There's always a little bit of exaggeration, a little bit of creative fudging, of embroidering the facts in any good tale. This one contains slightly more imaginary parts than usual, but I won't tell you which parts!
Live music, there’s nothing like it! Music itself makes
life a bit more pleasant, but live
music is the habanero sauce on the red beans & rice of life. Early on,
music was a relatively minor part of my life, Dad liked Dixieland jazz and Mom
liked Engelbert Humperdink and I just listened to whatever came on the AM
radio. Even as a high school freshman I was a bit behind the music curve, out of
my depth while my fellow students discussed ‘The Who’, ‘The Guess Who’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’.
Eventually I started listening to albums by the top groups of the time: Deep
Purple, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer and others
when during my junior year I fell in with a crowd that included some musicians,
one of whom hosted Friday night beer drinking and music parties where I
experienced the broad spectrum of rock music and lost my virginity.
One advantage of growing up in New York is the presence
of Madison Square Garden, a destination for every arena-rock band. Another is
the ubiquitous public transportation,[1]
which abets concert going by teenagers. Rosedale, my home neighborhood, like
many other neighborhoods in the borough of Queens boasted a Long Island
Railroad (LIRR) station. Not to be confused with the subway, the LIRR was a bit
more of an upscale railroad and was the commuting choice for many city workers
who lived past the borders of New York City. Unlike the subway, where you used
tokens to gain admittance to the platform, you either bought a ticket in
advance or paid your fare while on the train, but you didn’t have to pay a fare
just to get on the platform. This made the LIRR Rosedale station the cool
hangout for bored pre-teens in the neighborhood. My buddies and I would walk up
the concrete steps leading to the platform and watch the trains come and go. We
also discovered a cave-like chamber underneath the platform that we turned into
a clubhouse. As we got older (I almost said “matured” – but I’m still waiting
for that to happen) the proximity of
the station to the home of my buddy Alex, the unofficial jumping off point for
our forays into the world of live music, made it an ideal mode of
transportation from residential southeast Queens to the exciting world of “Da
City”: Manhattan.
Back before there was Ozzfest, before chickens and bats
lived in fear of having their heads bitten off, before Ozzie’s reality show,
there was Black Sabbath.[2]
Then, like now, Black Sabbath didn’t get much radio airplay, but there was a
vast underground of Sabbath fans out there, my friends and I among them.
Periodically Black Sabbath would appear live in concert at Madison Square
Garden and early in our senior year in high school we’d gotten tickets to see
our heroes. This show was to be the first concert of any kind that I would
attend, and if I remember correctly, the tickets were $15 for seats in about
the twentieth row. This was the most that I ever paid for a ticket in those
days, but it was also the closest to the stage that I ever sat. A typical
ticket, either in the nosebleed section, or even behind the stage, cost eight
or ten dollars. The evening began with our gang of guys gathering at Alex’s
house, from whence we walked the quarter mile to the LIRR station. At the foot
of the stairs, next to the taxi stand, was an important stop on our journey:
the liquor store.
Back in those days, when the memory of the 60’s was
still fresh and disco began to raise its glittery head, the drinking age in most
places was only eighteen. Even when we were as young as sixteen years old we
still managed to walk into liquor stores and delis and buy our beer. This was
due partly to the rather lax enforcement of the laws against selling to minors.
In fact, for a time, while it was illegal for a minor to possess alcohol, there were no legal penalties for selling it to them, a little loophole in
the law (long since closed) that left little incentive to pass up sales to the
little tykes. The other factor was that prior to 1980 New York State drivers
licenses did not have the operator’s picture on them. Not only that, but they
were not laminated, were printed on cheap pasteboard and could be altered with
ridiculous ease, facilitating I.D. swaps by those over eighteen to their
under-eighteen buddies.
