Remembering radio DJ Murray the K, the 'Fifth Beatle'

Everyone wanted a piece of The Beatles. The only problem is that when the historic day had finally arrived on Feb. 7, 1964 — cold, wet and breezy at Idlewild Airport — no one knew what a "Beatle" was exactly.

Except for one guy.

He too was famous, in New York anyway, also a touch scandalous, possibly unhinged. He was the scream king of WINS/1010 AM's "The Swingin' Soiree." Rock and roll champion, impresario, showman, pied piper, he drew a million-plus teens to "Soiree" every weeknight from 7 to 11. He got thousands to his live shows at Brooklyn's Fox Theatre.

Murray the K had made it his business to know and The Beatles had made it their business to know him. For both reasons, he was about to get the biggest piece of all.

In his 1964 essay on Murray "the K" Kaufman and the early Beatles radio wars — a frenzied fight largely waged between three or four New York stations — Tom Wolfe set the scene at the airport which was soon to be renamed for recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy:

A small press room and total "bedlam;" a hundred squalling, brawling reporters and photographers jammed into the back behind a rope.

John, Paul, George and Ringo on a stage far up at the front…while there, at their feet, squatted an "amok gnome…hunched, practically in a ball" who suddenly extended a mic up toward them. "Hey George, baby, hey hey George baby yeah, hey down here..."

George glanced down, just as some neglected reporter in the back "yelled out, 'Hey somebody tell Murray the K to cut out the crap.'

"So Paul McCartney, the Beatle, stepped forward, looked down [and] said, 'Murray the K, cut out the crap…'"

Murray the K: "Crazy, Paul, crazy! You're what's happening, Paul baby, and remember, you heard it here first on 1010 WINS."

An iconic moment in New York broadcasting history thus captured for posterity, Murray the K was just beginning. Over the next several weeks, he traveled with The Beatles from city to city, hotel to hotel, where he broadcast live shows from their rooms — the first from their suite at the Plaza — then hosted their concerts at Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium. The "Fifth Beatle" they called him, and the Fifth Beatle he called himself. The biggest band in the world was Murray's for the taking. Of course, he took it all the way, baby.

Wolfe called this "Murray the K's finest hour," but had he waited another year or so to write his essay, he might have arrived at a different conclusion. While Kaufman would go on to host the nation's first progressive rock and album-oriented format at WOR/98.7 FM in 1966, a trailblazing gig that lasted just a year, Kaufman's singular career triumph was well behind him by the end of 1964. When WINS became an all-news station in the spring of 1965, no more effusions ("what's happenin' baby!!") or boisterous declamations ("AHHHHH-BEY!!!) or this: ". . . OK, all you submarine race watchers out there, this is Murray The K on the 'Swingin' Soiree,' playing 'em red hot, and blue all the way . . ." ("Submarine race watchers" was K-speak for canoodling listeners.)

Six decades later, and 44 years after his death from lymphoma in 1982, Kaufman is now largely remembered, if at all, as a carny act from a time when AM radio ruled in New York and rock and roll was just getting its footing.

Or as a "Fifth Beatle," one — in fact — of several.

That's why his son, Peter Altschuler, a veteran Los Angeles-based voice actor and marketing executive, years ago created a website dedicated to his dad's memory, the Murray the K Archives.

The website has soundchecks, samples of song lead-ins called "Mystery Bits" (another novelty Murray the K pioneered) and clips from the TV specials. It describes its subject as "one of the most influential on-air and behind-the-scenes talents during the early evolution of rock music — from doo wop and rockabilly to rock’s emergence as what he called 'the soundtrack of our lives.'”

"I wanted to have some way for people to realize that he was more than his association with The Beatles," said Altschuler in a recent phone interview.

Did he have any regrets over the "Fifth Beatle" business? Did his father?

"Absolutely."

Tummler to rock and roll

Born in Washington Heights in 1922 to a family with deep roots in vaudeville, Kaufman grew up in the Essex House on Central Park South — as nice an address then as now. After World War II began, he was inducted but remained stateside to arrange entertainment for the troops, then after the war worked as a tummler in the Catskills. By the late '40s and '50s, he found work as a song plugger — someone who promotes songs to musicians —- and had a big success with the 1952 Bob Merrill novelty, "(How Much Is) that Doggie in the Window," which Patti Page turned into a massive hit in 1953. Kaufman later helped write the lyrics for his close friend Bobby Darin's first hit, yet another novelty, "Splish Splash."

