. Next month 21 new client FM stations will receive by mail, on reels pretaped by Drake's staff, their weekly programming. For the stations, it means getting by for much of their air time with only an engineer on duty. For Drake, it means fewer disk jockeys to monitor, more time in the pool.

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