A little after 2am I was woken abruptly by someone hammering on my door and yelling, “Mary, Mary, Mary!” over and over. The handle shook up and down but the door remained locked. I flipped the light on and lay there not making a sound. I heard footsteps retreating down the corridor so I got up and maneuvered the old, heavy dresser across the room to block the door just in case Mary’s despondent suitor returned.
The next morning was a lot better. I was greeted by a typical mid-November LA day; cloudless blue sky, sunshine and temperatures around seventy degrees going up to a high in the mid-eighties. All those jokes about weathermen in Southern California are true. They have just two lines to memorize and then they are set for life.
I walked down to Hollywood Boulevard and was shocked to see it looked even worse during the day. At least at night it had a few lights to brighten it up, now, in the unforgiving glare of the harsh morning sun, it highlighted the fact that the famous “walk of stars” was actually littered with bottles, cans, flyers offering nude massages and homeless unfortunates lining the sidewalk. And where were all the celebrities? I walked at least half a mile and didn’t recognize one person. What was the deal with that? I had been led to believe that all the world’s major actors came from Hollywood and here I was in the epicenter of it all and there was no one around who looked like they even owned a television let alone been on one!
I found Avis, located right next to the Grauman’s Chinese Theater and proudly presented my international driver’s license and picked up the rental car that my travel agent had pre-paid for me before I left England and headed out in that rust-red Chevy Chevette. I cruised west-bound on Hollywood Boulevard only to find that it ended abruptly less than a half mile further and merged into Sunset. But that was cool because Sunset Boulevard was not only home to TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip but it also led to the beach and after reading Surfer magazine for so many years back home I couldn’t wait to see Malibu for myself.
With my rental Chevy Chevette, Hollywood, November 17, 1976
Ummm . . . The Pacific wasn’t quite as blue as I thought it would be. In fact it looked a lot like the water back in Torquay with perhaps, if anything, even more of a brownish tint, but maybe that was unusual. Either way I knew it would be warm. I pulled on my Speedos (Hey, I’m from England and new in America; I didn’t know!) and sprinted into the water by Malibu pier. I was running so fast that I couldn’t stop even as my feet desperately tried to send me warning signals that perhaps the temperature wasn’t what I was expecting. I plunged headfirst into that sixty-one degree water and got out just as quickly. It was freezing. Now I realized why the American guys wore baggy shorts rather than tight, competition swimsuits—because it was so cold!
The sun soon warmed me up and very quickly I grasped the attraction of the Southern California lifestyle. The white sand, the laid-back vibe and the girls in bikinis looked like they had been assembled by a set director ready to shoot a sequel to Beach Blanket Bingo. All it needed was for Gidget to show up and they could roll camera.
I rented a board from a van parked by the pier and paddled out into the small three-foot waves. As long as I didn’t wipe out too badly in those polar waters then it was almost idyllic. As the swells broke into perfect little curls that you could ride for more than 200 yards, I understood why Malibu’s point break had become so celebrated and was looked upon by many as the birthplace of surfing on the mainland.
That night I went out and hit my first club. Everything was rock and roll on Sunset apart from one disco right in the center of the strip at 9000 Sunset. It was called Disco 9000 and I could almost envision the conversation the owners had had while coming up with that name, “So what are you going to call your disco at 9000 Sunset?” I planned to go there a little later but as it was a Wednesday I thought I would give it a little time to get busy first so I went to the club right across from it, The Roxy.
Before coming to America I’d promised myself I’d visit The Roxy as so many artists that I loved had played there including Bob Marley, Genesis and the jazz/funk group The Crusaders whose music I would play during the early part of the evening at my gigs in Europe. I stepped inside and looked around, imagining what it must be like to stand on that legendary stage.
I jostled my way through the early crowd and ordered a beer at the bar. As I was thanking the bartender a girl next to me asked, “Where are you from?” Within minutes I was sitting at her table with her friends and realizing that being a young Englishman in Los Angeles definitely had its benefits.
The girls advised me against going to Disco 9000 and instead invited me to their place at Mount Olympus. I nearly choked on my beer; the only Mount Olympus I knew was in Greece and home to Zeus and Hercules. They thought that was adorable and we all left together. Only in America can an accent cover up your stupidity and make you “adorable.”
California girls really are everything that Mike Love sang about on the Beach Boys’ classic, but along with my romancing I had to remember my true agenda. I had come to LA to try and make it in America and I only had twenty-nine days to do it and the clock was ticking.
I’d brought with me more than two dozen demo cassettes and resumes to deliver to radio stations and hopefully land myself a job. I had recorded one especially for American radio based on the cassette that Alan Lawrie had given me that I had devotedly listened to over and over again in my travels across Europe but right before I left England I felt it sounded too fake. It came across as me attempting to do an American accent and a slick top-forty presentation. It just didn’t ring true. It got to the point that I couldn’t even bear to listen to it. So instead I dubbed multiple copies of the “magic” demo that had sparked the interest of Swansea Sound and UBN before I left England. Both of those outlets were run by professionals and maybe if it was good enough for them then it might work here.
