Private Parts (15 page)

My resume and business card. I was so proud of my meaningless job and my meaningless accomplishments.

I went to shake her hand, and she didn't have a fucking hand. Then she asked me for a job.

"Bree, we pay four dollars an hour. It's beneath you. You worked at WYNY!" I said. I wouldn't hire her, because I felt that she would intimidate all of us. She was a professional! We were not professionals,

we were idiots, we were assholes! We were the worst assemblage of disc jockeys on the planet, and I put together the worst of them, because if I heard a tape and the guy didn't stutter I hauled him in and put him on the air.

So here I was, the new program director, and one of the jocks told me someone in the station was stealing from her pocketbook.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked.

Now that I was making that big twelve grand a year, I married Alison.

"Hey baby, spend the rest of your life with a guy with a bad mustache."

"My father and I share a slow dance.

"Do something," she said.

"We'll set a trap for them," I said. "We'll put out your pocketbook, and I'll stand in the other room, and we'll see who's stealing from your pocketbook." Sure enough, we found one of the jocks stealing from her pocketbook. He took twenty bucks. He was making ninety-six dollars a week, he had to pay rent and help out with his family's bills. He was taking twenty from her pocketbook because he was desperate.

So I went to the Israeli and told him what went down.

"If you want to truly be management, be a man, and fire him yourself!" he told me. "You go fire him! Be a man!"

I got it in my mind that, holy shit, if I was really going to be the manager, I really do have to fire this guy. And I was like pukin' over this, I was sick to my stomach. Even though he was stealing from the pocketbook, I felt really bad for the guy, but I had to go fire him. That's when I made the decision: I wasn't going to be in management. I probably could have done that whole trip and been a program director, but it was bullshit. I knew I had to get back to what I had wanted to do since I was five. I had to become a wacky morning man.

HERE'S THE LEATHER WEATHERLADY

I picked up
Radio & Records,
which is a trade publication in radio, and I saw that WCCC, a station in Hartford, Connecticut, was looking for a "wild, fun morning guy." I had fantasized about working for this station many times because it was right between Boston and New York, and every time I drove back to college I had picked it up in the car. This was a fifty-thousand-watt FM station and it had a sister AM station that simulcast in the morning. So I put together a tape. I knew that deep inside I wanted to do wild stuff, but you can't do wild stuff sitting by yourself in a room.

The craziest thing I did on that audition tape was say, "Okay, let's listen to some Robert Klein!" and
boom,
I played something off a Robert Klein album. Then I played some Cheech and Chong. Those were the only two comedy albums we had at the station. And I mixed in a couple of one-liners that I'd written. Other than that, it was mostly Robert Klein being funny. When I finally met Robert Klein, I told him I owed my career to him.

So I sent this tape off to CCC and they called me for an audition. I went up there, I was shitting in my pants. The guy said, "Go in that room, put on the mike, here's five records. Go do a radio show."

I went into the other studio, and I was in shock. I didn't know what to do. I just felt weird. But I did it and I gave the guy the tape, and it really pissed me off that I fucked up, so I called him up and said, "I haven't heard from you. What'd you think of the tape?"

"Your tape is great," he said to me, "but that shit that you did for me in my studio was terrible! You didn't do anything."

I told him that I had felt very uncomfortable, I wasn't prepared. So I went back up and I did another tape for them, and this time I just let loose, I went wild. I nailed it and the guy hired me. They hired me for twelve grand a year, so I was maintaining my salary, but I needed money to move. I called the owner and I asked him to help me out.

"I've got to move me and my wife to Hartford. Where am I gonna live till she moves up?" I asked. "I have no money."

"Well, all right. I won't pay for your move but I'll give you a hotel allowance of sixty dollars," he said.

"All right, sixty dollars a night..." I said.

"No, sixty dollars for the week."

"Where am I gonna find a hotel for sixty dollars a week?" I complained.

Well, it seemed he knew a place right there in Hartford. So I moved up there. First night I was there, there was a shooting at this hotel. They were shooting right through the fucking walls and I was going out of my mind. I was scared shitless.

