Shards

(An account of some experiences in radio. Names, places and a few incidentals have been changed to protect the guilty – there were none innocent.)

 

RADIO DAZE

 

My own radio experience began with state public radio, WHAT-FM, which was licensed in the late ‘70s; state public television was already in existence. Studios were at first located in the Principles House in Buckingham, birthplace of the state. It was located four floors up on the top of the building, accessed by perilously steep, narrow stairs. An outside fire escape began inexplicably at the second floor and ended equally inexplicably at the third: it was not encouraging.

The first five years of the station were rich. Much of the programming was produced locally and reflected the independent character of the state.  The Rosary Game, which received a national award, was hosted by  an eccentric, Ed, who dabbled in electronics, and was engineered by a good friend of mine, Simon, with whom I produced, for public radio, a half-hour report of a lengthy and violent lock-out at a local machine tool plant in the early '80s - interviews with the union, etc. Management predictably refused to comment. It was never aired. The Rosary Game was a spontaneous musical stream of consciousness - the Rolling Stones might be followed by a Haydn string quartet and thence to a piece of big band swing. When it worked, fabulous. Simon, who was a film studies major at Lagermouth College in Kingsley nearby (he ran the Flickering Lantern film series in the old Grange building in Kingsley for three years in the latter ‘70s), told of how Ed was invariably high. Sometimes, arriving at the station for the evening broadcast, Simon would find him nowhere in sight and have to hunt him up. On one memorable occasion, he found him in the janitor's closet and, as he put it, ‘had to take him down off a peg’ and manhandle him into the studio, where he propped him up in front of the mic - the show that followed was none the worse for the weed and the wear.

During this period, for a couple of years, I wrote and performed with a group devoted to political satire (the Mongoose show – produced by Pete Pallet, Fred Rodgers, engineer); it was syndicated over American Public Radio (APR) for fourteen years. One night, when we were expected to perform a song about fat girls, written by a friend of the producer I thought a blowhard despite his talents, Ted MacGilray, I and a woman in the cast, not, incidentally, fat, pointedly sat down and refused to join in. Of course, it was radio, so only the small audience that usually came to the studio saw our protest. Which brings me to a quirk peculiar to radio personalities.

I've found that radio is a perfect home for misfits of all stripes (I include myself).The crucial aspect of radio is that the dj/presenter controls the environment, at least as long as the listener tunes in – once off the air you might as well be dead, reflecting the basic mechanics of radio. People who find dealing with others difficult for whatever reason, from low self-esteem to high, can and do in this environment take confidence from the controlled protection of the studio. All they have to project is the voice;  listeners can't see them nor engage them, except under certain circumstances, say by phone, over which the presenter has control, too. So, you get lots of oddballs in radio. A good friend, Gary Fassteiner, who presented an extremely popular six-hour morning show every Sunday for five years at WXKE-FM, the commercial station I was involved with after WHAT, came of eccentric Polish émigrés who had settled in Greenwich Village. It was beneath them to think of working for a living, even though they were genteelly impoverished. They survived, I supposed, on the fruits of a ragged nobility. Their prohibition against work was strictly applied to Gary, who could never pursue a conventional job for long without drawing unwelcome attention from them. He made a living from teaching piano, and lived with the daughter Shelley of the nationally noted poet Marilyn Shelley. Yes, Shelley Shelley. Some of us, acknowledging his pleasant manner, nevertheless wondered at his eccentricities. These included seldom being seen in company with Shelley to the point that one questioned the relationship, a taste for heavily garlic-laced sandwiches that he ate during his shows leaving the narrow confines of the studio rank for the poor unfortunate who followed, and an ego that manifest itself in an unbelievable string of groupies given that he was no Hollywood fashion plate, rather more a genial bearded gnome. There were shakes of the head and opinion that he had been raised in a closet by werewolves. My associate Jim Lackard, with whom I produced the world music show Total!, was another case in point.