I went to every station in the Hollywood area I could find, KHJ, KRLA, KMET, KLOS, KWST, KBIG, KIQQ, KIIS, etc . . . If it began with a K I was there.
In most cases my polite, low-key approach and DJ business card got me inside the station but that was as far as the interest went. The assistant program director was usually the one who was burdened with having to deal with me and after a quick tour of their studios would take my demo and send me on my way. As I left the station I knew that my cassette would never be listened to and would probably end up being dubbed over or slipped into someone’s answering machine.
At KPOL AM 1540 it was the program director himself that met with me and laughed when I told him I was looking for a job at his station.
“Everybody wants to work here,” he said. “But without experience you’ve got no chance at getting a job.”
“But I do have experience,” I explained. “I’ve been DJing for five years.”
“Five years? I’ve got DJs whose headphones are older than that,” he cracked. “Go get yourself a job in a smaller market then come back when you have done something. That’s when we’ll talk. I’ll have one of our interns give you a tour so you can see what a real radio station looks like.”
He walked me to a bank of phones and introduced me to Steve Smith, a tall, lanky kid in his early twenties. After he walked away, Steve rolled his eyes.
“Don’t mind him. He thinks his shit doesn’t stink. I’m Steve.”
I introduced myself and we talked as Steve showed me around the smug a-hole’s station. Steve was a student at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, which Steve explained, using Southern California’s unique measurement of distance as “about an hour and ten minutes away.” He was studying television and radio broadcasting and as part of the program he was getting credits for interning at a radio station.
As he learned about my story he had an idea. Why didn’t I come down to his college and do a TV interview with him about my career in Europe that he would edit and put together as a project for part of his course? I was up for anything and the following Tuesday I found myself crossing into unknown territory, Orange County, Cali
fornia.
The shoot was fun and interesting. I’d never done anything like it before and I was surrounded by eager students who all had their own roles to play so they too could get college credits for being part of this feature. There was a makeup artist, a lighting director, a sound engineer, two cameramen, a director and Steve Smith, the star interviewer. They all took it extremely seriously and it felt very real for a taped piece that would only be seen by the class and their professor.
TV interview at Saddleback College, November 1976
Steve took me for a late lunch at a burger place to say thanks and as we talked he brought up an idea he’d been kicking around.
“You really want to stay here, right?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“If you can’t get a job right away on the radio do you have any other plans?”
I thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind working in a club but there’s no discos around, at least not like there are in Europe.”
“They are just starting here. There’s one in Irvine and I just heard yesterday about one that’s going to be opening in El Toro. And I know they’re looking for staff, because they’ve been putting up flyers on the campus. They might need a DJ. Do you want to go there with me and talk to them?”
I had no problem with that, plus as it was after four in the afternoon, Southern California’s space/ time continuum had shifted again and if I was to leave now the horrendous traffic would have made that seventy-minute drive more like two and a half hours!
The disco was set in a mini-mall about ten minutes north of Saddleback College and six minutes inland from the El Toro Y, the intersection of the 5 and 405 freeways. It had been a neighborhood bar in a former life, the kind of place brow-beaten husbands go to drink and escape their wives.
It was small with a maximum capacity of barely a hundred people. On one side of it was a liquor store and on the other, a pet shop. There was some painting going on inside but not much in the way of construction or major remodeling.
Steve introduced me to the two owners who were onsite overseeing the work. They showed me a basic wooden framework where the DJ booth was going to be which was positioned on the far side of the room away from the dance floor. That’s never a good idea as it limits the contact between the dancers and the DJ and it makes it hard to read the mood on the floor. I explained that point and they said that maybe they could move it later. They weren’t clear about whether they meant the dance floor or the booth.
They did get excited about the fact I was English and seemed to know what I was talking about and asked if I could be there on Friday for the grand opening. I didn’t see anything that looked “grand” but they assured me the club would be ready, the turntables would be in and they would even have records for the booth. It would be fifty dollars a night, four nights a week Thursday through Sunday. Did I want the job?
Memories of Tonsberg came flooding back but I had nothing else going for me and I had to start somewhere. I was in.
The bar would open at 11am, happy hour was four until six and I would start at 7p and play until 1:30am. I told them I’d be there early, by five, on Friday to get familiar with the gear and Steve and I left the dingy bar.
We stood in the parking lot and Steve shook my hand, “Looks like you’re here to stay,” he said with a big smile.
I can’t say I wasn’t excited about having a job. I like to work and this was my start, but I knew the club wasn’t going to be a long-term thing for me. I couldn’t even understand why they were bothering to change it from a local bar to a disco, it didn’t seem like it would attract that nightclub crowd, but I was the rookie there and they obviously knew the area much better than I did.
Friday rolled around and I went for an early lunch to give myself plenty of time for my drive down to El Toro. Around one o’clock my head started pounding and a searing pain shot from my forehead down through to my left eye. Multiple star fields swam in front of my vision and it was hard to hold my head upright. I was having a migraine attack.
