Boss Radio

Hah! Some of you will have made an obvious, but slightly incorrect assumption about this post, the rest of you will be wondering 'Who in the hall is Bill Drake?'

For those who think they've got it sussed, Bill Drake did not name my blog, well, not directly anyway...

This blog is named after the band I've been playing in for about 40 years. We've outlived The Grateful Dead and The Mothers of Invention, and are currently running neck and neck with The Tower of Power, although they get a lot more work than us and get better paid for it too

I called the band Boss Radio because at the time I owned the name.

I owned it because back when the government were trying to drive offshore radio stations off the air with the Marine Offences Act there was this plot to go out to the former Radio City fort and start broadcasting from the minute that the act came into force until they either came out and dragged us off or they starved us out. I became involved partly because I'd been on the fort already and partly because some guy dropped a load of tapes on my doorstep and asked if I could make up some jingles out of them for the station.

Further investigation revealed that he had no idea what format the station was broadcasting or what it was called, so I suggested two stations, one pop and one easy listening since those were the two genres covered by the current offshore stations. Sometime later the guy got back to me and said that 'they' liked the idea and they'd leave it up to me to name the stations. The tapes consisted of several recordings of the offshore stations, and one of WCFL, and I couldn't see how I could make any of the jingles on them into new jingles until I came across a sting on a Swinging Radio England tape that just went 'Boss Radiooooo'. I set to work cutting up jingles and dropping the sting in where the old station names went, and shortly after that the guy turned up and said one of the backers had pulled out and the whole thing was off. For all I know the whole thing might have only existed in his mind.

The trouble is, I'd registered the name 'Boss Radio', I now owned a name and had nothing to use it on...

The Boss Radio referred to in the sting was a radio format devised by Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs. Unbeknownst to them another young DJ called Ron O'Qinn was devising a format for a British offshore station to be called Swinging Radio England, and the two formats were to be released to a waiting world at about the same time, one in the US and one in the UK. Due to delays in getting the ship on air Boss Radio hit the US airwaves first, and although I have absolutely no knowledge of this, I suspect that this time advantage enabled O'Quinn to appropriate the name the name for his format over here. There were now two entirely different Boss Radios filling the ether.

The US version went on to become the biggest thing in Top 40 radio ever, the UK incarnation, due mainly to some really bad handling at boardroom level, but also to the looming Marine Offences Act, never really caught on. But it provided me with the sting which went into the jingles that I protected by registering the name which is why I named my group that and carried it over to my blog...

So farewell then Bill Drake. Others better aquainted with your achievements will write your obituaries, but this blog would like to thank you for giving it a name.