Pat O’Day

The son of a coal miner turned preacher, Pat O’Day was born Paul Wilburn Berg in Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1934. When Pat was 7, his father accepted the pastorate of a Tacoma church. The Rev. Berg soon landed a regular radio ministry show on Tacoma’s KMO, 1360, one of the state’s pioneer stations. It wasn't long that young Paul Berg knew that he wanted to be on the radio. Every night he’d go into the bathroom and practice announcing into the bathtub because it made his voice resonate.

Hosting the '67 Seattle Teen Spectacular

O’Day graduated from Bremerton High School in 1953. When he enrolled in broadcasting school in Tacoma and began perfecting his delivery, he says, he realized the secret to his father’s success as a broadcaster was being “one-on-one” with his listeners. “Whenever I was on the air, I’d look at the microphone and envision one person and talk to her or him,” O’Day says.

KVAS in Astoria, Oregon, in the fall of 1956, was O’Day’s first stop on the back roads to a major market. “In between reading lost dog reports and funeral home ads, he developed his ‘Platter Party’ concept, which meant broadcasting rock hits from remote teenage sock hops on weekends, thus turning the previously sterile medium of radio into an ‘event,’ ” wrote Northwest music historian Peter Blecha.

Moving to KLOG in Kelso, the young deejay, still going by Paul Berg, perfected his snappy, “faintly ironic” patter and began staging teen dance parties at the National Guard Armory to supplement his $350-a-month salary. He arrived in Yakima in 1958, lured by the promise of the program director’s slot and a $100 raise.

Pat with Annette Funicello

This audio captures Yakima-to-Seattle events in the Berg-to-O’Day transition. First is Berg on KLOQ in January ’59, just a few days before Berg left for KAYO Seattle. Second (recorded some years later is O’Day’s own words describing his name change. And third is an O’Day aircheck at KAYO in the summer of ’59, a segment that includes newsman Jim Harrison right before a news getaway intro to the Fabulous Wailers’ “Road Runner.” [ LISTEN ] (5:48)

When KJR announced it was switching to a Top 40 format, O’Day landed his dream job. On New Year’s Day 1960, he went on the air at KJR for the first time. Little did he know it would be his home for the next 15 years.

CRUISIN' 1966

In 1964 and 1965, the national radio industry acknowledged his power, voting him top Program Director. In 1966, O'Day was voted "Radioman of the Year" and was also honored (along with a select few other iconic radio men) with his own volume of the popular Crusin' LP series that featured his powerhouse patter wedged between compiled period hits. As Seattle's highest-profile DJ of the 1960s and the region's dominant dance promoter, Pat O'Day ran Northwest rock 'n' roll for nearly a decade.

Lee Perkins, Pat, Dick Curtis and Jerry Kaye, 1962

O’Day was part of a Beach Boys ticket giveaway with winner Nancy Rall. The Beach Boys, from left, were Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson and temporary member Glen Campbell c.1965.

O'Day's name became synonymous with KJR, the station he ran for a decade and built into an empire. To really understand his impact you'd have to consider the power of that station back then -- it was not uncommon for KJR to boast of a 37 percent rating, an unheard of dominance by a radio station. Today that rating would be more than the market share of the top seven local stations (KMPS, KUBE, KVI, KIRO, KBSG, KRWM, and KWJZ) combined!

O'Day, KJR's star DJ, was eventually promoted to Program Director and, by 1968, to General Manager. He oversaw the production of each week's Fab-50 play-list -- inclusion on this list was virtually the only way a record could become a hit in this area.

Additionally, O'Day produced or engineered numerous recordings by many of the top bands on the KJR play-list including the Wailers, the Viceroys, the Dynamics, and the Casuals. And if that wasn't enough, he also ran an extensive teendance circuit across the region -- which was the most profitable part of his empire and perhaps the most visible.

By 1962, O'Day was making more than $50,000 a year just from throwing dances. By the mid-1960s O'Day and Associates were presenting over 58 separate teen-dances a week throughout the state. He was also producing concerts featuring Northwest bands, including The Fabulous Wailers, the Ventures and the Sonics.

