FM (15 page)

Harrison had already moved on. “All right, this afternoon I’ll call Les Turpin at CBS-FM. You try to get ahold of George Duncan at Metromedia. Let’s find out if there’s a station we could program on the West Coast.”

I’d grown to love working on the Island, living near the Atlantic Ocean. Pulling up stakes to go west didn’t sound all that appealing. My family was nearby in New Jersey. But Michael was right, we had to make a move now while our stock was high.

So we pounded the pavement. We arranged job interviews at CBS. Everyone there was receptive and knew of our accomplishments in Garden City. But we were still kids. George Duncan agreed to see us at Metromedia headquarters. As head of the whole radio division now, he could send us wherever he wanted. But we failed the test he gave us, when we endorsed the uncensored version of “Working Class Hero.”

So as we stood on the roof that wintry Friday night in 1971, coats pulled tight around us against the wind, we had no prospects other than to languish at WLIR and hope for a savior to bail out Reiger. The hours we spent working decreased as we became more dispirited and more in search of an escape. As our little transistor radio played gently in the background, it was obvious that something indeed was up with Rosko. His normally silky voice was breaking like an adolescent’s and he seemed to be near tears. He reiterated that this was his last program at WNEW-FM, although he’d be on tape the following night. He played “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” and sang along, although we couldn’t know at the time how closely that song paralleled what was happening in his life. He thanked all his coworkers—George Duncan, program director Scott Muni. He was leaving of his own accord and he’d been treated like a prince by everyone at Metromedia. There was no rancor in his voice, only a strange kind of joy, as if he were leaving one happy phase of his life behind for an exciting new adventure. The last record he played was Lee Michaels’s “Heighty Hi,” and he sang along with it on an open microphone. He wished us all peace and closed with his patented, “I sure do love you so.”

Then he was gone with the wind.

Harrison and I were thinking precisely the same thing at that moment. While sad to be losing Rosko, there was no announced successor and no logical candidate to take the great man’s place. We rushed back into the building and began editing our audition tapes. The assault on Manhattan was about to begin.

The Lamb Lies Down
on Broadway

Once Harrison and I were officially hired at WNEW-FM, after the bizarre interviews with Muni and company, things seemed to move in slow motion. Our first duty was the bittersweet task of informing Reiger that we’d both be leaving. He seemed stunned by the news. He said that he had always allowed for the possibility that one of us would leave, but felt confident that the other would carry on. With both of us gone, he feared that his newfound prosperity would be short-lived.

The fact that he didn’t try to retain us with offers of more money confirmed our beliefs that it just wasn’t there to give. But we assured him that we’d stay as long as necessary to make a smooth transition, and that we would work with Chuck Macken, our recommendation to program the station. I felt that Macken was a solid man and that it wouldn’t take long for him to get up to speed. Michael had already drilled Chuck on the importance of closing ranks and keeping outside forces from corrupting what we’d built.

Meanwhile, our lease over the bakery was expiring and with our generous new salaries, we knew that our days of rooming together were over. I also felt the need to be in the city, although the idea of high rents and parking fees in Manhattan still put me off. A reasonable compromise seemed to be Queens, an easy commute by subway. I settled on a studio apartment in Lefrak City, eight miles from the station. Michael wound up in Lynbrook—it was a longer commute, but had more space.

Our first shot on the New York airwaves came quickly. Zacherle needed two days off in early April. Michael filled in first, and I did my initial show the evening of April 13, 1971. But we were cautioned not to say anything on or off the air about our upcoming roles at the station, since everyone who would be affected by the moves had not been informed of them yet.

Two weeks later, we got a succinctly worded letter in the mail:

I am truly sorry to inform you both that there are no openings in programming any of the Metromedia stations at this time, nor do we anticipate any in the foreseeable future.

However, I have gotten wind of the fact that there may be some changes coming at WNEW-FM in New York and that it might afford an opportunity for you both. I suggest you contact Varner Paulsen, the general manager, at your earliest convenience.

Good Luck and Congrats,
George Duncan
Vice President
Metromedia Radio

We were so afraid of Duncan that his impish sense of humor had escaped us until that letter arrived. But the plan at WNEW-FM finally solidified: Michael would do mornings, bumping the current occupant, Pete Fornatale, to middays. Muni would continue in the afternoons, followed by Schwartz, Zacherle, and then Steele overnight. After having a taste of the daylight hours, Alison couldn’t have been too pleased. An aggressive careerist, much of her outside activity took place during regular business hours, and working all night was not conducive to her syndication deals and commercial work. It also didn’t leave time for much of a social life. But everyone else loved the new schedule, especially Fornatale. It would allow him an easy rail commute from his Port Washington home, avoiding rush-hour traffic both ways.

