The West Coast band played a party for the Super Bowl when it was played at the Rose Bowl. We were doing a lot of session work: the Auto-american album with Blondie, three or four albums with Alice, Livingston Taylor, the Knack, one with the Guess Who’s Burton Cummings. We did a great record with Roy Thomas Baker producing. It was an album called Thunder by Andy Taylor, the guitar hero from Duran Duran. We got to work with Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, an idol of mine, who was producing with Roy’s 64-track recorder. We stacked up so many vocals, only the skilled hand of a master producer could make it still resemble a rock album and not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You crank this sucker up and your walls will move. Life couldn’t possibly have been better.
♦ ♦ ♦
During the summer of 1987, we were touring across America on the Happy Together tour. I was doing my laundry backstage in Memphis at the Mud Island Amphitheater when I got a phone call from my father. Panicking, I answered the phone tentatively. I expected the worst, but instead, my dad was actually happy. And that was rare. So, the reason for the call? My dad was at home when the doorbell rang and standing there, big as life, was my eighteen-year-old daughter Emily, who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a great many years. She and her mother, Melita, were still living in Seattle, but until she reached legal age, her mom refused to let Emily have anything to do with her birth father. Now she was in L.A. and I wasn’t. But we spoke, for the first time in forever, and made plans to get together as soon as the tour was over. I was floating. I was on cloud nine. My life had come full circle. I was together again with my daughter and we’ve never been out of touch since. There was a lot of catching up to do, and I suspect that once she reads this book, there will be more talks to come. What can I say? Honesty has its price.
A few months earlier though, on March 4, 1987, there had been other family news of a less joyous nature. My mother checked into the Kaiser Permanente hospital in downtown Los Angeles for a back operation, contracted some bizarre infection, and never came out of her anesthesia. I had never known loss like that in my life. The only music I could listen to was White Winds by Andreas Vollenweider: new age massage-parlor music. Anything else made me physically ill. I had never heard him before that and I’ve never listened to him since.
Our family was devastated. My brother, Al, left his home in Walla Walla, Washington, where he had gone to escape the nightmare of Los Angeles, to help my father get through the hard times. He moved into the house my mother and father had shared and he lives there still. Life Interrupted. The only time I saw my father smile after my mom’s death was upon the birth of my daughter Alexandra on April 30, 1989. She was born at Valley Presbyterian Hospital and her birth changed my life forever. The new Howard was going to be faithful to his wife, Susan. He would be monogamous, even if it killed him. There would never be another Emily Situation. I would do everything I could to protect Alex from the drugs and the weirdos and the infidelities that seemed to accompany my chosen profession.
♦ ♦ ♦
In 1989, the hip-hop group De La Soul released an album called Three Feet High and Rising, which yielded quite a few R&B hits. As was the custom, famous hit songs of the past were sampled and reworked and released as brand-new product. It was thought to be totally kosher in the record business. That is, until the Turtles came along.
De La Soul had taken our master recording of “You Showed Me” and added new lyrics and an additional rhythm track. And had a huge hit. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to us, nor did it sound like a good deal to our lawyer, Martin Cohen. We sued, and it became a famous legal case. No one who had ever been sampled had had the balls to say anything about it, lest they look like they wanted to destroy the new urban music that was coming from the streets. But we didn’t care. We had nothing to lose. We were suddenly those fat white guys who were trying to screw rap artists. Many negative articles were written about our bad attitudes in soul publications. But right is right.
We won. And since that famous case, anyone who is sampled for another recording gets paid for it. You can thank us now or send us a check later, but we set the new standard. We’ve been sampled dozens of times since that court decision and get paid for each use. It’s only fair. We were only pointing out the obvious. If you hear yourself on the radio, somebody should be paying you. You’re welcome.
♦ ♦ ♦
In the studio with Paul Shaffer, who was producing the new Darlene Love album; we sang with Jefferson Airplane on their reunion album (we’d done Paul Kantner’s solo album several years earlier); Roy Thomas Baker enlisted us to sing with Ozzy Osbourne on three songs for No More Tears; we contributed to a great album produced by friend Hal Willner for an Irish pop star named Gavin Friday. I loved the session work. I loved our constant weekend working. I loved my daughter. I loved my life. I bought a new Beemer.
