Jack Diamond's call to an ailing Harrison at the height of Beatlemania resulted in the guitarist recording a promo for the Springfield AM radio station.
Beatle George Harrison, left, in a 1964 Associated Press photo; and Sandy Beach, today at WBEN-AM radio in Buffalo. The battle for audience is timeless.
Case in point: WSPR disc jockey Jack Diamond’s call to an ailing George Harrison at the height of Beatlemania resulted in the guitarist recording a promo for the Springfield AM radio station.
Diamond – now Sandy Beach on WBEN-AM in Buffalo – recalled how he got a leg up on his competitors back in February 1964.
On Saturday afternoon, Feb. 8, 1964, Harrison was nursing flu symptoms and resting at New York’s Plaza Hotel while his band mates were busy at a Central Park photo session. At 4:45 p.m. – armed with a hotel telephone number given to him by The Beatles record label, Beach rang up the Plaza Hotel and to his surprise Harrison answered the phone.
For the next few minutes Beach pulled off what every radio station in the country was striving for – an interview with a real live Beatle. Harrison talked about his favorite American TV shows, a planned trip to Miami and the band’s upcoming film, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Even more impressive, Beach persuaded Harrison into providing a WSPR promo the day before The Beatles historic debut on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Within minutes of the phone interview, WSPR was running a new station promo: “This is George Harrison of The Beatles and you are listening to Jack Diamond – your Beatle leader in the Springfield area.”
Speaking recently from Buffalo, the Lunenberg native, born Donald Pesola, fondly recalled his Jack Diamond days on WSPR and the craze known as Beatlemania.
“When they hit it big – it was like a whirlwind,” Beach said.
Beach liked the Fab Four’s music, he said, but with only a couple of songs to go by “it was tough to gauge what kind of a career the band would later have.”
He followed up the Harrison telephone call on Feb. 16 when The Beatles were in Miami rehearsing for a second Sullivan show performance.
“George answered the phone and handed it to Ringo” laughed Beach.
Without the layer of managers and press agents to get in the way, Beach once again chatted with Harrison about Miami’s weather, the popularity of their songs on WSPR and their Sullivan appearance. (Recordings of this five-minute chat and the Feb. 8 conversation have been traded around collector circles for years).
Recalling his WSPR years, Beach rattled off memories of record hops in the retail parking lots, his Jack Diamond Fan Club Cards and most notably “The Jack Diamond Princesses” when young female listeners would write into the station requesting to be a “Jack Diamond Princess.” He would then geographically select the next “Princesses” with an eye on the station’s market share of that area. Beach rewarded the next round of “Princesses” by giving them a shout out on the air often with his goodnight sign off.
In January 1965, Diamond moved to a larger market, Hartford’s WDRC, and changed his name to Sandy Beach. His residency at WDRC at the height of Beatlemania was accompanied by frequent “Big D –Exclusively” voice-overs as that station aired the latest Beatles single. His success in Hartford led to Beach advancing from one Top 40 station to another.
During the next 30 years Beach, was behind the microphone at major radio stations in New York, Dallas, San Francisco and Milwaukee. Beach was program director for NBC and Capital Cities/ABC.
Today he is WBEN’s No. 1 drive time talk radio host – an extraordinary accomplishment for someone in the business more than 50 years.
He was inducted into the Buffalo Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2003 and is a three-time nominee for Billboard Magazine’s Personality of The Year.
WSPRpromo.mp3