Living On Air (5 page)

Once when I was on the air, still working on the FM station, I suddenly had a craving for a roast beef sandwich from Arby’s for dinner. The closest drive-thru was by the Naugatuck Valley Mall, ten minutes away without traffic. I considered the timing of it all, ten minutes there, five minutes to order and receive my dinner, ten minutes back to the station. If I put on an album that lasted a half an hour, I’d have five minutes to spare, no problem. “Tom
Collins here on WWCO FM and I thought I’d do an album spotlight tonight, playing an entire side of one album for you. Hope you enjoy it.” I bolted out of the studio, jumped into my ’72 Mustang and made it to Arby’s no problem although there was a line to order. I hustled through that line and in no time I was on my way back to the station, when I realized the album was already on its last track. I drove like a maniac, sweating, frantic to get back to C-O, and I still had a five-minute commute left ahead of me. Then I heard the sound that no deejay, program director, station manager, or listener ever wants to hear on the air. The sound of silence. Actually it was more like “tsch, tsch, tsch,” the sound of the needle bumping up against the label at the end of the album. I was devastated. When I hit the parking lot, I flew into the station and made up some ridiculous excuse for messing up on the air. That was the last roast beef sandwich I had in a long time.

In those early days on the air, I tried all kinds of tricks to get out of a jam. Those were the days when a small-town radio station had its own news and sports departments. The guys wrote up stories with taped interviews that we played throughout the day. Sometimes the reporters read their own copy, but at night they went home and it was up to the deejays to deliver the news. That was still during the Vietnam War and if you can remember, some of the names of those battlefields were hard to pronounce. On my shift, I had to “rip and read” from the wire service machines. That meant while a song played, I ran into the newsroom to rip the latest story off of the machine, then got ready to read it on the air during the news update. On my way back into the studio, I glanced at the copy from the wire machine and often realized I had no idea how to say some of the names of these Vietnamese
towns. Even if it was written out phonetically, I was still unsure. One night, I just panicked. In the middle of reading the story loaded with those unfamiliar words, I did what anyone would do, I reached over to the control rack and I killed the transmitter. I turned the entire radio station off the air. After ten seconds, I turned it back on, whereupon I said, “and that’s news, now let’s look at Waterbury weather…” as if nothing had happened.

As a deejay back then, we were always performing in real time, live to the audience, without any do-overs. Usually you’re alone in a studio, with that built-in cloak of invisibility. But soon I started making personal appearances, along with the rest of the guys. It seemed we were constantly broadcasting from some remote location, county fair, car dealership, inside a bowling alley, the annual dance marathon, any place that wanted a little publicity, WWCO was there. When the city of Waterbury turned 300 years old, the station picked me to broadcast live from a hot-air balloon. I don’t think anyone else volunteered and I could never say no. Standing in front of a live audience, there’s no hiding behind the microphone. I found out how much I loved performing, facing that fear. I craved that kind of pressure. It was an unforgettable time of my life.

Even though it has its limitations, I will always love AM radio. Especially growing up on the air, in the sixties and seventies, I felt there was a pure beauty in the AM sound that will never be duplicated. For me it was a living, breathing signal that picked up my voice and took it to the heavens and back again. Along the way it grabbed energy out of thin air as the sound waves ricocheted off the ionosphere again and again, thousands of times in an instant before they hit my headphones. I discovered sounds
that would never exist on FM or satellite radio that gave the AM signal depth and texture. Static rattling my studio speakers was a sunspot exploding in space. That crackling murmur was the wind whispering in my ear. I could hear lightning strike from a storm miles and miles away before I ever saw the flash in the sky. It was exhilarating. It was alive. AM radio was like seeing the Beatles in person, performing at the Hollywood Bowl, it was loud, exciting, and raw. Almost too hot to touch. FM radio was like listening to an intimate acoustic performance in your living room, pure, pristine, and real. A sound you could feel and caress. Both were unique and both were defined by the generations they served.

But as Bob Dylan foreshadowed several years earlier in the title of his song, “The times, they are a changin.’”