So here we are at the foot-of-the-LIRR stairs liquor
store trying to decide who looks old enough to go in and buy. Usually it came
down to either me or John M, (known for some unfathomable reason as “LaRuc”),
mainly because we both sported long, bushy sideburns, giving the illusion that
we were a few years older than we actually were. Now normally, the boys and I
were beer drinkers, Budweiser[3]
especially, which was usually was very effective at getting us drunk. But this was a special occasion, this was Black Sabbath! We were also going to be sneaking alcohol into
Madison Square Garden, so a six-pack apiece wasn’t going to cut it, since MSG
security didn’t allow you to bring alcohol into the venue and performed
pat-downs to ensure compliance. For the occasion we had purchased what was then
known as “wine sacks”, plastic bags covered in suede, made to sort of resemble
a Middle Eastern goatskin, and purchased non-carbonated beverages such as
Boone’s Farm wine and Tango (a pre-mixed screwdriver) so they wouldn’t expand
and explode. The wine sacks had a cord attached which could be utilized to
carry it over your shoulder; we slung them across our backs, concealing them
under our shirts. Since we were also wearing jean jackets and down vests the
sacks were well hidden. We had about twenty minutes before the train arrived so
we invested in a few six packs to tide us over on the train station. A half
hour train ride into Penn Station and we were in “The City”, ready to party.
First on the agenda: a stop for dinner at “Burger & Brew” where we loaded
up on burgers and salad and then headed over to The Garden.
Sometime the next morning, or more likely the next afternoon, I slowly
awoke, inching back to the land of the living. When more or less fully awake, I
noticed that my jean jacket, where I had secreted a bag of weed, was gone.
Had my mom picked it up from the floor and taken it to the laundry? Had my NYPD
cop dad found it? Was I in trouble?
I was pretty sure that I was until my brother Mike stuck his smirking face into
the bedroom, waving the little bag that he had taken out of my pocket.
In addition to the “big events” at Madison Square Garden and other big
venues, there were also our regular weekend outings at area bars such as
Speaks,[4]
Hammerhead’s, Oak Beach Inn and Beggar’s Opera. Most of these places featured
cover bands such as Rat Race Choir, Swift Kick, and the soon-to-be famous
Twisted Sister. Oak Beach Inn or OBI as it was affectionately known, was
originally located on Oak Beach on Long Island’s south shore and soon spawned
satellite locations, OBI West, North and East. OBI West, in Elmont neighborhood
of Nassau County, right past the city limits of New York, went through numerous
changes of ownership, from Oak Beach Inn West, to Hammerheads, to Popeye’s, but
never changed the décor, so the name always had some kind of nautical theme!
Just about every Saturday night, my friends and I would head out to one these
bars to enjoy one of our favorite bands or to check out a new one. Alex, the
unofficial leader of this particular pack, had a knack for picking good bands,
and we usually deferred to his choices. The group of us: Alex, Anthony, John M
(LaRuc), John H (Deadman) and I went to different schools and worked different
jobs and each had our secondary circle of school and work friends with whom we
shared our band selections; those friends in turn had their own circles to whom
they passed on band recommendations,
so that oftentimes a crowd at a Saturday night concert could in large part be
traced back to Alex’s band choice. One particular evening when the band was on
break one of us requested that the band play “Crossroads”, mainly because we
were from Rosedale and the songs hook included the phrase “goin’ down to
Rosedale…” The band didn’t want to
play “Crossroads”, so Anthony suggested that when they took the stage they ask
the audience how many had come to see them tonight at the recommendation of
“The BudvMen from Rosedale” (Yes that was what we called ourselves – we consumed
a lot of Budweiser). About ¾ of the
people there raised their hands. They played “Crossroads” (badly, but they
played it).
The BudMen and I were mainly hard rock guys, but I started branching out
to other forms of music in those days. Ray was a co-worker at the hardware
store where I worked and would bring his electric guitar with him and play it
on breaks. He introduced me to the world of jazz-rock fusion with Heavy Weather, a Weather Report album;
another work buddy started me listening to southern rock like The Outlaws and
Lynyrd Skynyrd. My musical horizons were expanding and a few years later, when
I moved to Nebraska, I was ready for KZUM Radio.
