by Don Keith
“Well, Rocky gets back to the station and it looks like a new doughnut shop just opened up. Cops were everywhere. The program director and the station manager, too. Seems the dumbass had grabbed an old reel of tape out of the news room to record his alibi and it was full of rotten splices. The tape had lasted half-way through the show, just long enough for the late Mrs. Graves to still be hearing her darling husband on the radio. Then the tape spilled out onto the control room floor in a big old pile.
“The boss heard the dead air, couldn’t get an answer on the hot-line, so he zoomed down to the station. He figured somebody must have kidnapped Rocky so he called the law. The neighbors who had heard the young war back at Rocky’s apartment had called the police too, and they put two and two together.
“Last I heard Rocky had started a broadcasting class in the state prison. One thing for sure. His graduates will be better than any of us at stealing records and toilet paper!”
A deep rumble of thunder punctuated Jack Ross's story but no one noticed. It was almost ten in the morning. A few had to leave for mid-day shifts at their stations but they were quickly replaced by a morning show sidekick or two. Nobody had gotten around to tipping any of the waitresses so now the jocks were being ignored. Besides the “card party,” the only other noises in the diner were the bus boys setting the salad bar for lunch and the icy rain tapping on the front window of the restaurant.
“J.D. the D.J. died,” Mary Midnight from KZ-101announced as she exhaled blue smoke and crushed out her cigarette in the middle of a bowl of leftover grits.
“Who?”
“Jerry Dobbins. Damn, what was his real name? I think it was Jerry German when he was at The Fox in Baton Rouge.”
“Tall, skinny guy? No hair?”
“That’s him. Great voice but couldn’t ad lib worth a damn. Used to have to write down every word he was going to say on the air. Even his own name!”
“Sure! I worked with him in Lubbock. What happened?”
“Liver. He drank more than any six guys I ever saw.”
“Imagine that. A jock who drank.”
“Who’s the biggest druggie or drunk you ever saw in the business?” one of the younger attendees asked. That’s how the proceedings usually got switched to the next topic. An innocent question followed by three hours of stories.
The sleepy crowd around the table was instantly rejuvenated by the fresh subject. Lee Shannon from WCVG got the floor. His was the biggest voice now that Chick had nodded off.
“Bruce Kline, hands down. Called himself Cousin Brucie before the real Cousin Brucie up in New York threatened to sue him. Then he was Uncle Brucie. His thing was pills. I told him that I had the sniffles and he brought out five different bottles of stuff, most of them not even on the market yet. We called him the ‘staff pharmacist.’”
“I remember that guy,” Mary Midnight said with a laugh. “I worked with him in Birmingham for a while. He ate Quaaludes like Lifesavers, but he was the sweetest guy. Far as I know, he never dealt or anything like that. Just a regular ‘Dr. Feelgood.’”
“That’s the guy. You’re right. He was great when he wasn’t cross-eyed and addled.”
“We had this guy named Rick Richards who nearly burned down the station one day. I drove by the station and saw the fire trucks. The owner was running up the drive-way in his bathrobe. He hadn’t even taken time to get dressed. Seems old Rick was taking a toke between records. He had flipped a roach into a trash can under the control board. It smoked the whole place, melted the wiring under the console ‘til it was one big gooey mess.”
“He’s the guy who fell out the window into the alley, isn’t he?”
“Yeah! He sure was! I’d forgotten about that! Where was that?”
“At ‘PNP in Pensacola. The station was upstairs, second floor, and the only bathroom was in the far back. Old Rick would put on the longest song we played...maybe ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or ‘Taxi’...and he’d go back to the shitter and lean out the window to smoke a doob.
“One night he was back there getting high and lost his balance and fell right out the window into the alley. If he hadn’t been so mellow, the fall probably would have killed him. Scared the bejesus out of a couple of winos in the alley, for damn sure. He just got up, dusted himself off, made sure he had his door key with him, went back upstairs, outro-ed the song that had been playing, and segued right into the next one. Never missed a beat!”