By this time, he was into radio, first at WMCA/570 AM, then WMGM/1050 AM, where he produced late-night talk shows with Eva Gabor and Laraine Day, and later co-hosted a talk show with his wife, Claire.

Next stop, WINS in 1958 as host of the all-night show, "The Swingin' Soiree." WINS was already a giant because of DJ Alan Freed, who first coined the term "rock and roll" when he was in Cleveland. Freed heavily promoted the still-novel genre, and Kaufman — now renamed Murray the K — did the same. But soon after joining, Freed was fired over a charge that he had caused a riot at a Boston rock and roll show (Freed ended up at WABC, where he was later dropped over "payola" allegations).

Bruce Morrow — much later the Cuz, or Cousin Brucie — was named Freed's replacement. But management decided Kaufman had the greater gift for the sort of horseplay that had already consumed Top 40 radio. (The oft-cited example: During a snowstorm, Kaufman said that any woman who came to the Columbus Circle studio in a bikini would get a prize; about a dozen arrived, in the middle of the night.) Kaufman got the job and Morrow went over to WABC where he made history of his own. (Morrow, 90, who is the last surviving DJ from that era, and still does a weekly show for WABC, declined to comment.)

Kaufman held the 7-11 p.m. slot for the next seven years, but radio was just part of what he did. Like Freed before, he produced and hosted a series of rock shows at the Fox — a magnificent old show palace (now drab office building) where four times a year he got acts like The Ronettes, Ben E. King, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Shirelles, Dionne Warwick, all on one stage, alongside Cream, The Who, and the Young Rascals.

Radio at the time mostly aired covers by white artists of songs by Black artists but Freed and Kaufman would play only the original cuts. These glorious shows at the Brooklyn Fox were all part of a synergistic bonding rite with listeners, who were just getting to know rock and roll.

Radio was where Kaufman made the most noise. In a Rolling Stone tribute after his death, Kurt Loder recalled that "Murray's combination of sonic blast and nonstop yowsah-yowsah made for electrifying radio." Indeed, Wolfe said "he builds up an atmosphere of breathless jollyfication, comic hysteria, and turns it up a pitch so high it can hypnotize kids." Sound effects included stuff like "freight trains, cavalry charges, screams of men plunging down an abyss, nutty macaw laughter from the jungle…all spliced together by the hysterical apostrophe, 'ALRIGHT BABY!!!"

"He was murdering the competition — a 29 [share]!"

Kaufman — six wives, three sons — was not an attentive father, says Altschuler, who first really got to know his dad as a 12 year old growing up in Roslyn Heights. His parents let him go to the city to visit his father at the studio where "it was literally all business," he says. "My father would have a stack of 45s that he'd go through and he'd listen to every single one. There were ones that became the 'pick hit of the week,' and others he called 'fliers' — tunes he thought so terrible that he threw them like Frisbees across the studio into the trashcan."

'It's What's Happenin' Baby'

After WINS went from Top 40 to all-news in early 1965, Kaufman — always restless and looking for the next big thing — scoped out three alluring options. None worked out but at least the first made national news.

His CBS TV music special that May, "It's What's Happenin' Baby," was a network collaboration with the government's Office of Economic Opportunity which figured this could be a way to inspire unemployed young people. Kaufman tapped many of the performers he'd promoted on the air or at the Brooklyn Fox shows. It was groundbreaking TV for the time, with mostly Black stars performing, like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, the Four Tops, Ray Charles and Warwick; Martha and the Vandellas did "Nowhere to Run" on the paint line at a Ford Mustang factory.

Sixteen million tuned in, yet predictably, the congressional blowback was repugnant. Hearings were held over whether taxpayer money was used to produce the program (it was not) but those were largely a pretext for racist screeds. One representative from Alabama said, "I for one refuse to accept the notion that the best way to communicate with young Americans is through African tribal rhythms." Suffice it to say, there were no follow-up specials.

