FM (22 page)

“These are the only numbers that count. The hell with Arbitron ratings. Don’t you worry about that. You just do the best show you know how. But if
these
numbers ever change, then believe me, you’ll hear from me right away. Then you can worry.”

Dave walked away, his spirits lifted. The next time the ratings came out, they showed improvement, and Karmazin heartily congratulated Herman. He’d found a clever way to raise Dave’s confidence and yet let him know the criteria against which he’d be judged.

Herman’s relationship with Mel underscored another tenet that has made Karmazin the giant he is today. He is able to identify the stars—the chief moneymakers—and he treats them like kings. They are accorded generous contracts, complete with perks that most companies would never extend to talent. If a Don Imus or Howard Stern gets in trouble, he’ll back them to the hilt. But he also is hard-nosed when it comes to union contracts or pay scales to those he deems replaceable. There is never fat in a Karmazin-run enterprise, dating back to his time at WNEW. When I was his operations manager, there originally was no music director. That fell under my domain until much later when I proved to him I needed assistance in that area. There was no promotions director, and only a part-time production manager. Now, radio stations have whole departments employing several people in each of those areas. But Mel wouldn’t expand the staff unless you could absolutely convince him that it would improve the station’s revenue picture. Likewise, he pares away jobs he sees as superfluous. One of his least popular but effective moves was to eliminate salaries for salesmen, making the position a “commission only” situation. By doing this, he drove away the timid and kept only those willing to hustle. Perhaps this dates back to his early days in radio sales at WCBS when he turned a $17,500 salary into $70,000 in yearly commissions.

As I said, I was almost fired by Mel a number of times: One of my most vivid recollections concerned a conversation in which he accused me of not working hard enough. He didn’t have the feeling that I was willing to go that extra mile for the company. I equated my attitude to that of a baseball player, who played hard but wouldn’t risk injury diving for the ball. I felt that my talent would make up for that.

He replied, “A lot of people have talent. I guess I need somebody that’ll dive for the ball.”

At that point, WNEW-FM had never cracked a three share in the ratings. We were then at a 2.7 and seemed to be bumping against a glass ceiling. But after that talk, I worked harder than I ever had, giving up evenings and weekends in a single-minded pursuit of that three share. When the numbers came out, we’d bounced up to a 3.1, and Mel took us all to our favorite watering hole to celebrate. Before we left the station, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I want you to know that more than anyone else, I hold you responsible for our breaking a three share. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard at this station. See what happens when you dive for the ball?” That was probably the best compliment I’ve gotten in four decades of radio.

I had very few problems with Mel after that. He’s extremely loyal to his people once they prove themselves, and he expects that loyalty to be returned.

A story told by Charles Laquidara illustrates that point. When Mel’s Infinity Radio bought WBCN, Charles was in contract talks and things weren’t going well. Karmazin flew to Boston and drove to Laquidara’s home to handle negotiations personally. The longtime morning man was surprised at how easily Mel agreed to his terms, and the two went out to dinner afterward, becoming fast friends. Karmazin even included stock options in the deal, something he said he’d never done before.

Subsequent contracts went smoothly as Charles dominated Boston’s ratings in AM drive time. But he noticed over time that his dinners with Mel were becoming more infrequent, and that whenever Karmazin came up to the station, Charles barely merited a quick hello.

Laquidara championed BCN’s workers when they had disputes with management and lent his voice to political groups that supported gun control, environmental issues, and generally liberal causes. His need for approval included Mel and he felt that their personal friendship extended beyond a typical employee-employer relationship. So when his boss next visited WBCN and ensconced himself in the general manager’s office, Charles wrote him a note.

“Dear Mel,” it read, “I know that since I met you the first time, you’ve succeeded in business far beyond anyone’s imagination. You are a very busy man. I realize that your time is valuable. I estimate it to be worth a thousand dollars a minute. So enclosed please find a personal check for three thousand dollars. I humbly request three minutes of your time before you leave today.” He asked an intern to deliver it.

The kid returned a moment later. “He said, ‘Fine.’ Should you meet in the office he’s in now, or in yours?”

Laquidara, always one to tweak authority said, “Tell him that since I’m paying, he should come here.”

Moments later Karmazin appeared, closed the office door, clicked the stem of his watch and said, “Clock’s ticking.”

Charles proceeded to outline his case: He’d been hurt by Mel’s indifference and he wanted to know what he’d done to deserve such disregard.