Jim had suffered unrelenting tyranny at the hands of his father, a federal court judge. He spoke of evening meals at which the father, an acerbic individual, witheringly destroyed his wife and children with verbal abuse. Jim went into the restaurant business and did too much coke, burnt himself out. He could be very charming and very nasty, and verged on the psychotic. Aside from our pairing, he had his own highly popular show. One night, when we were live on-air sharing music and conversation with an African drummer, Letingo Mawaff, who taught at Lagermouth, he froze up. He was at the console and was in the act of loading a cassette Letingo had brought. There was a pause - not dead air but air that's sleeping, as it's said of on-air radio without sound. As this persisted, I turned towards Jim. His body was contorted, his face a manic mask, as if  he were having an epileptic fit. We were live: I couldn't say, what's the matter old chap, going to hell in a bucket? Letingo looked anxiously at me and I shrugged helplessly, trying to buy time with some drivel about long, hot summer nights. Fortunately, Jim came out of it, though shaking and sweating like a pig. I was never more relieved and never more anxious for our future.

As I have confessed, I, too, am a misfit, though I like to think less socially damaging than Jim. I've never aspired to be a regular dj. I like to present music that I find compelling in a manner that informs the listener of  something of the larger context in which it occurred; I don't want to play set lists or blather on about the inconsequential. Despite Jim’s unpredictability, Total! was a perfect fit for me. My role was to hunt up people with interesting musical tastes and present them and their music live on-air. A case in point was a musicologist at Lagermouth. Frederick Plumm, author of Past Times, an excellent history of  American popular song on sheet music, had traveled in the Far East and South Africa collecting cassette tapes of local music, a sort of Alan Lomax undertaking. Another was a commercial artist, Harry O’Donnell, who had numerous connections in the jazz world and brought some wonderful selections along. Yet another, Toni Wackett, took music into the schools and played the hammered dulcimer. It was the interaction in all these fields and at different levels that made the show come alive.

So, what happened to all that good stuff? The answer lies in the all-too-common fate of radio, public or otherwise, that cannot be easily formatted for commercial gain. It's the accountants. WHAT was a case in point, as was, later, WXKE.

As I've intimated, degrees of anarchy informed both stations. For the first five years of WHAT, it was managed by a gay, Roy Daley, who tended to form cliques in the organization. This came to a head when he took to seating his boyfriend, who had no official connection with the station, at administrative meetings and soliciting his opinion of shows. Public funding was done through yearly marathons that ran round the clock for several days, and I manned the phone lines on occasion. The boyfriend would steer fund raisers to certain shows, and could only be ignored at the peril of drawing the ire of the station manager. As a result, some excellent shows were axed and, of course, people were pissed off. As WHAT grew, so did the attention of its board, who hired a numbers' cruncher out of public broadcasting in Washington DC to replace the manager. This guy was worse. If there weren't enough listeners, a show was dumped and replaced with a nationally syndicated program. Soon, most of the local shows were gone. In addition, many of the public donors were aging conservatives who wanted nothing but endless classical music to be aired. Stylistic diversity disappeared. It was a tyranny of the well-heeled. Indeed, much of what passed for music on public radio is what I came to call music to die discreetly by. Of course, there are exceptions. Not long after the numbers' cruncher arrived, the station was moved north to Queensville. We didn't miss it.

WXKE-FM was a similar story, and the thread of its brief history, six years, is instructive. It broadcast first on April Fool's day, 1984 - that should have been a warning. The parent station, WVAT-AM, was an extension of the longest running commercial frequency in the area, going back to post-war days. The owner, Max King, had made a lot of money in advertising in the '50s in NYC. Since the late '60s his had been the conservative voice of the Lower Plains, as the region is known, and the music was principally country and big band. Of course, the station had its own colorful characters. The popular Country Al took up with a married woman virtually on air. He disappeared with her one day creating quite a stir and was never heard from again. As was the case with a dj who, during a spell of rising floodwaters one spring, became hysterical, suggesting on-air that the dams on the Green river were liable to give way. There was panic and some people, quite unnecessarily, fled to higher ground. A boot from management encouraged his departure next morning. Then there was the flamboyant Bobby Singleton, who ran the area's biggest truck dealership. He was for many years a close friend of Max and, ever the dealer, had his own fifteen minute slot at 6.45 am weekdays, during which he sold old refrigerators or anything else he'd managed to scrounge up on consignment. Problem for Bobby was that he didn't like to pay taxes. The IRS finally caught up with him and confiscated his dealership, extensive landholdings and plane. But Bobby was not to be outdone. Before the IRS was able to remove several of the eighteen-wheelers, he drove them off and hid them in the woods. Some, later, were actually buried and only found years after when the environmental authorities, investigating a suspected illegal dump and boring core samples, dug up three mint semis.

