by Jessie Close
“Were you really trying to kill yourself?” Dad asked in a skeptical tone.
I demurred. “I don’t know.”
“Then why did you swallow those pills?” Mom asked.
I looked at them and realized that the nurse hadn’t tipped them off. They didn’t know that I was scared of Brad and didn’t want to get married. It was time for me to speak up. They were giving me my opportunity. All I had to do was tell them the truth.
My brother and I had joked about how MRA’s Four Absolute Standards had the opposite effect on the children who were raised with them: Absolute Honesty became Absolute Dishonesty, so that we could stay out of trouble; Absolute Purity became Absolute Perversion for the sake of fun and rebellion; Absolute Unselfishness became Absolute Selfishness, as we watched our own backs; and Absolute Love became Absolute Obsession. I truly wanted to be loved, but I didn’t know how to be loved and mistook obsession for devotion.
I looked into my parents’ faces and felt torn. I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want them to have another of their “What do we do with Jessie?” discussions. But I didn’t want to marry Brad. What would happen if I turned Brad away? Would rejecting him mean I was admitting that my rebellious behavior had been wrong? Despite my defiant attitude, I wanted my parents’ acceptance. I wanted their love. I wanted to be wanted by them. I wanted to please them.
There was also a practical question that I had to answer. If I didn’t marry Brad, what would happen to me? I didn’t want to live with them in Africa. I didn’t want to live with Tina any longer, either. Where would I go?
“Everything is okay,” I said. “I just got confused. I want to marry Brad. Everything will be fine after we marry.”
They looked relieved. Watching them, I felt as if I could read their thoughts: “This is just another example of Jessie being melodramatic, of our youngest daughter calling attention to herself.”
They smiled. I smiled back. But I knew I had just made one of the worst decisions of my life.
PART TWO
HUSBANDS AND OTHERS
The first time I dropped acid, everything changed. I felt that I had lost my innocence. I felt I had entered a new stage in my life and that my childhood was over.
—from my private journal
CHAPTER NINE
Brad and I returned from Africa married, and we set up housekeeping in a two-story apartment building at 11550 Nebraska Avenue in Los Angeles, which resembled a brown stucco 1960s-era motel. One of the first decorations that we put on our walls was a poster of a defiant Angela Davis wearing her hair in a huge Afro. We were radicals, hippies, and revolutionaries, and Angela symbolized our contempt for mainstream society and its holdover 1950s values.
Davis was accused of buying guns for three black convicts who took a judge and others hostage in a courtroom. That same year, 1970, was also when Ohio National Guardsmen fatally shot four unarmed Kent State University students who were demonstrating against the Cambodian campaign during the Vietnam War. The Chicago Seven were on trial in Chicago, and yippie Jerry Rubin shocked America when he lit a joint and tried to pass it to David Frost on national television, seconds before a gaggle of yippies planted in the audience stormed onto the stage yelling expletives.
During a demonstration in Griffith Park, I screamed into a police officer’s face: “Fuck the pigs!” He pulled his nightstick, and I took off running.
Although the zeitgeist that had rocked the 1960s—with Woodstock, free love, communes, antiwork attitudes, and psychedelic drugs—was starting to wane, Brad and I were still eagerly waiting for a revolution. It became clear to us that music was the best way to usher in this new Age of Aquarius.
Our tiny apartment became a hangout for other free thinkers, partly because Brad and I were generous with our pot. We smoked weed every day, sometimes dropped acid on Wednesdays (Wednesday being my favorite day), and tried any and all drugs we could get our hands on, all the while tuning in to rock and roll.
It was our love of music and our intent to change society that led us to decide to launch our own radio station. Brad began reading wiring schematics for radio equipment and began a hunt for cast-off electronics, which were plentiful in those days, thanks to military surplus being shipped back from Vietnam.
Two teenagers taking to the airways with an illegal radio broadcast seemed like an improbable dream, which is what made it so damn exciting.
Neither of us was employed. My trust fund paid me five hundred dollars per month. We were biting the hand that was feeding us, and we celebrated the irony of it. Brad began turning our salvaged parts into a broadcasting station in our bedroom. He built a recording booth in our walk-in closet. We moved our bed into the eating area next to the kitchen. Late one night, we climbed the roof of our building and plunked down a Vietnam War–surplus transmitter and antenna, hanging the wires down the outside wall of our building and into our apartment.
Our renegade radio station hit the air the first week of November, 1970, broadcasting through a fifty-watt transmitter that could be heard from Pacific Palisades to the Los Angeles International Airport.
We named it KPOT.
On a Monday night three days later, there was a knock on our door. About twenty of us were in our apartment, and when I opened the door, two uniformed police officers and two men in suits were in the hall. Oh, God, I thought. It’s a drug bust.
“You’re operating an illegal radio station, and we’re here to shut it down,” one of the suits declared. He and his partner said they were from the Federal Communications Commission.
The two FCC men pushed past me into the apartment, going directly into our makeshift studio.
“KPOT,” one of the cops said with a smirk. “How’d you come up with that handle?”