BOYS CLUB

I met some crazy characters while I learned how to be a deejay. You’ve already been introduced to the guys at 65 Bank Street, but I also worked at C-O’s new location in the suburbs, called Commerce Campus, from 1971 until 1975. Three great years and one very long year when I thought I would never make it out of Connecticut. Now when I go back home to see my family, I always drive by that funny round building with the thin walls, and smile. It’s a trip back in time, where I met a group of smart, talented, creative deejays who just happened to pass through our town on their way to the next big thing.

Bill Raymond was one of the few who made the move from 65 Bank Street to the new studio. Like me, he worked on the AM and the FM stations. There was this one night he was on the air when I dropped in to hang out like I usually did on the weekend. I must have annoyed Bill with hundreds of questions, because all at once, I turned around in time to see an album flying through the air, aimed straight at my head. I ducked at just the right moment. I think that was the last time I sat in the studio with Bill. It wasn’t until years later, when we were catching up on the old days, that I found out he had been roommates with Jerry Wolf. He filled me in on a couple of unanswered questions. First of all, Jerry Wolf was
his real name. I always wondered about that. Also, he said Jerry was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet. Bill said, “Jerry had a heart of gold. Of all the guys you could have called on the air in 1969, he was the right one. You were very lucky.” I knew he wasn’t kidding. There were a few guys who told me to get lost when I first showed up at WWCO, but Jerry wasn’t one of them. He was one of the good guys. Good thing I didn’t call Bill.

There was another deejay at C-O who became one of my closest friends, a guy named Johnny Walker. I know, Tom Collins and Johnny Walker, brilliant, right? What can I say? We were young. He was 19 years old when he was hired at the station in 1972, around the time I graduated from high school. Finally I was catching up to everybody else, meeting guys my own age. I had barely been introduced to Johnny when he helped me out of a jam. My boss at that time was Tom Coffee, a big Irishman, kind of a blustery guy who liked to play it tough, but he was really a sweet guy. He’s the guy who gave Ron Gregory his very first job in radio on the country station. He’s also the guy who refused to give me the night off so I could go to my senior prom. He said, “If you wanna work in radio, you don’t get any holidays.” My prom was on a Friday night and it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that he finally said, “Alright, you can go. I’ll get someone else to work your shift.” Johnny turned out to be that someone else.

Johnny was about medium height with a full, fuzzy beard, nearly as round as he was tall. He had a great big grin to match his girth. I think Johnny nearly always had a smile on his face because Johnny was nearly always high. The police pulled him over once late one night with another close buddy who happened to be our newsman, Steve Martin. They were petrified, convinced they
were about to be arrested when one of the cops focused his flashlight on Johnny’s face in the passenger seat of the car. The beam of light fanned out over Johnny’s long beard, ample chest and stomach, highlighting all the burn holes in his polyester shirt from the hot seeds that had popped out of the joint he had been smoking. When the officer saw the pack of rolling papers sticking out of Johnny’s front pocket, he fought hard to stop from laughing but it was too much. “What would it look like in the morning paper that the night disc jockey and newsman for WWCO were arrested for possession of marijuana?”

Steve knew all too well what would happen and he said, “It wouldn’t be good.”

The state cop said, “Damn right, but I like WWCO, I listen all the time.” Surprisingly he let them go with a warning.

My friendship with Johnny and Steve made me face a dilemma I had been struggling with for months. It seemed that everyone I knew, especially at the radio station, was smoking pot. That is everyone but me. I have never smoked, snorted, or injected any kind of drug. I was around it constantly, it was a part of my life, but I just wasn’t interested. I was beginning to think something was wrong with me for not wanting to try it, so I asked my big brother Henry what he thought.

“All the guys I know smoke pot and I’ve never done it, but they all love it and have so much fun doing it. Do you think I should try it? Would you ever do it?”

“Well,” he said, “if I smoked pot and then I did something I was really proud of, or some sort of accomplishment, I would never know if it was me, or because I was high when I did it. And that would bother me.”

