By John Eckberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Frank "Bo" Wood with his new magazine Tracks in his 35th floor offices at 312 Walnut St. The magazine is geared toward baby boomer music fans and Gen-Xers who share their tastes. The Cincinnati Enquirer/GLENN HARTONG

Bo Wood at WEBN radio in 1984. His father bought the station for $5,000 in 1967. Enquirer file

Frank "Bo" Wood has an economics degree - cum laude - from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Chicago. But just now the creative force behind the founding of WEBN-FM 102.7 is pondering the wisdom of his latest multimillion-dollar media investment.

Tracks magazine, a music magazine for music lovers, launched its premier issue in January under the leadership of editor-in-chief Alan Light, who was born and reared in Springfield Township, with $5 million in backing from Wood, 61, and other local investors.

Already Tracks is thick with music industry advertising and has been optimistically if not warmly received by national pundits and American music fans. Rather than focusing on a trendy hip-hop group, a rapper or a heavy metal band as do Rolling Stone or Spin, Tracks has adopted the motto "music built to last." With a press run of 150,000 copies for each of its first two editions - a free sampler CD of music is included with some - Tracks appears to be on the way to success, though it's a long road to the break-even watershed of 250,000 subscribers and the grand slam home run of 500,000.

The magazine will go from quarterly to bi-monthly in June.

Wood may sit in his office on the 35th floor of the Scripps Center in downtown Cincinnati and cringe when he considers the money pouring into this effort and whether there will ever be an end to the red ink. But questions like that always drive entrepreneurs.

And for this 1960 Walnut Hills High School grad, the question about profit is never far from top of mind. Neither is another query, something that has dogged his days for about as long as he can remember: How can we have fun with this?

Wood's career has been a journey of self-discovery and serendipity: from Harvard-trained businessman to would-be lawyer to radio station disk jockey, ad salesman, ad creator, program director and station manager. He still has the dulcet pipes of a late-night DJ.

FRANK 'BO' WOOD

Jobs: Chairman of the board of Sub Rosa LLC, owner of Tracks magazine, board member of Roto-Rooter Corp. and three other companies, chief executive of Secret Communications LLC, former president/general manager of WEBN 102.7, former president and chief operating officer of Jacor Communications Inc. CDs in the changer: Lucinda Williams, World Without Tears; Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia; AC/DC, Back in Black; Norah Jones, Feels Like Home. Books on the nightstand: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Positively Fifth Street by James McManus. Best hire: John Page Otting, for sales at WEBN. "We stole him from WSAI. He had green alligator shoes, a blond Elvis Presley bouffant hairdo and drove a giant brown Cadillac. But, man, could he sell."

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For a time, too, Wood was a local concert promoter. He brought Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Sly and the Family Stone, Arlo Guthrie and Paul Krasner to Music Hall. He tried to bring Jim Morrison and the Doors as well, but the city pulled the plug because Morrison was facing indecency charges for a show in Florida the week before. Wood sued the city but lost.

He folded up the concert promotion efforts and went on to become a radio company executive at Jacor Communications and later formed private venture capital company Secret Communications. In the meantime, he financed a handful of Web-based companies. Today he is chairman of the board of a music magazine via his limited liability company, Sub Rosa.

His roots in radio date to 1967. Upon graduation from the University of Chicago law school, he went to work as an associate at a Cincinnati law firm. He soon found that torts were not for him.

Meanwhile, his father, the late Frank Wood Sr., learned that a Cincinnati FM radio signal was up for grabs. For the broker's charge and the fee to file an ownership transfer with the Federal Communication Commission - about $5,000 - Wood Sr. could own WEBN.

The station was cheap. AM radio dominated the airways and few saw any future in FM. The FM band was not even commonly included on car radios until several years later.

Wood Sr. bought the station to play classical music and jazz, but his son had other ideas. After a three-week-long cup of coffee at the law firm, now known as Wood & Lamping, he left to help run Dad's new station from a little blue house at the foot of the antenna on Considine Avenue in Price Hill.

The station went on the air on Aug. 30, 1967, just as album rock was beginning to change the American music scene. The sweeping playlist swap from jazz to rock first came about during Wood's 10 p.m.-1 a.m. Saturday night shift, a show dubbed "Jelly Pudding."

John Coltrane's Live at Birdland soon gave way to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love." Dave Brubeck's Adventures in Time was replaced with Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth." Goodbye, Mel Torme. Hello, Jimi Hendrix.

"My Dad didn't like the sound of the music until it started sounding like a cash register," Wood said.

But it was neither a smooth nor a free ride.

