The exception was the program director at KNAC FM 105.5 in Long Beach. Jimmy Christopher actually seemed interested in the huge numbers that Z93 had pulled and set up an appointment to meet with me as soon as I was back in LA. That gave me hope and as I left SLO town and cruised south on California Coast Highway 1, I was filled with excitement at the unknown prospects ahead and finally returning to Los Angeles and the promised land.
KNAC was located just three blocks from the ocean on the tenth floor of the F&M bank building at 320 Pine Avenue. The on-air studio was huge and the offices spacious, if a little run down, from too many years of partying and abuse. I met with Jimmy Christopher a little after ten on Monday morning. Jimmy was a sports guy at heart but loved music and was passionate about it. He also was the afternoon drive DJ as Jimmy “the Saint” Christopher. We immediately clicked and talked for just a few minutes before he offered me the job. Then it was déjà vu all over again.
“It’ll be a six-hour shift,” Jimmy said, “Midnight until six, and then you hand over to Norm McBride. It’s won’t be a lot of money because, as you probably know, our ratings aren’t that great because of our limited signal.”
Jimmy wasn’t kidding about that. The FCC regulates every radio station in the USA and KNAC’s transmitter power was so low that it could only be heard up and down LA’s coastline. Drive a few miles inland and they were gone in a crackle of static. As a result, their advertising income was drastically restricted and so was their budget.
“I can only pay you a thousand a month for five overnights a week. That would be Monday through Friday. Will that work?”
It was a radio gig in Los Angeles. This was the reason I had come to America. I wasn’t going to turn it down no matter how small the salary.
“When do I start?” I said.
“How about tonight?” replied Jimmy. “The guy we’ve been using will be more than happy to go back to his wife and kids. He’s been bugging me for months to return to weekends.”
“I can do tonight, boss,” I smiled. “Can I check out the studios?”
“Sure,” said Jimmy. “I’ll take you in there and introduce you to Sylvia Amerito. She’s on the air now.”
Technically it was Tuesday morning, February 2, 1982 that I made my debut on LA radio doing the overnights on KNAC “Rock and Rhythm.” The format was rock, punk and new wave. I had a lot of freedom on the air—even more after 2am when I knew that the bosses were asleep—and anyway Jimmy wanted his station to be unique in the market; that’s why he’d instituted the format of having the newest music available played right next to “hip” rock standards.
It wouldn’t be unusual to tune into KNAC and hear The B-52s “Planet Claire” followed by The Beatles “Back in the USSR” into Elvis Costello “Pump It Up”, Romeo Void “Never Say Never” and Van Halen “You Really Got Me”.
Our main radio competitor was KROQ in Pasadena who also played new wave and punk. KROQ was famous in the industry as being totally disorganized and constantly on the verge of going bankrupt. The urban myth—which proved to be true—was that they were so behind on their rent that they had actually moved their studios across town in the middle of the night to avoid being evicted and having their equipment seized.
Stories of bounced checks, FCC lawsuits and days when the station just turned off its transmitter because they couldn’t pay their electrical bill were known to everyone. But somehow despite all of that they were starting to make an impact with the younger audience in Southern California. The kids didn’t care about the business side of radio; they just wanted to hear cool music that no one else was playing.
Jimmy wanted to stay ahead of KROQ musically and encouraged me to bring in new music from England to play first. He was talking to the right person as my Dad continued to send me new songs on a regular basis.
On my overnight show I debuted a number of great records and twelve-inches including Depeche Mode’s “See You,” Fun Boy Three’s “It Ain’t What You Do” and Haircut 100’s “Love Plus One.” I started combing the record stores and found some gems from closer to home including a local group called Berlin who had a song called “Tell Me Why.” I liked it but thought the B side was even better so I flipped it over and started playing that track every night. Jimmy heard it on my show and had it added to KNAC’s playlist so suddenly it was all over the station. Tune in to KNAC in the spring of 1982 and very soon you would hear “The Metro” booming out of your radio speakers.