As usual, Henry gave me an honest answer that cut right to the heart of everything what was most important to me. Some people take drugs to escape their lives and other people do it to intensify an experience. The truth was, for me, I didn’t want to change anything. I didn’t need to change anything. I loved every moment of my life at WWCO. It was my dream and the last thing I wanted to do was alter that reality. I was thrilled to be doing what I was doing with every day a new adventure. I was excited about my glamorous radio career. I have always been strong in my convictions, determined that if I set my mind on a particular goal, I would succeed. Some might call it arrogance. I call it confidence. I was nakedly ambitious with one thing in mind. I wanted to work at one of those powerhouse radio stations I used to listen to late at night. That was much more important to me than smoking pot, or trying something else. I never felt that I missed out on anything. Besides, by now you must have me figured out. I take risks when it comes to my job, but in my personal life, I’m more of a straight-arrow kind of guy. A guy who likes to have fun.

Johnny, Steve, and I used to cruise around town between our shifts, with me as the designated driver. Once they had had a few hits off a joint, I would take them to the top of a big hill in Oakville, then race back down, banging my foot on the floor of the car, shouting that the brakes were out. Johnny would grab onto the dashboard and scream his heart out, with Steve yelling just as loud in the back seat. They were usually so blasted, that stunt worked every time. Being the straight man I ended up entertaining those guys, putting on a one-man show to get them to laugh. Johnny called me “Kid.” The little dude in the front seat, making all the goofy comments.

Now that I had graduated high school, that spring of 1972, WWCO had become my new home. I spent more time at Commerce Campus than I did at Sunnyside Avenue. I never even thought about applying to college because I was already working the job I most wanted in life. Even when I had finished my own shift, I would hang out with the deejay on the air, or meet up with the guys in the jock lounge. There were still plenty of girls who wanted to meet a deejay and we were happy to hang with them, too. Saturday night in particular was known as visitor’s night, mostly because of Eddie Maglio, one of the salesmen at the station. Eddie loved doing live broadcasts from around town in support of local charities and on the weekend he had his own radio show. He called himself The Mad Hatter, and wore a leather top hat to all of his appearances. He probably raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for different charities at those events. Every Saturday night, at nine o’clock, he would kick off his show playing “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. When he was on the air, The Hatter always had a couple packs of Marlboro cigarettes lined up on the audio board, and one of those packs was full of joints. Whoever was around would meet up in the parking lot, with one of the guys going in to see The Hat to score a couple of joints. After a while The Hat would throw everyone out to go back on the air for something he called The Lover’s Hour. It was kind of a sad, tearful show filled with songs about breaking up and making up, and you could always hear Eddie singing along in the background.

Dick Springfield was another deejay I will never forget. He helped me figure out when it was okay to push the limits or when it was better to play it safe. Dick was the morning man and music director at WWCO in our new Commerce Campus location.
He was tall, thin, and always doing eighteen things at once. He would frantically run into the studio and ask me, “Hey, Tom, have you heard this record? What do you think?” Most times, before I could answer, he would be out the door asking someone else the same question. Dick was a smart, funny, all-around nice guy and he went on to enjoy great success later in life as a radio consultant on the West Coast. Dick lived about three hours north of Los Angeles in San Luis Obispo and years later, in the 1990s, after I had moved to L.A., whenever he was in town, we would get together for lunch or just hang out for a while to catch up with one another. Sad to say, Dick passed away much too young and radio played a role in the story of his passing.

I’m going to jump ahead for a moment to tell this particular story. It happened in June of 1998. Dick was up north when he was admitted to the hospital for emergency heart surgery, a complication from dental work he had done years earlier. His wife, Bobbie, and their daughter were driving from San Luis to San Francisco to be with him after his surgery and during the drive they were listening to a Frisco station that Dick programmed. The song they were listening to started to fade out and, as usual, they waited for the disc jockey to jump in with something smart to say but that didn’t happen this time. Instead the song continued to fade out much longer than normal and after a moment of silence, as the microphone was turned on, they heard some noise and confusion in the background. The disc jockey was a woman, and when she came back on the air she spoke with a heaviness in her voice. Tenderly, she told her audience that she had just gotten news of someone very dear to the station who had passed away after heart surgery. As Dick’s wife and daughter entered the city that night, it was their car radio that brought them the news that
their beloved husband and father was gone. As much as it hurt to find out that way, Bobbie told me later that it was just so right to hear that heartbreaking news through the medium that Dick loved so much.

