FM

by Richard Neer

  But Scott himself could be truculent, perhaps a residue from his old Rick Sklar days. He refused to take direction and could be contrary if you rubbed him the wrong way. If you told him he was playing too many Rolling Stones songs, he’d play an hour of them the next day. He would roar and flex his muscles on occasion just to show that he could. I began to realize that the only way to get Muni to do something against his initial instincts was to convince him that it was his idea in the first place. I sometimes lacked the skills to accomplish that.

  Scott and I got along well overall even though I never had been much of a drinker and his consumption was prodigious. We went to lunch together almost daily, either with or without record people. With his meal, he’d knock down four or five Johnny Walker Red Label scotches on the rocks, his drink of preference. In the studio, he kept a 1.75-liter bottle of the same distillment, which he tapped into once an hour. Most nights, after he got off the air at six, we’d go to a local watering hole where we’d grab a bite to eat and a few more scotches. He usually didn’t eat that much, only picking at his steak or burger. As beneficiary of Uncle Scott’s spotty appetite, my dog, Paddington, ate better than most humans.

  Amazingly, in all that time, I never saw him drunk. He had the most incredible tolerance for alcohol of anyone I’ve ever seen. Occasionally, late at night on a Friday, I might hear him slur his words slightly, but generally Scottso was the same guy at nine in the morning or at midnight, regardless of his tippling. He almost never missed a day of work for any reason, and had the constitution and strength of a bull. It wasn’t until 1986, when he had a near-death experience because his lungs had filled with fluid as a result of his profligate ways, that he stopped drinking. He overcame his demon and has been stone-cold sober ever since, one day at a time.

  But our main concern in the late seventies was Alison. Her activities outside the station were so consuming that by the time she reported for work at ten, she had very little left in the tank. She had television spots, syndicated programs, commercials, and public appearances that were draining her energy and detracting from her work. She’d won Billboard’s Radio Personality of the Year in 1978, but her show was sliding downhill at an alarming pace. Her sensualist technique was beginning to sound forced, and it wasn’t holding up well against the less contrived approach of Meg Griffin. It also seemed that she’d lost interest in the music. Upon playing a long track, she’d wander into the newsroom and chat with a desk assistant, only to let the record run out and click into the final groove for minutes on end. Sometimes a record would begin skipping and she’d be in the studio on the phone and wouldn’t notice until someone brought it to her attention. She refused to wear her glasses at work, and her myopia caused her some embarrassing gaffes on the air. Her production work was becoming sloppy, with the rustle of papers foreshadowing her every appearance on mic.

  Mel was on my back constantly about her. He felt she was hurting the station, and I couldn’t argue with him. We sent her memos, brought her in for meetings, at which she was always a perfect lady. She denied having any problems on the air, and when they were pointed out to her, she maintained that everyone had the same occasional lapses and it was no big deal. I met with her privately, and together with Muni and/or Mel, but eventually the results were the same—she’d improve for a few days and then slide right back into her bad habits.

  The way radio works today, there would be a simple solution—hire a producer at minimum wage and have him run Alison’s board and keep her energized and prepared for each break. But in 1979, I couldn’t even have an assistant to help screen music so an extra body just to cater to Alison was out of the question. In retrospect, it seems penny-wise, pound-foolish.

  I attempted to buy her time, but the excuses were wearing thin. After a final warning, I tried to relate to her how thin the ice she was skating on really was. She took it rather casually, until one morning I was called into Karmazin’s office. There was fire in his eyes—always the way I liked to start my days.

  “Did you hear Alison last night?” he asked.

  I could sense what was coming. “Parts of her show. Why?”

  “Do you know that she let a record skip for a full fifteen minutes?”

  Ooops. I hadn’t heard that and I sheepishly told him so.

  “It’s time to make a move, one way or the other. What do you think?”

  “I think we should wait until Scott gets here and discuss it with him.”

  “No. I want to know what you would do. You wanted this job, and the responsibility that comes with it. I’ll deal with Scott. I want to know what you recommend.”