“Charles, when I bought this station, I didn’t treat you like an employee. I treated you like a partner and a friend. I gave you stock options. I pay you ten times over scale. I never tell you how to run your show. And yet, anytime there’s a labor issue here, you’re always against me. The people here have unions, they have a mechanism to fight their battles for them. They don’t need you. You should be on the company’s side. You’re invested in the company, part of management. And yet every time something comes up, you’re on the other side. Also, it’s eleven-thirty now and you’re packing up to leave. Do you know that Howard Stern almost never leaves the station until three? He’s always listening to tapes and trying to improve his show. Do you think you’re better than him? Time’s up.” With that, he left. Charles had to admit that the words had resonance, yet he felt a moral responsibility to the support staff to use his leverage to better their lot. His contact with Mel has been limited since.

Two months after the three-minute encounter, Laquidara’s accountant called. It seemed Charles was missing a check that hadn’t yet been cashed. After retracing his transactions, he realized that the missing check was the one that he’d written Karmazin.

“Oh, forget about it,” he told his man. “He’ll never cash it.”

Shortly afterward, Laquidara received a letter embossed in gold ink from the White House. It was an invitation to meet President Bush, who wanted to personally thank him for the generous contribution to his reelection campaign. Also included in that day’s mail was a form letter from Wayne LaPierre, then president of the National Rifle Association, thanking him for the largest donation they’d received from a private citizen that week.

Good-bye Yellow Brick Road

Jonathan Schwartz was tired.

The grind of working seven days a week had become too much for him. He was entangled in a romantic situation that was strangling him, and he always had taken such attachments very seriously. One of them had landed him in a mental ward two weeks before he was supposed to start at WNEW-FM in 1967. This time, it was a young coworker, and Schwartz was feeling trapped.

His quest for love in many of the wrong places could be traced back to his childhood in Beverly Hills. His famous father wasn’t around much and his mother was often bedridden, so he spent his early years largely unattended by family. It was here where he developed his radio skills, closing himself inside a closet and practicing play-by-play for his beloved baseball. As he grew older, he began to break into houses in his neighborhood, where many people left their doors unlocked. He would rifle through his neighbors’ personal items, perhaps in search of some kind of human connection. (He once rummaged through a house he later discovered was Gene Kelly’s.) He always left everything as it was, but he admits to stealing a few 78s.

He was also tired of rock and roll. Like anything new and uncharted, the gradual revelation of its mysteries had been fascinating at first. Schwartz probed and experimented, exploring its limitations and taboos further and further. He defined rock as “jazz, under pressure.” But he was rooted in Sinatra and the standards of his father’s era and eventually found playing the Doors wanting. The music rarely spoke to him anymore—it was time to move on.

He’d come to the realization in the spring of 1975 that his radio work was interfering with his writing. It was all too easy to put in a full evening behind a hot microphone, have a late supper and stay up until nearly dawn, sleep away the day, and then get up and do it again, without ever putting pen to paper. He was earning a nice living between the two stations, AM and FM, and was revered by the fans of each.

But the old gang wasn’t around much anymore: Paulsen was gone, Duncan was on the road a lot; he even missed fighting with his old nemesis, Rosko. His new boss, Mel Karmazin, wasn’t enthralled by his habit of dialing up the radio station that carried the Boston Red Sox games and listening in while doing his show. But it was that and the alcohol that kept him going. His relationship with Alison Steele had never been good—he’d never had much use for her other than as a target for derisive flirtation. His appreciation for Scott Muni was only as a comrade in arms, a fellow drinker; but he was disdainful of what he saw as Muni’s substandard intellect.

Muni regarded him as a spoiled eccentric with peculiar tastes in everything but scotch. One of the characteristics Scottso found most disquieting was Jonathan’s habit of eating food from garbage cans. Other jocks would be appalled when Schwartz would steal into the newsroom, spy a pizza box crammed into a waste bin, and help himself to a half-eaten slice. One of Muni’s apocryphal tales, retold so many times that it is accepted as true, regards one such incident. Schwartz vehemently denies the veracity of the following:

Early in Jonno’s tenure at WNEW-FM, the station employed a young woman at minimum wage to answer phones at night and keep track of requests. One evening while leaving work, Muni found the woman sobbing softly. As father-confessor to everyone at the station, he tried to comfort her and see if there was anything he could do to alleviate her distress.

“Mr. Muni,” she wept. “You know I don’t make a lot of money here. I’m going to school during the day and I can’t afford to order out for food. So I make a sandwich every day and put it in the refrigerator here at the station. I bring in a can of soda, too. Well, today, when I went to get my sandwich and soda, they were gone. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day. I’m short of money and don’t have enough to order out.”

