In the mid-to-late sixties in L.A., the radio station to listen to was 93 KHJ, Boss Radio. They played pretty much the same Top 40 list as competing stations but KHJ had a great between-records sound and some colorful disc jockeys…and most of all, they always seemed to have some fun promo or contest going on. For a week or two there, for example, you could win a lot of money (a lot for a local station to give away, at least) if you could identify Location X.
Location X was a spot somewhere in Southern California. Every hour, whoever was on the air would play about ten seconds of audio recorded at Location X. He'd give out a little clue as to its whereabouts. And some lucky caller would get a chance to guess. I remember we all got caught up in the mystery at my school and spent a lot of time trying to parse the hints and deduce the elusive answer, not so much because we thought we'd win the loot but because it was an intriguing puzzle. Eventually, some caller got it. It turned out to be the merry-go-round at Lincoln Park.
Where is Lincoln Park? I don't know now and I didn't know then. None of my friends did, either. We all felt cheated when the answer was revealed, the way you'd feel cheated if, for example, you read a thick murder mystery and on the last page, the killer turned out to be someone who hadn't even been mentioned in the book before. In protest, a few of us switched our allegiance to a competing station, KRLA.
Perhaps the biggest promotion KHJ ever did was to announce the coming of the Big Kahuna. Who was the Big Kahuna? Just some actor they'd hired. The idea was to create a celebrity D.J. for personal appearances and to promote the station and it succeeded wildly. No one in L.A. really knew who The Big Kahuna was or why it was the event of the decade that he was arriving in Los Angeles and joining the Boss Jocks at Boss Radio. But they made it sound so important that crowds turned out, people tuned in and a genuine media event was manufactured.
I vaguely recall that he was treated as some sort of trendsetting wiseman…kind of a Hawaiian version of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi but without the religious overtones. Instead of teaching us Transcendental Meditation, he was there to teach us how to be cool…though what his credentials were in this department, no one ever explained. And that's about all I remember. Basically, he was briefly famous for being briefly famous.
What prompted this recollection was reading Ken Levine telling us that the Big Kahuna is no more. The actor who played him, Chris Varez (I never knew that name before) has died at the age of 69. Aloha, Big Kahuna! I have no idea why I thought you were important but I did for a while there. And I certainly think it's sad to see another element of my teenage years get old enough to go.