WXKE was first managed by Davey Liner, a gentleman farmer with broadcasting experience from Arkansas. Coming to the area in the late ‘70s he signed on with Max, whose daughter Sue he married a few years later. They had no children...except for WXKE.

The heyday of FM programming  in the US was the '70s.  It was wonderfully freewheeling, coming on the heels of  the hippy era.  Djs played what they wanted and how they wanted - whole record albums without interruption. – and fixed play lists were tossed. A very creative period. But then in came Mr. Morning-in-America Reagan. Deregulation of everything proceeded apace. The radio airwaves were deregulated in two assaults on them in his administrations. The process was to allow the purchase of increasing numbers of stations by a single corporate entity in any given area of significant market share. In this way many small stations were taken over, their programming replaced with ersatz content. Advertising, too, was allowed to have a bigger chunk of programming time. Creativity died on the vine. WXKE was to suffer the same fate, only later, largely because this hitherto rural area had yet to catch up with national commercial trends.

Davey, the station manager of WXKE, exercised control in a manner that gave the station shape but allowed for individual creativity. Every musical genre had a presenter. The station's structure was preserved through conventional drive time programming, morning and evening, plus news, weather, public announcements and a regular interview show with locals of note. Local news was reported in some depth for a while and there were regular remotes - live from the local boat show, etc. All this proceeded without much of a hitch for three years, until Davey commenced an affair with the program director, Amy Archer. That put a major crimp in things. Fortunately for him his father-in-law Max had died in the interim. When Davey’s marriage failed, his connection with the station became increasingly tenuous and he was rarely seen. The program director continued for a brief spell, becoming increasingly absent until she switched to the parent station. Anarchy set in. An exciting and inevitably ephemeral period ensued. Another Bobby (Seaver), an easy-going trust-funder whom we referred to as ‘the Sieve,’ became program director. He was so easy-going that we seldom noticed when he was gone. The music continued, with presenters, in some instances, waiting breathlessly for the UPS truck to bring the latest releases, leading to fights over who would be the first to air them. There had been rudimentary play lists, but these were now abandoned. Eccentricities took a new turn when Jean-Paul joined the station.

Jean-Paul, as so many briefly associated with the area, came from who-knows-where, stayed a few years and then disappeared. A latter day hippie, tall and lanky, charming and quite ruthless, Jean-Paul trailed a string of women who had unwisely opted to take care of him. Locally, he married a poet, long enough to sire a daughter before passing on. Years later there were stories of him painting and selling bizarre crafts - decorated whips and such – in a Paris commune. Jean-Paul’s music was reggae and he was a passionate rebel. Before coming to WXKE, he had a late night show on WHAT. Jean-Paul drank...on the job…tequila...too much. One night, he got into a rant about American imperialism. Next morning he was fired. Of course, we welcomed him with open arms. He fit right in after the corporate straitjacket that WHAT had become. Instead of ranting at WXKE, Jean-Paul might be found, as I did one night, sitting in a mellow fog by the mic, a bottle of tequila balanced on one knee and a blonde bimbo on the other. If the FCC had ever found out, the station would have become dead air, muy pronto.

This, of course, couldn't last. Station ownership was now in the hands of Max’s two children, the daughter Sue whom Davey had spurned, and a son Roger, who was a real estate broker in Boston. Neither had any interest in radio. WVAT was almost gutted of live programming, much of it becoming automated on a timed tape carousel. Equipment at WXKE was allowed to run down, becoming increasingly unreliable. Word began to come down from the owners that they couldn't go on staunching the flow of red ink. Though there was still an advertising department, other stations had emerged in the area taking a bite out of sales. Despite all this, the station remained very popular. People recognized its singular individuality as a station and were steadfastly loyal. Listeners ran the gamut from carpenters (in Millington, on a good night) to Lagermouth faculty and night shift postal workers in Rio Blanco Pass, as we called a local hub. Even today, eighteen years after its demise, the station is still remembered fondly by a few.