Mornings were still the least important shift. Most car radios still didn’t have FM tuners, and much of morning listening is spent in the car, trying to glean information and entertainment while fuming through traffic jams. Longtime morning hosts on AM like Klavan and Finch, John Gambling, Don Imus, and Harry Harrison, as well as the all news outlets, were too powerful to be challenged by anything FM could offer. Varner Paulsen expected audience shares in the morning to lag well behind the rest of the day parts, in stark contrast to the philosophy general managers have today. The money time on FM was 6 to 10 p.m., and that was in the hands of Jonathan Schwartz.

My first brush with Jonathan was an uneasy one. I had gone into the studio on my first day as music director to replace a worn LP when he cornered me, almost literally, exhaling garlicky breath in my face.

“Young man, what’s your name again?”

I told him, using the radio name I’d been stuck with.

“Ah, Dick Neer. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? What qualifies you to be on this radio station?”

Jonathan wasn’t trying to be obnoxious, although I didn’t know it at the time. This was his unsubtle way of asking me about my background, getting to know me. I had heard his raging ego had only gotten worse since ascending to prime time and replacing his arch rival, Rosko. I was warned by Steele and others to steer clear of him. “He’ll eat you for breakfast,” she told me.

“I don’t want to distract you before you go on the air,” I said to Schwartz. “We’ll talk another time when it’s more convenient for you.” I was determined to do everything in my power to ensure that that time would not come soon. With his unconventional radio voice, there was speculation among those who didn’t know him that Jonathan was gay. Reading between the lines of the staff’s warnings, I feared that his interest in me might not be wholly professional. I would later learn that my fears were completely unfounded, and that Jonno went through women like Muni went through scotch.

“Don’t leave, don’t leave, young man. Have you ever heard of me?”

This was ridiculous—any answer I might give would obviously be designed to feed his ego or reveal my own ignorance.

“Of course I’ve heard of you, Jonathan.” I made sure to use his first name. Referring to him as “Mr. Schwartz” would have only weakened my already prostrate position.

“Do you know that I do other things, that I’m not just a ‘jocque du disques’?” Of course, the appellation “disc jockey” would be beneath him. “Do you know, for example, that I’m a writer?”

“Sure I do. You wrote
Almost Home.
” In every station tear sheet, the minibiography of Jonno contained the obligatory “celebrated author of
Almost Home,
a collection of short stories.” I had no idea about the rest of his background, other than that he was from Boston and his family was rich. Little did I realize that his father had penned “Cocktails for Two,” the song I was compelled to play for years while introducing WLIR’s evening program of the same name.

Schwartz wasn’t satisfied to leave it at that. “I don’t suppose you’ve read it. No, I don’t suppose you read much at all.”

Welcome to WNEW-FM and the big time! I was being insulted by its most powerful host, a man whom I’d just met. At the time, I wasn’t a voracious reader, but did I look like that much of a hayseed to this snob? After all, I had just graduated from college. So I lied.

“As a matter of fact, I have read it. Look, the news is ending and your show is starting. I’d better leave.” I bolted out the heavy studio door as he shouted something after me. I grabbed my jacket and ran for the safety of the elevator, lest he pursue and interrogate me more about his book.

As I walked across town toward the bus terminal, I seethed. I knew from Alison that WNEW-FM wasn’t one big happy family but this was ridiculous. I posed no threat to Schwartz. I respected his air work and wanted him to like me.

But now I was faced with a real test: I hadn’t read
Almost Home.
There was no way that I could avoid him following up on it the next day unless I left early, and that wouldn’t sit well with my new bosses, whom I was trying to impress with my work habits. To admit that I had lied to him might gain his respect, or it might signal that his intimidation tactics had worked, leading to more of the same. So, as I passed a Doubleday bookstore on the way home, I bought a copy of his tome and began reading it on the bus. I didn’t enjoy it much under the circumstances, but I stayed up until two in the morning until I’d finished every last page. I felt like I was back in college, cramming for an exam.

Sure enough, Schwartz ambled into the music library at a quarter to six the next evening. I was prepared for him, not only by my study of his book, but by a pep talk from Alison, who told me not to take any more of his crap. She advised that if I did, he’d only try to humiliate me again, but that if I stood up to him, like all bullies, he’d retreat. She conveyed that even though Rosko gave away four inches and thirty pounds to Jonno, Schwartz had backed down from physical confrontations. I filed that away—not given to violence myself, and knowing that winning a fistfight with a star jock would result in losing my job. Not worth it.

I looked up at him from the pile of records on my desk. “Hey, Jonno, how are you?”

He reacted as if slapped, but quickly recovered. “Young Neer,” he said sneeringly. At least he used my name; that was a start. “I noted that you retreated rather quickly upon mention of my book. It led me to the inescapable conclusion that you indeed, in fact, hadn’t read it at all, as you stated.” This was typical Schwartz verbosity: perhaps a test to see if you’d rise to his level of literacy.