Back in L.A., we were now part of the Tim Powers/K. W. Jeter/James Blaylock group of sci-fi and fantasy authors that had come into our lives through Joe’s publishing career. We spent many nights in Orange County being regaled with stories of Philip K. Dick, of whom these gents were disciples. We did concerts almost every weekend and lived our lives between shows. Sean Connery asked me about my car at the video store.
On October 6, 1989, we signed a contract to go to New York City for a trial run doing daily radio on the biggest classic rock station in America, K-Rock. I should have sold my car to Sean Connery. We flew to the city on November 8, had station meetings on the 10th, and met the entire staff. We said hello on Meg Griffin’s show and cut promos with Bill Kates and genius voice artist Billy West. The next morning, we did The Howard Stern Show and said hello to Tony Pigg’s audience. It was a fantastic station with brilliant and nationally known personalities and we were going to get a full week of shows to audition for a permanent afternoon slot.
The week was incredible, largely due to our brilliant producer, Robert Benjamin. Alice phoned in from Amsterdam, Richard Lewis did twenty dynamite minutes of original angst. Alvin Lee came in, as did Graham Nash. We talked to Frank Zappa for an astonishing length of time about everything, and Penn Jillette came in for an hour of chat and oldies. He was amazing and we partied into the night. Stern loved our show and that was all we needed. His gigantic audience had gotten the seal of approval from their leader. Flo and Eddie were good guys who did great radio. And the K-Rock executives took notice.
On December 7, we were scheduled to play two shows in the atrium of the World Trade Center. The first show, at 12:30, went off flawlessly. Then, as we were changing clothes for the second set, a fire broke out on the seventh floor of one of the towers and the second show was canceled. That night, we sat in with the judges of the Miller Lite Comedy Competition and felt very much like New Yorkers.
Needless to say, it was a star-studded year for our holiday shows at the Bottom Line. Comics Chris Rush and Bill Hicks opened for us. Joey Ramone was there, as was Kathleen Turner: both great rockers. I played the weekend and had a few days off to hang with Penn and Tony Visconti, who was now married to May Pang, whom I had known from John Lennon’s lost Hollywood years. We signed contracts on January 4, 1990. I called Heidi Berger, my new Realtor friend, and rented a little apartment on East Fifty-Fifth Street, near the station, and flew back to L.A. on the 7th.
♦ ♦ ♦
We only had a couple of weeks. I packed what I could and we actually had a gig at a private Mardi Gras party in New Orleans the day before we flew into New York for the first time as natives. Richard Lewis was on our first show, and already there was trouble in paradise as Stern warned us, on the air, that Richard was his guest: Make no bones about it. He didn’t care if we had grown up with the man, there was a certain guest etiquette that must be obeyed. At K-Rock, you played by Stern’s rules or you didn’t play. Still, every time he mentioned our little show on his huge, syndicated program, our audience grew. Also, the management knew that we were Rock Personalities and brought a certain street cred to them that they didn’t have with any of their other
personalities. On our very first afternoon, we finished at 6 P.M., jumped into a waiting limo, and were driven to interview Aerosmith. They had turned down interviews with every other radio station in town but said yes to K-Rock when Steven and Joe heard that Mark and I would be doing the story.
And so it continued. We did comedy bits with Kates and West, had multiple guest stars daily, hosted local shows, drank at the Friars Club. On Monday nights, I would go solo to this bar called Michael’s Pub to see my idol, Woody Allen, play clarinet with his Dixieland band. Sue and Alex arrived on February 8 for a visit. Both Mark and I went on Nutrisystem diets on the air and lost a ton of weight. We broadcast live from the Lone Star Cafe with Jimmy Vivino putting our last-minute bands together and represented our borough in the comedy competitions with our pick, a young kid who sounded like Kermit the Frog, named Ray Romano. He won, by the way.