They were quiet for a moment, some of them thinking of their own close calls.
“Whatever happened to Bruce? He was a great jock when he wasn’t goofy on some chemical.”
“He had gotten himself together and had a cushy deal, doing all the voice-overs for the Ice Capades and voicing concert spots for a promoter out of Cleveland. Christmas Eve, last year, he was on the way to pick up his kids from one or the other of his ex-wives. It was raining like a son of a bitch. He hydroplaned, crossed the median and hit a truck head-on. Killed him instantly. And the weird thing? He was straight as an arrow. Cold sober for once and he buys it on the damn freeway.”
The table was quiet again. Mary Midnight squashed out her latest cigarette.
“Got to go guys. See you next time.”
That was the cue. They all got up and left together, still reluctant to be alone. Chick Charles stopped at the door, hesitated, then waddled back to the table and left a dollar tip under his coffee cup.
#
“I saved a kid’s life tonight.”
Jeff Jefferson had been sitting quietly on a couch in the corner of the apartment, sipping a beer, while everybody else pretended to watch the Super Bowl, but they had long since gone into story-mode. The tales started just after the National Anthem.
Stories about jocks who got all their nourishment from car-dealer-remote-broadcast hotdogs. Others who made a living selling promotional records and satin jackets, gifts from the record companies. And others who lived off payola and had plenty of dope and rooms full of stereo equipment—so long as they played the right records the right number of times.
Jeff had their attention, even though one of the teams had just scored a touchdown and the running back was dancing in mad delight on the screen.
“Saved who? What happened?”
“The kid called me after he had chewed up and swallowed a bottle of pills. He was sinking fast so I segued about ten records, talking to him while I got him some help.”
“Damn! Good work, Jeff.”
“But you know what? I got hot-lined by the program director. He reamed me good for not talking when I was supposed to. I may get fired for it yet.”
The assembled group hissed and booed lustily. The crowd on the television was doing the same for a bad call on the kickoff by one of the officials.
“That’s the way it is,” Chick Charles was saying. “We got to be doctors, preachers, lawyers, drug counselors, sex therapists...and it don’t pay a dime more for all those skills.”
“I never knew people called in to radio stations before I started,” Jeff said.
“I sure never thought about girls calling,” someone else admitted. “Can you imagine how lonely somebody has to be to call up a disk jockey, just to have somebody to talk to?”
“Hey, it’s all part of the job. By the thousands over the air or one at a time on the telephone, a living, breathing listener is a living, breathing listener. And what the hell? That lady you are giving phone sex may have an Arbitron diary and she’ll give you three hours a day’s worth of listening.”
“That reminds me of Dick Boyd,” Jim Flannigan said. “He was Johnny Knight in Memphis. Everybody who worked seven to ten in the evening was named Johnny Knight because they had so many jocks coming and going that it would cost them a fortune to keep changing the jingles. The weekend guy was always Jim Holiday. Same reason. They even had a gal for awhile and she was ‘Jim Holiday’ too. I worked with Dick in Knoxville. He hooked up with a gal named Veronica on the request line, and damned if he didn’t end up ma
rrying the old gal.
“None of us had the heart to tell him she had gone through the jock-staff at every station in town. We figured she probably qualified for the station pension plan considering all the time she put in there. She was really a sweet girl, but man, she had round heels for radio guys!
“Dick fell in love with Veronica and none of us said a word. When they set the date, he made sure we all got invitations to the wedding. Said we were all the family he had and he would appreciate it if we would come to the wedding. He asked me to be his best man. What could I do? Tell Dick about that cute little birth mark on his wife-to-be's ass cheek?
“I get to the church and it’s packed with all her relatives on one side and nobody but ten radio guys on the other. I’m standing there in my rented tux and Dick has the most ecstatic look on his face. I’m thinking maybe it’s my lot to have to take Dick aside and tell him the story before this thing goes any farther. I know if I look at one of the other jocks out there in the pews, I’m gonna lose it.
