Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  “I generally only listen to WSM and the ‘Morning Merry-Go-Round,’” the mayor said. “Y’all ain’t gonna make much of a showing against them, I don’t reckon. But more power to you for giving it a try.”

  Jimmy did not argue. Get the license and then they would see. He got his stock answers scribbled down on a writing tablet to send to Grover for transcribing.

  Detroit got a better reception from the president of the local NAACP chapter, a crowd of ministers and other black leaders. They were proud a black man would be president of a company that was putting a new radio station on the air in their town. They gave him page after page of suggestions about the kind of programming the community needed. Church services, discussion programs, special musical shows, lots of jazz and gospel. But they were confused about what FM was. And they were concerned that it had no chance against the long-established AM stations.

  Detroit did not argue either. He dutifully wrote down every word they said, read it back to them, nodded a lot, smiled, and promised nothing.

  While Detroit finished up the last of his interviews, Jimmy drove to the foot of a tall gray building downtown, circled the block several times until he could find a meter with time on it and out of sight of the lobby, and then parked. It was important no one saw his mutt car.

  He checked his watch. He could not put this chore off any longer.

  Carefully, almost as if it might explode if he mishandled it, he retrieved a wrinkled brown paper bag from the spare tire well in the old car's dusty trunk. Then he waited patiently inside the immaculate twentieth-floor office of a Union Bank vice-president. The receptionist watched him curiously as he nervously unfolded and refolded the top of the paper sack and shifted from one butt cheek to the other. He smiled at her. She quickly went back to her typing.

  “Mr. Gill?”

  He jumped at the voice but hesitated for a second. No one had ever called him “Mr. Gill” before. The older man in the conservative blue suit seemed surprised when he saw Jimmy sitting there in his office with the paper bag on his lap. He must have expected another kind of person. In Nashville, some millionaires did not necessarily look prosperous. The banker would at least give this pony-tailed kid a moment.

  “You are Mr. Gill?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Uh...come on into my office, son...uh, sir.”

  He spun and went back through his door, almost daring Jimmy to follow.

  Jimmy tried to stop his hands from shaking when he handed the heavy sack across the massive desk to the frozen-faced banker. The man turned white around the mouth and caught his breath sharply when he saw the stacks of bills inside. His eyes were wide in amazement when he emptied the money onto the desk.

  “This will establish Wizard Broadcasting’s operating account, Mr. Lawrence,” Jimmy told him, as authoritatively as he could manage. “I hope you will tell your bank’s advertising agency that we have chosen Union as our exclusive bank of record. And please, if you will, convey to them how grateful you are for our business and how thankful we will be for yours.”

  The banker was suddenly very friendly as he smiled and nodded and shoved forward a stack of counter checks and some papers that required signing. He came around the desk and pounded Jimmy on the back. Then he offered him a cup of coffee. Perhaps he would like something a bit stronger to properly seal their promising new relationship?

  Jimmy repeated the procedure at three other banks within three blocks of each other. Three more wrinkled brown paper sacks filled with money, but with no bills larger than a fifty. Three more promises that the banks’ advertising people would know of Wizard Broadcasting’s “exclusive” commitment to their institutions.

  Then he picked up Detroit in front of a black church in North Nashville and they drove back downtown to the Hyatt. They took an envelope full of bills and checked in to the hotel. After cleaning up, they rode the glass elevator to the revolving restaurant at the top of the building. As they ate, they could watch the lights coming on across the city, the tug boats throbbing up the Cumberland River, the lines of cars fleeing downtown for the suburbs.

  Jimmy loved the view. Detroit kept trying to figure out how the revolving restaurant platform worked.

  They spent as much for dinner and drinks that night as either had made in salary for a week’s worth of work at WBMH. They felt high-volume guilt at the extravagance, but the prime rib and two bottles of wine helped fade it quickly.