Wood remembers one bleak February afternoon in 1972 when a new bank executive called in a loan. Without it the station was doomed. Wood immediately gave up his salary to meet payroll obligations, but when he finished toting expenses and revenues for the week, he found he was still $30 short.

"True story - I went down to the pop machine on the first floor, and it had $30 worth of dimes," Wood said. With that 30 bucks, the station limped into another week, long enough to get new financing.

It would be a far different sort of math three decades later.

Between the lines

In 1999, when Wood divested his Secret Communications of the last of 15 stations in clusters in markets in Houston, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia, more than $550 million went to pay off debt and investors.

Not a bad run for the initial $5,000 investment on an orphaned FM signal 30 years before.

The passage of time still staggers Wood.

"One day some guy is trying to pass you a joint at Woodstock. You blink your eyes and your daughter is passing you a granddaughter," he said. "Where did the time go?

"Where did it go?"

Tracks is the latest entrepreneurial effort for Wood, who has agreed to provide $5 million in backing over the next three years.

He figures that while black ink may fill the magazine's pages, it will be a while before he sees it on the balance sheet. "A safe, sure investment? This isn't it," Wood said.

It's the possible multimillion-dollar windfall a few years down the road that brings entrepreneurs like Wood to the magazine industry. The value of a consumer magazine, like a radio station, is usually based on cash flow or earnings - before income taxes, depreciation and amortization - times a multiple of seven to 10. So if a magazine has annual earnings of, say, $2 million, its sale price will range from $14 million to $20 million.

When a pair of music magazine editors approached Wood about two years ago, Wood was intrigued by the opportunity to invest in a magazine that targeted at least two generations of music lovers: baby boomers who now check 401(k) performance the way they used to listen to Joni Mitchell, and the Gen-Xers who share many boomers' lost passion for music.

"Sixty percent of the CDs are bought by people over 30 years old," said Tracks editor-in-chief Alan Light, a 1984 graduate of Cincinnati Country Day and an alumnus of Yale University.

"But as for a magazine, there was nothing in the music media for that audience. And while boomers are the sweet spot in that territory, they are hardly the only audience."

Light and Tracks publisher and chief executive John Rollins worked together at Vibe and Spin magazines before they quit their jobs in 2001 and 2002 to seek deep pockets for Tracks.

It was not a great time to troll for angel investors.

The dot-com implosion had rattled Wall Street, and a nationwide recession took a bite out of publishing revenues. Big advertisers were not confident enough about the future to risk cash on ads that may or may not reach their audience.

What's more, powerful record companies, likely advertisers for any music magazine, were in a steep skid from youngsters downloading free music off the Web.

With the third edition headed to the newsstand, Light sometimes marvels that Tracks exists at all.

They found money from 40 to 50 friends and family members, but it wasn't enough. Then luck produced Wood, who learned of the venture from another multimillionaire in an international motorcycle-riding club.

When Light and Rollins went looking for an owner, their ideal characteristics included a passion for music, decisiveness and lack of fear of leaping into the void of start-up magazine mode.

"Everybody we talked to said it was a decent idea, but nobody was willing to back it up with commitment," Light said. "Pretty much the guy we described in our ideal world matched up with Frank."

Filling a void

Magazine industry analyst Samir Husni, acting chairperson of the department of journalism and head of the magazine program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., named Tracks one of the top 30 new offerings of the 949 magazines launched in 2003.

About one in four of those magazines will make it, said Husni, who for 19 years has annually published the Samir Husni Guide to New Magazines.

The best thing about Tracks, Husni said, is that it's multidimensional: The magazine is test-marketing a new approach to music distribution. Each issue in some markets holds a compilation compact disc of songs from albums reviewed the issue.

The Tracks Web site offers music samples. For fans who like to travel, say, to New Orleans during the Jazz & Heritage Festival, arrangements can be made through an on-site link to Madison House Travel of Boulder, Colo.

Other links take music buyers to amazon.com. Genres include country, world music, roots, jazz, R&B/hip-hop, rock and blues.

"You cannot exist in one medium anymore," Husni said. "Everything we do has to be multimedia: read about Norah Jones and then listen to her."

Jon Fine, media reporter at Advertising Age magazine, expects the magazine to fill a niche that is not met by Rolling Stone or other music magazines.

Fine says the magazine business may be the last frontier for entrepreneurs, as most other publishing ventures, from newspapers to books, are run by giant companies.

"In the magazine business you can still have major players that are idiosyncratic operations run by entrepreneurs," he said. "It strikes me that in Frank Wood they have the best of all possible investors - somebody who is jazzed with the idea."

Still, he said, the Tracks team must sell an enthusiast publication to people who may not be interested in reading about music any more.

"It's going to be tricky on the consumer side to see it work," he said. "But the niche is open."

E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com