I went home for the weekend in March. Most other weekends were spent doing shows with our band. Back on the air, we spun the platters and talked to Bowie, Keith Richards, Harry Nilsson, and so many others I can’t even remember. Michael McKean was a frequent visitor to my strange little former-cathouse apartment—not for the mirrored purple ambiance, but for the forbidden weed that he wasn’t allowed to possess. We all have our secrets.
In April, the Arbitron ratings came out and our show won for its time slot and the station went up more than two points. We were heroes. I celebrated with Dom and weed, a Comedy Channel interview with Allan Havey, and a late movie in Times Square with Penn and Eddie Gorodetsky.
In May, after our Romano experience and Cinco de Mayo at the Lone Star, station manager Mark Chernoff finally gave us our own office. That was a big deal. Only Howard Stern had his own office at K-Rock. And now us!
We were officially renewed on May 24, flew into L.A. for the weekend, recorded interviews for Rhino’s Happy Together documentary, and had a birthday party for Alex with all of her friends and all of Susan’s drinking buddies. The “trends” came out in June and showed that our little show had gone from a 1.9 when we started to over a 3, whatever that means. Everyone was happy. On the 22nd, we took a cab out to Yankee Stadium where our competition, WNEW-FM, was hosting a sold-out Billy Joel concert. Absolutely no interviews were being given, but Billy loved us and we went on air with a great, long, and amazing conversation. NEW was pissed. But we had pulled off an amazing coup and no one else could have done it. We brought friendship to New York radio. By August, our ratings had climbed to a 3.6 and we were officially beating out our competition, Scott Muni, a legend at WNEW.
♦ ♦ ♦
It was time for a new apartment and a new way of thinking. I had a new family and wanted to be with them. Mark had chosen to remain a solitary man, commuting when he could to his wife and kids in L.A., and holding court in an amazing bachelor pad downtown and living the single life. On September 10, I found the apartment of my dreams, on the twenty-eighth floor of RiverTower, at East 54th Street between First Avenue and Sutton Place, near the United Nations. The place featured walls of glass with a wraparound view of the East River and the city skyline. I finally had my Manhattan tower. I moved in on September 28 with little furniture, but I had my weed and I had my city.
We went out to L.A. to do a week of shows from Universal City, where we interviewed hundreds of celebrity walk-throughs on this huge radio junket. Paul McCartney was there and we reminisced as Andy tried to play Beatles songs on his tiny Casio.
Sue and Alex arrived in New York City on November 14 and we rented out our Studio City home to, of all people, the actor Chris Elliott, who was doing a series called Get a Life! and needed a rental for his dad, the genius Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray fame. Bob was my childhood comedy hero. I would have let him stay there for nothing.
It snowed at Christmas and I loved it. We did our usual Bottom Line shows, but we finally felt like locals. Howard Stern now considered us buddies and we attended his elaborate birthday party on January 10. Uh-oh. Familiarly breeds contempt, my mother used to say. When they stop talking about you, it’s trouble. That’s what I say.
THIRTY-FOUR
Happy Together
Flo and Eddie give great radio. My routine was to leave RiverTower about noon to walk to the station for show prep. Then, after briefly checking things over, I would frequently stroll around the corner for an amazing sandwich and an Irish coffee or two. That gave me time to smoke a joint in Central Park before our 2 P.M. broadcast. On special days, we would pretape an interview with, say, George Carlin or do television, such as The Joan Rivers Show or Geraldo Rivera. In March 1991, Mark Chernoff announced to the staff that K-Rock was now the number one classic rock station in America.