  I was clearly being tested and this was the part of the job I hated. Alison was a legend. She had always treated me wonderfully and had been instrumental in my getting the job in the first place. To be the implement of her firing would constitute a betrayal of the highest order in her mind. But I had an obligation to the station, and there was no way I could rationalize her recent performance.

  “I guess that we should let her go. Do you want me to tell her?”

  “No. Scott and I will handle it. You’re sure that she’s been warned? You’ve spoken to her about this? This won’t come as a surprise?”

  I told him that I’d done all I could. Muni obviously was in agreement as he confirmed to me later that morning. Mel and Scott gave Alison the bad news, and she was gone without saying good-bye. Who said programming a rock station with your childhood heroes would be all fun and games?

  Scelsa inherited Alison’s spot. He and overnight man “Father” Tom Morrera soon formed a coalition called the Butch and the Brick Show. In addition to Scelsa’s alter ego as the Bayonne Bear (who danced onstage at concerts), he also took on the persona of a punk known as Bayonne Butch. Like Charles Laquidara’s Duane Glasscock at WBCN in Boston, when in character, you had to refer to him as Butch or the Bear or he wouldn’t speak to you. He talked about these figments of his imagination as if they were real people, and Muni thought that Vin might have serious problems with schizophrenia. Morrera was generally a mellow sort; his nickname, “The Brick,” was given to him by Columbia promotion man Matty Matthews, who called marijuana “The Hashish Brick.” Given Morrera’s affinity for the substance in those days, the name stuck. Vin and Tom were devoted to new wave and punk, and were almost like a rebel outpost on the station. Since they occupied the hours between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., we felt that their more experimental approach, replete with lengthy cross-talk segments, would enhance our progressive image while doing us little harm in the ratings, which now were in the high-two to three range for listeners over age twelve.

  One time we let the two of them do a twenty-six-hour Butch and the Brick marathon. They pretended to barricade themselves in the studio and they wouldn’t come out until their “demands” were met. All of this was preplanned and seemed like innocent fun, recalling Scelsa’s earlier radical days at WFMU. But halfway through the marathon, the lack of sleep and incessant interruptions from secretaries and salespeople entering the studio to attend to bookkeeping began to wear on Morrera. The two actually did block passage into the studio by bolting the heavy airtight door.

  Sales manager Mike Kakoyiannis needed to add a commercial to the log and was frustrated when he found the door bolted. So he summoned a building custodian who let him in with a master key. Morrera was furious. He reached into his bag and extracted a huge hunting knife that he always carried with him (living in the city, he often walked to work in the late-night hours and felt that he needed the weapon for protection). Morrera warned the sales manager to back off or he’d cut him. Although he was smiling, Morrera had a reputation for being somewhat crazy and you never knew for sure if he was serious.

  “I warned you,” Morrera screamed. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  Kakoyiannis thought he was kidding and approached the log to make the necessary changes, when Morrera brandished the knife and chased him down the hall. Cornering him, he pushed the frightened salesman against a wall and l
ashed out with the knife, severing a button on Kakoyiannis’s expensive French-cuffed shirt and nearly drawing blood.

  “I’ll slice your little Greek souvlaki heart out and throw it on the floor,” Morrera threatened. The salesman beat a hasty exit and never attempted to enter the studio again.

  At the first Hungerthon, an event cofounded by Harry Chapin and Bill Ayres for World Hunger Year, Scelsa invited Patti Smith to join him as a guest. The idea behind Hungerthon was to raise money to help feed the needy or educate them to feed themselves and still continues today under Ayres’s leadership. Scelsa was a huge fan of Smith’s and loved the new album she was promoting, Radio Ethiopia. Before she hit the airwaves he gave her the prerequisite speech that we give all the invited guests. “Just remember that you’re on the radio, Patti, and there are certain words you can’t use. You’re cool with that, right?”