“The knobs on a mixer board are called potentiometers,” I replied indignantly. “That’s why.”
He didn’t buy it, and I managed to keep a straight face.
“Did you know you could go to jail for a year and be fined ten thousand dollars for operating an illegal station?” one of the FCC men asked.
I felt like laughing but didn’t. We were broadcasting the 1812 Overture—one of the most popular Fourth of July independence songs—when the FCC pulled our station’s plug. So much for free speech in the USA, I thought.
One of the cops said our neighbors had complained because our broadcasts were interfering with their television and radio reception. We had made it clear to our neighbors that if they experienced difficulty with their TVs or radios we would provide them with a filter. Obviously, we hadn’t heard from all of them.
“Who built this?” an FCC man asked.
“I did,” Brad replied.
“C’mon—where’d you get this?”
“I built it from scratch,” Brad replied.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“There’s no way a kid could have built this,” the man stated.
After jotting down information about Brad and me, our unwelcome guests left. Thankfully, the police didn’t comment about the smell of marijuana. We were told that it would be up to the FCC commissioner to decide if formal criminal charges would be filed. If so, Brad and I would be arrested, handcuffed, and taken in for booking and arraignment.
I was scared, but Brad wore the closing down of KPOT as a badge of hippie honor.
Our FCC raid caught the eye of a Los Angeles Times reporter. She arrived at our apartment the next morning to interview us. KPOT made page 1 under the headline FCC RAIDS CLOSET RADIO STATION. The newspaper photo accompanying the story showed Brad and me in our cramped recording booth. Brad had shoulder-length brown hair and a full beard, turning him from Charles Manson into a Jesus wannabe. Poised behind him in the photo was his flower-child bride—me—with long flowing blond hair that dropped well down my back. I was wearing a peasant blouse and no makeup. Power to the people!
“Everyone was so upset when the police showed up,” Brad was quoted as saying in the
article. “We were all crying.”
I explained to the reporter that everyone worked at the radio station for free. We were doing it because we loved rock and roll and believed it was our right to play whatever music we wanted. Brad and I were financing the station and living off my family trust fund because neither of us believed in working for money. “We had the money to live; we just wanted to do something for the people,” I was quoted as saying. “We never planned to go commercial.”
“Just because we didn’t have a license didn’t mean we weren’t responsible,” Brad added. A local commercial station had donated an emergency broadcast monitor to us, which was one of the requirements for operating a licensed station. “We wanted to make it as legal as we could.”
Brad explained in the news article that he had investigated applying for an FCC license, but “they told me I needed all this money, much more than we had.” Those fees were simply another example of how mainstream society kept young people from airing their voices.
“We were totally open,” Brad told the reporter. “We didn’t try to hide anything. We even gave the station’s phone number and address over the air.”
The Times’s story turned KPOT into a cause célèbre. Rock-and-roll radio stations across the country called us for interviews. Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station that operated on a tanker ship off the coast of England to circumvent the BBC’s monopoly, rallied with us. Petitions calling for the FCC to not punish us were circulated during a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The FCC commissioner took note of all the publicity and decided to not prosecute. We got away with the warning that if we were ever again involved with an illegal station we would get jail time and a fine.
Seizing the moment, Brad contacted the owners of Theta Cable, a fledgling company launched in part by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Cable television was just starting in Los Angeles, and Brad pitched the idea of adding a cable radio station into the mix of television stations that Theta was offering customers.
Three weeks after KPOT was shut down, Theta announced that it had decided to give us a one-year experimental contract as one of the nation’s first cable radio stations. Because we would only be heard by Theta’s four thousand subscribers and not on the public airways, we weren’t required to get an FCC license. We made up new call letters, CABL, and were 108 on the FM dial.
The Los Angeles Times announced KPOT’s return. A Theta Cable spokesman said, “Theta is interested in helping minority races and the youth movement, and this CABL 108 station is trying to do something of interest with community youth.”
What that story didn’t say was that Theta was not paying us. Basically, I was picking up the costs. We didn’t care. I mailed a business proposal that outlined how we planned to launch our new radio station to Grandmother Moore, and she responded with a ten-thousand-dollar donation.
On January 1, 1971, we began broadcasting twenty-four hours per day, using taped music from midnight until 9:00 a.m. Obviously, our new station needed DJs, and I was determined that at least one of them would be a woman. One morning while I was returning to the station from an errand, I noticed a music store. I ducked inside and struck up a conversation with an attractive young girl working behind the counter.
“I’m Jessie Sobel,” I announced. “My husband and I run CABL 108.”
“The renegade station,” the girl enthusiastically replied.
“Yep, that’s us.”
The clerk turned out to be the owner of the store, Cindy Paulos. Her husband was a bass guitar player in an LA band, and, like me, she had an income of her own, only she was from Beverly Hills. She’d married right out of high school and opened the store because she loved music.
“How would you like to be a disc jockey?” I asked after a few minutes.
“I’d love it.”
As quickly as that, we had our first female DJ. During the coming year, Cindy came in every day, even though she wasn’t paid. I got along with everyone. Brad didn’t. Cindy thought he was egotistical and a male chauvinist.
