KDAY, the Gangsta Rap Oldies Station, Breaks New Ground by Playing Music From the Bad Old Days

KDAY 1580 helped gangsta rap get its foothold. The wildly innovative station took the pulse of urban L.A. and helped usher in such trailblazers as Ice-T, N.W.A and Above the Law. Without KDAY, West Coast rap almost certainly wouldn't have exploded as it did — after all, nobody else was giving it airplay.

"KDAY was the one station that you could make a record, walk through the door, hand it to them, and they'd put it on the air," recalls Ice-T. "Right then!"

PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN

Current KDAY program director Adrian Scott established its hip-hop oldies format.

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More About

• Dr. Dre
• Greg Mack
• Adrian Scott
• Old School Hip-Hop
• Hip-Hop and Rap

Born in 1956, the station's moniker likely derived from its strictly daytime broadcast license. In its early days, it featured Top 40 music and well-known jocks such as Art Laboe and Alan Freed. But its signal shot straight into South L.A., and before long its focus was on mainstream fare from black artists, including Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles. (It also featured comedians Jack Burns and his partner, George Carlin.) By the early 1970s, it was broadcasting around the clock, and the legendary Wolfman Jack was on its airwaves.

KDAY jock Steve Woods played Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" — rap's first hit — upon its 1979 debut. But though it's often said that KDAY played exclusively rap, that was never the case. R&B was in the mix until the end.

In fact, at one point, program director J.J. Johnson decided to scrub hip-hop from the playlist.

"I initially thought it was a flash in the pan, like a lot of guys my age," says Johnson, who is now 61 and does freelance audio production. Ratings suffered, and Johnson lifted the ban for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's 1982 hit "The Message."

Rap only became dominant on KDAY after the 1983 arrival of Greg Macmillan, aka Greg Mack, who grew up in the segregated small town of Van Alstyne, Texas — raising cows, pigs and horses. He'd been hired away from a Houston station by KDAY's then–program director Jack Patterson.

It was clear to Mack that management was looking to shake things up. "My first week there," he remembers, "we were like, 'We need to figure this out, because we're getting our butts kicked.' "

Mack's mother lived in South Central L.A., and he and his young family joined her there, where they were treated to the sound of gunshots and "ghetto bird" police helicopters flying overhead at night. "Because my wife at the time was Hispanic, we always got pulled over," recalls Mack, who is black. "They always thought I was up to no good, that I was riding around with a girl of a different race like I was a pimp."

But the neighborhood helped him take the pulse of the streets, which meant hip-hop. Despite the fact that the genre had little institutional support here from labels, record shops or distributors, Mack got to work integrating the sound at the station.

Rap back then was driven by DJs and often had an electro flavor. Mack was particularly impressed by a turntable group called Uncle Jamm's Army, which performed before thousands at the Sports Arena. He enlisted his own version of the Army for the station, including future N.W.A members DJ Yella and Dr. Dre from a group called World Class Wreckin' Cru.

"He was always a very respectful kid, real nice, real shy," Mack remembers of Dre, who crafted mixes for Mack's daily show in the garage of his groupmate Alonzo Williams. Dre's style was unique: Rather than simply spinning records, he'd splice different elements of songs together with a four-track mixer. "You might hear 'Oh Sheila' by Ready for the World, but the vocals would be a Prince song and the harmony might be a whole other artist," Mack recounts. "People would say, 'Oh, he's not a real DJ.' I'd be like, 'I don't care what you call it, shit sounds good!' "

Dre and Yella were gone within a year, when N.W.A got serious. So Mack built up a new crew of young "Mixmasters." They weren't on-air disc jockeys; instead, they spun records on location that were broadcast live through a special phone line. But they brought KDAY hip-hop credibility by incorporating the hottest songs. The group's spiritual leader, Tony G, grew up outside New York City, and friends and family would send him new work from artists like Public Enemy, T La Rock and Eric B & Rakim — stuff practically nobody else in L.A. had.

They posted up at the toughest high schools and gangland roller-skate hot spots. As Mixmaster Hen-Gee would later describe the locations to writer Brian Coleman: "They were the killing fields."

"There was always someone getting shot or stabbed," Tony G adds. "The teachers were scared, the security were scared. They couldn't really do much."

He brought along a dozen of his biggest friends and stored a sawed-off shotgun inside the walls of his speakers.

Tough-talking rappers, meanwhile, were so desperate to get their music onto the air that they offered cocaine, heroin and handfuls of $100 bills, Mack says.

Tony G tells the story of a prominent local DJ who produced for Ice-T. When KDAY refused to play their work, the DJ allegedly drove up the hill to KDAY's Echo Park studios in a rage. He threatened to go inside and shoot up Mack, but Tony G intercepted him and talked him down.