by Richard Neer
Fortunately, I had gotten wind of the change through the grapevine the previous Friday and I resolved to play whatever I wanted and say good-bye properly to the few listeners who had hung in there over the twenty-eight years I had been at the station. It was the first time since the mid-eighties that I’d had an active hand in programming my own show. It was alternately invigorating and frightening. Like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it, but I had a few close calls when I almost couldn’t find a good segue until there were just a few seconds remaining on the previous track. By the end of the four hours, I felt mentally exhausted, but happy. I was able to close an unpleasant chapter of fear and loathing—what WNEW-FM had become all about in its death throes. But by closing out as I started—with total freedom—I was able to appreciate all the great times and wonderful rewards WNEW had given me for almost three decades. My eyes welled up as I listened to my final record, Springsteen’s “Racing in the Streets.” I closed with a brief farewell, and uttered for the first and last time, “WNEW-FM, Where Rock Lived.”
Mercifully, the day after I signed off, September 13, 1999, the station became FM talk at 102.7, not even acknowledging its legendary call letters. But ironically, since I am now covering New York Giants football, my pre-and post-game shows are still heard on the station, sans call letters.
Garry Wall was fired a few weeks later, ostensibly because he had no control over his afternoon team, who had played an immature prank on the White House at a time when CBS was seeking approval of the Viacom merger. The truth is probably that they were looking for an excuse to end his disastrous regime and this latest example of his slipshod management gave them a tangible reason.
The circle was closed with a real tragedy two months later when Kevin Smith passed on. His awful luck followed him to the end. While in Florida playing golf, he’d collapsed near the end of a round. He was brought in for tests, where they discovered a massive brain tumor and an advanced case of lung cancer. They gave him six weeks to live. He was fifty-one years old, and never sick a day in his life until that point.
Photograph
The event that encapsulated thirty-two years of rock radio at WNEW-FM occurred in New York City on the evening of November 3, 1997. The Museum of Television and Radio, on West Fifty-second Street, held a forum, reuniting the surviving members of the staff from the early free-form days.
The museum forum took place during the Chernoff interregnum, when Mark had brought the original jocks back for one last swipe at it. We were almost a year into the venture, and the ratings had risen steadily, although not fast enough for CBS. We were working for Karmazin again, but this time with several layers of management in between. Our fervent hope was that Mel’s sentimental attachment to the station and his loyalty to Chernoff would buy us the time we needed to resuscitate the old lady from the damage inflicted upon it by the prior administrations. Although we were cautiously optimistic, an air of finality hung over the evening. Celebrating our thirtieth anniversary as a rock station, we had survived continuously longer than all the rest. WNEW was on borrowed time, but it seemed that it had cheated death before, and might just wink at it again.
Two of the giants responsible for its inception were not present. Alison Steele, after a lengthy bout with cancer, died on September 27, 1995. Since leaving the station in 1979, she had worked at WPIX and WNEW-AM, and started a store called Just Cats on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Chernoff brought her back to rock radio at K-ROCK in the early nineties—the Nightbird flying again on overnights—so that she could be reinstated in her union’s health-care plan. Although she was undergoing painful radiation and chemotherapy treatments, she didn’t complain publicly and her listeners were shocked upon her demise to hear of how serious her illness had been. She never shared her struggles with the audience, carrying on heroically until the end.
George Duncan had left Metromedia in March of 1986. Although he could see the future of cellular technology, his true love was radio and he’d amassed enough money working for Kluge to be able to buy his own chain of small stations in Florida. On June 10, 1995, he attended a class reunion at Cornell. After a weekend of partying and reminiscing, the alums challenged the current varsity squad to a game of lacrosse, and Duncan plunged right in. At sixty-four years old, the strain was too much for his heart and he died on the field.
