Between the years 1987 and 1993, KMEL Summer Jam featured virtually every New Jack Era performer including Jasmine Guy, Bell Biv Devoe, MC Hammer, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, The Boys, Tevin Campbell, and many, many more. Although KMEL no longer puts on "Summer Jam" concerts the way it used to, it has inspired similar all-day superstar shows at radio stations around the country. But the magic that KMEL Summer Jam had (especially since it took place during the New Jack Swing era during its prime) has yet to be successfully duplicated - pictured at right are KMEL Music Director Billy Vidal, KMEL Program Director (now Sony A&R Exec) Keith Naftaly, Ice Cube, KMEL General Manager Dick Kelley, and KMEL's Davey D (now a renown hip-hop journalist).

Editor's Note: special thanks to KMEL alum Lisa St. Regis for the corrections on the caption!

For the San Francisco Bay Area, it all began in the summer of 1987, but the concert series that KMEL started has become a grand tradition elsewhere. Every year, Hip-Hop and R&B radio stations around the country such as Hot 97 in New York and 100.3 The Beat in Los Angeles invite some the hottest acts in the music biz to perform at their respective all-day, mostly outdoor concerts known as the “Summer Jam.” Typically, a Summer Jam show can sell out within hours – if not minutes – once tickets go on sale. And with crowds that can get as large as 22,000 attendees, Summer Jam is often the biggest musical event of the year for both radio stations and their listeners.

It should be noted that the first radio station to regularly schedule an all-day, superstar concert was Boston’s mainstream pop station Kiss 108 FM, beginning in 1980. It should also be noted that the first concert to be named “Summer Jam” was a 1973 rock festival that drew over 600,000 at Watkins Glen, New York. However, the Hip-Hop/R&B Summer Jam that has become so popular these days was born in the summer of 1987 when KMEL Program Director (at the time) Keith Naftaly put together the first show. Lisa Lisa & The Cult Jam headlined at KMEL Summer Jam #1 and two short years later, the KMEL Summer Jam had become the largest radio concert in the country, lasting for two days at a time and raising over a million dollars for local charities.

The following Q&A features the insights of two individuals who were 106 KMEL staff members at the time: Davey D and Michael Erickson. Currently, Davey D is an accomplished journalist running the popular Hip-Hop news site www.daveyd.com. Joining KMEL in the early ‘90s, Davey D produced a newsletter, co-hosted the morning show, and eventually became the station’s Community Affairs Director until late 2001. Michael Erickson started with KMEL as an air personality and mixer, and was named Assitant Program Director during the mid-‘90s before leaving in 1997. Erickson is currently Program Director at Adult Contemporary R&B station 98.1 Kiss-FM in San Francisco.

The Davey D Interview:

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.


L to R: KMEL GM Dave Kelley, Music Director Joey Arbagey, VP Keith Naftaly,
PD Dave Shakes (formerly of Chicago's B96 circa 1992)

The Michael Erickson Interview:

Q: What kind of impact do you think KMEL Summer Jam made in the San Francisco Bay Area?

M: Well, Summer Jam, especially in it’s first five or six years, created a musical event that the entire Bay Area knew about. Previous to that, I don’t believe any single radio station had created that kind of event. You knew it was coming, you looked forward to it, and you would buy your tickets before you even knew who was on the lineup. If you liked the radio station, you knew you were going to like who was going to be at the concert, and you expected virtually everyone who’s a star to be there. If there were one or two people missing, you pretty much didn’t know it because there were enough stars to cover it. So I think the magnitude of the event, the ‘larger than life’ feeling to it benefited the radio station. It became such an icon that people would talk about it, make plans for it, even put together a new outfit for it. It was something that was anticipated, celebrated and spoken of afterwards. I mean, having a summer jam T-shirt was actually a desired commodity, and people would wear them to show them off and prove that they were at the event.

Q: At one point KMEL Summer Jam became a two-day event. How did that come about?

