“This is Dave Lawrence. I’m the program director at Magic 98 in Bakersfield. Would you like to talk?”
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK
It took me ninety minutes to drive to Bakersfield. I was pleased that it wasn’t too far from Los Angeles because I knew I would be coming back. That had always been my goal and it wasn’t changing now.
The offices for Magic 98 were located in downtown Bakersfield. I cruised through the town and saw nothing but faded store fronts and low-rise buildings, two and three stories at the most, none of the gleaming high rises that were popping up all over Los Angeles and Century City. The center of Bakersfield felt old, as if time had stopped for it in the fifties and the town was resigned to being stuck there.
As I pulled up at a stoplight I saw that all the vehicles around me were pickups, their windows rolled down and Buck Owens’s hillbilly twang blaring out proudly for all to hear. Several of the trucks carried migrant workers squatting in the flatbeds. I had arrived in cowboy country, California, but the horses had left and had been replaced by Dodges and Chevys.
Dave Lawrence was happy to see me. Dave was the PD and morning drive DJ on Magic 98, and as our meeting got under way at 1pm he made sure to let me know he had just finished his show an hour before.
“We work six hour shifts at Magic,” Dave explained. “I’ve been looking for a nighttime guy for a while now. You’ll be working six until midnight. Would that be OK?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. It sounded like he was offering me the job. This was going well so far!
“We’re owned by a company that’s actually two brothers, Anthony and Rogers Brandon. That’s Rogers with an s, not Roger. Took me a while to get used to that,” Dave laughed. “But both are very nice people and leave us alone as long as we do our jobs and get their names right. The lack of interference from the owners is pretty rare these days. Do you know our format?”
I’d looked up Magic when I’d put together the list of stations to send my demos to. I answered Dave with the one word that kept popping up to describe KMGN Magic 98.
“Rock?”
Dave nodded, “Yes, it’s rock; in fact that’s our slogan, ‘The Rock of the Valley,’ but we’re not a regular rock station like KMET or the one that your tape was from, K-West. We play hard rock exclusively, the harder the better. We day-part a little, being a bit softer in the morning and then going all out at night. Your job as the music director will be to listen to the new stuff that comes in and decide what time of day those tracks go on the air.”
My head started to spin. “Music director?”
“Bakersfield is a small market. We all wear more than one hat here. I’m the morning guy, the program director and do some sales on the side to supplement my income. You’ll be the nighttime jock and the music director, and maybe you’ll find something else you’ll want to do after you’ve been here a while.”
This was sounding like it was a done deal. But picking the music for a hard-rock station was not something that was in my wheelhouse. I was Disco Dick. I could put together sets with Anita Ward, Chic and Sylvester all day long, but hard rock?
“What’s your criteria for adding songs?” I asked.
“Good question. Come with me.”
I followed Dave through the bustling radio station into his office. He sat at his desk and gestured for me to sit down across from him. He flipped through a stack of records and pulled out Ted Nugent’s Double Live Gonzo. He slipped one of the discs on his turntable, switched it on and dropped the needle into the middle of “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” Instantly the room quaked as a blistering guitar solo roared out of the speakers, rattling the walls and threatening to dislodge the posters and pictures hanging there. Dave looked up at me and yelled over the screaming licks.
“That’s as mellow as we get.”
I forced a smile and screamed back at him over the uproar, “I can do that.” Inside I knew I had some serious learning to do!
I had already decided that if I got the job I would only spend one year in Bakersfield to get the experience I needed before leaving and going back to try again in Los Angeles. I could put up with “the Nuge” and his ilk for twelve months if that’s what was required.
Dave’s offer was simple. Start as soon as possible, do my music duties from noon until five, then go on the air at six and rock the San Joaquin Valley through until midnight. He took a long breath and his tone dropped a little. The tough part was coming.
“It’s not a lot of money. It’s Bakersfield, so it’s a lot cheaper to live out here, but we can still only pay you $800.”
The numbers ran through my head. That was about what I was making now every week with my mobile DJ bookings and this would be a lot more hours, but the idea of hard work didn’t scare me. I was willing to work twenty-four hours a day if necessary to break into radio.
“That’s okay. I can live with that.”
“You understand that’s per month?” Dave added.
So much for my math. I would be going from living at the beach, making nearly $40,000 a year to a dustbowl in the desert for less than two hundred bucks a week. But if you really believe in your dreams you have to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices. I didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll do it,” I said and reached out my hand.
Dave took it and beamed. “I’m so glad,” he said. “You’ll start next Monday, a week from today. It’ll be great to have you here.”
With those words and that handshake I was to begin my professional career in radio.
The next few days rank among the busiest of my life. I had to tell Mark and Tim at Towards 2000 that I was leaving, let Katy know that we were moving out of LA, and do multiple journeys back and forth speeding over the California Grapevine to find an apartment in Bakersfield and move all our stuff.
Mark and Tim were cool when I broke the news to them. It really wasn’t a surprise as they knew how driven I was to get into radio and after winning that slot on KWST they could feel it coming.
