I needed speakers for my mobile disco setup and Cerwin Vega were the state of the art at the time. I reached deep into my pockets, drove to Pacific Stereo and bought four of those monsters that had horns, fifteen-inch woofers and weighed more than eighty pounds each. They sounded great but needed an amp to drive them so I picked up a Crown DC 300 and, just for backup, a Marantz 125-watt home receiver.
I spent the best part of a day soldering and checking all the cables until I was certain that everything was in place and working, and now Dick Sheppard’s Mobile Disco was ready to hit the road. I had spent every cent I had on this gear. If the gigs didn’t work out I’d have to ask Ron Newman for a loan just to get through the month.
But the gigs did work out and soon I found myself booked every Friday and Saturday night, and with the prices I charged for a disco show, starting at $300 and going up to $600, I was making amazing money.
My hand-built mobile disco system
Most of the party planners in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills were recommending me and even my weekday schedule was filling up; disco fashion shows at Robinson’s and Nordstrom stores, movie premiere events and album release parties, including for Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi with their debut Blues Brothers’ album, Briefcase full of Blues.
I did the arithmetic and realized that with all this business coming in and the gigs I was having to turn away, it was actually costing me money to work at The Red Onion, so I gave Gary Gunn and Ron Newman my notice and took the chance and struck out on my own.
After so many successful parties I began getting referral after referral. It reached the point that I was getting enquiries from people wanting to throw a disco party on nights when I was already booked. I hated to lose that potential client and their business but I couldn’t clone myself so I did the next best thing; I taught my girlfriend how to DJ and had her pick up the excess gigs.
Katy was a natural. She had been to most of my shows so she knew how to read the crowd and structure the flow of the music through the night. After just a couple of solo gigs she became a great DJ and very comfortable on the microphone and within just a few weeks clients were asking for her by name.
With Katy getting not just my overflow but also her own gigs, it meant I had to build a second DJ console from scratch, so I had my father send over a Citronic mixer from England along with two four-channel “chase” units and sixty feet of rope lights. When it all came together it was the best looking and sounding mobile disco I had ever seen.
With two complete units and two DJs I couldn’t just call it Dick Sheppard’s Mobile Disco anymore so I borrowed the name of the company I’d worked for back in the UK and Soundwave Mobile Discos was reborn in California.
The celebrity parties continued and I spun for “the Penguin”— Dodger baseman Ron Cey, Jim Nabors, Gene Simmons and Diana Ross, Regis Philbin, Mac Davis and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Zsa Zsa Gabor held the party in her two-level home in Beverly Hills. While her guests dined upstairs I set up my mobile disco downstairs in the game room. I was the only one there until a young black guy came in and joined me. He asked if it was okay if he looked through my records and I told him no problem. He pulled out a couple of singles and wanted to know if I would play them for him. They were two of my biggest tracks, Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” and Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” As the songs played he started to dance to them.
Watching Michael Jackson out there, alone, on the dance floor, putting together moves, stopping, correcting himself and then doing them again until he was satisfied is burned indelibly into my mind. As Marvin Gaye finished I told Michael that I had The Jacksons’ brand-new Destiny album to which he got excited and asked for “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).” He had no hesitation dancing to this; he had already perfected the moves for his own song and he floated over the dance floor as he sang and spun to the beat.
Michael walked over to me at my booth setup as the last notes of The Jacksons’ hit faded out.
“Do you have a cassette player?” Michael asked.
I said yes and pointed to the Panasonic beneath my console.
“Okay,” said Michael. “I’ll be right back!” He raced away up the stairs.
Within two minutes he lived up to his word and reappeared clutching a cassette. He handed it to me.
“Could you play this? It’s a track I was working on today.”
I slipped in the cassette and pressed play. I wish I could tell you the name of the song, but it was the first time I’d heard it and I was just too busy taking it all in to remember, but it was either “Rock with You,” “Off the Wall” or “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough.” I was mesmerized seeing Michael out there, singing a little, dancing a few beats then raising his hand to me.
“Can you stop it and play it over?” he asked.
Sure. It was just me and him and as far as I was concerned I would happily play it all night. I rewound the tape and restarted it. At exactly the same spot Michael had me stop the tape again.
“Sounds great, Michael,” I said.
“No,” he shook his head, “it doesn’t. The strings fade up. They need to come in with a strong attack and be much louder right after the break. Can you play it again and when I point to you can you turn the volume all the way up please?”
I did as instructed and Michael clapped his hands.
“So much better,” he cried out happily. “I’ll get that fixed.”
I stayed quiet. What was I going to say—good? It already sounded incredible to me.
For the next twenty minutes we talked about the music scene, disco and funk. Michael told me how much he liked English people and how great the audiences had been when The Jackson 5 toured the UK. “More people came to see us than saw The Beatles,” he said proudly. “And I met the Queen. Do you know her?”
Sadly I had to tell him that we were not acquainted.
