Murray the K

Murray Kaufman (February 14, 1922 – February 21, 1982), professionally known as Murray the K, was a New York City rock and roll impresario and disc jockey of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. During the early days of Beatlemania, he frequently referred to himself as the fifth Beatle.

Murray Kaufman came from a show business family: his mother, Jean, played piano in vaudeville and wrote music and his aunt was a character actress on the stage and in film. He was a child actor—an extra—in several 1930s Hollywood films. He attended Peekskill Military Academy, a military boarding school, and he was later inducted into the United States Army where he arranged entertainment for the troops. Following the war, he put together shows in the Catskills' "Borscht Belt", also doing warm-ups for the headline performers.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked in public relations and as a song plugger, helping to promote tunes like Bob Merrill's "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?." From there, he worked as a radio producer and co-host at WMCA (and briefly thereafter at WAAT), working with personalities such as Laraine Day on the late night interview program Day at Night and with Eva Gabor. At the same time, he was doing promotion for several baseball players, including Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, and his radio beginnings may be attributable to his connection with the New York Giants, whose manager, Leo Durocher, was the husband of Laraine Day. His work on those shows earned him his own late-night show that often featured his wife as co-host, as was popular at the time. For a while in the 1950s he was president of the National Conference of Disk Jockeys.

Kaufman's big break came in 1958 after he moved to WINS/1010 to do the all-night show, which he titled The Swingin' Soiree. Shortly after his arrival, WINS's high-energy star disc jockey, Alan Freed, was indicted for tax evasion and forced off the air. Though Freed's spot was briefly occupied by Bruce Morrow, who later became known as Cousin Brucie on WABC, Murray was soon moved into the 7–11 pm time period and remained there for the next seven years, always opening his show with Sinatra and making radio history with his innovative segues, jingles, sound effects, antics, and frenetic, creative programming. Jeff Rice, writing in M/C Journal, says that Tom Wolfe calls Murray "the original hysterical disk jockey".

Murray the K reached his peak of popularity in the mid-1960s when, as the top-rated radio host in New York City, he became an early and ardent supporter and friend of The Beatles. When the Beatles came to New York on February 7, 1964, Murray was the first DJ they welcomed into their circle, having heard about him and his Brooklyn Fox shows from American groups such as the Ronettes (sisters Ronnie and Estelle Bennett and their first cousin Nedra Talley). The Ronettes met the Beatles in mid-January 1964, just a few weeks before, when the Harlem-born trio first toured England (the Rolling Stones were the group's opening act). The Beatles and Decca Records (distributor of Philles Records, the Ronettes' American label) jointly threw the Ronettes a welcome party in London. When the band arrived in New York, Murray was invited by Brian Epstein to spend time with the group, and Murray persuaded his radio station (WINS) to let him broadcast his prime time show from the Beatles' Plaza Hotel suite. He subsequently accompanied the band to Washington, D.C. for their first American concert, was backstage at their The Ed Sullivan Show premiere, and roomed with Beatles guitarist George Harrison in Miami, broadcasting his nightly radio shows from his hotel room there.

Murray came to be referred to as the "Fifth Beatle", a moniker he said he was given by Harrison during the train ride to the Beatles' first concert in Washington, D.C. or by Ringo Starr at a press conference before that concert. (However, in The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit he is seen christening himself thus in a phone conversation with the Beatles on the morning of their arrival in New York.) His radio station WINS picked up on the name and billed him as the Fifth Beatle, a moniker he came to regret.^{[citation needed]} He was invited to the set of A Hard Day's Night in England and made several treks to England during 1964, giving WINS listeners more Beatle exclusives.

In December 1964, Murray announced his intention to resign from WINS on the air, breaking the news that the station had been sold and would soon switch to an all-news format. He did his last show on February 27, 1965, before the format change in April 1965. A year later, in 1966, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that AM and FM radio stations could no longer simultaneously broadcast the same content. This enabled Murray to become program director and primetime DJ on WOR-FM, 98.7—one of the first FM rock stations, soon airing such DJs as Rosko and Scott Muni in the new FM format. Murray played long album cuts rather than singles, often playing groups of songs by one artist, or thematically linked songs, uninterrupted by commercials. He combined live in-studio interviews with folk-rock—he called it "attitude music"—and all forms of popular music in a free-form format. He played artists such as Bob Dylan and Janis Ian and the long, album versions of their songs that came to be known as the "FM cuts". Al Aronowitz quotes Murray as saying about this formula, "You didn't have to hype the record any more. The music was speaking for itself."

Murray championed Bob Dylan after his much-maligned decision to go electric. He introduced him to boos at a huge Forest Hills Tennis Stadium concert in August 1965, saying, "It's not rock, it's not folk, it's a new thing called Dylan."