On April 19, Mark’s birthday, we brought Todd Rundgren into the studio with his keyboard and guitar and he performed an hour of brilliance. The phones lit up like a Christmas tree. It was fantastic. Afterward, Chernoff called us into his office—we guessed to congratulate us. Instead, he went on a rampage. We were K-Rock. We were supposed to play more music! That’s what our slogan said. But, during that hour, WNEW had played a dozen records and we had played three—all Todd’s. Yes, Chernoff thought that it was great radio, but that didn’t neutralize the station’s mission, which was to play more music. Suddenly, we found ourselves limited to two and a half minutes to talk or do bits between songs, all guests would need to be approved, and we were to stick to the playlist from now on. Our show was about to sound just like everybody else’s. They were paying us over a half million dollars a year to babysit CDs. It was the beginning of the end. Already.
When CBS bought the station during the summer, during which we had spent every weekend doing concerts, they made sweeping changes, the first of which was to let us go. We were costing the network more than five times the salary of any other DJs, and Stern was about to make a huge syndication deal that would place him in stations all over the country. We were replaced in our drive-time slot by veteran jock Pete Fornatale. On September 13, we were officially unemployed.
♦ ♦ ♦
Susan, Alex, and I moved back into our Studio City home after Get a Life was canceled, and it was like we had never left. Wendt was still there, we built a childproof fence around the black-bottomed pool, my bad back was returned to the hands of my favorite chiropractor, and concerts happened every weekend.
But … we had played a show for KOOL radio at Denver’s Mile High Stadium back in May 1988, and the female disc jockey who had introduced us was fabulous. She was blond and glorious and clad in a pink leather dress. She had the unlikely name of Michelle Dibble. Again, the voice went off in the back of my brain—“I WILL HAVE HER!” But since I was married and therefore monogamous, we began—for the time being—a phone friendship that continued for years. Every time I was in Denver, I would see her for platonic chats and infinite wisdom. When she moved to St. Louis to do morning radio there, we kept up our telephone friendship. During my bad times with Susan, she was literally the only one I could talk to. And I did. For hours on end. Before cell phones, it was costly therapy.
Mark was having an equally difficult time adjusting to his daddy and husband role in the Canyon. His kids were grown-ups now, and he really hadn’t been an authority figure in their lives for a couple of years. Dinners around the table weren’t the same anymore. During almost each and every warm California afternoon, Susan would get together with Mark’s wife Pat and their friends around one of our swimming pools for girl talk and gallons of wine.
When I had first encountered Susan, I had thought nothing of her proclivities toward drunkenness, probably because I was largely drunk myself, or something like it. But now that I had dispatched with the worst of my habits, Sue’s daily rituals were becoming beyond annoying. She would pass out nightly after some sort of screaming insanity. This had begun long before my move to New York, but I had thought her new location would remove some of her temptations. Instead, in Manhattan, she had been able to actually order liquor up to the apartment, so she never had to leave the house to
get her buzz on. Now, in L.A., it was getting to be intervention time. Today, twenty years later, she counsels individuals with the same affliction.
Meanwhile, I was making up for lost time by spending weekends with my father and brother, both still reeling from the effects of my mother’s death, and neither one of them ready to move on. Sid, in particular, wasn’t doing so well. Sally’s belongings were exactly where she had left them before checking into the hospital, although years had passed. It was starting to look like Baby Jane lived in Westchester.
Sue got a job on Ventura Boulevard selling pricey kids furniture at a store called Bellini and we spent another familiar Thanksgiving with the Powers and the Blaylocks in Orange County. On December 26, we flew back to New York to rehearse for the Bottom Line.
Early in ’92, Emily flew down for a visit and it felt like we were such a family. Two kids and my white picket fence. But there really weren’t that many concerts that year, just enough to keep us going, and it started to seem like L.A. was closing in around us. Plus, my poor dad never pulled out of his tailspin following my mother’s death and, despite my brother’s constant attention, was losing ground quickly. He needed to go into a nursing home near me in North Hollywood. I visited frequently, but it was a losing battle.
Mark and I flew to New York in March to sing on the new Ramones album, Mondo Bizarro. A couple of the guys filtered in and out, but it was 100 percent Joey’s show and I loved that guy. He loved us too and was thrilled to have an element of California on the record. We were part of Joey’s original vision as he wrote these songs, and it was an honor to be in the same studio with the guy.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 27