Pat and Jimi Hendrix, 1968

By 1968, O’Day’s success as a concert promoter and high-key, wisecracking persona — not to mention KJR’s Top 40 format — had bred contempt among the cognoscenti in the city’s growing “underground.”

They branded him a greedy opportunist more interested in ratings and his piece of the action than “music that matters” — Buffalo Springfield, Dylan and The Byrds vs. “empty-headed crowd-pleasers” like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean.

O’Day rose to station manager, all the while expanding his concert business and investing in real estate, cutting deals and hobnobbing with the stars. Notably, he recalls a pool party where he says Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who told their wild-man drummer, Keith Moon, to lighten up a bit because drum kits were more expensive to replace than guitars after the obligatory set-ending bashfest.

O’Day says he dabbled in cocaine and marijuana, but his drug of choice was alcohol: “A lot of times I went back on the air after a four-Jack Daniels lunch, and no one could tell.”

Worried friends staged an intervention in the spring of 1986. “I went to Schick Shadel Hospital vowing I would beat the system, thinking I’d go in for two weeks and get them off my back. Well, I walked out two weeks later and never had another drink. I felt like a new human. … Schick changed my life — maybe saved my life.”

THE KJR SUPERCAR
Pat O'Day (front) and Lan Roberts

If the old deejay sounds like an evangelist, it’s because he is. O’Day became the voice of Schick Shadel’s radio and TV commercials. He still gives the welcoming address to each incoming group of patients.

To recap, few broadcasters had greater impact on Pacific Northwest radio than Pat O’Day. His 15 years at KJR — from jock to program director to general manager, 1959-1974 — and the talent he put on the air, built KJR into an empire which at times captured more than 35 percent of the greater Seattle listening market. He was nationally recognized in 1964, ’65 and ’66. Often forgotten by many was his even greater financial success as an organizer/promoter (O’Day and Associates and later Concerts West) of teen dances and big name music concerts.

August 4, 2014

Those ventures propelled him to even higher levels which attracted legal challenges that his enterprises were unfairly monopolistic — allegations about which he was cleared, but which diminished his power-base. After leaving KJR, O’Day’s financial stamina (through the sale of Concerts West) led to ownership of several radio stations, including KXA, KYYX and KORL in Honolulu. In the early 1980s O’Day’s fortunes fell on hard times and near bankruptcy. He later carved out success in the real estate business.

Pat O'Day passed away on August 4, 2020. He was 85 years old.

WHERE DID PAT WORK? Here is the list: KAST, KLOG, KJR, KORL, KYYX, and KKMI (GM).

Some materials found on this page were originally published by the following: Radio Historian

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Terry Knight

Knight was born on April 9, 1943 in Lapeer, Michigan. After graduating from high school in 1961, he briefly attended Alma College before dropping out. Knight's music career began as a Detroit DJ in 1963 when he replaced Dave Shafer as "Jack the Bellboy" on WJBK, coming to Detroit from Flint, Michigan's Top 40 rock station WTAC.

The following year, he moved across the river to CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. Arguably the first American DJ to air the Rolling Stones, he hosted a late night show from high-powered CKLW, bringing the British Invasion to the Northern states. He was awarded the honorary title of "The Sixth Stone" for his early support of the Stones. By the end of 1964, however, Knight had left CKLW and the radio business, intending to pursue his own career in music.

Terry Knight working the mic for the first time as "Jack the Bellboy" at WJBK in Detroit Michigan on July 22, 1963. [ LISTEN ] (19:23)

This is a scoped aircheck featuring a Cleopatra movie live read, a 7-Up commercial, a "Bellboy Battle", Wrigley's Gum commercial, a word from Merollis Chevrolet and more...including weather reports, and numerous jingles.

Around 1965, Knight fashioned his own songwriting and performing career in Flint by becoming the front man for Terry Knight and the Pack. With this band, Knight recorded a handful of regional hits for local Lucky Eleven Records, part of the Cameo-Parkway Records group, including his self-penned generation gap anthem "A Change On the Way", as well as scoring two national hits, a tasteful cover of the Yardbirds' "(Mister, You're a) Better Man Than I" and his ultra-lounge reading of Ben E. King's "I (Who Have Nothing)" (which came close to making the national top 40, peaking at #46).

