On the set of Square Pegs with The Waitresses – September 1982
MAD WORLD
It was a little before five in the afternoon and I was still at KROQ, locked in the production room working on features for tomorrow’s morning show with Raymond. There was a soft knock on the door and Katy leaned hesitantly inside.
“Dick—Richard,” she said, her voice subdued as it is so often when someone is the bearer of bad news. “Pat Welsh wants to see you in his office.”
I stood up and somehow knew immediately what I was about to hear. I looked Katy in eyes and said, “I’m either being fired or my dad’s dead.”
There was not a trace of humor in my voice. I knew for a fact that it had to be one of those two things.
Tears welled up in Katy’s eyes and I knew it was the worst possible scenario. I pushed past her and ran to Pat’s office as if my speed would change the news that I knew I was about to hear.
Pat stood there, waiting for me, behind his desk. His phone was off the hook. He looked down at it and said simply, “It’s your mother. I’ll leave you alone.” Pat left his office, shutting the door behind him.
I stared at the phone. I hated it. Picking it up was the last thing I wanted to do. If I smashed it or hurled it out of the window maybe that would silence the horrific message it held for me. But I could do neither; my mum was waiting to talk to me and now, more than ever before in her life, she needed to hear my voice even if I was dreading her words.
I picked up the phone, “Mum?”
“It’s your Dad,” the little voice said over the phone. “He’s gone. We’ve lost him.”
Somehow words formed in my mouth, “How?”
“He was in bed. One minute he was there with me and the next he was gone. I’m waiting for the doctor but the ambulance man said it was a heart attack.” She paused, not believing her own words, “He just died. My big, strong husband died. Reg is gone.”
The world became a tiny place at that moment. There was only my mother and I who existed, no one else, the two of us united by my father’s death, both of us also dying inside.
I forced myself to keep control, “How about Stephen? Have you told him?”
“He’s in the south of France with Winky. I can’t reach him.”
“Mum, I’m going to the airport right now to fly over and see you. I’ll be there tomorrow, I promise.”
“Thank you, my love. Travel safely, please.”
I hung up and left Pat’s office. He was waiting for me outside his door. He spoke first.
“Take as much time as you need. We’ll all be thinking of you.”
I raced home to Sherman Oaks, grabbed my passport, money and some clothes including my dark suit and hurried to LAX. I caught a flight leaving at 9:30 that got me into Heathrow the next afternoon.
It was pouring rain as I picked up a rental car and sped the 200 miles south to Torquay. The motorway had a speed limit of seventy but despite the weather I pushed “a ton”—one hundred miles an hour—most of the way. I tuned into BBC Radio One and Rosko’s Round Table was on. It was a weekly show that had celebrity guests reviewing new music. Rosko introduced a song that was about to be released the following week.
“Check this one out; it’s a band from Bath with their third single. Their first two didn’t do anything in the charts but they are hoping this one breaks that losing streak. They’re called Tears for Fears and this is “Mad World.””
The song came on and everything about it grabbed me, from the title, to the vocals, to the beat that matched the sweep of the wiper blades across the windshield as they battled the torrential rain.
To me I was living in a mad world. How could there be any sanity when this man who had done nothing but help people all his life, spent years serving in the military and worked on early radar to combat the German blitz and then raised his two boys in a house full of love and laughter was struck down and taken from us so young?
Curt Smith’s hauntingly beautiful voice tore through my heart as he sang about having no tomorrow. I felt the same way—how could there possibly be a tomorrow when my father, the person who had been responsible for my life, was no longer here to share it with me?
On the plane over from LA, I had been unable to sleep for any length of time and during those restless moments images of my Dad had filled my mind; in them he was still alive, still so vibrant and strong, so I totally related to Curt and Roland’s words as their song continued to speak just to me that the dreams in which they were dying were the best that they had ever had. Now it would only be in my dreams that I could find happiness and see my father again. Would those be my best moments?
My body shook as tears poured from my eyes and I became two people; one who was in an instinctive mode driving that speeding car as it cut through the downpour, and the other, a lost little boy running home to get out of the rain and find comfort and safety with his heartbroken mother.
Mrs. Northcott, ever the kind neighbor, was sitting with Mum when I arrived a little after six that evening. She gave me a hug, went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea and left Mum and me alone.
My mother told me the story of what had happened. Some of it I knew from Dad’s letters.
Stephen and his girlfriend/ mother of his child, William, who was barely one year old, were away on an extended vacation in Monaco, France. Stephen had left his newborn son at number 22 for over two months and Dad and Mum had been given the responsibility of looking after the baby boy and auditioning nannies to take care of him. With everything my father had taken upon his shoulders, he was stressed and not sleeping.
The night of the sixteenth a new girl had just started in the hopes of becoming William’s nanny and was staying in the guest room.
Mum and Dad went to bed late, around midnight, and Mum tearfully went over those final terrible minutes. “He said he felt fine. He was talking about coming back to see you in America again. He couldn’t wait. He told me how much he was looking forward to that holiday and finally getting some rest. We got into bed and he kissed me goodnight. I reached over to him to give him a kiss and he was stiff.”
