Jan 22, 2021 5 min read

There’s been a longstanding legend that when the Beatles and other British artists took America by storm in 1964, Pittsburgh radio programmers covered their ears, preferring instead to keep spinning the doo-wop tunes that were rapidly being swept out of fashion.

Terry Hazlett says that’s just not true.

His proof?

Weekly surveys of what Pittsburgh radio stations were playing 57 years ago show that radio listeners in this region were just as ravenously hungry for every note the Fab Four played as their counterparts in other parts of the country.

“The British Invasion was just as popular here as anywhere else,” Hazlett said. “When you look at the surveys, there’s a decent amount of doo-wop. But they mixed it in with the British Invasion and no one thought about it.”

The persistence of that myth inspired Hazlett to pull together the book “Survey Says: The Hits of the ’60s in Western Pennsylvania.” The self-published volume looks at what was popular in the region week by week in the 1960s on what were then Top 40 radio stations like KDKA, WAMO, WBUT in Butler, WIXZ in McKeesport and WJPA in Washington. In those days, radio stations would release weekly surveys to stores like National Record Mart and G.C. Murphy that customers were allowed to grab and peruse for themselves.

Newspapers like the Observer-Reporter, The Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette would also print listings of popular songs on local radio.

Hazlett devoutly picked them up when he a young music fan growing up in McMurray, and has hung on to them over the years. For “Survey Says,” he created composite lists for each week of the 40 most popular songs for each week of the 1960s, starting Jan. 4, 1960 and ending Dec. 29, 1969. The book highlights the tremendous changes popular music underwent in that turbulent decade, with the likes of Percy Faith and Chubby Checker dominating the charts at its beginning, and The Rolling Stones and Steppenwolf cranking out hits by its end.

“I have at least a couple hundred of these,” said Hazlett, a disc jockey on WJPA in Washington and a former manager of Canonsburg. “I’d go every week, even if I had nothing else to get at the store, and got the free surveys.”

The surveys were “a tremendous advertising tool,” Hazlett said, and now provide a glimpse at how one city’s musical tastes changed over that decade.

But even if the 1960s journey from Lawrence Welk to Led Zeppelin was dizzying, Hazlett’s book highlights how much disparate musical genres mingled on pop music radio back then. During the week of June 23, 1969, to cite one example, Henry Mancini, Marvin Gaye and Creedence Clearwater Revival were clustered closely together on the charts.

“It was called ‘Top 40 radio’ because it pretty much played the top 40 songs of the day, no matter what the genre,” Hazlett said. “I listened to a variety of Top 40 stations, so wasn’t really aware if there were more specialized genre stations as well.”

In the 2020s, commercial radio is segmented and driven by formats – most likely, you tune in to a station because you want to hear a certain type of music, not because you want to hear a specific disc jockey. Hazlett points out that back in the 1960s, radio was personality-driven. Listeners tuned in to one radio station or another because they liked or trusted the disc jockeys. And those disc jockeys had a little bit more latitude to let their own tastes and preferences shine through. While staying within the parameters of the station’s format, they could spin a few personal favorites that weren’t getting attention elsewhere.

The national charts were considered more of a guide than something carved in stone for local programmers and music directors. Also, many disc jockeys played records at dances in their off-hours, and if a song caught on, they’d add it to their playlists.

“There also wasn’t a lot of research on music compared to today,” according to Hazlett. “Many Top 40 stations were programmed from the gut, and the most popular disc jockeys had at least some say in what songs they played.”

In the course of his research, Hazlett found that some regional disc jockeys were engaged in a form of triple-dipping – playing songs on the air that they wrote or co-wrote themselves, and were released by their own record labels.

“There were disc jockeys in Pittsburgh that did that kind of thing all the time,” Hazlett said. He also pointed out that the way the charts were compiled were somewhat less than scientific.

“Retailers’ influence on the charts was immense, because stations would call record stores every week and have whoever answered the phone rate sales of certain records. Unfortunately, sometimes the clerk who answered the phone would give high marks to songs they liked, even if they weren’t selling, and sometimes the clerks apparently were told to give certain songs high marks because the retailer bought too many copies, or the song simply wasn’t selling.”

However, by the time the latter part of the 1960s rolled around, radio stations “had moved on to more precise research on what songs to play,” Hazlett explained.

Whether it was the Pittsburgh radio landscape that Hazlett and others fondly recall, or Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit or any other American city, commercial radio had more personality 50 years ago than it does today. In the 2020s, its formats and announcers are largely interchangeable from city to city, shorn of the personality that made it so distinctive in the 1960s.

“Radio took the personality out of radio,” Hazlett said.

”Survey Says: The Hits of the ’60s in Western Pennsylvania” is available on Amazon, at the Guitar Gallery on Route 19 in North Strabane and at WordAssociation.com.