FM (13 page)

What it came down to with him was that he wanted to be accepted for who he was, and not what he could do for someone. Surrounded by record promo men and sycophants who constantly told him how great he was, he appreciated a woman who would not hesitate to criticize him when he transgressed their shared principles. She could help steer him to a higher path instead of silently accepting his flaws. As the relationship blossomed, however, his job left him feeling increasingly empty. He grew tired of the glitz and superficiality that came along with his stardom. He still loved the work, being able to impart what he viewed as the best part of himself to his audience, but if they only chose to see him as a cool guy with a great voice and missed the underlying message, well, that was their loss. It took its toll on him, as well.

Over the three and a half years he spent at WNEW-FM, the showbiz side of it all began to overwhelm him until even he wasn’t sure who he was. He’d vacationed a couple of times in the south of France, and was impressed by the French people’s indifferent attitude toward him. They couldn’t care less about some black American disc jockey who only spoke a few words of their language. The French wanted to know Bill Mercer for the
man
he was, not for his celebrity. It was an epiphany—as if he’d found in France millions of people who shared his wife’s values.

So in 1971, at the top of his profession, Bill “Rosko” Mercer decided to walk away. George Duncan had ascended to the top of Metromedia’s radio division by then, and he and new general manager Varner Paulsen prevailed upon Rosko to stay with all the usual inducements. But it wasn’t about money, as it almost always is, or long-term security, perks, or the other little trivialities we occupy our time worrying about. He wanted to rediscover
himself.
How very sixties it now sounds.

He wasn’t closing any doors—he might return to America one day and he might even do radio again. But to the delight of his colleagues, the coveted 6 to 10 p.m. slot was about to open up. There was blood in the water.

Move on Up

It was a chilly night in late winter 1971. Mike Harrison had just finished his 5 to 9 p.m. shift on WLIR and I was wrapping up some paperwork in the office. We grabbed a quick cup of coffee and went out to the rooftop of the Imperial Square Building with a portable radio that was locked in at 102.7 WNEW-FM.

“Something’s up with Rosko,” Harrison said. “I just heard him say something about doing his last show.”

“Wow. They actually fired Rosko? I can’t believe it. I wonder who they’re bringing in.” We stared westward into the dark night, looking toward the city. Long Island is relatively flat, and from seven stories up, you could see the New York skyline on all but the most hazy nights. The lights of the Throgs Neck Bridge twinkled in the distance, but our focus was on the crest of the Empire State Building. At that time, most FM antennae were located atop its tower. In the evening, we often retreated to the serenity of the rooftop after working, to mellow out and formulate our plans for WLIR. Those plans had taken a different turn of late.

After “Dimensional News” failed to boost us ahead of our competition, Reiger talked openly of selling the station. His ownership had been a stormy and difficult ride. Since we had become full-time employees, our views had shifted from our initial perceptions of him as a tightfisted ogre. We had pictured him a wealthy man; after all, he drove a luxuriously appointed Oldsmobile, courtesy of a sponsor. He resided in what we assumed was an opulent house near the Hamptons on eastern Long Island. He loved sailing and had, we thought, a large yacht at his disposal. He had chits at some of the finer local restaurants, also in trade with sponsors.

But we didn’t realize that everything he had was tied up in the radio station, including the mortgage on what was in reality a comfortable but unpretentious split-level home. The yacht was really a meticulously maintained but modest sailboat. His wife clipped coupons, his sons went to public schools—he really was just getting by, sweating out payroll every fortnight. As Harrison and I spent more time at the station during business hours, we began to sympathize with his plight. He was just a small businessman, a mom-and-pop operator competing in a world of corporate giants with much bigger battalions at their command. We started to see him as a doting uncle, who wanted success in the modern world but was too tied to old customs to achieve it. He began to treat us as his sons, proud of our accomplishments and work ethic.

It was in that spirit in the spring of 1970 that Harrison hatched a scheme that he believed would mutually benefit Reiger and ourselves. We were graduating that June, he from Hofstra, I from Adelphi. We slowly accepted that the odds of making it in theater were narrow. We believed that we had talent but there were thousands of talented actors on the unemployment line or waiting tables. Plus, our upbringings influenced us to seek the security of a regular paycheck, even with the risks that a radio career entailed. No big-city program director was beating down our door, and even WHLI wasn’t impressed. As for Reiger, a man nearing sixty, he wanted to be able to create a comfortable nest egg to sustain him in his later years. Clearly, his current format wasn’t putting him closer to that goal.

