Programming: The Executioner

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Drake's musical suggestions, he admits, are not necessarily "in a bag I personally dig"; they are based on studies of record sales and individual markets.

Sometimes he will go unannounced to the town of one of his clients and just check into a motel, dial-hop around the radio, and then decide how to beat the competition. For example, the program director of Memphis' WHBQ says that his Drake-ordered strategy is to go for "the schoolteacher who lets her hair down, forgets the Mantovani, and swings a little."

Edge of the Swamp. A lanky (6 ft. 5 in.), all-business bachelor, Drake himself is trying to learn to swing a little with the music set in Los Angeles. But it does not come naturally to a fellow who was born Philip Yarbrough (his assumed name, he says, "sounds better") in Georgia on the edge of Okefenokee swamp. What did come naturally, though, was the sound of music. At an early age, he was conducting a fantasy disk-jockey show at home, playing his favorites—gospel and country, Eddie Fisher and the Four Aces. By junior year in high school he was doing a teen program on Saturdays on the local radio station, and after a year at Georgia Teachers College, he plunged into radio full time. Seven years and four stations later, he teamed up with Californian Gene Chenault to go into the consulting business.

Drake-Chenault Enterprises, as the firm is still called, is not universally admired in the music field. When Drake proclaims a hit-bound choice, the prophecy is often self-fulfilling because he controls so many successful stations. But the hits he creates, such as Sonny and Cher's I Got You, Babe and The Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville, can seldom be described as creative new works. A Los Angeles underground paper called Drake "a monument to public tastelessness." For better or worse, Drake is going to have more influence before he has less. Next month 21 new client FM stations will receive by mail, on reels pretaped by Drake's staff, their weekly programming. For the stations, it means getting by for much of their air time with only an engineer on duty. For Drake, it means fewer disk jockeys to monitor, more time in the pool.