Plus, I was alone. Alison was convinced she should keep her job in New York. She had this good social work job. We were actually going to live in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I tested it out but it took an hour and a half of solid driving. By the time I got to the station, at five in the morning, I was exhausted. And this job was fucking torture. From six to ten I was on the air in the morning. From ten to two, I had to do commercials. Not just voice commercials -- I had to produce finished commercials. And if the sales guy didn't like it, I had to go in and produce it all over again. It was like a torture chamber. It was just an unbelievably exhausting job. There was no way to explain how bad it was.

I was up there every day. I worked Saturdays from six to noon, trying to be funny. Then from noon to three, I had to be the production

guy. Plus, I was the public affairs director. I had to do half-hour interviews on Sunday morning. But I would tape those during the week. It was funny because my public affairs show was the most interesting thing about the job, because at least I got to talk for a half hour straight with no music. I would interview local people, such as the head of the ASPCA.

But I would get into these bizarre lines of questioning. I'd ask them about their dating habits, whatever. I can't tell you how bizarre this was, because nobody was doing anything like this in radio at this point. People have told me that Imus was doing amazing stuff on the radio back then but he wasn't doing shit! He got on the radio, and he used to say: "Quack-quack, who loves you, baby?" I don't know how he got that irreverent reputation. But he had it because nobody was doing anything. Anybody who sounded a little different was irreverent.

But there was one good thing about Hartford. I met Fred "Earth Dog" Norris there. Fred was going to college and he was the overnight guy. He was a funny guy and a good writer and he had a knack for doing impressions. After his shift he hung out with me in the studio while he put away his records. He was half asleep and I'd say, "Fred, in thirty seconds, you gotta be Howard Cosell."

In Hartford, I began to conceptualize what I could really do with a morning show. I started off by demanding that the governor recognize my birthday as a state holiday. No response. I called aides to the mayor of Hartford. They told me I'd have to be dead. Finally, I got the majority leader of the state senate to send me an official-looking document that "for the rest of eternity" January 12 would be commemorated in Connecticut.

When Paul McCartney got busted in Japan and imprisoned for possession of grass, I called Tokyo to protest. When Yale and Harvard medical schools announced there was a shortage of dead bodies for research, I ran a cadaverathon on the air. But the one thing that got me the most publicity in Hartford was my "To Hell with Shell" boycott. It actually wasn't even my boycott, it was a listener's idea. During the summer of 1979 we experienced some gas shortages. I read a chain letter that was sent out to people in Hartford urging a two-day boycott of Shell products because Shell was foreign-owned and was the first company to ration its supply. We discussed the letter on the air and I suggested that people drive with their lights on to protest the rise in fuel prices. "Turn the lights

on bright until they get the prices right" was the rallying cry.

Pretty tame stuff. But you have to remember that this was at a time when disc jockeys kept their mouths shut and never bad-rapped anyone. We were the stations' goodwill ambassadors, and controversies were to be avoided. Advertisers are gods in radio, and the rule is you never upset them. Two people from Shell even called our station, but we kept up with the campaign. Why not? Shell wasn't advertising with us.

I was doing well at the station, I had been there for a year, and I asked for a raise. A lousy, stinking twenty-five-dollar-a-week raise. The owner, Sy Dresner, told me he had to think about it. That really pissed me off. I got on the next morning, I was doing my show, it was a Saturday, and I put on "Free Bird" and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed, I was on my knees, praying that somebody would hear me from Hartford and get me the fuck out of there. I just couldn't believe I was wasting my time at this annoying job.

Plus, I had the worst living conditions. I was living in this connected town house with neighbors who became obsessed with my show. At four in the morning they would play their stereo super-loud and if I banged on the wall they'd go even louder. And then they started a campaign against me. They started hanging all these signs on my front door. They said it was freedom of speech. "You can say what you want on the radio, we can say what we want on your front door." They were like mental cases. We were living in an apartment where you flushed your toilet and the next morning you woke up and there was shit all over the floors and water was everywhere. It was just un-fucking-believable. I was living the nightmare of being a famous person who was poor. I couldn't afford to live in an unattached house. People always think that you're rich if you're famous.

