Art Laboe, a radio DJ whose career ran for 79 years, died Friday at his Palm Springs home of pneumonia. He was 97.
Joanna Morones, who went to work for Laboe as his executive assistant in 1995, and eventually served as his producer, marketer and promotions person, said Laboe had been well until recently when a respiratory ailment landed him in the hospital for pneumonia.
After a week there, with the prognosis grim, Laboe decided to spend his final days at home, Morones said.
“He got home and after a couple of days he stopped eating, and then a couple of days later he passed,” she said. “It wasn’t a long thing, thank God. He didn’t suffer.”
Morones said she was with Laboe on Friday before leaving to return to the station to finish production on his show for Sunday, Oct. 9.
“I went to go see him and said my goodbyes because we knew it was inevitable,” she said. “I said, ‘Art Laboe, I’ve got to get back to the station to produce your radio show, I’ll see you in a little while.’”
Soon after his aide called to tell her Laboe had died, and Morones returned to his home to sit with him until his body was taken away.
In recent years, Laboe’s radio home was at KDAY-FM/93.5 in Palm Springs, where he and Morones produced The Art Laboe Connection, a show that featured Laboe doing the kind of now-vintage radio for which he found fame in Los Angeles in the ’50s.
A radio legend to the end
On a visit with Laboe in the studio in 2020, just a few months before the pandemic forced him to hunker down and record his show from home, Laboe was busy doing dedications from the hundreds of fans who still wrote him asking him to send a song over the air to a loved one.
“We’re going to play a song called, ‘Gangsters Get Lonely, Too,’” Laboe read for one dedication from a mother to her son. “It goes out to ‘My son Matthew in Buckeye, Arizona; From mom Liz over in Phoenix.’ Says, ‘Happy belated birthday, and I love you; keep your head up. All for you, son, from your mom Liz.’”
Those simple personal touches – taking a request, dedicating a song – are things Laboe is often credited as being the first DJ to do.
Laboe was also famous as one of the first DJs to take the music to the people. His live shows at Scrivner’s Drive-In in Hollywood in the ’50s were renowned. Laboe would drive his radio gear from the station to the drive-in on the corner of Sunset and Cahuenga boulevards.
There, usually at night, he’d spin R&B and early rock records for teens listening at home or who’d show up in person, and he’d conduct interviews with celebrities who stopped by.
Eventually, the Scrivner’s shows got so big the city acted to shut them down. Laboe then moved east to El Monte Legion Stadium, booking live shows with rock and roll acts such as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ricky Nelson and the doo-wop group, the Penguins.
The El Monte shows became so popular and such an enduring memory for generations of fans that siadin 2018 the city declared Art Laboe Day in his honor.
Laboe was also proud to have coined the phrase “oldies but goodies,” a term he eventually used on a multi-volume series of compilation albums he released on his own record label.
“I think some people did a dedication and popped that word out — just, you know, ‘This is an old song, but it’s a good song,’” Laboe says the moment in the ’50s when that phrase arrived. “And then I said, ‘An oldie but a goodie? That’s what I am.’ And they all laugh.”
In recent years, Laboe promoted annual oldies shows at the Glen Helen Amphitheater in San Bernardino. The most recent show took place Saturday, Oct. 8, one day after Laboe died, with acts such as Peaches and Herb, Rose Royce, and the SOS Band on the bill.
About 12,000 people attended the concert on Saturday, Morones said.
Living on the radio
Asked in 2020 when he’d made his radio debut, Laboe took a worn union card out of his wallet and pointed to the place where it said he’d been a member since 1943. He was 18 years old at the time, a Navy recruit just out of high school in Los Angeles, when, stationed at Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, he finagled a job at KSAN-AM in San Francisco.
If you do the math, not only was Laboe a radio DJ continuously for 79 years, he was on air in parts of nine different decades.
Morones said news of Laboe’s death was kept under wraps for the concert Saturday and also the latest Art Laboe Connection radio show on Sunday, Oct. 9, partly to let fans enjoy him one more time without the sorrow of his passing.
Plans being discussed would keep the Art Laboe name on the radio and concert marquees into the future, Morones said.
“We hope to continue (the radio show) mostly as it is, which is a dedication and caller-based show,” she said. “We archived Art’s tracks the last seven years. And so instead of him reading dedications what we’ll do is go into the archive and find tracks of him talking about the music.”
During the pandemic, a second host, Old School Becky Lou, joined to help out on air as Laboe’s energy sometimes lessened, and she might also be part of an ongoing program of posthumous Laboe radio shows.
Eventually, a public memorial will be held in Laboe’s memory and honor, Morones said.
“Art had wanted a big concert to be presented so we’re looking at something in the Los Angeles area,” she said. “Possibly El Monte because that’s where he had huge successes back in the past, though I’m not sure there’s a place big enough for it there.”
Longtime listeners
An hour after news of Laboe’s death was posted on his Facebook page, 17,000 had shared the post. Nearly 5,000 left comments, sharing memories, grief, and a whole lot of love for a man whose voice had filled their homes and cars and anywhere else over the decades.
“He was the voice of love,” David R. Basulto wrote. “He brought us all together.”
A few dozen comments later, Lydia Serradell predicted Laboe will live on in the hearts of listeners. “Like the music you played, you will not be forgotten,” she wrote.
“Rest in eternal peace, Art Laboe,” Martie Evans wrote. “Sunday nights will never be the same. Thank you for all those years of wonderful music and dedications. My husband got through several times. ‘Those oldies but goodies remind me of you.’”
Anticipating the end
Two years ago, when asked how he hoped fans would cope when he was no longer on the air, Laboe pointed to the song that he said might be his all-time favorite oldie.
“There’s a song by a group called the Skyliners and it’s called, ‘Since I Don’t Have You,’” he says. “That’s been a song that touches my heart because there’s so many people that you don’t have anymore.
“And you know, that’s my favorite. Everybody has one. I have a few. But that’s one of the big ones.”