The panache of a renegade station with its young staff and anything-goes attitude appealed to emerging rock stars. Our station became the cool place to introduce your music in LA. I remember answering the phone and talking to George Carlin. He liked to phone in with song requests. Rock star Frank Zappa came by for an on-air interview. I engineered a show for Flo & Eddie. Memphis soul singer Ann Peebles and folk singer Hoyt Axton were guests. When Hoyt came in, he put down one of the longest, thickest lines of cocaine that I’d ever seen for us to enjoy. He’d written “The Pusher,” a song about the difference between frequent marijuana use and heroin. “The Pusher” was performed by Steppenwolf on the band’s first album and later was on the Easy Rider movie sound track. Axton told me his lyric “God damn the pusher man” was so controversial that officials in North Carolina insisted that Steppenwolf substitute the words “gosh darn” when the band played there. I really liked Hoyt but knew he was struggling with addiction. Everyone was trying to find a place where you could smoke pot and use drugs to expand your mind without having them overtake your life—and that included Brad and me.
To us, our little apartment became the epicenter of LA’s rock-and-roll scene. We didn’t have to buy weed or pills anymore. Record company promoters dropped by weekly and made certain our apartment was well supplied with pot and cocaine.
Executives for Theta Cable asked me to speak to their sales force about how to best pitch our station to potential subscribers. I arrived at the meeting wearing shorty-shorts and a tiny halter top that showed off my eighteen-year-old breasts. After I finished my speech, an older gentleman took me aside and said, “You did a good job of explaining your station, but you might want to dress differently, more conservatively, next time.” He said my appearance had been so distracting that the salesmen weren’t listening to what I said.
When RCA Records invited us to speak at a seminar, I wore skin-tight pants made of fake snakeskin and a bright velour blouse, but I still didn’t put on a bra. I was against wearing them.
I was having a blast working at our radio station. I developed a knack for identifying hits. I could listen to the first five beats and tell you what the song was, who the artist was, and what label it was released on, and when. When a new single came in I could tell right away if it was going to make it onto the Billboard Hot 100. Everyone was having fun. Our apartment was always swarming with people. I also owned two dogs I’d gotten from the animal shelter, one named Poo and the other Bowie, but the real shocker when guests came in to be interviewed was my pet rabbit. I named him Rarebit of Mischief.
My rabbit did his business in a litter box on the apartment’s balcony, but I never cleaned it and it was disgusting. Rarebit chewed the bottoms off our sliding-door curtains until they were two inches too short. He grazed on the linoleum around the toilet in the bathroom, and he chewed up chunks of our gold shag rug. I’d also bought a pet mouse and got a surprise when she had a litter. One of them fell out of the cage. Instead of putting him back, I decided to let him roam free, and he ended up nesting in our stove, which I never used. We survived on burgers and fries from Jack in the Box and a nearby A&W drive-in. We went there so much that the teenagers used to give us free fries for my dogs.
I gave the mouse who nested in our stove the name HM, an abbreviation for House Mouse, and I remember laughing whenever we would have a guest come in for an on-air interview and House Mouse would walk into the studio, stand up on his hind legs, and look at the guest. He was tan with a little white patch on his chest, so he didn’t look like a wild mouse. The guests would be enthralled by his boldness.
Our apartment and menagerie were all part of who we were as hippie radio operators. Glenn came to see me once, and she laughingly told me there was nowhere in my entire apartment where she could sit because everything was covered with pet hair.
Glenn had finally broken away from Up with People and MRA and was attending the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I didn’t give
a damn about going back to school. Why should I? I was married and too busy managing our station.
We’d been broadcasting for more than a year when Crystal Sound Recording Studios offered me a job as an assistant engineer. Crystal Sound was built by Andrew Berliner, who started out by building a studio in his apartment—just as Brad and I had done with KPOT. Their studio had outgrown the apartment and become a well-respected operation. Carole King’s first album, Writer, was recorded there in 1970, as was James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon the following year.
Going to work at Crystal Sound was a tremendous opportunity, and I was excited, but when I told Brad, he freaked out.
“No wife of mine is going to work as an assistant engineer,” he announced. He didn’t like the idea of me working late at night with musicians. He wanted me in our apartment, where he could keep an eye on me. He also didn’t want me working for anyone but himself.
“I like engineer work,” I complained.
Brad and I had been married long enough for us to have had several arguments. But this one was different. He got physical. “You aren’t going to work there!” he shouted, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me. “You’ll do what I tell you to do. You’re my wife.”
I will never forget the furious look in his eyes. Brad had gotten physically abusive with me before, but only during sex in our bedroom. I was pretty naive at the time. I didn’t know that a husband could rape his wife. It wasn’t a common thought during the 1970s.
I was about to learn that his grabbing and shaking me was a prelude of what was to come.
CHAPTER TEN
“Where ARE you?” he whined.
“I’m just here,” she said as she stepped to her left to flush the toilet and exit their bathroom.
“I woke up and didn’t know where you were,” he complained.
She entered their dark bedroom, her eyes on the floor, her arms folded across her breasts.