Muni empathized and gave the woman some money. He then headed back to the studio, where he saw an empty soda can and crumpled paper bag in the area where Schwartz had been sitting before going on the air that evening.

Muni decided to get some vigilante justice. The next morning, he prepared a treat for Jonathan—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a special added ingredient: a crushed slab of chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax, a powerful laxative. He wrapped it in wax paper and stuffed it into a brown bag, much like one the receptionist had used. He surreptitiously placed it in the small refrigerator the station provided for its employees’ convenience and waited for Schwartz’s arrival.

It was a Friday evening and when Muni finished his show and got ready to depart for the weekend, he checked the refrigerator and the bag was missing. Schwartz, who claims in thirty-five years of radio never to have missed a show due to illness or to have even been late, dragged himself into the studio the following Monday.

“Bad weekend, Fats?” Muni asked him. “You look a little green around the gills.”

“Horrible case of diarrhea,” Schwartz said. “Must have been something I ate.”

Muni never let on the source of his malady. He was gleeful in his revenge, but the incident didn’t curb Jonno from devouring anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Despite his boyish mischief, Schwartz was feeling out of sorts playing rock music for kids. He told Karmazin that he didn’t want to leave the station in the lurch, so he was handing him a year’s notice. May 1, 1976, would be the date of his final show on WNEW-FM. Mel tried several times to dissuade him, but his mind was made up and he never looked back. He was financially secure and free to write what and when he wanted. He kept his part-time gig at WNEW-AM, where he could play only what he wanted. He could flit in and out of exotic women’s lives without having to face them at work. But he would miss the free food.

Thunder Road

Just after the fourth of July in 1974, an obscure musician from New Jersey played the Bottom Line, an intimate but prestigious music club on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village. On his second album, he’d written a song about the holiday and his manager thought it would be a good idea to book him to play New York near the Fourth. Unfortunately, although it sounded good on paper, it turned out to be a bad idea, since many city dwellers flee for the shore or mountains to escape the heat at every opportunity. The house was half full, but despite the lackluster gate, the club’s owners, Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, saw something during those shows that made them believe that someday Bruce Springsteen would revolutionize rock and roll.

I developed a friendship with Bruce through an odd series of coincidences. I was a big Rangers hockey fan and I attended most of their home games on Wednesday nights with the rep for Columbia Records, Matty Matthews. It seemed that after every game, there would be an artist Matty had to pay his respects to, and since I wasn’t on the air until 2 a.m., I generally accompanied him.

I must have seen Springsteen play Max’s Kansas City a dozen times. I really wasn’t too impressed with those early shows. Bruce had presence and the band had a lot of raw energy, but it was too much for such a small club. Whenever we went back to his dressing room to say hello, he treated each introduction as if I was meeting him for the first time. A bad memory or drugs, I thought, not knowing at the time that he didn’t indulge. Maybe he had met so many DJs in the course of his touring that he didn’t remember me. Or maybe he was just shy or simply didn’t care.

Our real relationship blossomed not in person, but on the phone. During that era, all the jocks felt that it was important to answer the request line to stay in touch with the audience and get a sense of what they wanted to hear. And frankly, we often got lonely, sitting by ourselves in a small room filled with records. Nights could be especially long—meeting Matty for dinner at six, seeing a hockey game, catching a live performance, and then doing a program until six the next morning. The juxtaposition of all the social activity followed by the imposed solitude made for a difficult transition, and the phone was the only way I got any feedback. Talking into an open microphone in the middle of the night is like trying to have a conversation with a golden retriever. Occasionally we’d flirt with female listeners; some even became friends or lovers. Dave Herman met his second wife via the request line: She’d called to ask a question, they began talking, hit it off, and agreed to meet for lunch at a promotional party. A couple of years later, they were getting married at his country home in Connecticut. There are other less wholesome stories I could tell about the listener line, but I made some lasting friendships with some of the regular callers, and one of these was Bruce Springsteen.

I must have given him the hotline number a dozen times, but he’d jot it down on some scrap of paper and lose it, so he always called on the request line. We’d talk about sports, women, music; whatever was on our minds. He’s an amazingly self-educated man. When you hear him interviewed today, he is so articulate and chooses his words so precisely, it would seem that he’s the product of a Princeton education. In reality, the closest he got to Princeton was Ocean County Community College in Toms River, New Jersey, which he attended for one semester before dropping out. But back then he had trouble putting words to his feelings, although he did it better on the phone than in the flesh. I was always astonished that this man, who struggled so mightily to express himself in normal conversation, could author the lyrics that he did. I think sometimes that he crammed his verses with so many syllables in an attempt to overcompensate for his lack of formal education. As his confidence grew, his later work got simpler and more elegant. The more he traveled and read, the more he refined his art, until he now can say a lot by saying very little.