So I was praying to get the hell out. The next day, I got a call from Dwight Douglas, one of the biggest radio consultants. He said, "I heard your show. I think you're fuckin' brilliant."

"You're kidding! That's fantastic," I said.

Then he told me he was going to put me at one of his stations. Now, Dwight's company was so powerful at that point, it was like the touch of God coming to you.

"We've got a great opening in Columbus, Ohio," he said.

Now, to me, Columbus sounded like Hartford.

"You don't understand. This is the hottest station in Columbus.

They have a real ratings book, four times a year, the whole thing. Hartford had a ratings book once a year," Dwight said.

So I put together a tape to give to their people in Columbus, and a week or so later he called me and told me the jock had decided to stay in Columbus.

"But don't worry, I've got you in mind," he said.

Meanwhile, I was ready to kill myself.

Again, I was looking through
Radio & Records
and I saw that a station in Detroit was looking for a morning man. Detroit sounded like a big market. But I'm bad in geography, I had no idea where Detroit was. I didn't know it was north of Canada! I called Douglas and he said the opening wasn't for me. I thought, "Fuck him." So I called the GM of the station, Wally Clark, and sent him a tape by overnight mail. That night I got a call.

"You're hired. We're flying into Hartford to do the deal."

"You're kidding!" I said.

So we arranged to meet at the Marriott, the biggest hotel in Hartford. I couldn't believe this was happening. I said to Alison, whom I'd kept in the dark about all this, "I'm going to meet with some guys from Detroit. They want to hire me."

"You applied for a job without telling me?" she said. "You don't even know where Detroit is!" I gave her my whole radio rap about how we had to travel around the country building my career or we were doomed to be stuck in Hartford. My philosophy was that you needed a resume with nine hundred call letters on it. I was always shocked at the number of disc jockeys who were willing to stay in places like Hartford with owners who wouldn't even give them health benefits.

So I went to meet the guys and they told me the station was an incredible rock station called W-4. They were in the process of moving the station to the Renaissance Center, which was a brand-new series of beautiful high rises with crystal and the works.

"I'll do it!" I said.

Clark handed me a piece of paper.

"This is the salary."

I opened it up nonchalantly. Twenty-eight thousand dollars. Holy shit, twenty-eight thousand dollars! This was it! Finally, I could tell my father I was making twenty-eight grand.

So I went home and told Alison -- she flipped out. I told the radio station to go fuck themselves. I called Douglas, the consultant. He

told me he was hoping for a better station for me, because W-4 was having some problems. I didn't want to hear about any problems. I didn't care, I was pulling in twenty-eight. Then I called my father. And I was thinking maybe I should go for thirty. He told me twenty-eight was great but there was no harm in calling the guy and asking. So I called Wally back and he said, "Okay," and now I was pulling down an even thirty.

I was totally jazzed. I packed up all my stuff and drove up to Detroit alone, because Alison had to give a month's notice on her job. They put me up at the Renaissance Center. It was beautiful. I said, "Where's the radio station?" "Oh," they said, "we're not in the Renaissance Center yet. But you just drive down the block, into downtown Detroit, and the station is straight down this road." So I got up the next morning at four o'clock, I was ready to go to work. Meanwhile, I had talked to the program director and he had given me a whole list of rules. Don't take phone calls from women because you sound wimpy when you talk to women. Only talk to men. Program directors were always burdening me with their
lame
theories. I figured, if they knew anything they'd be doing the morning show. How the hell am I going to control who's calling?

So I left the Renaissance Center and drove to the station. As I was driving, the neighborhood was getting progressively worse. Finally I saw the station. It was a bombed-out old house. I swung into the parking lot and parked the car and got out and there were fucking rats nipping at my feet. I was flipping out. The station was a toilet bowl, but who cared? I was the morning man in Detroit!
A major market.