So Harrison shared his plan with me. We would create the nation’s first suburban progressive rock station. It was his belief that WNEW-FM, WPLJ, and the rest served only Manhattan. They were too cosmopolitan for suburbia, too focused on city life. Nassau Coliseum was in the works. The Westbury Music Fair and Long Island colleges were hosting concerts with major rock bands. A new entrepreneurial culture was emerging—hip boutiques and head shops were opening almost daily. But there was no radio station addressing this burgeoning community. Harrison believed that if we could fill the void in this radio wasteland, there would be a thirsty audience eager to drink from our well.

Of course, Reiger and his wife were skeptical. They hated rock music and the idea of hippies hanging out in their penthouse. But whereas the salary structure at WLIR kept us from hiring quality talent for news, classical, and easy listening, the low pay scale would attract young broadcasters who actually loved and understood the music and lifestyle, because they lived it. Rather than hire recycled Top Forty jocks, we would bring in fresh talent who wouldn’t have to fake their passion for Clapton and Hendrix.

Harrison asked me to prepare a report, showing Reiger the availability of the demographics we sought. I researched the population data at Adelphi’s library, extrapolated some highly questionable figures, and tried to weave a compelling reason that WLIR would prosper as headquarters for Long Island’s rock culture. A more scientific analyst might have scoffed at my conclusions, but they were fueled by a heartfelt belief in our mission.

Michael was in constant meetings with Reiger while I set about to recruit a staff. I spoke to some friends at WALI, but Harrison judged them too radical for what we needed. His idea wasn’t to do free-form radio at all, but a formatted version of what the city stations were giving. We believed that this was the first time anyone tried to give shape to progressive radio without destroying the freedom that made it work.

Thus we came to a crossroads that WNEW-FM and its successors would reach years later. Whereas the concept of total freedom is an attractive one, no one is totally free until they’re six feet under. In America, we have control over our lives to a large extent, but we are all governed by laws that we defy at our peril. We theoretically have freedom in the workplace, but management always has the final say on how wide-ranging our discretion is to be. We also put restrictions on ourselves, based on our judgments of what is best for our interests. We sacrifice freedom for security every day. As the Eagles put it, “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.” So Harrison and I saw no contradiction in giving people freedom within boundaries.

We sought to hire like-minded jocks. Although we never codified it in the terms that others would later, our goal was to make money. We wanted to get ratings by playing the music our generation wanted to hear. In turn, local advertisers would purchase commercials, get results, and both would thrive. Although this seems like Radio 101, you’d be surprised at how many managers were afraid to explore this in 1970. Since FM disc jockeys had risen to the power their AM siblings possessed in the fifties before payola, they controlled the content of their shows. They selected the music, the spoken material; they were individual fiefdoms within a greater empire. Alison Steele liked spacey music; Rosko, jazz; Muni, British rock. Their choice of music defined a large part of their personalities on the radio.

Michael and I thought that although they went overboard at times, WNEW was not the prime offender—WPLJ was our target of scorn. Their morning guy did a talk show, their midday guy did a jazz show, the afternoon guy liked country and folk, et cetera. There was less continuity than there was at the old WLIR. You could never be sure of what you were going to hear. It sounded like six separate radio stations, depending on who was on the air at the time. If one jock was on vacation and another filled in, regular listeners to that day part would be jolted by unfamiliar music they couldn’t relate to.

Our idea at WLIR was to homogenize the sound so that the station was more consistent. This might strike you as what Bill Drake and Rick Sklar were doing, and you’d be partially correct. But the difference was vast—like that of a democracy versus a dictatorship. To us, WPLJ represented total anarchy. WNEW-FM was a young republic with essentially responsible leaders. WOR-FM was BOSS radio, a smothering monarchy. We sought a middle ground, where each jock had the freedom to highlight music that he liked within a large core of songs that we knew were popular. This was actually the toughest road, and reflecting back, I think that only two kids in their early twenties could have done it. It required total devotion to the mission and seventy hours a week.

We gave each jock a one-page guideline of what was expected of them. We insisted upon a certain percentage of oldies, current popular album cuts, then secondary cuts from those same LPs. There were slots for new unknown artists and a wild-card selection, where the jock could play whatever he wanted. But rather than follow a playlist with songs delineated by category, we left much of this to the jock’s discretion. It was freedom with an honor code.

That meant that the scrutiny had to come after the fact and that Michael and I had to trust our hosts’ music acumen and integrity. Jocks had to list what they played, and we would go over their selections the next day. We’d have frequent individual meetings with jocks, making general comments that redirected the music when it strayed from our guidelines. Only records that were in our library were eligible for airplay, but we were very open to a jock’s suggestions on albums we hadn’t added yet. In the early going, we couldn’t get review copies from most record companies, so we had to either buy albums or bring them from home. For the first month, the financial restrictions were greater than any philosophical ones we could impose.