  Smith nodded and as the record ended, he introduced her. “You know, they tried to censor me before I came on the air,” she began. “But fuck that. This is Radio Ethiopia, and we don’t let anyone fucking censor us, man. Radio Ethiopia lives.”

  Karmazin was listening across the glass in the engineering room and went ballistic. Scelsa and Harry Chapin were able to calm him down, after he initially demanded she be taken off the air right away. Vin had a heated discussion with Smith, and the rest of the interview passed without incident.

  Any attempt to rein in Butch and the Brick usually resulted in Scelsa resigning and Muni driving out to New Jersey to convince him to stay. On one such occasion, Scott had a serious accident while braving icy winter conditions. He smashed into a stalled car in the fast lane at forty-five miles an hour. His head hit the windshield and required almost two hundred facial stitches from shards of shattered glass. His mouth was so shredded that he had to drink his meals through a straw for almost two weeks. It affected his speech temporarily and caused him to miss several weeks of work. He drove a full-size Lincoln, but the force of the impact pushed the engine into the front seat. Fortunately, it only resulted in severe contusions on his knees. The crash served as a wake-up call on two levels: First, it alerted Scott to the fact that there were nights when he was in no condition to be driving and that he’d been lucky so far; and second, that babysitting a temperamental DJ would soon be erased from Scott’s job description. Vin’s upside often had made us overlook the high-maintenance aspect of his personality. But even Muni’s tough love wasn’t working and there would soon come a time when we’d need to call Scelsa’s bluff.

  But for Scelsa, events at WNEW-FM were eerily echoing what had happened to him at WPLJ almost a decade earlier. A corporate decision was handed down from Metromedia that all artwork on the walls had to be selected and approved by upper management. All the gold records and rock posters were removed in favor of tasteful Olympic posters from John Kluge’s personal collection. Black-and-white photos of the jocks, deliberately overexposed, were encased in Lucite squares and hung in an alcove greeting visitors to the station, now at 655 Third Avenue.

  With the aid of Marty Martinez, producer, desk assistant, and aspiring jock/newsman, Scelsa found an album cover featuring weird, spooky eyes and ordered a hundred copies from the record company. They cut out these eyes and carefully glued them to the back of the clear acrylic panels protecting Kluge’s Olympic posters. Each morning became a game of discovering where they had placed the self-proclaimed Spooky Boy pictures before any corporate rep saw them. After a couple of warnings from me failed to quell the tampering, I decided to ignore the insubordination and just chalk it up to “boys being boys.” But one morning, the eyes, which had now spread like a virus throughout AM and FM, were pointed out jokingly to Karmazin. Mel hit the roof, and demanded that the offenders be fired for desecrating Kluge’s priceless posters. Muni calmed Mel down enough to issue an edict—the posters must be cleaned up within twenty-four hours or anyone having any involvement in the graffiti would be axed. It took a massive effort, but by the next morning Scelsa and company had removed all the eyes from the posters. They pasted them on Mel’s door, with tears drawn in under them, bearing the caption, “We’re sorry.” It wasn’t until years later that I found out about the similar occurrences at WPLJ and understood this oblique form of rebellion against authority.

  Some on the staff harbored the hope that if I was deposed as the station’s enforcer, things would go back to the laissez-faire state they’d enjoyed under Muni. They didn’t see the bigger picture at Metromedia and that I was their last chance at self-governance. The next step almost certainly would be a more authoritarian regime run by an outsider. Scelsa told me he’d made a secret pact with Karmazin that he could be the staff bad boy with impunity, as long as his ratings were good.

  But the constant battle he had within himself to keep any interloper from affecting his “art” was wearing us down and endangering his job. His constant resignations over trivial matters were becoming tiresome. His ratings weren’t any better than Dennis’s or Pete’s, who required almost no maintenance.