I sold them my mobile DJ gear and we met with an up-and-coming club promoter, John Dunn, to help find a couple of local club DJs who could cover my gigs for me. Mark pointed out that a few of the existing clients had insisted that I be their DJ and there would be no getting out of those engagements, so I promised I’d drive back and spin at those parties for Towards 2000, and to be quite honest I was actually glad to do that as I knew the money would come in handy based on the pittance Magic 98 would be paying me.
Katy was thrilled for me and I gave her the choice of whether she wanted to come to Bakersfield or not. As wonderful as she was, we were both young and were already having our occasional ups and downs, plus her family lived in San Pedro and she would be leaving them behind. But Katy didn’t hesitate; if I was moving then she was coming with me and I was happy she was.
We rented an apartment right off of the 99 freeway and started to get it ready to settle into. It was mid-way through our move that I found out that Magic 98’s on-air studio was not in the building where I had met with Dave Lawrence. The programming and sales offices of Magic were housed inside that building which was actually the base for another Rogers Brandon station, KERN. The studio for Magic was out of town, way out of town, in the middle of nowhere—Shafter, California, population 7,010.
It was a plain concrete-block building barely eighteen by eighteen feet, which contained the transmitter, a studio, a tiny bathroom and a cluster of black widow spiders. It was topped by a 220-foot-high broadcast tower. To get there I had to head up the 99 then drive through endless tracts of barren fields that made it look as though the farmers were spending their days attempting to grow sand. All in all, it was nearly thirty miles from our apartment. But I had moved to Bakersfield to learn and pay my dues and that’s just what I was going to do.
Every day I would head to the KERN building and work with their production director learning how to edit, loop and splice. In the afternoons I would go out on sales calls to find out the inner wor
kings of selling a radio station. I would listen to the music that came in from the record companies as soon as it arrived in the mail and on Tuesdays I’d take calls from their promo people then report our “adds” to Magic’s playlist to both Billboard and Cashbox. And Sunday through Friday as the sun started to set into the endless desert I’d race out to Shafter to be on the air from 6pm until midnight, rocking the valley with Ozzy, Priest, Motorhead, Leppard, KISS, Scorpions and Zep.
Katy and I quickly felt the financial pinch from the meager wage I was bringing home each week. After taxes, social security, etc. I was barely clearing $135. We had the rent, utilities, gas and a car payment to make with that. Soon I was using my credit cards to support us and quickly running up a growing monthly balance that the banks were more than happy to carry at a 21% interest rate.
There was a Wendy’s right down the street from our apartment and that became our regular place for dinner. We’d get a single to-go container from the salad bar and cram it full of chicken strips, beets, tomatoes, garbanzo beans, carrots, eggs and croutons and bring it home along with a dozen packets of dressing. We’d buy a head of lettuce at the supermarket because it was cheap and saved us space in that precious to-go container for the other more expensive items, and make a salad that would last us two days. We stole teabags and sachets of coffee from the KERN offices along with toilet paper and kitchen supplies—anything to make sure that we could pay that month’s rent.
In the Magic 98 studios, Shafter, California
In December, Dave received another job offer and left Magic 98. That’s when I realized there were only two kinds of radio DJs in Bakersfield, and that’s those on their way up or those on their way down. The old joke there was you could always spot a radio DJ’s car. It was the one with a U-Haul trailer permanently attached to it. I related to that 100%. Eight more months and I would be gone too.
With Dave across the country, the owners of the station approached me with a proposal. They wanted me to take over as program director and morning drive DJ. And with the increased responsibility I would get a 25% pay raise. Now I was up at four-thirty, on the air until noon and then in the offices of KERN until at least seven at night. I did a quick calculation; factoring in all the extra time that had been placed on my schedule my salary increase came out to a princely sixty-two cents an hour, but I didn’t complain because Katy and I were grateful to have that extra fifty dollars a week.
My first job was to find someone to fill my vacated nighttime shift. I moved the midday guy to nights and filled his position by having Katy take it. She quickly got a handle on the rock format and proved to be a natural on the air and an amazingly good radio personality.
One of the few good things about Bakersfield is its proximity to Los Angeles. It means that if a band is on tour and they want to pick up an extra show, then Bakersfield is always available and has a built-in audience of people starved of excitement.
With heavy metal having a huge following in the desert it made good sense for the record companies to have their acts play Bakersfield, and naturally, they would approach us at Magic 98 as “the rock of the Valley” to sponsor and promote the shows.
This gave us huge visibility for the station and for me it marked my first experiences of walking out on stage in front of thousands of people to introduce their favorite group. Amongst the ones that I was privileged to work with when they came to town were Motorhead, The Babies and Ted Nugent. When I was asked to introduce the Nuge, Ted took me aside to explain his opening and make sure we were on the same page.
“Make sure you finish with my name, Ted Nugent, because that will be my cue, then you run to stage left as quickly as you can,” he told me. “That way you definitely won’t get hurt.”