All too soon we were interrupted by the guests coming downstairs for Zsa Zsa’s disco party, amongst them my all-time favorite actor, Sean Connery. It was a night for my personal record books.
I thought my time with Michael was done. After all, I was just a hired hand and most celebs never stay in touch, but three days later I received a call from Epic Records saying that Michael had requested I DJ the platinum album presentation party that the label was throwing for The Jacksons to certify their latest record selling more than one million copies. The record executive then said mysteriously, “You’ll have to get FBI clearance for the party.”
The event was being staged inside the vault of City National Bank in Beverly Hills. Michael, Randy, Marlon, Tito, Jackie and I were to wait inside the vault with all my DJ gear set up, along with rope lights, fog machine and a single-beam red LASER. When the door of the vault opened I’d hit the music and The Jacksons would dance out through the fog and LASER to “Blame It on the Boogie.” And because we were not bank employees and were being left alone in a vault for an unspecified length of time, we had to be screened to make sure we – The Jackson gang - were not potential bank robbers.
After their appearance and the platinum album presentation, everyone would move to the lobby where I would have another full sound system and lighting rig set up and then DJ a disco party for The Jacksons and all the invited guests and press. It was a lot of responsibility that would entail using top-of-the-line gear and I knew I would need help.
A couple of months before I had been approached by Tim Mahoney and Mark Rowlands, two English transplants to LA, to join forces with their rapidly growing disco company, Towards 2000. They had invested in great equipment and already had a lot of gigs on their books but as good as they were, they didn’t feel that being the front person, the DJ, was for them. They were more into growing the business which they were both exceptional at.
Their idea was to join their business skills with my DJ reputation to create an unstoppable force in mobile DJing. I put off deciding on this as Katy and I were doing so well by ourselves, but in t
his situation, partnering with Tim and Mark made perfect sense.
We met up at their small showroom in North Hollywood and struck a deal. Soundwave Mobile Discos merged with Towards 2000 and now there would be no event too big for us to handle.
The Jacksons’ party went flawlessly and TV footage from it was shown around the world. The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about the party on July 31, 1979.
The headline was “Rent-a-disco: Dance Party Comes Home” and the article featured a big picture of me DJing in front of the lighted Jacksons logo with the caption:
At The Jacksons’ disco party in City National Bank in Beverly Hills, Towards 2000 disc jockey, Dick Sheppard, starts a record on part of the $25,000 worth of traveling equipment the company uses. We were making waves.
George Lucas booked me to DJ his Christmas party for Skywalker Sound in San Francisco and Mark, Tim and I drove up there with all the gear doing terrible Darth Vader impressions the entire length of the 5 freeway.
Clubs began contracting with Towards 2000 to supply equipment for their discos and I designed a number of sound systems including one for a bar in Torrance and another for the first disco that opened in Anchorage. Mark and I flew up to Alaska in the dead of winter to oversee the installation and to train their DJ.
When we returned there was a message waiting for us from the Playboy Mansion—Hugh Hefner wanted us to do a sound and lighting installation at his famed home in Holmby Hills.
Driving into the mansion through the security gates and up the long curved driveway was nothing short of mind-blowing. It felt like stepping back in time to visit a stately chateau in France; that is, if the chateau was populated by nearly naked Playboy bunnies! Inside we were shown the organ room—literally that, a massive church pipe organ—and the inner sanctum of Hugh’s bedroom.
He wanted his church organ augmented by hidden amplifiers and speakers and a light system designed to shine down inside the organ pipes and “dance” with the music. Upstairs he wanted to replace his existing speakers with a new sound system that hooked up with his three televisions in the bedroom. We took measurements and notes and returned a week later to do the two-day installation.
With Olivia Newton-John
Another huge name came into the picture when Elton John booked me to play his thirty-third (actually billed as thirty-three and a third—the speed of a vinyl LP) birthday party at Le Dome in Beverly Hills, and as the word continued to spread Towards 2000 also became the recommended DJ company for LA’s restaurant to the stars, Spago.
Many other celebrity parties followed including one for Olivia Newton-John who was red-hot after her massive success with Grease.
I was making money, business was booming and I wasn’t happy.
It wasn’t Katy or Mark or Tim who were making me unhappy; it was me. I had come to America to get on the radio and for the past year I’d done nothing to make that happen. Sure, I could stay with Towards 2000 and continue DJing live and probably make more money doing that than if I landed a radio job but it wasn’t just about the money. It was the promise I had made to myself. I was no longer pursuing my dream; I was letting myself down.
I have few fears, but one that terrifies me is the fear of regret. If you don’t at least attempt to chase your dreams then how will you face yourself when you are older? Too many people live a would-have, could-have, should-have life—I saw that all the time growing up in England where fear of failure stifles you from even trying. Was I letting my runaway success in one area distract me from my true goal? There was only one thing I could do and that’s get out there and try all over again.
With this re-energized drive I locked myself in my home studio and worked on a new radio demo tape. A week later I was ready to walk the streets of Hollywood, cap in hand, and ask the radio programmers to please listen to my tape.
