Born in 1940 in Schenectady, New York, about three hours drive due north of Manhattan, the young Tom Moulton was a fanatic for the radio, particularly WKBW located in nearby Buffalo. “I used to hear all these Black records on the Hound’s show,” he recalls, referring to George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, one of the most influential radio DJs in history, thanks to the virtually inescapable 50,000-watt signal of WKBW, which could be heard over much of the East Coast. “When I was a little kid, I always thought I’d grow up and play records on the radio and turn people on to music and have it all beautiful and nice. That’s what I really thought it was like.” Unfortunately, these dreams were shattered by the payola scandal. “When Alan Freed got caught… That hurt more than anything. How can you get paid to love something?” Moulton pauses before answering his own question. “You can’t.” In 1958, at the idealistic age of not quite eighteen, Moulton and a few friends piled into a car and drove west. “We went to Los Angeles. Why? It was sunny, bright, and when you’re young and from the East Coast, L.A. represents Hollywood, the glamour and glitz.” Moulton adds, “And I knew I loved music, and I wanted to be somehow involved with that.” His first job was with Seeburg, which was, along with Rock-Ola and Wurlitzer, one of the largest manufacturers of jukeboxes. In an almost metaphoric foreshadowing of a role he would play later in life, Moulton worked at the Seeburg “one-stop” as a
45s buyer. (Instead of going to different labels to find music to stock their jukeboxes, owners would visit a one-stop, which had them all, paying a slight markup for the convenience.) Moulton, in other words, would choose which songs from the record labels’ catalogs would subsequently be available to fill Seeburg jukeboxes. “I always had a good ear for music, and I knew that if I went crazy for something, then everybody else more than likely would too. I’m not bragging, but ninety- nine percent of the time, I was right when it came to picking whether a record was going to make it or not.” When stereo was introduced, Moulton became one of the newfangled format’s biggest boosters. “I was a big stereo nut,” he affirms. “Seeburg was starting to make stereo jukeboxes and we wanted to have special stereo mixes for these jukeboxes. Most of the companies would do it, if you requested it.” After getting this brief taste of the power he would wield in the not-so-distant future, Moulton’s ear was caught with the next hi-fi fad, and in the early ’60s he moved to San Francisco to join forces with Madman Muntz, who owned the patent on the special playback head used for eight-track tapes. This didn’t last long, however, and he was soon hired by the branch manager of King Records to do sales and promotion in San Francisco. “I was at King for three years and really liked it a lot,” he says. Moulton worked with King artists Earl Bostic, Freddie King, Hank Ballard, and, of course, the Godfather of
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