She caught her breath as she realized the accidental double entendre. “Not like that! I mean he was stiff, dead—just suddenly. I tried to roll him out of bed and beat on his chest but nothing worked. The poor girl came in, saw Reg lying there and screamed and ran out the door. She just left in the middle of the night. I don’t know where she went. I called the ambulance but by the time they got here they couldn’t do anything.”
The enormity of everything she had been through hit her. “What are we going to do?”
My mother cried in anguish and despair, and I held her tightly in my arms as she wept and wept for her husband.
Her pain was deep on so many levels. Both she and Dad were children of World War I, born into a time of great uncertainty and terror. My mother was only a few weeks old when her father passed away and as the youngest of eight children she watched as her mother struggled to make ends meet.
Twice her mother, my Nanny McCann, fought off bailiffs and police who arrived at her door to drag her off to Eastville Workhouse at 100 Fishponds Road, the dreaded paupers’ prison that no one ever left alive. More than 3,500 bodies are buried in unmarked graves on that site and Nana was determined not to become another fatality.
“Who will look after my little ones if I’m gone?” the tiny Irish lady screamed as she beat the police away. “And don’t you be coming back neither!”
Nanny and her children all worked hard to get by and just as my mother reached her teens, instead of finding the fun and freedom that kids of that age long for, she watched the planet plunge into the Great Depression. If times were bad before, now they were much, much worse.
Things changed when she met my father. Mum was working as a bus conductor and Dad fell instantly in love with this uniformed, auburn-haired beauty. He changed his schedule going to and from the school where he had just started as a math teacher and made sure he only rode
on the routes she was working even though it meant an extra half-mile walk each way.
They married in 1938 and less than a year later my father was approached by the Ministry of Defense to use his math skills on a radar program called Chain Home. The clouds of war were gathering and Britain needed to be prepared for the onslaught that was coming.
Dad was taken from Bristol and from Mum and relocated to the east coast of England where he remained for four years. The program he was working on was so secret that he was forbidden to even reveal its name and what he had done with them until twenty-years after the war’s end because of the Official Secrets Act.
Mum and Dad strolling the Torquay seafront, 1943
When he came home on leave he was unable to tell his wife what part of the country his unit was located in and what they were developing, but he did find time to take her away from Bristol and the massive bombing raids there to the West Country. It was during one of his leaves that they discovered Torquay.
He became highly respected amongst his fellow soldiers and the civilian scientists who oversaw the project and in his free time was quite an athlete, playing football and becoming captain of the cricket “eleven” that played other units around the country and gave everyone’s minds a much needed respite from the horrors of the war around them.
My father, Reg Sheppard, with his regiment’s “eleven”; he has the bat
He left the army in 1946 with the rank of major in the Royal Artillery. They asked him to stay and become a career officer but Mum was having none of that. She didn’t like to travel and certainly didn’t want to raise her son Stephen, who was turning one year old, as an “army brat.” Reluctantly Dad left the military, his friends and his already esteemed career and returned to teaching.
Dad took care of all the finances for Mum. She ran the house, and ran it well, but Dad made sure the bills were paid and that we had enough to make it through each month even on a meager teacher’s salary. When times got tough he would take a second job, evenings and during the summer, using his math skills to oversee the cashiers at Newton Abbott Race Track. It was a long, thankless job and it meant he had to arrive before the first race and stay long after the track was closed to make sure the books were balanced, but our family needed the money so he worked hard providing it for us.
With him gone Mum was understandably devastated. Not only had she lost the man she loved but she didn’t know how to drive and had never written a check in her life or used a credit card. That was Dad’s world and now she was flung headfirst into it. I spent hours with her explaining how to fill out a check correctly, how to use a ledger and keep a rolling balance. She was frustrated at first but quickly stepped up and grasped the information.
It took two days to locate my brother, Stephen. By the time he arrived in Torquay I had taken care of the death certificate and, with Mum’s help, the funeral arrangements. Dad was to be buried near his parents at a cemetery in Bristol. I asked Mum if it would be all right to see Dad before he was moved there. He was being kept at a mortuary nearby.
I had never been in a mortuary before. I stood outside the room where the mortician had my father’s body prepared and waiting for me.
“He’s inside,” he said.
I stepped into the freezing room and saw my hero lying there on a table. My knees buckled and I fell to the floor. But I didn’t want to leave. My father deserved more. I had to say goodbye to him.
I picked myself up and lay my head on his chest. His body no longer had any semblance to anything living. It was hard and he felt like a cold plastic doll.
Tears poured from my eyes and I cried like I hadn’t since I was a young child. They fell from my face onto his. If this had been a movie my teardrops would have caused some essence of life that remained within him to stir; his fingers would twitch, his eyelids would flutter and he would come back to me, come back to us.
But there was no musical crescendo, no Hollywood happy ending. He lay there unmoving. My tears pooled on his face and then streamed down his cheeks as if he were crying for me as I was crying for him.