M: During that period of time, there was a) so much good music available and b) so many cooperative artists and record labels. We didn’t necessarily set out to do this two-day extravaganza. Summer Jam was a originally a one day event, but we quickly discovered that there was a wealth of talent available and that out of necessity we turned it into a two-day event. We expanded it early on in the planning process.

At that period of time too, you also had different elements of music coming together. You were still on the tail-end of what we now call the “freestyle” movement: the Exposes, the Stevie B’s, the Cover Girls and other groups. There was still a little bit of life left in “freestyle”. The “new jack” genre had come into full force by then, with Guy, Heavy D, etc; and then the hip-hop arena was really blossoming too. So, I think that also created a need for Summer Jam to be a two-day event. You were able to bring three different factions: R&B, “freestyle”, and hip-hop together, and they were all popular at the same time.

Q: Who were key individuals/organizations behind KMEL Summer Jam?

M: In my opinion, Keith Naftaly was by all accounts, the driving force behind KMEL Summer Jam and the reason there was a successful Summer Jam. He developed relationships with the record labels and in many cases with the artists themselves. Keith was highly respected by everybody involved to the point that they wanted to participate and support the venture knowing that it was for a very good cause. [Naftaly] was a visionary and I think he was able to convince people around him to be a part of that vision.

Q: What community services/causes did KMEL Summer Jam support?

M: We always tried to spread the monies out to a variety of Bay Area charities. The causes were always diverse in scope. It was always about ‘how can we reach a variety of communities and a variety of causes?

Q: What role did you play in making KMEL Summer Jam happen?

M: Keith Naftaly was the architect of the event itself. He was the executive producer of everything. But as time went on, I became the producer of the radio broadcast. What you heard at home if you were not there, was largely due to my efforts. What I tried to do year after year, was to do a better job of conveying this event to the listener. Even though there were 22,000 people at the event, there were hundreds of thousands of people not at the event trying to get a taste. That’s where I really took my pride, finding ways to turn our DJs into reporters live at the scene. To be descriptive, to convey the mood, the attitude, the clothes, the vibe, and the weather to the listeners at home and paint an audio picture of what was actually taking place. We didn’t start doing the broadcast until Summer Jam III in 1989.

Q: Was KMEL one of the only radio stations to simulcast a Summer Jam?

M: I think so. I think early on, the clout and the significance of the event was so commanding that the artists didn’t really object to it. An artist usually wants to control how they’re perceived and it’s difficult to do [on a simulcast]. We used to hire a separate sound engineer and we’d do a separate mix just because we wanted the product to sound as good as it possibly could on the radio. Some artists were more sensitive than others. But I think after getting caught up in the vibe of the event and the cause, they’d go with the flow and say, ‘all right, let’s do it’. At this point I couldn’t tell you specifically which artists backed out, but there were one or two performances that we couldn’t broadcast because they didn’t want us to. That was definitely the exception, not the rule.

Q: And the KMEL Summer Jam concerts were simulcast up until what year?

M: I couldn’t tell you exactly. I left in ‘97. We did put some live shows on in ‘96, but I know that with some of the hip-hop acts, you couldn’t put them on the air. The lyrical content became too challenging from a community and FCC standpoint.

Q: KMEL Summer Jam used to run from mid-morning to midnight. I would like to hear your thoughts on how the once “carefree” spirit of Summer Jam concerts might have changed over the years. For example, do you think there was a change in the vibe of the music industry itself?

M: Well, I think the tone of music did certainly change and evolve, and we definitely went into an era where the rap music was definitely harder and edgier and I guess more violent in it’s content. I still believe that music itself does not cause problems. I don’t believe the general listener, or the general audience causes problems. I still believe that it always comes down to a handful of individuals especially relative to the size of the audience. With Summer Jam, you’re talking about 22,000 people, and it really only takes 20 or 30 at the most to cause very disruptive behavior. It takes somebody to start it, and then there’s the mob factor that will kick in and people start to get rowdier because they see other people rowdier. But I never witnessed a massive group of people doing something violent or instantly turn rowdy. It would usually be a small group and then it might spread into larger numbers. But I never saw any audience turn negative or violent as a result of the music or the artists that were on stage. They were fans, and the response was always very positive about the music. The vast majority of people attending were extremely disappointed if any event was shortened or anything because of some kind of destructive behavior.

