Bill Gavin's Advice To A New Music Director

Program Notes From Bill Gavin

You don’t know who he was? Gavin was one of the most important men in the music radio business. I would go so far as to say he was the most important radio music director who ever lived. Bill was into middle-age when Rock ‘n Roll hit. He was an announcer and music director at stations in Seattle and San Francisco. He had a weekly half-hour Top Hits show. In 1955, he was hired by an ad agency to over-see a weekly Top 10 music countdown show that ran on 48 stations. At the time, the only charts we had were those of Billboard and Cashbox Magazines, and those charts were based on record sales (billboard) and jukebox plays (cashbox).

The problem radio music directors had was that when Rock ‘n Roll exploded in ’55 and ’56, those charts were too slow. It might take two months before a local record store got stock on the latest Brenda Lee or Elvis or Little Richard release that the local radio station had been playing. And there were a LOT of records hitting the desks for radio programmers every week. We needed some help wading through it all and finding the “right” records to be playing. Bill Gavin helped us do that with The Gavin Report.

Bill didn’t editorialize all that much in his sheet, but when he did we all knew we were sitting at the feet of a wise man. Here’s one that I saved from sometime in the late ’60s.