On the panel that night were the station’s first three program directors: Nat Asch, Scott Muni, and me. Our collective terms encompassed sixteen years. At this time, the station had had three PDs in the previous sixteen months. I had my first opportunity to have an in-person meeting with Rosko, who had a profound influence on my career as a role model and as one who provided me with an opening to join the staff. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years before and appeared small and frail, but his magical voice was as vibrant as ever. Also in attendance was Jonathan Schwartz, about to see another dream broken. WQEW, the station that had picked up the baton of standards from WNEW-AM, was sold to Disney and flipped to all-children’s radio, leaving Jonno temporarily out of work. Pete Fornatale and Dennis Elsas were there, along with Dave Herman, all of whom had been restored to their original shifts at 102.7 by Chernoff. Vin Scelsa, back doing his Sunday night Idiot’s Delight program on WNEW-FM, shared the stage with Zacherle, whose radio appearances were limited to Halloween specials on WCBS-FM.
The group swapped stories of the good old days, and then took questions from the audience. Those who were still working at the station were asked about their frustrations, dealing with a tight classic-rock format, as they nostalgically recounted a time when they could play and say whatever they wanted. Dave Herman answered directly—it was frustrating but he understood the limitations, given the soaring value of FM franchises and the fact that these highly leveraged broadcast groups needed big returns on their money. Muni replied that it hurt him not to be able to play new music, which he considered the lifeblood of any station.
Fornatale responded by reading a parable, typed onto a piece of white paper that he carefully unfolded from his breast pocket. It seems that at a board meeting, a university chancellor had been visited by an angel of the Lord, who told him that due to his meritorious service, he was being rewarded. The angel offered him a choice—he could have either infinite wisdom, great wealth, or incredible beauty. After a moment’s contemplation, he chose infinite wisdom. There was a great commotion of thunder and lightning, followed by a beatific peace, during which the chancellor’s head was encased in a faint halo and he sat speechless.
“Say something,” cried a colleague.
After a moment’s pause, he answered, “I should have taken the money.”
There was general laughter and applause in the room, but some quickly stifled nervous chuckles from the panel. To a man, the parable had hit home. We had all started out in progressive radio thinking of ourselves as artists, embracing the heady freedom of creating a radio program from the tools of our imagination, limited only by our own vistas. Now, we were ruled by a benevolent dictator who had grown up listening to us. As radio goes today, it was the best that could be expected. But as we wistfully recounted the past with our exaggerated stories, the facts were clouded by foggy memories—middle age interfered for some, dotage and disease for others. But palpable was the knowledge that most of us had sold out years before. The two proud rebels onstage, Schwartz and Scelsa, had always held firm against the incursion of the money changers. But the rest of us had joylessly accepted the hands we were dealt, awaiting our next paycheck. We never had the economic freedom to be defiant, and were robbed of our spirit as a result. We rationalized that we still were well paid for jobs that required no heavy lifting. It wasn’t a dishonorable fashion in which to slouch toward retirement. We dimly hung on to the hope that somehow, if we held out long enough, the circle of fools controlling our fate would spin in our favor once more.
In many ways, I think the panel got more of a kick out of the evening than the audience of three hundred or so who packed the museum
’s auditorium. There were some uneasy moments onstage—as Rosko sang the praises of Howard Stern, some of the others held their nose in contempt. But old feuds were put aside; even Jonathan Schwartz and Rosko embraced, and we generally comported ourselves as gentlemen. There was mild disagreement when I disputed Dave Herman’s contention that the glory days were gone for good. Sadness too, as Nat Asch began the proceeding by eulogizing Duncan and Steele, our two fallen comrades. In a lighter vein, he admitted that his several attempts to oust Steele in the early days were misguided, but proudly boasted that he’d also had to fire Sally Jessy Raphael, and that he’d fire her again today.