Q: Were there any special moments in your years being involved with KMEL Summer Jam that you consider priceless to this day?

M: Well, for me I remember walking out on stage for the very first time [at Summer Jam II]. That was the largest crowd I’d ever stood in front of. There was about 22,000 people out there and just that moment alone was almost overwhelming. I’d been in front of 8,000 or 10,000 before, but there was something about KMEL Summer Jam, and the energy that went with it. I had just joined the station, and it was kind of an ‘arrival’ for me because I was able to work the mic, relate to the crowd and get them to respond. It helped me bond with the rest of the staff. It proved that I ‘belonged’ and that I could contribute to the power that already was KMEL – because it was a very powerful station when I joined it.

Q: If anyone out there wanted to learn more about the Summer Jam phenomenon and the role KMEL played in it, what would you tell them?

M: I would tell you that my exposure to the national phenomenon is limited. It’s subject to what I’ve heard. But what I can tell you that the Summer Jam that [92.3 – later 100.3 The Beat] is doing in Los Angeles was a byproduct of KMEL because Keith Naftaly went down to the Beat and became the Program Director there [circa 1993]. Then we started piggybacking Summer Jams where one was on a Saturday at one location, and on Sunday was the next. So KKBT’s Summer Jam was a by-product of KMEL because the people involved were the same ones.

There’s no doubt I think, that KUBE up in Seattle found out about KMEL Summer Jam and the success of it and said, ‘we’ve got do something like that for our audience’. Then when everyone started doing them, that’s when it became more and more challenging because the artists could only be spread so thin, and the labels could only ask for so many favors. Then you got into the politics of the record/radio business, such as: why did you give that station this, when you didn’t do that for us?

Even the Bay Area changed, because when Wild [107— later 94.9] came into existence, you now had an extremely competitive situation in the Bay Area. The record labels all of the sudden got caught up in the politics of it all and weren’t necessarily as willing to go in one direction vs. the other. But Summer Jam wasn’t about industry politics in the beginning. It was about helping the community, and not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of thousands of dollars – and in a couple of situations – over a million, were donated to Bay Area charities. In the years that have followed since San Francisco’s KMEL Summer Jam set the trend in 1987, radio stations in cities such as Memphis, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas (in addition to New York, Los Angeles and Seattle), have each started their own version. Out of all the Summer Jams’ currently being celebrated, Seattle’s KUBE 93 has probably done the best job of capturing the spirit, energy and excitement that KMEL Summer Jam had during it’s prime. In 2002, the KUBE Summer Jam roster included four heavyweights: LL Cool J, Usher, Busta Rhymes, and Nelly. These days, most of the other cities would have been very lucky to have even one of the aforementioned artists at their show.

In Europe, a reggae super concert named “Summer Jam” has been going strong since 1994. In Tanzania, a hip-hop/R&B concert series named “Summer Jam” has been in existence since 1999. There are also many other concerts going on today all over the world in all genres of music that use the “Summer Jam” moniker (as well as a US-based Christian music tour). Could all of this be coincidence? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Keith Naftaly, the “godfather” and visionary of the Hip-Hop/R&B Summer Jam phenomenon has gone on to become senior vice president of A&R at J Records. At J, Naftaly is widely considered to be the number two executive (on the creative side) under the label’s legendary Chairman, CEO and Founder, Clive Davis. J Records is “home” to many superstars including Alicia Keys, Busta Rhymes, Luther Vandross, Angie Stone, Monica, and Tyrese. The J Records roster also includes Mario, Lyric, O-Town, Rod Stewart, Liza Minelli, Deborah Cox, and American Idol II winner, Ruben Studdard.

As of 2009, Naftaly is now Senior Vice President A&R @ Jive/RCA, after serving in a similar role at Dreamworks, then Sony Music Label Group.

Part 2: An overview of the Summer Jam concert artists: 1987 - 1999 (click here)

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