  Later, they walked off the huge meal along the streets of Lower Broadway, dodging the strange looks of tourists and a few cops walking their beat. They passed in front of a dark-red-brick building that looked like a church. But a sign told them it was the old Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry broadcast originated each Friday and Saturday night before its recent move to a new home at Opryland. That was the same show that the old Zenith radio once snatched out of the air as Jimmy turned its dial. The place was a shrine for radio history and both of them were reverently impressed as they stood there.

  It was the first time they had stayed a night in the same room together. They were too excited to sleep, still buzzed from the wine at dinner and the day’s work. They talked in the darkness for hours until fatigue finally claimed them. Then Detroit woke Jimmy up at six to tell him that he snored like a sawmill. Oh, and that he had just called out for his mother in a whimper so pitiful that Dee felt he had to shake him out of his nightmare.

  Jimmy ignored Detroit. He reached for the telephone and ordered a huge room service breakfast with a meal befitting two entrepreneurs about to set Nashville radio on its ear.

  They both had to pull their midnight shifts that evening. They started back south to Birmingham before noon. They were rested, well-fed, excited, and full of talk about all the huge tasks ahead of them and of all their glorious plans to conquer the radio dial in Music City like a horde of Huns.

  A few miles south of town, Detroit told Jimmy to pull over, a knowing grin on his face. He produced one of the engineering maps that he seemed to always have handy for studying.

  “Take the next right turn, Jimmy,” he ordered.

  The winding black-top road carried them off U. S. Highway 31 for a mile or so, and then Detroit pointed to the right again, up a rugged gravel road. It led to the top of a knobby mountain, to near where Channel 9's huge steel television tower was getting in the way of vectoring airplanes and galloping clouds. They abandoned the car a quarter mile short of the spire's base because of a locked chain-link gate. Skirting the gate through the woods, they walked up the steep grade quickly, panting as much from excitement as effort.

  Detroit pointed to a spot near the top of the candy-striped tower, just under the spiky television aerial.

  “That’s the place where our antenna will be hanging,” he announced. “And you see the far corner of that cement block building? That’s where the transmitter will sit in a few months. The transmission line will come right out the side there and go up the north face of the tower.”

  Channel 9 had fallen on hard times. They had happily welcomed the offer of tower rent money when Wizard’s consulting engineer approached them with a nice deposit. But it was unreal and abstract to Jimmy until that moment. It had only been stacks of papers to sign, circles drawn on maps for Detroit Simmons to study, bodiless voices on the other end of a telephone line to negotiate with. Now it was real steel standing tall and straight in the cool, blue Tennessee sky.

  Beyond the squatty building and the tower’s base, through the pine trees and honeysuckle, Jimmy saw the entire city below, cradled in a bowl of green mountains. The Cumberland River snaked through its middle, and sunlight flashed off the windshields of thousands of cars.

  He fought the impulse to scurry over the fence that protected the tower and start a climb up its side, just as he had done years before at WROG. He longed to feel the cold steel, the slight trembling of the mast as the wind set off vibrations along its length.

  Soon, it would be his transmitter conjuring the magic electromagnet
ic waves inside its enchanted chamber. His transmission line conducting the pulsing current to a pretzel of copper strapped to the side of the tower near its top. His voice that would modulate the signal that would spread out all over a million acres.

  On the way back toward Birmingham, they twisted the radio’s tuning knob and listened to the terrible small-town, hick radio stations whose weak signals barely circumvented the hills. They giggled like school kids on a field trip, made mocking fun of the stations, imitated the amateurish announcers and the poorly done commercials.

  They changed a flat tire after a blow-out near Tullahoma. The spare was almost as flat, but it did not matter. Back in Birmingham, Wizard Broadcasting could write them checks for new cars for both of them.

  As they drove on, they talked and planned and schemed. Promised each other that they would build a station the whole industry would talk about. Invent a sound that the world would come to Nashville to listen to and study and take back to wherever and try to duplicate it. Turn on a revolutionary format on a virgin radio band that would soon be discovered by others who were just like they were. Pioneering people who held the medium and the music in such reverence that it had become almost a religion to them.