But no one would. There was no interest. My knuckles became bloodied from knocking on all the doors. One radio station after another would politely tell me to go away. No, I couldn’t try out on an overnight spot for no pay just to show them what I could do. It was very nice that I DJ’d all those big parties but that means nothing to us.
I was at my lowest when I went back to KMET, the Mighty Met, at Metromedia Square. Through some confusion at the front desk, I was shown into the program director’s office at that powerhouse rock station.
The PD was something of a rarity at the time in radio; she was female. She was a good-looking redhead who had carved out a major niche in the FM rock market as the talented program director of that legendary station. I hoped that just as she had come up through the ranks, paid her dues and then shattered the glass ceiling that had prevented women from running radio stations, she would have some sympathy for my story and ongoing struggle.
I spoke to her about my years as a DJ in Europe and America and slid her my resume, card, press cuttings and tape. Without even looking at them she put her hand on the envelope and pushed them all back to me. I’ll never forget her words as they cut through my soul and dashed everything I’d worked for.
“I don’t need any of this,” she said. “Because you’ll never be a DJ in this town with that accent.” She almost seemed to enjoy watching my obvious disappointment as she waved me away and went back to her work.
Minutes later, I stood on the dirty sidewalk at the corner of Sunset and Van Ness burning with anger as I looked up at the Metromedia sign. “Fuck you,” I thought. “One day you can sing along with me on the radio.” I didn’t know how, but I was more determined than ever to make that happen. I hadn’t come this far to give up now.
It was a few days after my birthday in 1980 that I heard the promo on KWST. “We’re looking for the best unknown DJ in Southern California. Win cash and a one hour slot on LA’s finest rock station, K-West. Call for more information.”
Within minutes I had found out what the contest rules were and what they were looking for. They needed a cassette, no longer than ten minutes, showing off your voice and DJ delivery. Simple. I could do that. But I wanted to send in something that stood out from the thousands of tapes that they were certain to receive.
I hunkered down and produced two unique KWST jingles and opened my tape with one of them. I then went into a voice break that teased “a K-West exclusive! A remix coming up of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall.’” This was a huge risk that could be looked upon as being almost sacrilegious, messing with a major track from such a legendary band, but maybe it just might be enough to keep them listening through my entire tape.
I got to work on the remix, extending vocal bridges “We don’t need no education, cation, cation,” working in sound effects of pigs grunting during “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding,” and phasing the beat so it would drop in and out. It took me a long time on the analog equipment I was working with but after much sweat and second guessing, it was done.
I sent in the audition cassette along with a high-speed reel-to-reel in case they wanted to play the remix itself on the air, and I waited. The day finally arrived when they announced that they would reveal the winners that evening at 8pm. Winners? Katy and I looked at each other. Wasn’t there just meant to be one winner?
At eight o’clock J. J. Jackson hit the airwaves and told his listeners that they had two winners for the best unknown DJ in Southern California. Both would get cash and a one-hour shift on KWST. He’d have their names right after this break. Yikes. It was the longest five minutes ever. J. J. came back on the air and gave the name of the first winner. It wasn’t me. Okay, the odds had just lengthened.
“. . . and our second winner is . . . Dick Sheppard.”
I think he carried on talking but Katy and I didn’t hear another word he said. We were holding each other, screaming and jumping up and down. Finally I was going to get an hour on a major station in Los Angeles. It was what I had been chasing for so long, it was the reason I had left my parents, my country and my career in Europe. I would have sixty minutes to pro
ve that it hadn’t all been in vain.
A week later, on July 28 I was at KWST ready to go on the air with J. J. Jackson. He was a big, friendly bear of a man who greeted you with a huge smile and words of encouragement. And he knew his music. I remember thinking how fortunate I was to have him set up the board for my on-air DJ session.
I had studied KWST’s format at length and had been told I could pick whatever songs I wanted from their playlist for my show. I’d done the math in my head. An average of twelve minutes of commercials in the hour meant I had forty-eight minutes for music and talk. I picked a couple of mainstream rock hits from Boston and 38 Special, ‘Suffragette City’ from David Bowie because it came from the Ziggy Stardust album which featured David on the cover standing outside a recording studio which was also called K-West, and the title track from a just released album by AC/DC, Back In Black. No one was going to be sleeping during my hour.
The show flew by and despite my nerves I had no major problems. I knew Katy was recording the show back home in the apartment, but I was so happy when J. J. Jackson handed me two cassettes.
“One is scoped,” he explained. “Just you talking, most of the music is cut out; and the other is the complete show. Hope that’s good for you.”
I was on cloud nine when I left the studio.
The next day I made a dozen dubs of the scoped cassette of my hour on the air in Los Angeles at KWST and sent copies along with my resume, to radio stations in Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, San Francisco, San Diego, Bakersfield and Fresno.
On the morning of July 31, 1980 my phone rang. A cheerful voice came on the line.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 18