The biggest problem about doing overnights at KNAC was my commute from Long Beach back to Tim’s apartment in Sherman Oaks. I would hit the 710 then the 405 starting at around six twenty in the morning and anyone who has ever faced the morning rush hour on the freeways in LA can feel my pain. It would take a minimum of an hour and a half to make it the thirty-nine miles to the valley.
It was all I could do to keep my eyes open on that stop-and-go crawl of a drive and the only thing that kept me going was tuning into the energy and humor of the morning team on our competitor, KROQ.
Ramondo and Evans were fresh, funny and unlike anyone else on radio. I couldn’t believe the stuff they got away with. They made my long, tedious drive bearable. But by the time I arrived at Tim’s apartment and crashed on my ever-present foam mattress on the floor of my room I was ready to sleep the rest of the morning away.
Tim and Mark’s company was going gangbusters. They were happy to have me working with them again and before February was over I was back DJing four nights a week at private parties and discos. They introduced me to another DJ they used, Egil Alvik, “the Swedish Eagle,” and we became instant friends. Amazingly we had both arrived in America on the same day—November 16, 1976, within an hour of each other. It was fun to practice my limited Swedish with Egil and he made sure that I had an instant refresher course of all the bad words.
I also got to know John Dunn, the club promoter, really well and spun for him every Monday in Encino at Le Hot Club. I had no idea that John and his one-club gig would be the ticket to everything I’d been looking for. My set would be from eight until eleven and then I’d race to my car and shoot down the freeway to Long Beach to make it in time for my overnight radio show. As the weeks sped by the hours began to take their toll.
One night in late March I was already more than halfway through my overnight shift and it was a little after four with still no hint of any morning light to chase away the darkness.
I cued up a record from one of my favorite rock bands of the late sixties, The Doors. It was the opening track of side two of an album that I consider a “must have” for anyone’s record collection, The Doors’ Greatest Hits. The cut I put on was “Break on Through.” It had always been a song I loved, from the beginning bossa nova beat through to the Vox organ and Jim Morrison’s haunting vocals that build and build to become almost a primal scream. I introduced it on the air, cranked the studio speakers and leaned forward with my elbow on the console and put my head in my hand to enjoy that archetypical California sound.
The listeners got much more of the California sound than I did. When I opened my eyes “LA Woman” was playing, the final cut on the LP. I had fallen asleep during “Break on Through” and stayed asleep, sitting up, as the entire album side had tracked through. The most amazing thing to me was that “Break on Through” is less than two and a half minutes long; I had gone right out as if I’d been decked!
I jumped on the microphone as “LA Woman” faded away. “Great to hear an entire album side from one of LA’s most important bands. Kind of a mini nighttime concert from The Doors here on Rock and Rhythm, KNAC. I’m Dick Sheppard, and now, let’s cross the Atlantic and come up to date with The Human League.”
For the next couple of days I waited to get called out on what had happened but nothing came. No one had heard my screw up. No listeners had phoned in to make fun of me, no staff had been tuned in. Was I talking to myself? Is it radio if there is no one listening? I knew it would soon be time to move on again if, in the words of Jim Mo
rrison, I ever really wanted to “break on through.”
ON YOUR RADIO
It was John Dunn’s idea, but I was for it 100%. Le Hot Club was packed with the hip kids on the disco nights he promoted and John, ever the entrepreneur, saw a fresh opportunity with the rise of New Wave music and decided to expand to two nights a week with the second being a “New Wave dance party.”
He needed to get the word out quickly, so he bought time on KROQ. I’d asked him to advertise on KNAC but John said no because its low signal didn’t reach that far inland, while KROQ and its transmitter blanketed Encino in the San Fernando Valley where Le Hot Club was located.