He was a big radio fan, and once confided that his friends would tease him by calling him Cousin Brucie. He often listened at night, and not only knew the major rock groups, but was aware of R&B and new stuff as well. Our talks were often rambling two-hour discussions, with long gaps while I had to change records or set up commercials. He’d wait patiently and we’d pick up where we’d left off. Often, I could tell he wasn’t alone, as he whispered his words into the handset so as not to disturb the sleeping body next to him. Sometimes, if six a.m. came around and we were still on a roll, I’d continue the conversation in another room as Dave Herman did his morning show.

Springsteen’s first album,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,
had received tepid airplay, and many of my colleagues thought he was a low-rent Bob Dylan. The hype coming from Columbia didn’t help, since they were comparing him to the poet from Hibbing and projecting him as “the next big thing.” Bruce himself resented the comparisons and told me so, and I defended his talents whenever the staff would get into a music discussion, blaming the record company, not the artist, for the overaggressive promotion.

He didn’t even feel that the record captured what he was doing. “I was always with a band,” he told me. “When I auditioned for Columbia they were into this singer-songwriter thing. But at the time, I was so desperate to get a contract that I’d have done anything. But I was into playing guitar, loud.”

Greetings
sold modestly, mostly in the Northeast, and won some loyal followers like myself and Ed Schaiky of WMMR. Certain influential people became believers, but none were more devoted to Bruce than Schaiky. He’d actually schedule his vacations around tour dates and follow Bruce from city to city. If Murray the K was the Fifth Beatle, Ed could lay claim to being the ninth E-Streeter (or tenth, or eighth). The mere mention of Bruce would incite a lecture on his latest song or performance and minutiae about how Bruce changed the set from night to night. Ed almost got to be annoying in his devotion to the Boss. Another early disciple was Kid Leo (Lawrence Travagliante) at WMMS in Cleveland.

But most radio people didn’t see what the fuss was about. “Frankly, I didn’t see what the big deal was,” Dave Herman said in
Newsweek.
“The record was okay, but to compare this scruffy New Jersey kid to Dylan was ridiculous. I saw him as a pale imitation and I resented the comparison.”

When the second album,
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,
came out the following year, the resentment only increased. Vin Scelsa and I were its champions at the station, and I thought it was getting decent support, but apparently Springsteen’s manager, Mike Appel, didn’t agree. He sent everyone on the staff a postcard asking, “What does it take to get airplay on this station?”—the clear implication being that the only way to get his artist exposed was through payola. One by one, the jocks tacked their postcards up on the station’s bulletin board under the legend: “Did you get one of these, too?” It was hard for me to do damage control, especially since I remember getting Xeroxes of hundred-dollar bills after the postcard came in the mail, and I was
supporting
the record. We complained to Columbia, and they publicly disavowed the postcards while privately telling us that Springsteen’s manager was an idiot who thought he could use intimidation to get his acts on the air. I told Bruce about the mail campaign, but he knew nothing about it.

That incident set Bruce back in a market that should have spearheaded his drive to the top. I loved the record, even though it showcased more of Bruce’s jazz and classical side than his straight-ahead rock and roll roots. I savored the opportunity to play the entire second side, consisting of “Incident on 57th Street,” “Rosalita,” and “New York City Serenade” on the overnights. I thought it captured the city at night so perfectly, with lines like, “It’s midnight in Manhattan/This is no time to get cute/It’s a mad dog’s promenade.” “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” was another song of quiet desperation that I relished playing year-round. Overall, if Bruce had stayed mining that vein, I’d have been a fan for life. But I knew that he’d never achieve mass popularity going that route.

In late 1974, my brother Dan was attending Syracuse University and working part-time for Columbia Records, promoting their artists upstate. He’d obtained a bootleg copy of the title song from Springsteen’s forthcoming album,
Born to Run,
which was scheduled to be released in August 1975. When I played it for the first time on the overnight show, I knew that my midnight telephone conversations with Bruce would soon be over because he’d belong to the world and would outgrow the need to call radio stations in the middle of the night.