“But then the organist strikes up ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ and there she is, guys. Miss Veronica. And she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, floating down that aisle in her white dress like any other virgin on her wedding day.
“When she gets to the altar, the preacher tells everybody that we should bow our heads and pray. I don’t. I just bow my head and look out of the corner of my eye at Veronica. She had lifted her veil and was looking right back at me. Boys, if a face and a pair of eyes could talk, hers were speaking volumes. She was begging me, pleading with me, not to say anything to Dick. I just smiled at her to let her know it was okay. One big tear welled up in each eye and rolled down her cheeks and she smiled right back. It was the most beautiful smile I had ever seen.
"Last I heard, they had three kids and a marriage made in heaven. Dick chased the money and moved over to sales and is managing a station somewhere in the Carolinas now.”
They all applauded the happy ending of Flannigan’s story. The television crowd at the Superbowl was standing, cheering wildly along with them.
#
The crummy little bar was around the corner from WSFA Radio, two blocks from The Mighty Six-Ninety and a half-mile down the road from The Super Q. The top ten scores on the pinball machine were all by disk jockeys at one station or another. The leader on the list had over thirty-seven billion points.
“I hate to be called a damned ‘disk jockey,’” Mike McGraw was saying to anyone who might be listening above the noise from the juke box. Otis Redding was pounding out his version of “Satisfaction.” “That makes it sound like all we do is play damn records. Cue ‘em up and start ‘em spinning. Is that all you do, Chucker?”
“Hell, no! I don’t play no records!” The Chucker was wasted. It was almost nine o’clock on a Tuesday night. He had been drinking Jack neat since before three.
“We are ‘broadcast personalities,’ ain’t we, Chucker?”
“Damn right! Broad-damn-casht person-damn-alities!”
“I don’t hear ‘em calling Dick Clark no damn disk jockey. Or John ‘Records’ Landecker up in Chicago. Or Gary Burbank. Or Dr. Don Rose. They’re not ‘deejays.’ They’re ‘broadcast personalities,’ man.”
“Who’s the best you ever heard, Mike?” one of the jocks asked. Mike had passed through an amazing array of towns in his career and had heard most everybody in the business at some time or another.
“You mean besides me? ‘Cause I think I’m the damn best and I listen to myself all the time. Well, sir, Dr. Don’s still amazing. He can do three jokes over a ten-second record intro. Then there’s The Greaseman. Unbelievably dirty, but he uses made-up words so he can get away with it. I heard Rick Dees when he was in Memphis. He does some great stuff with the telephones and pre-recorded bits. Jay Thomas started in Jacksonville where I did, you know, at the ‘Big Ape.’ He’s out on the West Coast now. The more he insults the listeners the more they love him. Scott Shannon’s good. He has theater-of-the-mind down pat.
“And I used to love listening to Joe Rumore when I worked in Birmingham. He’d play whatever the hell music he wanted to play, country, top-forty, whatever, and he did his show from the basement of his house.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he’d go down to a studio in the basement and do his show. He did this contest where if he called you and you answered your telephone by saying ‘Joe Rumore’ instead of ‘Hello,’ you’d win a new car. My grandmother lived just outside Birmingham and until the day she died, every time I called her, she’d answer the telephone ‘Joe Rumore.’ I think she was always disappointed it was me calling and not old Joe trying to give her a new car.”
"I didn’t know you worked in Birmingham, Mike."
"Sixteen months. Longest gig I ever had."
"Well, if you did Birmingham, you probably knew Superbird, too.”
“God, yeah! What a character! You wouldn’t believe this cat. He was fantastic on the air, too. Always seven-to-midnight ‘cause he worked so well with the kids. A real motor-mouth. One of the first screamers. And crazy as a loon."
“Is the Macon funeral story true, Mike?”
“Damn straight, it was.”
“What is the Macon funeral story?” Rick Stone had only been a jock about a year. He was one of the few who had not yet heard the Macon funeral story.