John’s brainwave was that I voice the commercials for him. I didn’t care that the real reason he wanted me to do the commercials was that he would be saving around $400 a week by not having to pay one of the KROQ jocks to use their name to endorse the club; instead I was thrilled to have the opportunity to get my voice heard on a station with a decent signal that could be picked up all over Southern California rather than staying stuck on one that was limited by the FCC to just a few towns up and down the coast.
John set up a time for me to go to the KROQ building and record his commercial so on an unusually warm day in late March of 1982 I headed out to Pasadena. Like many American cities at that time, Pasadena was run-down and had sections filled with homeless people and drug addicts sleeping on sidewalks and in doorways; its main thoroughfare, Colorado Boulevard, had been taken over to the point that it had become a no-go area and was unsafe to visit at night.
As part of a major, concerted effort to turn things around, the city council was instigating a number of far-reaching changes to Pasadena including introducing a very confusing one-way system that had just been implemented so try as I might using my trusty but now outdated Thomas Guide map book and John’s hand-written directions I couldn’t find my way through the maze to Los Robles Avenue.
After circumnavigating the streets of the city three times I was so frustrated that I almost gave up and turned around. Instead I took a series of deep breaths, pulled into a gas station, found a pay phone and called KROQ’s office number.
Within moments I received directions that were completely different from John’s. I had actually passed KROQ twice and it was less than a half mile away. In minutes I was there and safely in the parking lot behind the building.
To say KROQ was underwhelming is an overstatement. Located above a hospital clothing supplier, “Look for Uniform Circus, then you’ve found us,” the receptionist told me, KROQ was reached through an unassuming ground-floor door with a hand-painted wooden KROQ sign above it, the only clue that a radio station existed within.
The stairway was covered with a worn and dirty avocado-green carpet and the walls were painted a deep plum purple. There had obviously been a contest to find the two most clashing colors in the world and this peculiar combo had won out.
The friendly receptionist, Angela, whom I’d spoken to on the phone just minutes before, greeted me with a smile from behind her aging wooden desk. “You found us?”
It was as much a question as a statement. Yeah, I was as amazed as her at how tricky it was getting around the Pasadena streets. She directed me to the production room barely ten feet behind the reception area.
As I walked down the corridor I realized I could see all the way from the front to the back of the building. It was less than fifty feet long and thirty feet wide! Where was the rest of the station?
I knocked on the production room door and John Logic waved me in. John was a tall, lanky surfer type who hadn’t been told I was coming but that didn’t perturb him; he seemed pleased to have the interruption. His acid-washed shorts and t-shirt fit in with the décor of the studio which was casual and young; posters of The Ramones and Gen X jostled for wall space with pinups and calendars of bikini babes. The room was small and basic—like the rest of KROQ—but everything you needed was right there.
John showed me how it all worked and then stunned me by saying, “You got it? I’m going for lunch.”
As he left me alone in the studio I was almost in shock. What? You’re leaving me with all this gear? What if I was to sneak out with a TEAC reel-to-reel recorder under my arm? But petty theft was not on the agenda today so I set to work on the two commercials. One was for “This Tuesday”; the other, for a “Tonight!” version.
I voiced the spots, laid down the tracks over some music borrowed from John’s production library albums and dubbed the finished ads onto two blank “carts.” I copied the typed format of the labels from the other commercial carts in the studio and awaited John’s return.
When he got back he was visibly impressed that I’d done all his work for him. I said I thought it was all in place except for the colored dots on the carts which I hadn’t been able to make sense of.
John explained, “That’s so we know the order of which commercials run first or last on the air. Red means they have music or are a beer or movie spot and those are exciting so they go first in a stop set; blue is a produced spot but nothing to jump up and down about, you know a car commercial or a sale at a store; and green is hideous like an insurance commercial or loan company! Those are cold reads, no music, just audience killers. Those go last.”
He pulled out two red dots and stuck them on my carts. I would be running first in a commercial block; the audience would have a chance to hear me before they tuned out to avoid the hard sell.
