In early 1981, WZAK Cleveland switched from brokered ethnic programming to R&B but didn’t really ignite until a year later when market veteran Lynn Tolliver, Jr., was named PD. Tolliver was a veteran of both R&B (WJMO) and Top 40 (WGCL) radio in the market. The success of WZAK would establish Tolliver as one of radio’s great showmen and strategists; the station endures to this day as an Adult R&B outlet.
Lee Zapis was WZAK’s OM, then GM and president of family-owned Zapis Communications. In 2019, he published Change Is on The Air, his memoir of the legendary station and its legendary programmer. Tolliver died February 13 at age 71. Services for Tolliver are being held today, February 22. The following excerpts are Zapis’ remembrances.
WZAK became famous in Cleveland because Lynn built a solid structure. He would say, “I’d always been about building the fort. If you create a fort, and you fortify the fort, the fort will protect you. That was my foundation. A lot of the jocks that I was around earlier, they didn’t understand that; it was always about their ego, their personality, and their career, not the station.”
Lynn noticed when he promoted the station more, even if he didn’t promote himself, listeners remembered him. Once, when he worked at WJMO, he was in the car with a friend and Rick James’s “Super Freak” came on. His friend asked, “Is that JMO?” Lynn told him it wasn’t. “Turn to JMO,” his friend said. And Lynn thought: “Right in the middle of Rick James? Wow.” [Even on AM in 1981,] the station meant more to listeners than the song. It fortified Lynn’s theory that DJs should always promote the radio station first.
Lynn remembered WZAK as the best radio experience he ever had. At WZAK, he was able to be a part of all the elements of the station–not just the on-air product, but also the other factors that went into making WZAK what it was. Lynn was involved in the sales process as well as the on-air and off-air promotions, and allowed his staff to do more as well. At other stations, he told me, even as program director “you may not have had any input. At other stations, the DJs are often at each other’s throats on the same stage. I didn’t understand that. I’m thinking, ‘Hey, this DJ comes on in the morning, and that DJ comes on in the afternoon. Why are they at each other’s throats?’ They are on the same team.”
Tolliver’s philosophy was to let the DJs be free and not to nitpick their style, as some program directors did. He wanted to earn their trust and give them freedom. “Phat Friday,” the show that his nephew Dave Tolliver and Anthony “Banana” Marshall did together, was the show Lynn hated the most. I think he disliked it so much because of a generational thing. But it was one of the hottest shows so he let them do their thing.
WZAK embraced research, calling 125 listeners weekly. [Editor—That’s a now unimaginable sample size in an equally unimaginably wide 18-44 demo.] But he gave the on-air personalities “freedom within a structure.” Lynn’s approach to music was always innovative. Most of the record companies did not like him because he would listen to the album and try to pick the song that he thought was the best song for his audience.
Tolliver saw that there were some artists that everybody liked. He would never choose another artist over Aretha Franklin or the Temptations – even in the ‘90s. In 1998, WZAK helped give the Temptations their last hit with “Stay.” He would stress how the only way to know if you were playing the strongest possible song in the moment was to play as many great records as possible. If a song worked both lyrically and musically, he said, it meant that both men and women were covered.
But WZAK helped new artists, too. At WJMO, Tolliver had been credited with breaking “Sara Smile” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, paving the way for the duo as both pop and R&B stars. At WZAK, he launched the careers of LeVert, then Gerald Levert as a solo artist. He was first to play MC Hammer on the radio, the trio Next, Usher, Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love.” Jodeci once took a private jet to make sure they got to one of WZAK’s parties because the station had been so instrumental in their stardom.
Kevin Harewood was GM/COO of Hush Productions in the 1980s when the company was one of R&B’s most prominent music management companies. “Tolliver was so good at picking hits,” Harewood recalls. “He was the first to play a lot of artists, including Freddie Jackson and Meli’sa Morgan. Some of the songs WZAK played first went on to become No. 1 singles. Tolliver just picked records that [we] weren’t on to yet.”
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com