I and Jim proposed to other staff to buy the station as a group. Not surprisingly – no one wanted the risks - Jim and I were left the initiative. Meanwhile, the Worm, as I called Dan Droogell, appeared as the new program director one warm fall morning in 1989 – Bobby Seaver had drifted off to another gentle berth. Gary and I were in his car chatting outside the station when I first spied his fat little toady body approaching the entrance. I knew at once by his appearance that he was a bureaucratic storm trooper and said as much to Gary. His subsequent greasy, weaseling manner confirmed that he was a Trojan Horse sent  to do the dirty work of the owners. I had no doubt we were all to be got rid of. At about the same time, another piece of  professional vileness, Saul Bates, appeared in the guise of a radio executive who specialized in flogging deadbeat stations back to life. He, too, was a consummate liar. The efforts of  Jim and I to buy the station were rebuffed. Draconian measures inflicted by the Worm at the behest of His Vileness, as I called Bates, began to have effect, and one by one people left the station. At a meeting one day of the remaining staff called by the tyro and his henchman, when I called them on the many promises that had been broken, I was openly roasted for questioning their integrity. I held my ground until told to leave. Never quit is my motto; make them fire you. My departure was not, however, my last dealing with the station.

Though Jim, my erstwhile radio partner, could be wild-eyed and treacherous, he had charisma and a knack of fooling wealthy women into being accomplices to his survival. His luck did run out, or, shall we say, he failed of his talents, and died in his 50s a few years later of cancer, leaving a trail of wreckage behind. But that was yet to come. His then-latest female dupe had a wealthy and influential father on the West coast, a Democratic lawyer and deal-maker in LA. He was willing to handle the station purchase. In addition, I had lined up some local support. By then the station owners had grown tired of paying His Vileness, who wanted a bigger stake in the station, and he had slunk off to find another warm carcass to beat. Delight at this turn of events was tempered by awareness that the Worm remained to slither through the increasingly deserted studios, intent on creating a new station for himself. Jim and I approached a radio broker, who was seeking a buyer for the frequency. At first there was discussion, then all of a sudden it had been sold. It seemed more than likely that the local radio mafia, the other station owners in the area, were determined that our ragtaggle mob who were so popular must be silenced for good. I remain of the opinion that the Worm had a hand in this. Initially he seemed interested in joining us, but then suddenly became unavailable. As all this was taking place, some of the retailers who had advertised on WXKE banded together in support of us. Fred Inger of Friends on Johnson St. in Kingsley, an unabashed radical, was prominent among them. Unwisely, but then who cares when affairs have reached such a dismal pass, a boycott directed at advertising on other local stations was proposed, and flyers, etc, were distributed. The radio mafia brought legal action and that was the end. So much for democracy - the freedom of speech in its efficacy belongs only to the powerful in America. We were perhaps fools in pursuit of our vision, but I’d rather have been that than an angel too anxious to fly.

The fate of the station? The Worm cobbled together a mish-mash of the old station with remnants of the former staff and, after a couple of years, threw in the towel. He moved to Rhode Island where he promoted rock festivals. The station's frequency was bought by a branch of the radio mafia and disappeared into Easy Listening programming. Goodbye cruel world - Welcome to the wrecking ball.

We extracted a brief but memorable moment of revenge at a dinner that was given by management for personnel at a chi-chi restaurant, Dana Vale in Winslow, in the final days of the true WXKE. The restaurant owed advertising dues to the station, and it was decided to collect them by way of the dinner. Twenty or so of us were seated at two long tables and the menu was à la carte. At one table sat owners, management and the more sober-minded. At ours sat the dissenters and rowdies, those who, in the words of the Grateful Dead song, knew they 'may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least we're enjoying the ride.' It was a cash bar and we made the most of it, ordering up bottle after bottle of gourmet plonk. I still picture Jean-Paul, his long hair flopping about an angular, mischievous face, his tall, lanky body half-risen from the table, one arm gesticulating wildly to an approaching waitress juggling with three more bottles of the finest. The bill, we learned later, was on the order of $3,000 plus. Somewhat in excess of the restaurant’s debt.

I retain a Golden Microphone award from the state’s Broadcasters’ Association for one of my own shows on WXKE, Raise the Levee! featuring New Orleans r&b. This was thanks to Neil Rice, who was briefly the program director during the station’s closing days. Other’s shows, better than mine, lacked for promotion, demonstrating yet another failure of the station. The best things in life may or may not be free, but I know they are ephemeral.