Some DJs just cruise; it’s time, temperature and station ID—that’s it. They don’t care about the music and certainly have no interest in the listeners. They are just there because they lucked into the job and it’s better (a lot better) than digging ditches. They are the ones you almost tune out on the air and you have no clue or even interest as to what their names are or the things they do when they are not on the radio, because they are not relating to you on a personal level.
The ones you remember, the ones who become your personal favorites, are the ones who come on the radio to work, to entertain you, to be that other person in the car next to you as you drive home, to be your friend when no one else gets you. They are the ones I continue to aspire to be as a DJ, so as I entered my seventh hour I forced any tiredness aside and tried to be that personality I would want to tune in to and hear on the radio.
For my jock’s choices I worked in two more songs my father had sent me from England; one was a great track with boundless energy from Echo & the Bunnymen called “Back of Love” and the other was from a group that I was really starting to love, New Order with “Temptation.”
My other jock choices were requests for records I had played earlier in the day from Berlin and Talk Talk and it made me feel great that the listeners were already so involved with the show that they remembered the names of the songs they had only just heard for the first time a few hours before. Not only that but they remembered my name too and were excited to talk with me!
But the biggest moment of the entire nine-hour marathon came at 5:25pm when a swear word changed the course of my life forever.
DJing the three shifts back-to-back was baptism by fire and so far I hadn’t been burned. As I entered the five o’clock hour, my final sixty minutes on the air, I wanted to end strong.
At five twenty I broke for a stop set and ran the produced commercials first. I was into the final spot which was a live read for The Parrot Place in Van Nuys. I held the yellow four-by-six-inch card in my hand and read the live copy that extolled the virtues of the exotic birds in stock.
I had just reached the line “And through this weekend, macaws are on sale—” when the studio door opened and an older white-haired man wearing a suit leaned in.
“Where’s Snakeskin?” he demanded.
I hit the microphone off for a second; said, “Hawaii”; turned it back on and continued, “so now through Sunday macaws are—”
“What’s he doing in Hawaii?” the older man blustered.
I hit the mic off again and pleaded, “Please! I’m on the air right now.”
I went back to the live read, “for only forty-nine, ninety-nine. Also available—”
“I need to speak to him,” the interrupter announced loudly.
I am not a tough guy, and most people will tell you that I’m not a rude person either, but at that moment I was thrown for a loop and completely done. I punched the mic off and leapt to my feet. “Get the fuck out of the studio or I’ll come over there and fucking throw you out.”
Silence. The two eyes framed by that shock of white hair burned through me but he stepped back and pulled the studio door shut before things got totally out of hand. I sat down and attempted to pull myself together as I finally finished the live read.
I was back together and composed as I handed the studio over to Spacin’ Scott Mason at 6pm. I stepped outside and ran into the GM, Pat Welsh, in the hallway.
“Good show,” said Pat. “You were on for six hours?”
“No, nine,” I replied. “I was in for Denise Westwood; started at nine.”
Pat nodded respectfully. “That’s a long time. Hopefully Elvira shows up tomorrow.”
And Danny, I thought to myself.
Pat continued, “I’ve got someone who wants to meet you. Come with me.”
I followed Pat down the short corridor to his office. He waved me in and sitting behind Pat’s desk was the well-dressed white-haired man.
“I want you to meet Ken Roberts. He owns KROQ,” said Pat as he pronounced my death sentence.
It had been more than eleven hours since I had eaten but the urge to throw up swept over me. Before I could do that, Ken Roberts spoke.
He addressed his question to Pat, ignoring me entirely, and said, “Ask him why he told me to fuck off.”
Pat turned to me, and just in case I was stone deaf, repeated, “Why did you tell Mr. Roberts to fuck off?”
I took a breath and then stepped forward one pace so that I was right in front of Pat’s desk and facing Ken.
“From what I understand the only way a radio station makes money is by selling commercials. I was on the air when some guy I didn’t know barged into the studio and interrupted me three different times while I was reading a live commercial for the station. At that point I had two choices; one was to tell that person to shut the fuck up and get out of the studio and the other was to put the commercial down and have a nice little chat with him while I should have been working, and that would have meant that K-Rock wouldn’t have gotten paid for that spot. And that’s not going happen when I’m on the air. No one is going to take money away from a station I’m working for.”