“Well, you remember the black group, The Silktones? Their lead singer, Cliffie Dubose, died. Overdose, if I remember right, or choked on his own vomit or something. That’s how they all go, ain’t it? Anyway, they brought his body back to Macon to bury him. The Bird was working there at the time and he was crazy about their music. Used to use ‘Goodnight Doesn’t Mean Goodbye’ as his closing theme song every night. Bird grabbed a couple of guys from the station and went over to crash the funeral but they weren’t letting anybody but family and record company big-wigs into the church.
“Here’s the thing, though. Superbird, if he combed his hair just right, looked a little bit like Ringo Starr. He could do a pretty fair English accent, too. Anyway, they get up to the church...the only white faces within six blocks...and a big old burly guard stops them at the door. One of the other jocks with him says, ‘Man, don’t you know who this is? This is Ringo Starr, the Beatle.’ The guard about shits. ‘Sorry, Mr. Starr. You and your friends go right on in. So sorry.’ Well, before they can even get in and seated, word’s spread all over the church that Ringo Starr of the Beatles has shown up at the funeral.
“The Widow Dubose comes back to where other mourners have made room for Superbird and them to settle down in a pew. ‘Mr. Ringo, I’m so honored you have come to my husband’s funeral. How’s George and Paul and John? Cliffie just loved your song, ‘Backoff Boogaloo.’ I’d be so honored if you’d sing it for us today during the service.’ Well, Superbird could yell and scream with the best of them, but he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. ‘I’d be delighted,’ he told her, ‘But I ‘ave a ‘orrible frog in me throat.’ He managed to talk her out of it, but they stayed for the whole funeral and skedaddled afterwards before some of the record guys could catch up to them and blow the whole thing.”
“Where is Bird now?”
“Out of the business. I think he has a record store or a tee-shirt shop in Sarasota or somewhere. Nobody wanted screamers or creative jocks anymore. No more Superbirds or Tom Donahues or Jimmy Gills. Some broadcast consultant decided they needed jocks who would appeal to the adults who had more disposable income, so they wanted only big, bland voices.”
" Jimmy Gill? Did you ever hear him when you were in Birmingham? I've heard he was the best..."
"Brother James! Yeah I worked with him for a day or two."
The jocks who could still sit up straight did.
"You worked with Jimmy Gill? Come on!"
"Yeah, I did. He was only doing overnights then, if you can believe it. I was PM drive. Back in the sixties. He had been around already, at a half dozen stations, but he kept getting fired because he was so much
better and smarter than the stiffs who hired him. But you could tell the guy was something special. He could open that microphone and make you feel like he was talking with you and nobody else. He didn't tell jokes or do bits but when he spoke, you wanted to turn up the volume to hear what he was saying."
"Yeah, I've heard tapes. He never worked L.A. or New York either, did he?"
"Naw, I guess Nashville was the biggest market he did."
"Why did he take himself off the air before he made the majors? He might've been bigger than Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasem combined."
"Are you kidding? Once you get to where he was, you don't really have the inclination anymore to play records and talk dirty with fourteen-year-old girls on the request line. Jimmy Gill lived out every one of our dreams. But I bet you one thing. If anybody was born to be on the radio it was Jimmy Gill."
All the heads around the table nodded reverently.
“He’d be out of place now, though. They don’t want personalities on the radio. They only want pretty voices that don’t care if anybody is listening or not. Hired vocal cords. Audio whores.”
“Damn right! Broad-damn-casht person-damn-alities!” the Chucker chimed in.
“Yeah, guys who can say only what they are programmed to say into a cold microphone.”
“Damn big-voiced robots.”
“Disk jockeys.”
“Yeah, damned disk jockeys.”
WROG
One
He was ten years old when he first saw the place where the wizard did his magic. Yes, it changed him. But so did a lot of things that happened. Burying his mother . Meeting Detroit Simmons. The Polanskis. The Georges. Even moving Grandmama and her television set. And rediscovering her old upright Zenith radio.