My first exposure to the world of non-profit community radio came on a
Wednesday as I was trimming lettuce in the back room of the produce department
of Food 4 Less. Spinning the radio dial [5]I
came across the sounds of jazz fusion, and thinking that I had found a jazz
station I continued to listen, later finding out that KZUM played not only jazz
fusion, but blues, folk, reggae and other varieties of music that ordinarily
weren’t played on the commercial stations. What I really fell in love with was the blues. While working overnight
delivering newspapers I began to listen to Jim Anderson’s
“midnight-Thursday-‘til-whenever-Friday-morning” blues show and realized that
blues was more than just pickin’ and
frownin’ – but it was the source for much of the music that I listened to
back in the seventies. When I heard “Travelling Riverside Blues”, “Crossroads
Blues” and “One Way Out” and it wasn’t
Led Zeppelin, Cream or The Allman Brothers I was hooked. Eventually, after
changing jobs and not working overnights, I started hanging out down at the
KZUM studios with Jim and his beer-drinking crew.
“Nothin’ But the Blues” was an open invitation blues
party that took place from midnight until at least 4:00AM every Thursday night
into Friday morning. Bands from the nearby Zoo Bar would stop by after the bar
closed, third shift workers would pop in after work and blues lovers from all
over Lincoln made a point of being in the KZUM studios when it was all
happening. Jim, the programmer (what KZUM called their disc jockeys) had a huge
collection of vinyl that he dragged down to the station for his two blues
shows, the other one being “Another Blue Monday” on Monday afternoons. Jim, who
was fluent and literate in Russian, never seemed to have a paying job but always put his heart and soul into spinning blues
records as well as educating us all about the music and the musicians. One of
the attractions of hanging out at the studio during Jim’s shifts was being
entrusted with reading PSA’s (Public Service Announcements) and SPA’s (Station
Promotional Announcements) over the air. For me this was a great thrill. Back
in high school I was part of a group that put together a mock radio station for
English class and had a hankering to be an “on-air personality” someday. This
was my introduction to the big time. Eventually I not only read PSA’s and
SPA’s, but learned how to operate the equipment. One Thursday night, seeing Jim
passed out in his chair as a record spun to a close, I took over. Seeing how
easy this was, I soon applied for my own show, part two of “Another Blue
Monday” from 4 – 6PM on Mondays, which I soon renamed “Old, New, Borrowed and
Blue”.
Building on my earlier fascination with the modern rock renderings of old
blues songs, pairings of originals and cover versions became the foundation of
my show, liberally mixed with music influenced by the blues and contemporary
blues bands. After a few months I moved to Sunday nights at 10:00PM and called
the show “Shades of Blue”. For several years I got to introduce bands at The Zoo Bar, and interview travelling blues
acts in the afternoons on the air.
Being a community, i.e. non-profit radio station we engaged in periodic
fund-raising marathons, with minimal regular programming and a lot of on-air
begging for money. Since my regular job was just a few blocks from the station
and my home was a mere five minute’s drive from downtown, I participated on and
off in the fundraising efforts during all hours of the day. One of the most
interesting was with a high school senior by the name of Kyle Umland. [6]
My first encounter was during my first shift for a Sunday night blues
show where I was to follow Kyle’s two-hour jazz program. Programmer etiquette
dictated that you would end your show by playing a song long enough to let the
person coming after you get into the studio, cue up his or her own first song
so that there would be a smooth transition. If you wanted to say a last minute
“goodbye” to your listeners you would allow the next programmer to set up and
say your farewells from a secondary microphone while the new deejay presided
from the main chair. On this particular night Kyle went right up to the last
second, said his goodbyes and then got up and walked out of the studio, leaving
the mike “live” and no music cued up! I raced in, threw a record on the
turntable and ad-libbed my introductions. After I got everything going, I
walked out into the common area where Kyle still hung around. At the time I
wore my hair fairly long, had a thick beard and was dressed more or less like a
biker. I let Kyle know in no uncertain terms that if he ever pulled a stunt
like that again, he could be assured that I would, with great pleasure,
seriously injure him. A week later I came to the station straight from work. I
wore a jacket and tie, had trimmed by beard and my long hair was smoothed down
and tied back in a ponytail. Due to my very different appearance Kyle did not
recognize me. While preparing for the deejay handoff, cuing up a final song and
switching chairs, he told me about the “nut-job” who had threatened him the
week before, expressing his relief that I
had showed up instead!