“I did read it.” I tried to sound unimpressed. And though his prose was not exactly to my liking, he was obviously talented. Plus, as his tear sheet stated, director Peter Yates (
Bullitt
) had optioned it for the cinema.

He looked askance. “Oh, really,” he said skeptically. “What was your favorite part?”

I then launched into a lengthy description of my favorite story, and then mentioned some other segments that I had enjoyed. He listened to my entire analysis with his mouth open, as if a child of four was explaining quantum physics.

“I could have sworn you hadn’t read it,” he muttered, almost to himself, as he fled to the studio. My feeling was that I had won something important in my little duel with Jonathan. For once in his life, he was almost speechless. Our relationship, though never a close one, was conducted professionally and with respect thereafter, but for reasons unrelated to my perceived little victory. I grew to like Jonno, accepting his strangeness as a sort of quirky charm.

I had misread his intentions as poorly as he had misunderstood mine. Schwartz has always considered format to be the “dust in the air” at any radio station, ready to settle down at a moment’s notice. He lived in constant fear of anyone in a position of authority telling him what to play. In his obfuscating fashion, he was letting me know that he was not about to take orders from me when it came to music. Even though my impression of his personal wealth was vastly overstated, he wanted everyone to believe that he enjoyed economic independence from the job. His trumpeting of
Almost Home
was his way of saying that he didn’t need WNEW-FM, but that
it
needed
him.
His writing had garnered the station oceans of free ink, in the
New York Times, Newsweek,
and other important publications. Along with praise for his work, every article contained the call letters and that impressed the powers at the station. He was also tight with George Duncan, who had told him that he’d be around as long as there was a Metromedia, which was indeed prophetic. Schwartz was defending his territory, fierce in his desire to maintain autonomy and defend free-form tenets.

My agenda was to be accepted as a peer. The only system that WNEW-FM had to regulate music was the “rack.” This was a rolling wooden bin, about thirty inches tall, with a partition in the middle. It contained about 250 albums. Similar to what Tony Pigg did at KSAN, my job was to give the rack a semblance of organization. Albums were designated NA (new album) and PA (progressive album), which merely meant that it was a current release. In the back were FA (folk album), JA (jazz), and INST (instrumental). In those days, the station simulcast hourly news with WNEW-AM so instrumentals were helpful in filling time to the top of the hour. At any given moment there might be sixty NAs, one hundred PAs, thirty FAs, twenty-five JAs, and a handful of INSTs. I would listen to the new releases and mark tracks that I liked, although the jocks were under no requirement to heed my suggestions. I might include a bit of biographical material or a brief description of the sound of the record. Weekly memos came from my desk, detailing the new albums added.

The rack was changed every six weeks and this was enough to keep me awake the night before. It entailed winnowing out the NAs, moving the successful ones to PA or FA, and eliminating the ones nobody played. The NAs might then shrink temporarily to ten, before gradually building to sixty again and necessitating another rack change.

To keep the PAs at a manageable level, the less-played ones would be put in the “wall,” a massive shelving system along the rear of the studio. All records that achieved PA status went into the wall, regardless of merit or airplay, and stayed there after they lost their designation as a “current.” Politics played a big part in deciding the fate of an album. Holy hell would be raised if you removed a record that a friendly promoter was hyping to Muni or Steele. You had to be sure that it was toast before relegating it to the obscurity of the wall, since anything that left the rack saw an enormous drop in airplay. The rack-change memo was my biggest enemy, in that regard. With all the albums available, I figured that I could sneak a few losers out of the system without anyone noticing. But the memo had to state which new records went into the rack, which into the wall, and which just vanished. The jocks then perused the memo and if one of their favorites was eliminated, I heard about it. Muni generally insisted that I return it to the rack or, on a few occasions, suggested that jocks play their own copies.

I also had to check over the taped shows to make sure that the proper albums were pulled from the library and inserted into a cardboard box containing cue sheets. Tom “Tammy” Tracy produced the taped shows, meaning that he recorded the vocal tracks and barked out timing so that the jocks knew how many songs they could play within a given hour. He typed a detailed cue sheet for the weekend engineers, who most often were veterans of WNEW-AM and neither knew nor liked rock and roll. Very, very often, even Tracy’s clearly labeled instructions were misinterpreted and disaster followed.

Schwartz tells of one particular tape operator we’ll call Lewinski who, in Jonno’s words, “would never be confused with Saul Bellow.” One evening, a friend had arranged a ménage à trois for the always adventuresome Schwartz. Upon reaching his Manhattan apartment, one of the two nymphets suggested that they videotape the encounter for posterity. Unconcerned that the tape could surface later and cause him embarrassment, Jonno carefully positioned his video camera and adjusted its focus toward his king-size bed. He flipped the stereo to 102.7, where his taped show was about to air. He anticipated a night of ecstasy—listening to himself on the radio while enjoying the lascivious attention of two young women. It just couldn’t get any better than that.