I think I mentioned Art Laboe in another context in another thread - he was the most successful example of this - becoming very affluent
buying time at KTYM and XERB to sell his "Oldies but Goodies" records. Laboe had been a regular DJ in the 50s, and again much later at KRTH - but for at least 2 decades, he made a living on brokered radio, and promoting Oldies concerts.
My mom bought me some "Oldies But Goodies" albums. They seemes strange to me because the songs were familiar to me, but the versions on the records were all being sung by black people. I'd heard "Earth Angel" by the Crewcuts (by then an oldie), but I'd never heard it by the Penguins. I was fascinated by this. It was later that I heard Art Laboe hawking the records on XERB. My mom wouldn't have ordered them via XERB, so they must have been available in a record store early on.
Given that most places in America weren't as culturally diverse as SF, I'd assume that Art Laboe sold way more albums via XERB than via record stores, at least until XERB went away.
I remember when the Wolfman used to be very crude and told teenage girl callers to get naked for him, etc. It was quite a listen. What amazed me was that he recorded these programs the night before and they were hand-carried to Rosarito Beach, since it was illegal to connect to a station outside of the U.S. for rebroadcast back into the U.S. The shows certainly sounded live, and the callers probably didn't realize that they weren't on the air at the time they called.
The Wolfman sold baby chicks, "45 fabulous hits for $4.45" and things like fuzzy dice for the rear view mirror. Who knows, maybe he started that awful fad. There were, of course, the racetrack programs and the preachers, but I remember a lot of that going away and XERB doing basically music shows in Spanish prior to 9pm each night. The one I remember with the biggest cadre of preachers was XEROK and XEMO. (Were they the same station? I forget.)
For the most part I remember Wolfman promoting music shows, car dealers, and other sponsors in LA. Aside from a few mail order things I don't recall him promoting things that would appeal to people much outside of LA. At the time XERB came in hugely loud around here, even with KFAX on the next channel starting at 10pm when they used to sign back on.
[/quote]
[/quote]
I don't remember how Laboe's
Oldies but Goodies records were marketed other than brokered radio, but they must have been. I remember being surprised in the early 80s that my brother-in-law (then in the Navy) had the complete "OBG" collection on cassette. He's was an Oldies nut, but since he had lived mostly on the East Coast - not a former XERB listener, I'm sure.
In the late 60s and early 70s, My father worked in an animation studio on Sunset Blvd in LA. I remember discovering XERB "studios" a few doors down - a tiny dumpy building with one of those light-up "marquee" letterboxes that small retail businesses used in those days.
Needless to say, XERB boomed into LA from Rosarita Beach 24 hours a day. I've heard their signal could be heard after sunset very clearly up and down the west coast as far north as Vancouver.