The band also left behind three long-playing garage classics before breaking up in 1967. (Brownsville Station honored Knight and the Pack with a cover of the Knight-penned "Love, Love, Love, Love, Love" on their '73 album Yeah!)

Although he did not make enduring music, Terry Knight holds an important place in the history of 1960s and early-'70s Michigan rock as both a performer and an entrepreneur. In the mid-to-late '60s, often recording with the Pack, he had several big hits in Michigan (and smaller ones nationwide), which were usually covers of songs by major and more significant performers, or blatant attempts to ape such performers with derivative original material. Prior to trying his hand at singing and recording, he was also a popular disc jockey on several Michigan-area stations.

Grand Funk Railroad

He is most known, however, for assembling Grand Funk Railroad, which included two members of the Pack, bassist Mark Farner and drummer Don Brewer. In the late '60s and early '70s, Knight served as Grand Funk's producer and manager, although those relationships were severed in 1972.

Knight entered the music industry as a radio DJ while still a teenager in the early '60s, doing stints at Flint's WTAC and then building a big following at CKLW (based in Windsor, Ontario, though actually for the most part serving the Detroit audience).

At CKLW he managed to get away with playing the Rolling Stones' "Little Red Rooster" over and over for an hour, in the days when you could still do such things on AM radio.

During the early '60s he also began to play guitar, sing, and write music; then at the end of 1964, he quit his CKLW gig to concentrate on music. One account has it that he gave his reason for leaving as planning to move to England to become the sixth Rolling Stone. That didn't happen, and he struggled to build a career in Flint, teaming up with a local band, the Jazz Masters.

The Jazz Masters -- with Farner, Brewer, and three other musicians -- became the Pack, who backed Knight on his debut 1965 single, "Tears Come Rollin'." Terry Knight and the Pack didn't ring up big local sales, however, until putting out a faithful cover of the Yardbirds' "Mr. You're a Better Than I."

Over the next year or two Terry Knight and the Pack had several big regional hits on the Lucky Eleven and Cameo-Parkway labels, making number 46 nationally with their biggest single, a cover of Ben E. King's "I (Who Have Nothing)"; there were also a couple of albums.

Knight did write some of his own songs; these were such transparent rewrites of tunes and approaches used by Bob Dylan, Donovan, P.F. Sloan, the Yardbirds, the Count Five, the Rolling Stones, the Lovin' Spoonful, and others as to be laughable.

Perhaps his experience as a radio announcer, which must have required him to cull through dozens of singles on a weekly basis, influenced him in this regard by making him a quick study of current trends. The best of the lot was the corny but moving folk-rock tune "A Change on the Way," another successful regional release.

Further problems that likely hindered a national breakout were Knight's own severe limitations as a vocalist. The anonymous liner notes to the bootleg '60s Michigan rock compilation Michigan Brand Nuggets put it best: "Knight spent the better part of his recording career trying to sound like other artists, having little personality of his own, at least not on record." The problem became especially acute when Knight affected a tough talking-blues or melodramatic narrative spoken delivery (as he did often). The stiff results sounded like nothing so much as a stage manager suddenly pressed into service as a sub for a missing leading man during rehearsal. As for his actual singing, in a similar vein, it sounded like a guide vocal laid down by a colorless producer or manager before the actual singer came in to do his bit.

It therefore made sense then that Knight's biggest success would actually come as a producer and manager. The Pack split from Knight around 1967 or 1968 to play as the Fabulous Pack, with Knight continuing to work for a while as a solo act. He told the Detroit Free Press that he went to London to talk to Paul McCartney about joining Apple Records, which didn't work out. Knight had, however, gained a lot of experience in the studio and also in other dimensions of the business as a songwriter and producer at Cameo-Parkway. In 1968, he put the Pack's Mark Farner and Don Brewer together with bassist Mel Schacher, who had been in ? & the Mysterians. With Farner taking guitar and vocals, Grand Funk Railroad were born. Knight also had lesser success during this period as the producer of hard rock-horn band Bloodrock.

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