But the acid test was what came out of the speakers. Between the two of us, Michael and I listened all day until sign-off at 1 a.m. We didn’t believe in terrorizing the staff on the hotline, but we would sometimes make surprise calls or visits to the station during off hours just to let them know we were listening. And since I did the 1 to 5 p.m. shift and Harrison did 5 to 9 p.m., we knew the crux of the day was covered. Don K. Reed (later of WCBS-FM) did mornings and his pop leanings fit perfectly into what we envisioned that segment to be. Chuck Macken started out doing middays, and his tastes were a bit more progressive than Reed’s, again fitting nicely into our concept.

Reed was the subject of one of the station’s most embarrassing anecdotes. In the years Don K. did the morning show, it was truly a one-man operation. He selected the music, prepared and read the news, and engineered. The office staff didn’t arrive until nine, so he did most of his program in complete solitude. The men’s room was near the front entrance, quite a distance from the studio. So when Reed had to answer nature’s call, he had the option of running all the way down a long corridor or using the women’s loo, which was mere steps away. Most often he opted for the latter, since there were no females present until later. For some reason, the handle on the ladies’ room door was not installed properly, with a lock button on the outside and keyed on the inside. It was probably the work of an inexperienced carpenter, and Reiger hadn’t gotten around to calling building maintenance to rectify the error. So women who desired privacy needed to bring the key with them to lock the door from the inside. Without the key, the only other way the door could be locked was if the button was turned on the outside.

While on the air one morning at around 8:15, Don K. Reed retreated to the ladies’ room for a quick respite, but failed to notice that someone had left the outside latch in the locked position. He screamed and pounded on the walls to no avail, as his record ran out and clicked into the inner grooves. It wasn’t until a half hour later, when the office staff arrived, that someone released a red-faced Reed from the ladies’ room, whereupon he dashed into the studio and introduced the next record as though nothing had happened. Building carpenters corrected the lock problem that very afternoon.

As solid as our full-time staff was, we did have a problem finding part-timers who would go along with the program. We mistakenly thought that we could tame some radicals who wanted WLIR to be to the left of WPLJ. Life with them was a constant battle. They would conveniently forget to note certain selections on their music sheets. A few would even lie outright, denying that they played what we’d actually heard. One guy took pride in finding the most obscure tracks on popular albums. He’d play something by Chicago that even Peter Cetera didn’t know. If you just looked at the column listing the bands, his music seemed in perfect balance. But if you listened, you might only recognize one track in ten.

We signed on as the “new” WLIR in June of 1970, and following WNEW’s pattern, we kept our full-timers on seven days a week, with weekends featuring the same hosts on tape. Michael Harrison loved Rosko’s sound and shortened his radio moniker to just “Harrison” in tribute to his hero. He spoke in Mercer’s laid-back tones, until he found his own persona within a few months. With Bill Mercer’s success in New York, most rock stations wanted a cool-sounding black man on at night and we were no exception. But we never found our own Rosko. Following Harrison, we wanted a black jock in the worst way. Today, it would be called tokenism—then it was opportunity. Too bad Robert Wynn Jackson only knew classical music.

Our eyes lit up when soon after we signed on, a black man walked into our offices unsolicited and announced that he wanted a job. He even looked like Rosko. He had a very deep voice, and professed to be a big fan of rock music. He’d been working at a small AM daytime country station on the Island, but just had to see us when he heard what we were doing. He brought an audition tape, but it consisted mainly of reading simple copy so we couldn’t tell if he had a rap or not. We took him to lunch, and he impressed us with his life experiences in the service and radio. We asked him on the spot to audition for us the following Saturday night, and we thought we’d found a combination of Rosko and Jimi Hendrix, who’d also been a serviceman, in one undiscovered surprise package.

The surprise was on us. After a couple days of orientation running the console for other shows, we judged him ready to handle the technical part. My own experiences had compelled me to worry about that with each new hire. Mike and I went to dinner in Hempstead that Saturday night and sat in a car together at 9 p.m., eagerly anticipating his first words.

“This is WLIR, coming to you from the Imperial Square Garage. I hopes you enjoy the music I’m about to give you.”

It was 1970 and “hopes” didn’t trouble us too much. But where had the “Imperial Square Garage” come from? We later found out that’s what the sign said on the multilevel garage where we parked, so he assumed that was the name of the building.
O-kay.