Mike Murphy And The Birth Of HITS Magazine
I formally interviewed Murphy twice in 2018. The audio is from the second interview recorded on a houseboat in Marina del Rey, California, May 22, 2018.
CHAPTER ONE: Murphy Gets An Indie
ME: In late 1982, KZZB B95 in Beaumont/Port Arthur, Texas scored its first P2 (Parallel Level 2) status in Radio & Records. That was good for Program Director Mike Murphy.
MM: “The independent promoters were all over the place when I first started. And once you earned R&R reporting status, your station became powerful, even small stations. P1s had the most juice, P2’s were the middle markets, and P3’s even smaller stations. Once you got that, every indie jumped out and wanted to work with you. You had guys coming at you from everywhere. Different guys had different ways. Some came on with drugs or women or whatever: ‘We got you covered. Whatever it takes to work with you.’
I went with an indie because I saw everyone else in the business making money, and I’m starving. I’m thinking I’m getting in on this.”
The indie he chose was Musicvision, owned and operated by Dennis Lavinthal and Lenny Beer.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Murphy Chooses Jewish Guilt)
MM AUDIO: “Don Anthony. He was working for them at Musicvision and he was a guy that I had known for a little while. He had called me before my station was really important at all. And so I kind of knew him. And when the day came, when we had that almighty reporting status, all the indies came out, of course, and everybody came to town and everybody had their offers of this, that, the other.
And Don was in and we were out and he was like, look, dude, it’s really simple. It goes with some of these guys, some of the goons, they’re not going to be happy if you, you know, if you don’t play to some things that they want and they could get rough. He goes, ‘my guys, my Jewish guys, the worst you get is guilt.’ And I was like, you know what? Guilt. I’ll take the guilt. I’ll go guilt.”
KZZB P2 Program Director Murphy became a Musicvision guy. Beer’s job was to help Murphy succeed and move to a better station so MusicVision could charge labels more for his adds. By 1986, indies were billing $500, $750, $1500 and $2500 or more per add per station depending on R&R parallel reporting status.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Murphy Is Beer’s Guy)
MM AUDIO: “You have to keep in mind that this is a period of time, that period of time in radio, that there was no monitoring of stations. So you reported. I’m playing the hits because I want to be successful. Now I can report that I’m playing something that maybe I’m playing or maybe once a night overnights. And that was part of that.
But they would always turn me on to big hit records because it was good for me. It was good for me. And the bigger my station became, the more they could charge the labels for access.”
In 1984, Program Director Michael St. John (another Musicvision guy) was leaving WWKX KIX106 Nashville. Beer and St. John got Murphy the job and Musicvision kept the station.
MM: “WWKX was a P2 Top 40 that had just been sold. The new owners turned it into a shit show which is one of the reasons St. John left. I lasted as long as I could and ultimately went back to B95, the P2 in Beaumont. I was in Beaumont in early ‘86 when all the indie shit flew. That’s when I got the call from Beer.”
CHAPTER TWO: Turn The Lights Off
The indie shit he referred to was a February 24, 1986 NBC News Report by Brian Ross titled, “The New Payola.” Indies like Joe Isgro, Fred Disipio, Jerry Meyers and Jerry Brenner — who were pulling down millions — were immediately out of business. So were Beer and Lavinthal at Musicvision, who were forced to leave their own millions on the table. It was temporary unemployment. The two indies knew exactly where that money was coming from and came up with another way to siphon it: HITS Magazine was born.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Murphy Gets The Call From His Former Indie Lenny Beer)
MM AUDIO: “And I remember getting the call from Lenny and he was like, we figured out how we’re going to do this. And I’m like, wow, really? And he goes, yeah, we’re going to do a magazine and it’s not going to be like the ones that you see now. It’s going to be slick. it’s going to look like TIME or one of those, you know, something like that. Really, really good looking and legit. And this is how we’re going to do it. Yeah, this is how we’re going to get back in the game. And I moved. I couldn’t wait. I was like, yes, let’s go. I was ready to come to Los Angeles for sure. I’m like, I was all about it.”
CHAPTER THREE: Welcome To Your New Home
Lavinthal and Beer launched HITS from the two-story Fred Sands building on Ventura Blvd just off the 405. Creating a magazine from scratch just months after the indie promo massacre was a psychotic shit show driven by two new “publishers” obsessed with quickly reclaiming their label promotion budgets.
The day-one HITS hustle was, of course, radio. Regardless of editorial tone and glossy feel, HITS was an industry “tip sheet.” It was Lavinthal and Beer’s tool to convince radio PDs that HITS was the source for discovering hit records to make their stations successful, and propel them individually higher in the radio ecosystem. The labels would then pay for HITS’ influence via advertising and individual “promotion projects” for the former indies.
It was the Musicvision model with an added advertising revenue stream.
To get there, Beer created a team to mine airplay and sales data and, most importantly, cultivate relationships with radio stations. Make them your guys was the mandate — just like Musicvision. That’s where Murphy came in. There were immediate headwinds.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Convincing Radio You’re Not Indie Criminals 00:45)
MM AUDIO “In the beginning, there were a lot of people that were afraid to talk to us. That’s because of Lenny and Dennis, their indie background, their independent record promotion background. So everybody was very afraid of us. They didn’t want to get in trouble. They were very afraid of anything looking wrong. They didn’t want to look like they were doing something wrong.