No one had the self-destructive instinct to address the present-day troubles with radio, especially those who were still working. Rosko had learned the hard way that venting your emotions in public is not the best way to survive in a business increasingly made incestuous through consolidation. He was working at K-ROCK in the early eighties, when it was trying to be a Top Forty station, perhaps a reflection of the old WABC. They had brought back Dan Ingram and some of the other great jocks of the past. After suffering less than spectacular ratings, the station was purchased by Infinity and converted to its classic-rock incarnation. Rosko could have blended in nicely but, in a pique, he expounded on the air about what a beautiful mosaic K-ROCK had been and how a racist named Mel Karmazin had taken it away in favor of a bland, white, suburban-oriented, vanilla rock station. The outburst cost him dearly, and not only the job at K-ROCK. Years later, Rosko was the voice of CBS Sports when Infinity merged with CBS and Mel took over both companies. Rosko’s contract wasn’t renewed and his lucrative job vanished, causing him to sue the company (unsuccessfully, as Karmazin maintained that he had no hand in the dismissal—believable with all that he had on his plate at the time).
Scelsa challenged Schwartz on a question from the audience. A man wanted to know how Jonno viewed his eight-year foray into progressive radio, when all along he had been a lover of his father’s standards, playing them on the radio exclusively over the last two decades. Schwartz replied that he quickly embraced rock music, and loved the freedom that Asch and Duncan had given him to craft his own program. “We spoke Russian and they didn’t,” was how he put it, meaning that the jocks had some idea of what they were doing, but management didn’t.
Scelsa reminded everyone that Schwartz had said on his last show in May of 1976, “Frankly, I never liked the Doors, and it gives me great pleasure to know that I’ll never have to play them again.”
An upbraided Jonno retorted that there were many other groups he did like. He also confessed to having learned the music by listening to Rosko on the air, and how in the early days he stole albums from Rosko’s locker to educate himself. But Bill “Rosko” Mercer maintained that if this was true, it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Most of what he learned was from visiting local colleges and listening to the students. In the early days, he and Duncan would travel anywhere they were invited to host similar forums—ostensibly to teach, but in reality to learn.
Ironically, one of those panels was held at Fordham, where it was organized by a young Pete Fornatale, and another at Queens College, by Dennis Elsas. He was impressed and intimidated by the intelligence of Fornatale’s probing back then, and it was instrumental in Pete being hired as the station went into its youth movement. Rosko asserted that by listening and giving the audience what it wanted, WNEW struck the right chord at the right time with the young people it was trying to reach.
And here the dichotomy surfaced. When the somewhat older group of Steele, Schwartz, and Rosko learned the music, coming from backgrounds of standards and jazz, they were essentially entertainers trying to learn about their audience. The next wave of Fornatale, Elsas, and myself didn’t have to be taught—we were the audience. PD Nat Asch saw the first group as a bunch of leaders who shaped popular taste by exposing the new music and gallantly risking failure with their bold choices. In reality, the kids were instructing the adults. The older jocks weren’t leading, but following—doing informal research with their potential audience and trying to stay ahead of the curve.
The most peculiar aspect was that the adults ultimately did it better. Their intellect and grasp of larger issues enabled them to distill what they heard and filter it through their experience. They came out with a product that wasn’t afraid to be diverting, while our generation was so averse to artifice that we eschewed the standard rules of entertainment and risked being tedious with our earnest approach.
We were students and fans of the music, and brought enthusiasm to the task. But we were devoid of pretense: We had no act. We were defined by the music we played. When one thinks of Rosko, it’s his poetry that one remembers, and the same is true of Steele. In Schwartz’s case, his storytelling rules the memory. Muni—his voice and larger-than-life persona. With Elsas, Fornatale, and me, it was our music. When we meet listeners today, they fondly remember a new artist that we turned them on to—a Bruce Springsteen or Dire Straits—that they first heard on our shows. Once the liberty to use our curious ears as an instrument was taken away, we had no act—just a modest, intelligent approach that is no longer valued in commercial radio. The early group became legends, we were supporting actors; while vital to the success, we weren’t the stars.
Still, our passion for the music served us well. Although Fornatale and Elsas are working only on noncommercial radio today, they had long and illustrious careers at a world-famous station. They were steady performers who always were well liked, if rarely loved. I was fortunate enough to get into talk radio and ride that wave into the present, but my performance career at WNEW-FM had its share of ups and downs. Schwartz and Steele left with their legends intact.
