FM

by Richard Neer

  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 lea
st 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.”

  In addition to the music, Bruce told stories. I don’t know to this day where that came from, but he presented his songs like an FM jock, explaining and embellishing their meanings. The sets lasted just over two hours. I found it impossible to leave after the early show and begged Allan Pepper for standing room for the eleven-thirty performances. I was psyched that this would be like Muni and the Beatles at Idlewild—that’s how exciting the shows were.

  That’s why I was destroyed when Mel Karmazin awakened me that Friday morning with the terse message that the show was off. I groggily tried to make sense of it. It seems that Appel was reneging on his agreement to let David Vanderheyden, the Bottom Line’s regular broadcast engineer, mix the concert for radio. He was demanding a professional mobile recording studio (a truck costing thousands of dollars) with himself at the controls. Of course, no one was willing to pick up that expense and, therefore, the broadcast was canceled.

  I was livid as I hastily drove into the city. I tried to figure out if there was a hidden agenda behind Appel’s demand. Did he think that Bruce wouldn’t deliver the goods? That was hard to believe after having seen the show. Was there a possibility that Bruce had gotten cold feet? I recalled my conversations with him and how he’d always felt ambivalent about being a rock star. On one hand, he wanted to be recognized as a great artist and have all the attendant fame and riches, and on the other, he saw himself as just an average kid from Jersey and didn’t want to be changed by the experience. He didn’t want to be isolated from his fans, playing only cavernous halls where he couldn’t see their faces. He wanted to be able to go out in public and do the things he normally did—hang out at the beach or go to a ball game, without an entourage. He hated the mansions and trappings of fame that would cloister him away from the average people that he cared and wrote about. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life writing songs about how tough life was on the road. He wanted success, but he also feared it. He felt the star-making machinery itself was corrupting; he’d had a taste of it in the hype surrounding his first record and he didn’t like it. I hoped that if he were revisiting these doubts I could give him a pep talk that would assuage his uncertainties.

  The first person I encountered upon entering the club was Appel and after talking to him for only a minute, I knew that Bruce wasn’t the problem. Dawson and I corralled him in a quiet corner of the room and played good cop/bad cop. He told us his fears were grounded in the fact that the Bottom Line’s mixing console was in a very noisy location near the stage. You couldn’t get an accurate mix from there.

  “Right,” said Dawson. “All the more reason to let David do it. He’s mixed dozens of shows from there.”

  “Why should I trust my artist’s future to some kid from NYU I just met?” Appel asked.

  “Mike, we gave you tapes. Did you listen?” I wanted to know. “David even did some tapes of Bruce last Fourth of July.”

  We could tell that he hadn’t heard the tapes as he responded by changing the subject. “Have you seen that rinky-dink board he uses?”

  Vanderheyden’s console was far from state of the art but he was very proud of how he’d cobbled together a system that turned out sound rivaling that of the quarter-million-dollar trucks. His system had quirks, but he had them under control and his tapes were grand.

  “Mike, you almost blew it for Bruce last year. I don’t have to remind you about the postcards. You want to hazard a guess at what your airplay at Metromedia stations will be in the future if you blow us off now?” Pat said ominously.

  “Is that a threat?”

  I tried to be conciliatory while Pat played the tough guy, a role he relished and came by naturally. “Mike, look. We’re all fans of Bruce. We want the best for him. We don’t want a crappy-sounding broadcast on our airwaves. You’ve got to trust David.”

  �
�For you, it’s one bad show. For me, it’s a man’s career. How do I explain it to him if the shows sound bad and I tell him that some college kid mixed it? I need to be in control.”

  He had a point. “Let’s try this. Let’s go up to David’s booth. Listen to the tapes he made from the first two nights.”

  We climbed the rickety ladder behind the stage and David slapped on his tapes. They sounded as good as I’d remembered. But Appel was too stubborn to back down now. “All right, the equipment works. But this show is going live to New York and Philly.” Sure enough, WMMR had hastily petitioned Columbia for a simulcast, and Ed Schaiky had driven up to represent them. Could Kid Leo be far behind? “This is a tough mix. I’ve got to be at the board. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

  He was holding the cards. We were bluffing with our threat at pulling the record. We’d only be hurting ourselves and we weren’t in a position to speak for Metromedia. “Give us a minute,” Pat said.

  He went down the ladder into the club and we explained the situation to David. “He’s been in my booth the last two nights,” he told us. “He doesn’t have a clue. If he mixes this, it will sound like crap. I don’t want him touching my equipment.”

  Now we were surrounded. I didn’t fancy explaining to Karmazin that my grandiose idea was now dead, especially since he’d since found a sponsor. We brought David down to see Appel. I ventured a middle ground. “How about this? David will be hands-on. You direct him. He’ll do anything you want.”

  “I’m hands-on. He can help.”

  No point arguing further. We had the show back, and even though we knew that it wouldn’t sound as good as it could have, the raw power of the E Street Band should shine through any technical limitations. We shook hands and called the station to tell everybody that the show was on.