You know, it took really, it was a good solid year or more really to get people where they were like okay and comfortable enough. I mean I can remember going to like conventions or stuff like that and guys and going up and like wanting to introduce yourself to them and them like hauling ass. They didn’t even want to be seen with you. They were afraid.”
But this wasn’t just the standard indie promo radio hustle. There was a magazine, and it cost a shitload to finance. Anyone who’s worked for Lavinthal and Beer knows negative cash flow equals death. The two unhappy publishers emphatically impressed upon their staff (or “money siphons”) that failure was not an option.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Murphy’s Not In Radio And He’s Not An Indie. He Works For A Fucking Magazine.)
MM AUDIO: “It was like, what am I doing here? You know, it was a learning experience. Just.going into the magazine because we were really putting out a magazine. We were part of that. My job wasn’t just calling radio stations and talking to them. We actually had to be part of putting out that magazine.
The selling of the ads, which was a whole new ball game for me, that was hard. That was really hard in the beginning, because we had to sell every ad. Later, as the years went by, big overall deals were made, but in the very beginning, it was a week to week thing, selling those ads. And it was like the bane of my existence. It was like, you know, Lenny and Dennis up our butts to get some ads in the mag. And it was, it was tough. It was a tough sell to the labels at that time, our rates were pretty high. And so it was, it was a rough gig in the beginning. It really was. It was hard. And it was the part of it that was not a lot of fun. It was like, okay, I have to tell Lenny and Dennis that no RCA is not buying an ad this week.”
CHAPTER FOUR: Shit Gets Wacky
The first year of HITS Magazine was a fever dream. The HITS office was a high-pressure psychotic cluster fuck and the psychosis started to show up in print. It then started to define us. Lavinthal and Beer wanted to make money. When psychotic HITS started earning, they let their people run wild. The progressive craziness, both in office and in print, tracked with revenue spikes, and that’s what mattered to Lavinthal and Beer. Off the rails was good for business, and business started getting good.
(MURPHY AUDIO- Murphy’s Not In Radio And He’s Not An Indie. He Works For A Magazine.)
MM AUDIO: “We became empowered. was like, we got away with a lot more stuff. We got to do more things. We got to be crazier. We were bigger in the business. So people, you know, took you more seriously. And it was like, you know, ego time. was, it was big on the ego, you know, definitely fed the ego of everybody that was part of it.there was a time where the silliness and the things that we would do were kind of just relief and release of like tension from all of this stuff. And then it became kind of ⁓ more of a sport to mess with people in the office, you know.
Our coworkers, lot of, lot of, you know, pranks and that’s kind of thing. Just, it just all blew up. mean, it just became like full block.”
An inventory of individual antics reads too douchey. Boasting about wacky koo-koo decades later feels sad. But the formative years of HITS were creative, unique, and that collective experience established permanent friendships among those who lived it. People at HITS bonded.
(AUDIO- Murphy’s Acknowledges We May Have Been Annoying.)
MM AUDIO: “I will say this that I’ve always noticed that especially, you know, during all of that time is that hits, was a clique. I mean, we hung together, you know, it would be, we would go to events, we would go do things and then invariably...we would end up together, all of us together, being crazy and doing shit. It was never mean-spirited stuff. We did crazy stuff that probably rubbed people the wrong way, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t set out to be that. It was just maybe annoying or whatever”
CHAPTER FIVE: The Publishers Get Their Money
If reclaiming their indie money was the sole intention behind the birth of HITS Magazine, then Dennis and Lenny achieved their goal.
Anyone who’s worked for Lavinthal and Beer, for any amount of time, knows they’re money-generating beasts.
And get the fuck out of their way while they do it.
By 1995 Lavinthal and Beer had structured multi-level promotion, marketing and advertising deals across most major labels and their umbrella music groups. The magazine (no longer a tip sheet) they created in 1986 to reclaim their indie money was thriving.
1995 RCA Label Deal:
Advertising : $275,000 total billed quarterly
Marketing: $175,000 total billed quarterly
Dave Matthews Promotion Project: $25,000 initial payment
500,000 units: $10,000
750,000 units: $10,000
1,000,000 units: $25,000
1,000,000 units: $25,000
1,000,000 units: $25,000
1,000,000 units: $25,000
1,000,000 units: $25,000
And there were a lot of those. Many with higher budgets. And it kept scaling through the 90s. It was not easy money. They had to ruthlessly chase it. But their machine was firing on all cylinders, and they were doing what they do best: Making money.
This June 19, 1997 Dennis Lavinthal email to Tommy Mottola and Michele Anthony says it all about 1997:
CHAPTER SIX: Goodnight Chet
The friendships established during the early years of HITS Magazine are now decades old. I’ve come to believe they’ve endured because of that unique shared experience. People who were there understand it.
SOUNDBITE: Monumental Murphy On Friends/Experience 1:21
EPILOGUE
I was at HITS Magazine from 1986 until I flamed out and withered away. Murph, Joe Fleischer, Jon O’Hara, Jimmy Stewart and Mark Pearson lived a lot of that with me. They remain my closest friends today.
HITS is celebrating 40 years by publishing a big, ad filled anniversary issue. I wrote this.