Kaufman got into nightclubs. Murray the K The World, which he and fourth wife, Jackie Hayes, opened in 1966 in an abandoned airplane hangar at Roosevelt Field in Garden City, was something of a marvel — a "multimedia discotheque," with multiple levels and 20 screens where movies were projected during live performances. The club landed on the cover of Life magazine, while "A KRAZY NEW WORLD EXPLODES," was the front-page headline in the New York Daily News, with the subject line, "It's what's happening, baby!" Murray the K World closed not long after. 

He got back to radio in late 1966, when he became WOR's program director and DJ of a novel new format, which was about as far from the relentless whiz-bang gimmickry of Top 40 radio as he could get. A brand-new Murray the K emerged too. The scream king gone, he played full cuts of songs like Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11 minutes, 23 seconds). Album-oriented-rock (AOR) radio was born but station management bailed, and went to oldies not quite a year later.

Kaufman went to the NBC Sunday radio magazine show, "Monitor," and briefly had a regular weekend TV music show on WNBC/4. There were DJ stops in Baltimore and Washington, and then, after moving to Los Angeles in the 1970s, he got into nostalgia, with a syndicated radio program, "Soundtrack of the '60s."

He did that until "he couldn't do it any longer," says Altschuler. After the long battle with cancer, Kaufman died Feb. 21, 1982, a week after his 60th birthday.

Fifth Beatle

Altschuler says the "Fifth Beatle" idea was never his father's, but instead of another so-called "Fifth Beatle," their manager Brian Epstein, who died in 1967. "The Beatles came to Murray — Murray didn't go to them — because Epstein had been told that if he wanted to make it in the States, which meant making it in New York, the most important music market in the world in the early '60s, The Beatles had to get in the good graces of Murray the K, so Epstein arranged for him to be at their feet that day" in 1964.

Epstein told his father "to go down to Washington, D.C., and go with them to Miami, where he roomed with George Harrison — God knows why they were so cheap — and when he was stopped by security on a train, Harrison said, 'It's all right. He's the Fifth Beatle.'

"He was invited to be part of all that. It was business, and Epstein was good at that, so he associated with Murray."

Kaufman "was basically given a tip and he ran with it. If it was given to Bruce [Morrow], he would have run with it, too."

There would be consequences. During a rare reflective moment with Tom Wolfe, Kaufman said, "When The Beatles came here, I believed this was the test. This was the biggest thing in the history of popular music. Presley was never this big, neither was Sinatra. The fact that I was associated with The Beatles the way I was, living with them, having George as my roommate … well, it caused such jealousy as I have never seen in my life."

Altschuler now says his father belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — an honor accorded just three radio jocks: Freed, Dick Clark and San Francisco's Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, who pioneered the progressive AOR format at KMPX/107.7 FM on the West Coast. But Altschuler says his father first launched AOR, in 1966, at WOR.

He should be the fourth inductee, but that Fifth Beatle tag, along with a lingering sense that he just was a novelty act — as opposed to the DJ who helped breach the color barrier on Top 40 radio and establish rock and roll — have kept him out.

Altschuler recalls that he once had lunch with Freed's son who (he says) told him that "'my father may have given birth to rock and roll but your dad raised the kid…'"

When he died in 1982, long after the WINS glory years, and the Brooklyn Fox shows, long after the pioneering stint at WOR, Kaufman was mostly remembered as either that scream king of Top 40 radio or as a self-promoting carnival barker who dared equate himself with the Greatest Band of All Time.

Nevertheless, there were a couple observers who knew better.

"If he didn't invent rock and roll, at least he gets a share in the patent," wrote veteran ESPN host (and Lynbrook native) Tony Kornheiser in a tribute at the time. In Rolling Stone, Loder wrote, "What would the golden age of rock and roll have been like without Murray the K? Imagine a world without all the great R&B acts he exposed? [Also] No Who, no Cream, no Animals. No Jimi Hendrix…No Rolling Stones (he put together their New York debut, at Carnegie Hall.) No inside, on-the-scene Beatles buzz! Unimaginable."

Murray the K would certainly not have disagreed. "The Beatles are the greatest," he told Wolfe, "but I'm not riding [their] coattails. And if they go, I'm going to be ready for the next person who comes along. I've done everything you have to do in this business. I've made every move you have to make. I've put cash on the line and I came out a winner. And now, I want everything that goes with it — all the good, and all the respect, because I've earned it."