The song was a breakthrough, an homage to the production techniques of Phil Spector, with densely layered instruments echoing over a relentless driving beat. The theme was classic Bruce—the lonely rider, desperate to break loose from his meaningless blue-collar existence to find his place in the sun, all the while doubting his ability to break the ties that bind. After a few weeks of exclusive play on my show, other jocks were getting requests for it and asking me for a copy. His doubters on the staff were slowly being converted into believers.

Kid Leo in Cleveland had gotten hold of the record around Thanksgiving of 1974 and immediately gave it heavy airplay on his afternoon show on WMMS. He loved the song so much that he played it as he was signing off every Friday afternoon, and it became his anthem leading into the weekend. Bruce played Cleveland again in February of 1975, and was trying out a few of the songs from the forthcoming album. He played “Thunder Road” (then called “Wings for Wheels”) and “Jungleland,” both of which were received with enthusiasm. But when the band went into “Born to Run,” the entire crowd rose to its feet and sang it along with him. When the show ended, Bruce asked the promoter how this audience knew every word to a song that wasn’t scheduled for release for at least six months. He was told about Leo’s unbridled support, to which he said, “Bring him to me!”

Leo was led backstage and was a little unsure if he would be excoriated and possibly sued for pirating the record, which technically wasn’t supposed to be aired. But Springsteen was overwhelmed by the response of the crowd and thanked the young DJ profusely. They spoke for about ten minutes, and Leo became Bruce’s friend and biggest champion in Cleveland.

But 1975 was make-or-break time at Columbia. Bruce’s contract was coming to an end and if his third album continued the disappointing sales of the first two offerings, the label would drop him. I had begun to cultivate a friendship with Mike Appel’s personal assistant, a stunning blond woman. Upon hearing
Born to Run,
I was convinced that it would be a smash and I wanted WNEW to be there at the beginning, and not let the payola postcards destroy the relationship. There was a buzz starting about the album, and Appel’s assistant played me some other tracks that convinced me that Bruce was about to explode. Through her and Michael Pillotte, the national promotion director at Columbia, I found out that the band had been booked for the Bottom Line in mid-August, right after the album was to be released.

I found other allies in strange places. Michael Leon of A&M Records, who had no tie to the group other than as a fan, had obtained an advance copy of the record and was promoting it to his legions of friends in the business. Pepper and Snadowsky saw national prominence for their club if the dates turned out to be as monumental as we hoped they’d be.

So I sent a memo to Mel Karmazin stating that I’d put my reputation on the line that this Bottom Line concert was going to be historic and that we should arrange now to do a live broadcast before someone else beat us to it. Pat Dawson and I would do all the legwork—coordinating with the record company, the club, and the band—if he would just give us the airwaves for two hours. Mel sensed my passion and gave the nod.

The alliance was an uneasy one from the start. Whereas Columbia was willing to underwrite some of the costs of the broadcast, their funds weren’t limitless. They saw this as a favor to the station. Mel was going on my word that the prestige of this event would make up for the lost revenue we’d suffer by presenting the show commercial-free. Even if we had found a sponsor, we’d have probably made more money with regular programming. I couldn’t push him for a contribution above that. The club generally was paid a usage fee whenever they hosted a broadcast and I had to convince them to waive that, explaining that the attendant publicity would more than make up for the few dollars they lost. Pepper and Snadowsky were smart businessmen and agreed quickly. But with all these ducks in line, we still had objections from Appel, fearing that bootlegs of the concert would harm record sales. Pillotte smoothed him over, or so we thought.

I tried to talk directly to Bruce about this, but his management drew a tight wall around him. I was hoping he’d call, and I eagerly answered every ring on the request line hoping that it would be him. But he never called and although he’d once given me his home number, I’d been as careless with that as he had been with our hotline number.

As the show dates grew nearer, tensions mounted as I sensed we still had a few loose ends. He was booked into the club for ten performances—five nights, Wednesday through Sunday, with shows at 8:30 and 11:30 p.m. We were scheduled to broadcast the early show on Friday. That way, any technical glitches or early jitters could be worked out, and the print journalists who reviewed Wednesday and Thursday’s shows would be able to increase the anticipation with what we knew would be glowing accounts.

I attended a couple of the early performances and they were fabulous. Bruce had really found himself onstage, borrowing from Elvis, James Brown, Little Richard, and others, but still adding his own special panache. They were the best rock shows I’ve ever seen, before or since. He sprinkled in a collection of oldies like the Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room,” Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo,” Ike and Tina Turner’s “I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” and the Beach Boys’ version of “Then I Kissed Her.” He played with the full band, he played with solo guitar or piano, and in guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s words, “We kicked ass.”