  Tired and talked out, they listened to eight-track tapes of the artists they would play and imagined how they would sound on their air. Jimmy did his best disk-jockey introductions to each song, smoothly ad-libbing a joke or two into the gear-shift-lever microphone. And they laughed and listened and sang along, the car’s windows rolled down, the sun bright, and the air cool and crisp as it whistled in.

  Jimmy was so deep in the joy of it all, he didn’t even notice when they crossed the Tennessee River bridge. It was almost as if they were high on some exotic narcotic only they knew about.

  They both were aware of the reality of it all and of how little they really knew about the deep water into which they were diving. They agreed that their ignorance only made the adventure all the more exciting. It was the same as when they were kids, playing together in the jungle along the ditch between the duplex and the mysterious radio station. Living Detroit’s movie-theater upper-balcony adventures as they plunged blindly but bravely through the thicket of dense honeysuckle vines and snatching saw briars.

  The two boys had ignored the sinkholes, dodged the hornets’ nests, and refused to worry about any lurking rattlesnakes they might encounter. Their dreams drove them.

  Those childhood games eventually put them into a clearing near the wizard’s place, a spot where the sun was warm and the sky high. There they lay together on their bellies in the smooth grass and curiously watched the blue flashing lights and listened to the melodic buzzing at the base of the spire.

  That was their first encounter with the wizard.

  Now, Jimmy and Detroit were convinced that he was once again going to work some powerful magic.

  The River

  Eighteen

  "Jimmy, it's that Goldberg man from the bank again."

  “Dammit, Sam, how many times...?”

  Jesus! Didn’t she ever listen to what he told her? He had ordered Sammie Criswell, the receptionist, not to buzz him when he was doing his show on the air. And especially if it was this particular loud-talking banker from Boston who had been trying his damnedest to get to Jimmy for more than a week now.

  He sighed, bit his tongue to keep from yelling at her any more, hit the button on the console that started the back turntable and Crosby, Stills and Nash's song "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" filled the control room with its pulsing acoustic guitars and elastic-tight harmonies. The seven minute track would give him a chance to handle some business and get the next record cued up and ready to play at the same time.

  "Okay, Sam. I’m sorry. What line did you say?"

  "Two. And Jimmy Buffett's out here in the lobby with his tapes again."

  "Tell him to just leave them, please, hon. I’ll listen to them when I get a chance."

  To Jimmy’s credit, he would later take the time to listen to Buffet’s songs and put a couple of the tracks right on the air. Even though nobody had heard of the kid yet. After all, his name was Jimmy and he was from Alabama, too.

  "James Gill," he said into the telephone. He almost stumbled and said, “Brother James,” the on-air name he had adopted on the air in Nashville. When he was in the control room, he was Brother James. When he was in the front office, he was James Gill, senior vice-president of Wizard Broadcasting, Incorporated.

  "Mr. Gill? Sol Goldberg at BankMass in Boston. Howyadoin'?"

  "Fine as frog hair, Sol," he answered, intentionally launching into his best slow-as-a-slug, Spanish-moss-and-magnolia Southern drawl. He had long since excised all traces of the South from his on-air delivery, but the accent could sometimes be useful. It put certain people, and especially Yankees, completely off guard. The slower, the more like a character off Hee Haw, the better. “How y’all doin’ by now?”

  "Good. Good. Now, have you had a chance to look over those figures I sent down to you on the Atlanta property? Gold mine. A damn gold mine, Gill, and with the price at ten times cash flow, it's an out-and-out steal for you guys. But you got to get off the pot or piss. We got lots of tire-kickers. Somebody’s going to beat you to this thing if you don’t do something soon."

  The banker shot the words down the phone line at Jimmy like hot shrapnel, his voice abrupt, nasal, completely in command. Jimmy smiled.

  The alleged cash flow on the stations in question was actually next to zilch. The stockholders of BankMass were on the verge of taking a cold, cold bath in Boston Harbor unless they could find a greater fool than the trio of New York doctors they underwrote on the original purchase of the station three years before. Jimmy Gill knew the score much better than Sol Goldberg could ever suspect.

