That approach helped stabilize the company’s finances, and Mays capitalized by launching an ambitious growth plan. According to Right of the Dial, a book by the journalist Alec Foege, they then pursued an aggressive sales strategy, offering news coverage to advertisers. Mays hired John Barger, the programming director for Dallas’s KRLD, who persuaded him to change the format from Top 40 to talk radio. In 1975, though, the company purchased San Antonio’s WOAI, one of a limited number of AM stations in the country with a Class 1 license (often called a “clear channel” because it is protected from interference from other stations and can therefore be heard nationwide). Then he promptly forgot all about the deal. Mays passed, but he agreed to co-sign the note so the group could finance the purchase. In 1972, a group of investors approached him about buying KEEZ, a local radio station. After his discharge, he earned an MBA at Harvard, then settled in San Antonio and eventually set up his own investment banking firm. He was just 22, but he oversaw thousands of workers digging the pipeline by hand. Mays got a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M before joining the Air Force, which sent him to Taiwan to supervise construction of a pipeline for the Chinese Nationalist government. Mays never intended to get into radio- Forbes once dubbed him “the accidental broadcaster.” He was born in Houston and grew up in Dallas, the son of a salesman who was killed in a car accident when Mays was twelve, leaving Mays’s mother to support the family by selling real estate. In the end, iHeart fell victim to simple mathematics. But as a song that probably didn’t get a lot of play on Clear Channel stations would have put it, the harder they come, the harder they fall. This is all a far cry from the days when Clear Channel was the most dominant player in the radio industry it helped to usher in the era of talk radio and was regarded by many as a nearly unstoppable force for the blandification of rock music. Credit analysts predict it could file for bankruptcy any day now. The company has lost money every year since 2007, and it’s saddled with $20.4 billion in debt.

It adopted the tech-hipster moniker iHeartMedia, and its finances are a mess. Today Clear Channel is a markedly different company from the one Mays sold.

I heart country radio