For the next month I went back every week to update the commercials. John Dunn didn’t pay me one cent to do them but that was okay. I got to know my way around KROQ and the staff became used to having me in their building. I would walk straight in from the street and get a happy wave from Angela without being questioned or even stopped.
During that time I found out just how disorganized KROQ really was. I’d thought John Logic was the production director, the guy who supervises the recording of the commercials, jingles, and “bits” that go on the air, but he wasn’t. KROQ didn’t have one. Instead, the DJs were responsible for recording their own commercials and at certain times of the day would have to battle to have access to that one little production room. And it wasn’t uncommon at KROQ to even have the salespeople push their way in there and dub spots for their clients.
I’d never seen anything like it before—not in Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo and certainly not at KNAC. But here we were in one of the world’s biggest radio markets at a station that had no rules. It was the wild west of radio and the sheriff had left town!
I got to know several of the jocks plus the station’s music director, the brilliant Larry Groves. One of the DJs from the morning show, Mike Evans of “Ramondo & Evans” came into the production room while I was there and asked if I was the guy with the English accent. When I replied yes—my voice giving me away—he wanted to know if I would cut “drops” for a couple of the morning show features that he and Ramondo, Raymond Bannister, did.
I was excited to do this for him. I had become a huge fan of Mike Evans on my morning commutes and I did my best to act as professionally as I could around him while all the time inside the little boy in me was screaming “Get his autograph!” But I restrained myself and casually asked exactly what he needed.
One recording he wanted was for a hilarious character Mike had created called Yolanda and the other was me saying his nickname in a very British accent, “Well, hello and good morning! You are listening to the Hose.” Liking what he heard he also had me track several variations of “Go to bed with April Whitney; wake up with Ramondo & Evans” that would act as promos and run on-air throughout the day on KROQ. Suddenly my voice was all over KROQ on virtually everyone’s shift.
Jimmy Christopher, the PD of KNAC, called me at home to chat and brought up that he was hearing me on KROQ. I explained about Le Hot Club and how it had all happened and instead of chewing me out, Jimmy was very supportive and wished me well. He made no threats against my job and if anything I felt encouraged.
Now I w
as in a situation where I would get off the air at KNAC at 6am and as I made my ninety-minute morning slog back to my apartment in Sherman Oaks I would listen to Ramondo & Evans and hear myself on the air at least twice an hour.
It was a month later, just a couple of days after my birthday, that Larry Groves came into the production room while I worked on a new promo for the morning show. “When you finish up in here Rick wants to see you in his office.” Larry was very matter of fact and didn’t wait for a reply before he left.
“Rick?” I thought. That could only mean Rick Carroll, the program director of KROQ. After all these weeks I still hadn’t met him so this was a big moment, unless he was going to kick me out of the station which was very possible.
Rick’s office was tiny and cramped and filled with gold and platinum albums. Unfortunately because of the lack of wall space they were just piled on the floor in a towering heap that looked as if they could fall over and come smashing down at any time. Two big speakers hung from the wall and on his desk a turntable fought for space with an unruly stack of papers that screamed out for organization.
Rick looked up and gazed questioningly at me through his long, curly hair, “You’re the English guy I’ve been hearing on the air?”
I nodded as Rick continued, “In the middle of June all the jocks are going away on a station trip to Hawaii for two weeks. I’ve got some local names to cover most of the daytime shifts like Elvira and the lead singer from Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman. But I’m short one person, and that’s someone to do Denise Westwood’s program from nine until noon. Do you want to do it?”
“Fuck yes I do!” Those were the words that instantly leapt into my brain but I managed to contain the extent of my excitement and answered in a semi-controlled manner, “Yeah, I could do that.”
Rick continued, “Good. Couple of things. We can’t pay you, so for the two weeks on the air you’ll be working for free. How do you feel about that?”
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 21