Television: What Makes Howard Spin

Howard Miller, 40, a balding Chicagoan, does not sing, dance, act, play a musical instrument or even tell fortunes, but last week no fewer than 40 advertisers waited in line to sponsor whatever few minutes they could get of his 6:30-to-8 a.m. show on Chicago's independent WIND. Miller is the outstanding specimen of a once meek breed that has inherited the world of U.S. radio: the disk jockey.

From WABC to WXYZ, wherever a kilocycle turns a profit, more than 5,000 smooth-talking, hard-selling pitchmen spin the phonograph records that make radio go round, plus a line of chatter, commercials, gossip, commercials, interviews, weather reports and commercials. They are not only the big noise in radio; they are teenagers' idols, pooh-bahs of musical fashion and pillars of U.S. low-and middle-brow culture.

As the highest-riding disk jockey of them all, shrewd, bustling Howard Miller, star of a radio program with the nation's biggest local audience, has pushed his turntable into a $350,000-a-year career that leaves him only four hours a night for sleep ("All I need"). He boasts 300 fan clubs, 1,200 fan letters a week, 2,000,000 loyal listeners to his morning show alone. He does another WIND show for 21 hours Sunday evenings, as well as a daily 15-minute network program (CBS 11:45 a.m., E.S.T.). He writes a weekly record column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Between personal appearances at theater concerts and youth rallies, Miller has also managed a feat reminiscent of selling refrigerators to Eskimos: he is the first disk jockey to ply his trade successfully on TV Wrapped Up in Integrity. "I'm a ham an exhibitionist and a frustrated actor " says Jockey Miller. He is also a seasoned ad-glibber and a canny judge of audience psychology. He banters with housewives and stenographers, butters up "misunderstood" teen-agers (who buy 60% of pop records), keeps a cold eye on just what is selling in the record shops.

Says Miller: "I never knock. But at the same time I'm sincere. I have integrity. Nine out of ten records I play, I don't think are good records. But they are commercial records. I play the things they want to hear. Unless I do, I don't have an audience, and therefore I have denied my station, my second integrity, an audience. And the station loses the account of my advertiser, my third integrity. But they're all wrapped up into one integrity—to build the biggest audience there is."

From his high perch in Chicago—which buys 9% of the nation's pop records and, with Detroit, is regarded by the trade as the crucible of record popularity for the whole U.S.—Miller is probably the nation's biggest single influence on record sales. He bases his choice of records not only on how they may already be selling, but on his own theory of U.S. taste: "We have entered an era when there is admiration for things being done as we would personally do them. Kids are more attracted to imperfection. I can show you thousands of records that are musically perfect, but they didn't sell. Johnnie Ray's great success was his ability to cry publicly. He relieved tensions. Pat Boone is the boy next door. Presley is a visual singer as well as a kind of Jimmy Dean, and the rebellious ones had a new place to hang their hats after Dean died."