I staggered towards the door, left my room and was blasted by the blazing sun that threatened to incinerate my throbbing eyeballs as I searched Hollywood Boulevard for a store that sold anything that could help me. But sadly this was 1976 and there was no effective migraine medicine available over-the-counter. I returned clutching a bottle of Beyer aspirin which proved to be as useful against migraine as a witch doctor’s chant and a bath of nettles picked under the light of a new moon.
I drew the blinds and huddled under the sheets in my hotel room. The darkness felt good. No way could I get up. No way could I drive. I slipped in and out of consciousness throughout the afternoon. I kept meaning to go downstairs to the reception and call Steve but I couldn’t find the strength to move from the bed. And I didn’t have the number for either of the two owners of the club. So I just lay there as my skull split asunder and the clock scorned me as it approached and then swept past 7pm.
Morning came and I was surprised to find I was human again. I could stand and walk and maybe even talk. And boy, was I hungry.
I ploughed my way through eggs, bacon, pancakes and hash browns washed down with an orange juice and decided it was time to see if an apology might work. I sat in the reception of the hotel which was obviously a burial ground for old, red naugahyde couches and put a quarter in the lobby’s payphone and dialed Steve’s house. He answered on the second ring.
“I’m so sorry about last night,” I said.
“So you heard?” replied Steve.
“No. I haven’t heard from them. I don’t think they know how to reach me. I was so sick—” I hadn’t even gotten to the apology as Steve cut me off.
“The club. You haven’t heard about the club?”
“No. Did it go well?”
“It burned down.”
“What?” I was stunned. “When? How did it . . .”
“Right after they closed. It was on the local news this morning. They think it was an electrical fire. Burned the entire club down and half of the mini-mall.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought that everything in that dump was half-assed, but a fire? I’d never even got close to experiencing anything like that.
“I was there last night for about an hour then left when I realized you weren’t coming. It was pretty dead,” continued Steve.
“Who DJ’d?” I asked.
“Not sure. I think it was a busboy or a bartender. They just put on the records. Like I said it was dead.”
I told Steve I was going to drive down and see him and I would be there within two hours. I hung up and sat there in the lobby trying to take in what I had just heard.
Steve was waiting for me by his parents’ pool when I arrived. He’d driven to the mini-mall and talked to the fire crew who were on hand to make sure there were no flare ups. Steve had interviewed them for his communications class and the firefighters had told him that it looked like the fire had started by the DJ booth—they’d found a flashpoint in that area with the charred equipment.
The first theory they were working with was that maybe the DJ hadn’t shut the gear down correctly and after everyone had left some faulty wiring ignited the blaze. But the firefighter stressed that these were still “early days” and they were still looking to confirm the real cause of the fire. The saddest thing was it also burned through most of the pet shop next door. I think that upset me as much as losing my gig. As bad as that was, Steve waved the thought away.
“It’s a good thing you weren’t there last night,” Steve said.
“No.” I shook my head. “If I’d been there I would have made sure it was all turned off correctly. There would have been no fire. The club would still be there, the animals would be alive.”
“Listen, man, they are blaming the busboy or whoever it was in the DJ booth last night.” Steve dropped his voice. “If it had been you then they would have arrested you and then deported you for working illegally. Don’t you think that’s a little too ea
sy?”
I didn’t follow him. “Too easy for what?”
“Maybe they wanted it to burn down. And maybe they wanted someone to blame it on. That’s all I’m saying.”
Oh my God. If he was right then I would have been in such trouble that it would have followed me for the rest of my life, wherever I went. What Steve was saying made sense. That’s why they weren’t spending any money or effort changing the place from a bar to a disco. And that’s why they offered me the job simply based on me having a business card. They were going to set me up! It wasn’t important to them that I could DJ, what was important was that I would have been an illegal immigrant breaking the law and the responsibility for the fire would have fallen squarely on my head. Case closed.
As night started to fall Steve and I drove over to the burned-out mini-mall to see the extent of the damage. It was far worse than I had imagined. It looked like an old bombsite in England left over from the blitz. More than half of the mini-mall had been gutted and the exterior walls had been reduced to rubble when the roof had collapsed in the raging inferno.
Three days later Steve’s suspicions were proved correct when the local papers reported that the cause of the fire had officially changed from an electrical fault to probable arson and that police were questioning the staff and the owners. Had I been working that night there is no doubt that I would have been provided with a one-way ticket back to England with “Do Not Return” stamped on my passport. For the first and only time in my life I was grateful for a migraine.
The burned-out disco and mini-mall in El Toro, December 1976
I went back to pounding the pavement and knocking on radio stations’ doors. One that I hadn’t tried before was KMPC 710 AM. They were very kind to me and I was introduced to several of their DJs who were part of their “Station of the Stars” lineup that included Gary Owens, Wink Martindale and Robert W. Morgan. One who was exceptionally cool was Sonny Melendrez who let me sit in on his nighttime show on multiple occasions.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 15