It’s analogous to a modern ball player, who perhaps should retire years before he does to protect his legacy. But the lure of big money and failure to find another vocation cause him to hang on. The new audience sees him only as a washed-up .220 hitter who can never deliver the big blow, never having seen him in his early glory days. When Steele left progressive radio in 1979, she vanished from her rock audience for twelve years before resurfacing in the relative obscurity of K-ROCK’s overnight. Even then, her shows could still be viewed as a time capsule, since Chernoff gave her the freedom to program half of her selections. Schwartz became the ultimate authority on Sinatra, and his exploits in that field were unheard by most in the rock generation. As the baby boomers aged, however, many of them came to respect the quality of that music and appreciated Jonno’s encyclopedic knowledge and peerless presentation.
A New York Times piece on WNEW-FM written in 1970 but never published was shown to Fornatale in manuscript form. The author described Muni as the station’s heart; Rosko, its soul. Schwartz represented its intellect. Zacherle, eccentricity. Alison Steele was its femininity, and Fornatale, youth. Whereas the others still have the same perceived identity, Pete’s has faded away to the inevitable aging process.
But what became of those true pioneers—those who blazed trails in Top Forty or paved the way for the progressive revolution, the main characters in our story? The following is reported in July 2001.
Rick Sklar met a tragic end. A devoted runner, he tore an Achilles tendon while jogging. Minor surgery was performed to repair the injury, but Sklar had an adverse reaction to the anesthetic and died on the operating table.
Along with Don Imus and Wolfman Jack, WNBC had an impressive lineup of disc jockeys but always struggled to keep up with WABC. Shares for both stations continued to wilt in the face of FM’s challenge, and by May of 1982, it became clear to the entire industry that FM was the place to hear music, and WABC closed down as the preeminent Top Forty station of its time, flipping to a news-talk format. WNBC hung on a little longer, but was sold off by the network in 1988 and was converted to all-sports WFAN.
Even in its current talk incarnation, WABC will still do special weekends as a tribute to the golden days it once enjoyed. Both WNEW-FM and WCBS-FM, who at times could lay claim as i
ts successor, have produced programs honoring the great station. A website devoted to MusicRadio 77, created and managed by Allan Sniffen, has thrived for years, and was an invaluable aid in telling their story.
Radio life goes on for the rest: Bruce Morrow bought and managed several stations of his own before selling at a nice profit. His partner was Legacy’s Bob Sillerman. Morrow and Dan Ingram still dabble on weekends at WCBS-FM, the hugely successful oldies station in New York. Muni now hosts a taped one-hour program on WAXQ, and it has that station’s highest ratings. He enjoys limited freedom to play what he likes. But it’s all for image—they don’t want him to do full-time work. Tom Tracy married a respected female judge and lives in South Carolina.
Vin Scelsa still plays whatever he wants, on the noncommercial college station WFUV. Still a stubborn nonconformist, he insists that his contracts state unequivocally that he have total artistic control of his program. As long as management signs off on it, he will remain an oasis of freedom and creativity in a tightly formatted world. He’ll never make it a full-time living, as he once briefly did, but with his other resources he doesn’t have to. Fornatale and Elsas are also at WFUV (and Dennis has an active voice-over career, like his late hero Bobaloo). Meg Griffin works for Sirius satellite radio, while Dave Logan and Lee Abrams are at rival XM.
Schwartz is heard weekends on WNYC-FM in New York and on XM satellite radio. Although you won’t hear much rock on his watch, he still is able to play the great music of past generations and is not ruled by a program director. His writing has given him the economic freedom to be his unique self—he is loved by many.
Zacherle is retired, doing occasional ghoul shows when called upon. He’s had a rich, full life, and his tastes remain simple. Living in a rent-controlled apartment, he probably still owns his old VW convertible.