After this encounter Kyle and I got along very well, subbing for each
other on occasion and helping each other out during fundraisers. During one
particular fundraising “marathon”, we were an hour into his show with
absolutely no calls. Now, just like NPR, KZUM would interrupt regular
programming to berate our listeners with pitches designed to make them feel
guilty and send us money. On this Monday night, the approach was just not
working, so Kyle had the brilliant idea to be proactive and call people at home
and ask them for pledges, rather than wait for them to call us. This was the
era just before cell phones had almost completely replaced land lines, so there
were many prominent people listed in the local phone book. We called dozens of
them and received pledges from about half, including a generous donation from
then City Councilman Mike Johanns, later mayor of Lincoln, governor of
Nebraska, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and US Senator.
Another aspect of KZUM was its openness and the accessibility to the
public, due largely to its volunteer nature. Fans of the various programs were
always popping in to say hello and we often let some of these people make
on-air announcements and help pick out records the way I got started). Most
were not as wild and crazy as the aforementioned shows hosted by Jim Anderson,
but there were some moments. It seems
that no matter how minor a celebrity
one is, no matter how small one’s fame is, there are always those who seek to
latch on to it…groupies. Usually these people were pretty harmless, like the
guy who was incarcerated at the state prison who wrote me letters every week
making song requests, or the woman from eastern Europe who on my last night as
a programmer gave me a painting as a thank you for years of enjoyable music.
And then…there are the nut jobs.
Lorraine (not her real name) started out just calling in requests to a few (male)
programmers. After a while, certain deejays could expect to hear from her every
time they were on the air. Next she began flirting with us over the phone and
began having long conversations that we could only end by pretending that the
connection was cut. After a while Lorraine began coming up to the studios just
before the building was locked down for the night and hanging around for hours. One night, during one of the semi-annual fundraisers, Kyle and
I were again manning the phones and on the air pitching the glories of
non-profit community radio when Lorraine, having having somehow entered the building, appeared in the studios. At first we put her to work
answering the phone and making a few on-air pitches which seemed to keep her
busy and out of trouble. Everything seemed fine until one of the breaks for
music when I visited the restroom and Kyle left the air studio to pick out some
additional music and we left Lorraine alone in the room. Kyle returned first
and got halfway into the room before he realized that Lorraine was completely naked.
He put the engineering console between him and the naked girl and started
screaming for me. I came running in and spotted the trouble just as the record
ended and we had to get back on the air and make another appeal for money. This
did not go at all well, because in addition to the initial shock, Lorraine
began doing things which I will euphemistically call distracting while Kyle and I tried to look at anything else. There
were several problems with the whole scenario: I was married, we were
reasonably sure that Lorraine was under aged and the prospect that some FCC
regulation was being broken into little bits and crunched into dust was a
distinct possibility. So we called for help.
Fortunately another KZUM programmer, a woman and a friend of ours, lived about a block from the KZUM
studios, so we called her for assistance. Within five minutes she burst into
the studios, picked up Lorraine’s pile of clothes, grabbed her by the arm and
dragged her toward the elevators, favoring Kyle and me with a look that
communicated her disdain for the problem-solving skills of men in general and
us in particular. We were plagued for months with prank calls from other
programmers requesting that we “play ‘Misty’ for them”.
[1] It’s
difficult to get too far away from public transportation in New York City.
There are the subway and city busses and the Long island Railroad, as well as
several private bus lines, like the Jamaica Bus Company. Most people were
within a reasonable distance from a bus or train.
[2] One of
the great ironies of life is that although Ozzie was fired from Black Sabbath,
he went on to great mainstream fame, even among those who don’t know or like
his music, while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone outside of Sabbath fans
who know the names of the other three original members of the band.
[3] We were
serious about our Budweiser – we all could recite the slogan on the can that
began with “This is the famous Budweiser beer…”
[4] Formerly
a disco until disco died a merciful death. Speaks still had a giant mirror ball
on the ceiling.
[5] In those
days, before digital tuners radios had a literal dial, which could be “spun” to
change stations.
[6] Kyle’s
father wrote a book back in the seventies attempting to cash in on the “Ancient
Astronauts” craze. The premise of his book was that the Mayans were space
aliens. This is 100% true. It's called Mystery of the Ancients. It used to be in the downtown Lincoln library
