Talking oldies with Richard Kaufman, aka 'Ricky the K'

Richard Kaufman, host of the Internet radio show Ricky the K's Solid Gold Time Machine, is on the phone with me when the subject turns to what oldies songs still get airplay on his show vs. what still gets played on traditional radio.

Kaufman asks me to name any artist. I check my iPod, which is paused in the middle of What in the World's Come Over You, a 1960 hit by Jack Scott, A Canadian artist who had nine Billboard Top 40 hits between 1958 and 1960. I have three 3 of his songs on my iPod. Kaufman says he plays five on his show.

I've pretty much just told you everything I know about Jack Scott, all of which I just looked up. But Kaufman is largely the reason I have three of Scott's songs, as well as hundreds if not thousands of old Top 40 hits, on my iPod. In 2003, I wrote a story on Kaufman, who operates his show out of a home studio in his Dallas-area back yard. Back then, he railed against the limited playlists of traditional oldies stations, which he says can have as few as 350 songs in rotation, leaving out a good chunk of rock and pop history. As an example, he cited the Four Seasons, who had 27 Top 40 hits during the '60s alone -- only a fraction of which were still played in 2003.

This gets a little music-history-geeky, but Kaufman's example led me to check The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, where a cursory browse revealed just how many former hits -- by the Four Seasons and others -- no longer got airplay in 2003. And the number is dwindling further in 2012, as oldies stations shift their playlists to fit shifting demographics, mostly targeting an advertister-friendly 25- to 54-year-old audience. There are exceptions, but a song from, say, 1965 isn't going to induce nostalgia in a modern 35-year-old the way a song from 1985 might. Or so the theory goes. You'll hear some '60s songs on a station like KLUV/98.7 FM -- which now plays a "classic hits" format, rather than the oldies format it was known for for years -- but the bulk of the station's playlist these days comes from the '70s.

Demographic-targeting is one of the reasons Kaufman started the Solid Gold Time Machine in 1998. And it's one of the reasons he keeps doing the show. But not the only one.

"If it was television, if it was movies -- if they were not doing well and the ratings were going down, they would find talent to try to make more compelling content," Kaufman says. "Where radio's answer is 'We don't really value talent, so let's fire a whole bunch of people and lets make our operating costs lower.' ... You've got voice-tracking, you've got automation. The other thing that's changed is that if there were not many '50s and '60s songs on in 2003, today there are almost none."

Ricky the K's Solid Gold Time Machine's playlist, on the other hand, is strongly focused on the 1958-1971 period -- as it was in 2003. Kaufman plays a few songs from before 1958, and a handful from post-1971, usually by groups like Three Dog Night that had a series of hits that began in the late 1960s and spilled into the '70s. Kaufman has not shifted to target changing demographics -- this is the same period he focused on in 2003. This leaves out a big chunk of my big nostalgia era, the '70s (and all that followed), but Kaufman has his reasons for making '71 the rough cutoff date.

"The real change in music began at the end of '71," Kaufman says. "Radio began to change and go toward what it is today starting as early as '68, but music radically changed. ... In 1972, it got a lot more boring and a lot more middle of the road. It got more bubble-gummy, but I'm not talking bubble-gummy like the Grass Roots or the 1910 Fruitgum Company, I'm talking about bubblegummy like Billy Don't be a Hero and Run Joey Run." (Note: I don't agree with everything Kaufman says, but Run Joey Run is a strong candidate for worst Top 40 song ever. Click the link and see if you don't agree inside of five seconds.)

But even within those general 1958-1971 paramaters, Kaufman plays more songs than a typical oldies station, where the narrow playlists were another factor in his launching the Solid Gold Time Machine.

"Even at the height of the oldies format, which was probably in the '80s, the stations were playing probably 300 to 800 records," Kaufman says. "But in this [oldies] era, there were approximately 3,000 songs that either went Top 20 or got massive airplay even if they didn't. You're talking about a format that was over-researched to death and burned itself out. But now the main reason these songs are not getting played is because ad agencies don't want an audience that's over the age of 49, because they claim it takes twice as many ad impressions to get someone over 49 to change brands, so it's not economically feasible for the advertisers."

When I talked to Kaufman in 2003, he aired a three-hour show five times a week. Now he's down to one three-hour show, which airs from 8 to 11 p.m. Central on Friday night. One of the differences now is that the show is broadcast live on UStream, while in 2003 it was audio only (because of music license-fee restrictions, he doesn't podcast the show).

"I can deliver the show live with video," Kaufman says. "and that's a major factor, when you have a world where radio devalues talent, to be able to do something and actually be live, be a personality."

Being a personality is vital to Kaufman, as you can hear from this clip and see from this old WFAA/Channel 8 story about the Solid Gold Time Machine:

Kaufman says he could do the show five days a week if he wanted to, returning it to the subscription service it used to be. But he also says he could offer the show to radio stations, doing three hours in different markets on different days -- say, Miami on Monday, Los Angeles on Tuesday, Dallas on Wednesday, etc. Or he could do it for foreign markets.

"Right now, I'm playing vintage '50s and '60s commercials," Kaufman says. "But if I can get this in syndication or on a bunch of radio stations in a different market each day, some of those vintage commercials could be replaced by paying spots. It would be a way for the stations to make money."

Kaufman has done the show steadily, except for a period when health problems caused him to stop doing it. When he returned last year, he says, he believes he was doing the show better than he'd ever done it. He's 61 now, but he stresses that he could ramp it back to 15 hours a week if he needed to. And he still maintains the energy level of a 25-year-old disc jockey in 1965. And he says it takes him 180 hours to repeat a song with his 3,000-song playlist.

"I'm lucky in a lot of ways," he says. "I mean, I have a studio that's specifically built for this and I've had all along. The video's kind of a novelty, but one thing that's kind of cool is that people can watch the show and listen to it on their cellphone. ... I've heard from people who listen to it on a cellphone and say it kind of replicates listening to it on a '60s transistor radio, because the speakers in a cellphone are just as crappy as the speakers in '50s and '60s transistor radios. So it's kind of like history repeating itself."

Kaufman says he airs the show on Friday nights because he wanted to air it on a night when prime-time TV got some of its lowest ratings. He aimed for a time when it would be prime time in all time zones, trying to make it as early as possible for the East Coast and as late as possible for the West Coast. "I have listeners in Australia, and it's 14 hours ahead in Australia," he says. "Depending on where they are in Australia, people listen to it at 10 o'clock in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. The only people that have a problem are people in Northern Europe, where it's six hours ahead, so they're listening at like 3 o'clock in the morning."

If you're in DFW, you can hear or watch the show from 8 to 11 p.m. Fridays. Kaufman's website is www.60sradio.com. The link for the video of the show is here. You can also follow the show on Twitter and Facebook.