I wiped my eyes and gently dabbed his face dry and spoke softly to my father, telling him how grateful I was for his love and his caring and oh, how I would miss him. As I stepped back something amazing happened.
I’m not a religious person but I do believe that somehow we are all connected, and I don’t mean just humans, I mean all, everything that lives somehow shares the same bond of life. And at that moment I felt the spirit of life fill the room as my father gave me his final gift.
Suddenly it was me lying there on that slab, dead. And I was standing looking at my own body. I turned to my left and my father was right there next to me.
He looked me in the eyes and spoke to me so clearly: “That will be you one day, my son. Remember that. Don’t waste a minute, because one day it will all end.” He smiled, that warm, beautiful smile he had, and he was back on the slab and I was alone, standing there in that cold room.
I know this may come across as dark and depressing, but for me, in that instant, I was given an amazing awareness of life itself. Too often we go through our lives thinking that everything will last forever and we forget to live to our fullest potential, believing we have all the time in the world.
My father showed me how wrong that viewpoint is. When you know that something is finite you enjoy it so much more while you have it; you cherish it; you want to make the most of it, to take every opportunity you can.
From that day on the way I looked at life altered. I was freed of so many doubts. We can plan for tomorrow but we have to live today, in the moment, because time is so fleeting that we may never have that chance again. The worst thing that ever happened to me, my father’s death, allowed me to glimpse the inevitable future and in doing so breathed new life into my soul.
Time itself changed in that room. The awareness that swept over me, that swept away any fears I had, became my new starting point for life. It was no longer September 20, 1982, it was Day Four A.D.—After Dad. I vowed that from that second onwards I would keep my father’s spirit with me and share my life with him. During every high, and even during the lows, I would take a second to stop and say “This is for you, Dad.”
I left Torquay a week later. Before I headed out I made Mum promise to keep to the plans that she had made with Dad to come to Los Angeles in just a few months and stay with me.
As I drove back to Heathrow I had two things with me that I didn’t have on the drive down: I wore my father’s wedding ring on my right hand to carry his love with me everywhere I went, and in my bag was a copy of “Mad World” which had arrived at the house two weeks before in a promotional mailing. It was the very last record package that my Dad had opened and listened to for me. He had rejected most of the rest but on that Tears for Fears’ twelve-inch he wrote “I think you’ll like this one.” He was right as always.
“Mad World” would be the first song I played on my show when I returned to the air waves on KROQ days later. It was his final musical pick, not just for me but for all the KROQ kids.
Part Two: A.D.
NEW LIFE
It was a relief when I was welcomed back to KROQ by both the jocks and the management. In the back of my mind I was concerned that they were going to say they had found someone else while I was gone but instead it was just the opposite.
With those final moments I had spent with my father still flooding my mind and body with inspiration I threw myself into my work and found that with everything that was happening I had virtually no free time which in many ways was a good thing as it stopped me from dwelling on my loss.
After our morning show Raymond and I would head straight to the production room to work together on produced bits to air on our show the next day. Then I would put together a two-minute segment that I’d started when I was part-time called ROQ Notes which ran every morning and afternoon on KROQ. When that was finished I would voice commercials for the station, then race down to Long Beach t
o shoot my cameos for the TV show Square Pegs. Virtually every evening you would find me behind the turntables in a club: The Roxy on Sunset, Marilyn’s Back Street in Pasadena, Florentine Gardens in Hollywood, Dillon’s in Westwood, The Odyssey on Beverly Boulevard, Seven Seas in Hollywood. It was a crazy non-stop schedule.
My buddy Egil Aalvik came to meet with me at the station. He was putting together a promotional evening and was looking to book me into a club in Santa Monica called Moody’s. They wanted to do a Richard Blade New Wave Monday night.
I was all for it, particularly if it meant DJing with a friend like Egil. Then I had an idea. Why didn’t he work with me at KROQ assisting with production and using his unique voice, complete with his Swedish accent, on some of the commercials? Maybe that way I could introduce him to the station much as I been able to work my way into KROQ just a few months before. Egil was thrilled with the idea and within just a few weeks “Swedish Eagle” became an integral part of the station lineup.
Monday nights at Moody’s at 321 Santa Monica Boulevard were an instant hit, and with two levels and a 600 person capacity, overnight the club became the place in Southern California for young people to show up in their hippest clothes to mingle, dance and find a new romantic partner. For me it was reminiscent of my time at Magic in Vienna as record company reps would make a point to hit Moody’s every Monday to meet me in the DJ booth with stacks of albums and twelve-inches for me to promo and give away.
Within less than a month, Lloyd Moody, the owner, announced that he was using this new-found success to revamp the club by putting some money into the décor and sound system and changing the name to The 321. That name lasted about one minute because even though the club was officially eighteen and over, the doormen were notoriously lenient and never enforced that age limit, so when you asked a hip kid, a rude boy or a new romantic chick where they were going on a Monday night the answer was inevitably “the 3-2- young.”
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 25