Q: What made KMEL Summer Jam special in your opinion?
The thing that made KMEL Summer Jam special is that it really dealt with the hip-hop and R&B thing for the first time, and it became a model for a lot of other stations to follow – which was good and bad depending on where you sat at. The other thing about KMEL that I thought was noteworthy, was that all the money went to charity and all the artists came through and did it for free. Keith Naftaly, the PD at the time had such a reputation, and was committed to breaking so many new acts, that artists literally begged to participate in Summer Jam because it was such a big event. You have to remember that for a lot of the urban acts back then, performing in front of 22,000 people was a rarity. Also at that time, KMEL’s audience was racially diverse, which gave those artists a chance to gain exposure to a wider variety of people as well.
Q: Can you recount some of the most memorable performances in your opinion?
D: I think the one that stands out in everybody’s mind is Ice Cube. Ice Cube headlining at midnight. It was one of the first times he’d performed his solo act without N.W.A for a large audience. It was being broadcast on the air live, and he did all of his unedited songs, from “F*ck the Police” on down. It was just incredible. I mean you could never ever do that again, but I think Ice Cube’s performance was something that I think everybody went nuts over. I also remember good performances by Naughty By Nature, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, EPMD, Roger & Zapp, Rodney O and Joe Cooley, Run DMC, Sway & Tech when they were DJs at the station, Boyz II Men and Public Enemy too.
Q: And was KMEL one of the only stations to simulcast the concert on the air?
D: Yes, we were one of the only ones to do that. Some people said the broadcast never sounded as good, but I think that with the excitement and buildup of a show known to sell out in 20 minutes, you’re going to listen no matter what.
Q: The concern over of a few people in the crowd ruining the show for everyone…was that present early on?
D: Well, first we had the famous food fights. It wasn’t really a fight with people going up against each other; people would just start throwing food and stuff at the stage during the middle of the day. You have to remember that Summer Jam is like 90 or 100 degrees outside, and you’re there all day. If you had lawn seats – and this is before we had the booths that allowed you to stay occupied – you’d just be up there scrunched up on the lawn getting restless between sets. So we always had the food fight thing and everybody would just pull their blankets over their head while it was going on. The food fights basically became a Summer Jam tradition.
Then at Summer Jam 1995, the Luniz were performing. Too Short had headlined at Summer Jam the previous year and for some reason he wasn’t asked to come but he came through anyway. That became a big problem because him and the Luniz had beef. They got into a fight backstage, and that prompted the Mountain View police to put their foot down and put an end to any local acts performing. They also put an end to us being able to go past 6 o’clock. I think those restrictions are still in effect to this day.
After the ’95 incident, I secured 2000 tickets the following year to go to youth groups and police agencies so that we would have chaperones and responsible adults dispersed throughout the crowd to discourage anything that might possibly happen. That worked for a couple of years, but once Clear Channel bought the station and cut it down to 400 tickets, that was the end of that.
Q: How has KMEL Summer Jam changed over the years, in your view?
Over the years, the whole concept of Summer Jam in my opinion, just became a money-making situation for a lot of stations including KMEL. It’s like ‘we do Summer Jam, and we’ll make a ton of money because we’re able to sell ads and booth space’. For the longest time when KMEL did Summer Jam, we never took advantage of the Shoreline’s facilities to have booth spaces and sell advertising and all that other stuff. It was just that you came for the music and that was that. And I think that maybe from 1996 and on, all that changed and Summer Jam in my opinion became more of a sales thing than it was a music thing. I mean, you got the artists, but you never really got the artists.
Once other stations adopted the formula and started using their resources to basically cajole artists to their events by twisting arms and threatening to limit airplay, I think Summer Jam lost a little bit of its luster. And once Keith left, [KMEL] wasn’t as committed to breaking new artists, so all of the sudden it just wasn’t as special for both the audience and the artists. For the artists, it became just another stop, like: ‘we gottta do KMEL, then LA. Then Seattle, Arizona, and Texas. Four of the five aren’t even going to pay us, so this is really just payback for them playing us.’
Q: So the KMEL Summer Jam heyday was probably the Keith Naftaly era?
D: Oh, definitely – most definitely. That’s when we experimented with doing the two-day Summer Jams, the longest runtimes, and that’s when you had the biggest artists. KMEL also perfected the whole charitable angle, and that was a big “to do” for us. A lot of agencies got pretty good money from KMEL Summer Jam. For some organizations it was a major part of their budget.
When Keith was there, they would literally work out something with promoters or actually buy out a tour date, so that the artists would come to Summer Jam and not their original tour destination. They would pull major favors with people. You can’t do that now unless it’s just really a coercive situation, but you had artists back then that were like, ‘I wanna perform at Summer Jam, I like KMEL. They’re the ones that broke my record, so we’ll give up this Bay Area date just to come here.’ And I’d seen everybody from Hammer down to, you name it, bust their butt to get on down to KMEL Summer Jam.