  The headphones lying next to his elbow were pumping out Crosby, Stills and Nash's wonderful harmonies so loud he was afraid they might feed through onto the telephone. He slid down their volume some more, paused a deliberate beat, lowered his voice and gave Goldberg his well-rehearsed speech.

  "Sol, y’all know that thing is a dry well and that pack of Park Avenue sawbones would druther pull the plug before dark tonight than keep pouring more good money after bad. It's worth a third what you’re tryin' to hold me up for and you know it."

  The digital countdown timer Detroit had built and mounted on the console showed two minutes were left on the record spinning away on the turntable behind him. He checked the needles kicking wildly in the center of the control board and wiped away a thin sheen of sweat from his upper lip.

  "Mr. Gill, I..." Goldberg’s voice was hesitant now, raspy and quivering with suppressed anger. "Look, why don't you and your folks come on down to Atlanta Friday and look this thing over in person? Maybe we can find some common ground if we can get face-to-face."

  Both Jimmy and Sol Goldberg knew that Wizard Broadcasting was about the only minority-owned group with the wherewithal to close a deal as dirty as this one had become and that the whole Atlanta operation was teetering on the brink of being belly-up, so near default Goldberg could feel the icy wind blowing through his thirtieth floor office suite up there in Bean Town.

  What Goldberg did not know was that it would be hard for BankMass to blow smoke up his ass. The George twins had the connections to give Jimmy more information on the station's health than Dunn and Bradstreet could. He knew the Atlanta station’s books as well as he did their own. And he knew that it was one sick puppy.

  Goldberg was aware that every troubled radio station in the South had approached Jimmy since Wizard Broadcasting’s success in Nashville. The phone messages were piling up. Jimmy Gill had become a must-call anytime anybody wanted to liquidate a weak property.

  "Well, Sol, we got our fourth anniversary party comin' up this Friday evenin' and I can't hardly miss that blow-out, you know," he drawled, laying it on thick as ribbon-cane syrup. He resisted the impulse to mention the availability of grits and okra and a bowl of fried chitlins at the party
. "We'll be in there at the crack of dawn Saturday mornin’, and we’ll meet with y’all then. That is, if it's okay with y’all."

  If Goldberg wanted some relief from the heavy weight that was crushing him, he'd do it on Jimmy’s terms and at Wizard’s bidding. Jimmy was talking from a position of strength. He knew it. So, now, did the banker.

  Checking the minute's worth of groove left on the record, Jimmy went for one more dig to let Goldberg know he was aware of exactly how strong his bargaining chip was.

  "You ought to just hop on a airplane and come on down to Nashville and help us celebrate all our success, Sol."

  "You guys are the talk of the business, all right, Jim," he admitted, but it sounded as if he was about to chew on the telephone mouthpiece as he said it. "Damned good job you have done down there."

  "Why, thanky, Sol. ‘Preciate them kind words. I better run. I got a meetin' that's waitin' on me to get goin' now. See y’all Saturday mornin’ about ten. Y’all keep warm up there. Bye bye!"

  Jimmy was sweating as if he had just run a race but there was a big grin on the reflection of his face in the double-paned control room window.

  Perfect timing. The Crosby, Stills and Nash record was in its last throes, the guitars thumping toward the cold abrupt ending to the song. He had practically closed the deal for Wizard’s first acquisition in the seven minutes it took the group to sing the song. This was a story for his memoirs.

  Quickly, Brother James slid the Yes album onto the near turntable, dropped the needle on the fourth track, and just as “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” died, the a cappella harmonies of the British band's "I Hear All Good People" kicked in in a perfect, seamless segue, as if the station had been taped and carefully spliced together. Over the first guitar break after the vocal opening, Jimmy found he couldn't restrain himself. He reached and flipped the microphone on, laughing out loud with the exhilaration left over from the deal-making and the sheer beauty of the music.