  We’d been in competition before with two other stations in the market playing rock. In 1974, the classical station WNCN had been sold and turned into rocker WQIV, under Tom O’Hare, formerly of KMET in Los Angeles. Their hook was that they broadcast in quadraphonic sound, an early form of surround sound. Like later incarnations of that same idea, the problem was that there were two competing systems of quad transmission, and consumers were reluctant to buy either until a standard could be agreed upon. O’Hare was called the “Quadfather” and hired Carol Miller and Al Bernstein (both former part-timers at WNEW-FM). They were making modest inroads until a listener coalition of classical fans successfully sued to rescind the FCC’s permission to change formats. The commission ruled that the presence of only one part-time classical station in New York (WQXR) was contrary to the public interest. Imagine that ruling standing up today.

  But WPIX was another matter and although they never got big numbers, they squeezed us musically. We could never hope to score heavily with the new-wave crowd with PIX in the mix, and if we moved to the right, toward more conventional rock, we were playing on WPLJ’s home turf. We had to balance ourselves delicately, playing the best of the new music that wouldn’t alienate our core. Although overall we were successful at doing this, our ratings were compromised and we all breathed a sigh of relief when WPIX’s management decided to go in another direction.

  The WPIX days were short-lived and although the demise of that format was welcome news, it also created some difficult decisions. Meg Griffin was now available and wanted to return to WNEW-FM, and my brother Dan was out of work as well. After dabbling with WRNW and WLIR, he had become fairly well known in the rock community and brought a fresh, energetic approach. But there were political considerations.

  First, there was the nepotism issue. I already had enemies within the organization who would use the hiring of Dan against me, especially if I had to fire someone else to make room. And I also had to consider the makeup of the staff attitudinally. Dan would become the ally of Butch and the Brick from a music standpoint, pushing us farther left, and Meg Griffin would take that a step farther. I hoped that if I hired Dan, I could count on our relationship to keep him from straying too far off the ranch with his choices, but I knew the temptation from his industry contacts and friends would be powerful. I pulled the trigger and prayed for the best.

  So Dan Neer, going by the name Dan-o, joined the staff on weekends. Meg Griffin was rehired to do some fill-ins, and also to bring back more female presence, lacking on the station since Alison left. Ironically, the new cool-jazz format that WPIX picked up (changing their call letters to WQCD) hired Steele to do evenings some time later.

  But after importing two new-wave advocates in place of two traditionalists, I thought it was important to bring some balance back to the mix by finding a solid AOR jock. Pete Larkin was out at WMAL-FM in Washington, so I asked him if he’d consider coming back to New York for some fill-in work. I’d known Pete since his days
at WLIR and had kept in touch as his career leapfrogged from small stations in Baltimore to a successful AOR in D.C. Since there was nothing steady available, he agreed to commute from Washington whenever we needed him. For my part, I tried to bunch his shifts together to minimize his travels, and offered to let him stay in my spare bedroom when he needed to. Pete was an avid runner at the time and he and I would often take treks together and also enter 10K races, which helped me cope with the tensions at work.

  We entered the eighties with a volatile coalition of two opposing forces: the “artistic” personalities who resented any encroachments on their freedom, and the pragmatic ones, who believed that our “art” must be balanced with commerce to survive. Within two years, the battle would be joined and one side vanquished. But first, a completely unpredictable tragedy would occur that would define the station’s finest moment. And although it marked WNEW’s artistic zenith, it presaged the end of its free-form days.

  Across the Universe

  Marty Martinez was dressed in his punk finest, festooned with a bright yellow skinny tie with the XTC logo on it. He was finally feeling that he had been accepted as an equal by his peers, not just the token minority hire. He was going to the Christmas concert.

  Marty had been hired two years before as a desk assistant, amid the typical confusion that reigned whenever Scott Muni conducted a job interview. A friend of his had been contacted by WNEW-AM’s veteran news director (and sports play-by-play announcer) Jim Gordon, who was looking for some night help on the news desk. Desk assistant is an entry-level position, essentially a learning experience that paid poorly but could lead to better things. The job entails preparing copy for the anchor, collecting various sound cuts sent by the wire services and street reporters, and basically doing whatever it takes to make the anchor’s job easier, including writing some items when time constraints require it.