Ted’s concern was that I didn’t get burned, and I certainly appreciated that. His opening was spectacular. As I wrapped up my introduction by screaming his name, he swung down from the rafters like Tarzan, dressed only in a loin cloth. He dropped from the rope, grabbed a bow and arrow that was waiting on stage, set fire to the arrow and shot it across stage to a target that had been soaked in kerosene. As the arrow hit, the target exploded in a massive fireball.
It was a phenomenal start to a show and the whole audience jumped to their feet as one, gasping at what they had seen. It was also a very expensive stunt, because in addition to the props needed, a fire marshal, three firefighters and a paramedic had to be present at the side of the stage in case anything went wrong. Fortunately, that night at the Bakersfield Sports Arena, Ted Nugent’s aim was perfect and set the tone for a “balls to the wall” rock show.
Interviews with the bands were as important to us at the station as they were for the groups themselves. Their presence on our airwaves gave us credibility and we gave them a chance to promote their latest album or tour to a big audience.
In February of 1981 we had been hyping for weeks that one of the gods of heavy metal, Judas Priest, were coming in to the station to be live on my morning show. They were releasing the follow up to an album that had been gigantic for them and for us, British Steel. The new LP, Point of Entry, was coming out the following week on February 26 and they were trekking across the country making sure their fans knew about it.
They were due to arrive at the studio at 7am which is normally the time a touring metal band would be going to bed. Seven came and went, and no Judas Priest.
At seven-twenty, my counterpart, the morning guy from KERN, called me on the hotline.
“Do you know anything about five guys in leather doing an interview with you this morning?” he asked.
“Absolutely. That would be Judas Priest. I’m waiting for them to get here and go on the air.”
“Well, right now they are standing outside the KERN building.”
“Oh my God, how long have they been there?” I asked.
“Their car dropped them off about fifteen minutes ago and left and they’ve been banging on the door but I didn’t know who the hell they were. I thought they were a biker gang or something, so I wasn’t going to let them in. After all, it’s just me here until eight. What do you want to do?”
The record company’s limo driver had made the same mistake as I had and thought that Magic’s broadcast studios were in the same building as KERN instead of all the way out in Shafter. So Judas Priest had been dropped off in error and now had no way of contacting the driver to have him return for them. All I could think off was that this multi-million album selling band had come all the way from Birmingham, England, woke up with the dawn to make a scheduled interview with a little radio station in a one-horse town and now was pounding on the windows, pleading to get out of the cold and to be let inside the building.
“Let me call Katy,” I said. “Tell them someone will be there in minutes to get them and bring them to Magic.”
I hung up, called Katy and stressed, “Get there as quick as you can!”
I kept the outside door of Magic’s little concrete bunker propped open so I could greet them as soon as Katy pulled up. Sure enough, forty-five minutes later her tiny Toyota Tercel squealed to a halt right outside our breeze-block building. I had to stop myself from laughing as I saw Katy and five big guys dressed head-to-toe in studded black leather, chains and boots try and extract themselves from that little Japanese import. It was a clown car full of five of the world’s most popular heavy metal rockers. than an hour promoting their upcoming tour, album and then taking questions and talking with listeners live on the air. They could not have been nicer and despite their escapade in the desert they went on to see their new album be certified “gold” within a week of its release.
With Rob Halford of Judas Priest outside Magic 98 with DJ Katy’s little car! Rob Halford and the rest of Priest stayed on the radio with me for more
As program director and on-air talent, plus doing promotions and appearances, my schedule had become non-stop. It was rare I had a minute to myself as I was all about learning every aspect of the station and of radio. Katy was wor
king hard as well; she was on the air right after me and at nights would often have to go straight to the production studios at KERN to do voice-overs for local commercials.
All of this created a huge problem for us on a personal level; now I would only see Katy for a few minutes when I was handing over my shift to her at noon and then again when I stumbled in to our apartment at night, too exhausted to do anything but fall into bed and sleep.
Time became our enemy and those moments we had shared in the past—road trips to surf spots in Mexico, hikes along the coastline, movie nights and lazy dinners—were long gone. Now we were like strangers who pass each other at the same time each day as they travel to and from their work.
The station took off in the ratings book, but as Magic climbed, Katy and I began our long, inevitable fall as we started arguing more and drawing further apart.
It was the middle of June when some insignificant spark ignited into a raging blaze between us and we laid into each other with a verbal assault that would have been wrong to launch at your enemy, never mind your lover. But anger is an evil beast and we both gave each other as good as we got.
Two days later, our emotions still flayed raw, I knew it was time to have that inevitable talk with Katy about the future.
“We can’t go on like this,” I said. “Either you move out or I move out. I really don’t care which. Let me know by the end of the month. I’m good with whatever you decide.”
Katy was a smart, clever girl and said nothing in reply. She didn’t want to unwittingly start World War III all over again. And for the next two weeks we attempted to continue on as if nothing had happened. But some things you can’t forget or ignore, and silence can be as powerful as a scream.
On Wednesday, July 1, 1981, I told Rogers Brandon that I was giving the company one month’s notice and leaving Magic 98. He was upset and wanted me to stay.
“We thought you liked it here,” Brandon said.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 19