Back at C-O, before I knew it, another year passed. My determination at work had paid off and I was promoted to afternoon drive, on the air from two in the afternoon to six at night. I followed a guy who was different from any other deejay I had ever met. His name was T.J. Martin, a smooth-talking ladies’ man, twice my age. We heard that T.J. had a wild affair with the woman who wrote the best-selling book “Peyton Place.” She divorced her husband to marry T.J. but as much as T.J. loved her, he was much fonder of classic cars and handmade suits. Two years after they were married, when he had helped blow through all that Peyton Place money, T.J. stuffed the trunk of his 1964 Mustang with all his clothes, then took off in the dead of night. Somehow he ended up working at Commerce Campus, cooing to the local ladies of Waterbury.

T.J. was hired for the midday shift, ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, to charm and sweet-talk the housewives listening at home. I know it sounds sexist, but first of all, it was 1972. It was sexist. Secondly, it was Top 40 radio where every day-part is clearly identified. Six to ten a.m.? Wake up people, give them the news they need to start their day, and a heavy dose of fun and hit music. Ten a.m. to two p.m.? Kids are in school, not able to listen and people who worked were at their desks. In ’72, nobody listened to the radio at work, it wasn’t allowed. The only audience left out there was officially “housewives.” Who do you put in that midday shift for that audience? Someone who can
make housewives forget their day-to-day chores, put a smile on their face, and help them fantasize a little. Enter T.J. Martin, Mister Cool. He oozed charm and sophistication and dressed the part too, wearing tailored sports jackets, pocket squares, Italian slacks, clothes his wife bought for him before he skipped out on her. Every day T.J. showed up at the station looking suave, immaculate, a little bit like the singer Dean Martin. He always brought his lunch with him and a thermos of coffee to sip on during his shift. But by the end of his show, he had lost some of that luster. He not only looked like the character Dean-o portrayed on TV, he sounded like him too. T.J. slurred his words, missed his cues, and talked over the lyrics of every song. Finally someone figured out it wasn’t coffee in that thermos. It was vodka. By the end of his shift, T.J. was smashed.

Our general manager at that time was Bill Raymond, the same guy who threw the record at me. He wasn’t going to take that shit from anyone. Bill sat down with T.J. to tell him he just couldn’t drink on the air anymore, it had to stop, so T.J. promised to go cold turkey. Instead of bringing his thermos to work, he started bringing in fruit every day, apples, grapes, even a bag of oranges, to snack on during his shift. Only his show didn’t get any better. Somehow, T.J. was still getting loaded by two in the afternoon. It took Bill a couple of weeks but he finally solved the mystery. Every morning, before he came to work, T.J. injected the grapes and oranges with his favorite drink of choice. You guessed it, vodka. Before they could fire him, T.J. skipped town in the middle of the night, just as he did when he left his wife. We heard all kinds of stories about him, that he faked his death, he changed his name, maybe he moved to Colorado, but we never found out what really happened.

Around the time T.J. disappeared was the same moment AM radio started to lose its grip as king of the airwaves. By 1974, the FM frequency that we all laughed at and dismissed back in the sixties would begin to reveal its true potential. Our FM country station was 20,000 watts, and covered hundreds of miles from Massachusetts, through the entire state of Connecticut, on down to Long Island. The AM signal was a paltry 1,000 watts and barely made it past Waterbury. At sundown the signal dropped to 250 watts, just a little bit stronger than the light bulbs in your home. You could just about toast a slice of bread with that power. WWCO-AM 1240 may have been state of the art for its time but its days were numbered, and closing in fast.

As FM was taking over, we were going under. When we should have been doing everything we could do to stay fresh and on top, we tightened up. Bill Raymond had moved on and we had a new program director who seemed out of touch with the reality around us. He called the station “The Famous 1240” and the deejays were now “The Good Guys.” Instead of sounding like the cutting-edge station we had always been, we started sounding like something out of the nineteen fifties. C-O would make one last great comeback under the guidance of Joe McCoy with a group of talented deejays, but for now, I was desperate to leave. I was still doing the afternoon shift at C-O when I became the music director, which was Jerry Wolf’s job when I first met him at the old studio on 65 Bank Street. I liked the added responsibility, but I was always angling for more.