I finished and stood there, waiting for the death blow. The silence in the room was palpable. After a moment Ken Roberts leant forward, put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin in his hands. His gaze continued to be fixed on Pat Welsh, as if I weren’t in the room. He finally spoke and when he did it was six words that would change everything for me from then on out.
“I like the kid. Hire him.”
ROCK THIS TOWN
My parents could hear the joy in my voice when I called them Tuesday morning, June 15, 1982. I had so wanted to get on the phone and share the news with them the night before as soon as I walked out of Pat Welsh’s office, to let them know that I’d gotten a job at KROQ, but even as excited as I was I kept in mind the eight-hour time difference between LA and the UK and I didn’t want to wake them in the early hours of the morning.
Mum, always the reserved one, gave me a “That’s nice, my love.”
Dad was a lot more forthcoming. “Well done, lad,” he said. “Let’s see where this takes you.”
Those were exactly my thoughts. Just where would this gig at KROQ get me? After all, as soon as the full-time DJs got back I would be relegated to weekends so I definitely had to make the most of doing a daily show during my remaining two weeks on the air. I had to give the audience my very best every second I was on the radio; to try and make an impact and “bring the show” just as I tried to do when working in a club.
Midway through my program I took a call from an excited young listener. She seemed “safe” so I took the chance and put her on live and unedited. I punched the phone line onto the air and hit the mic on. “It’s KROQ. You’re on the radio. What do you want to hear today?”
She giggled as she answered me, “Oh my God, Richard Blade, I love your accent. You sound so cute. What do you look like?”
“Two arms, two legs and all the good bits in between,” I answered.
“Can you send me a picture?”
“Sure. Just let me have your request first.”
“I don’t want to hear anything special. I love all the music you guys play. But I do want your picture,” she continued.
I was getting a little embarrassed. I wanted to be “the music guy,” not have some listener rattling on without giving me a song cue. “Send me a letter at the station with a stamped addressed envelope inside and I’ll send you a picture.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise. Now let’s play Missing Persons on K-R-O-Q!”
What I didn’t realize was my casual promise created a monster. For the remaining ninety minutes of my show virtually every call was from listeners asking if I would send them a photograph as well so they could check out the new English DJ on their favorite radio station. I gave them all the same pat answer about mailing me a stamped addressed envelope.
Two day
s later when I arrived at the station the receptionist handed me a large box with more than 200 letters in it. They were all requests for pictures!
My first KROQ publicity picture, June 17, 1982
That afternoon I had Scott Mason take a photo of me in my ever-present flight suit against the brick wall at the entrance to KROQ’s little parking lot. Then it was off to Photomat to have 250 small three-by-five prints made. It was just a quick “snap” but it would have to do as a publicity photo because it was all I had and could afford and I was sure that 250 photos would more than take care of it.
At least, that’s what I thought. The next day there were 200 more letters and by Saturday I had to print another 500 photos to sign and send out. At eleven cents a picture I was already into it to the tune of approximately one hundred dollars. If the requests kept up at this speed I’d be broke before I even moved to part-time.
I became aware of some of the many idiosyncrasies of KROQ. The entire building had no electrical ground circuit. The engineer—and part-time DJ—Scott Mason had done a great job in dampening any hum in the studio and over the air that would be caused by the lack of a common ground, but because the building was ungrounded it meant that if there was a spike in the power in one area it could have an effect everywhere.
This was particularly noticeable with the copy machine. The entire top of the big Xerox would slide back and forth as it took the original being copied across the lighted tray below. Unfortunately, as it clicked its way back and forth, those loud clunks could be heard over the air and all across Southern California! This was really obvious during the slower songs we played like Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer” and Freur’s “Doot-Doot.”
What I had to do before I put on one of these quieter tracks was run out of the studio and plead with the sales staff to stop making copies of their billing or proposals for the next few minutes. If it was urgent and they couldn’t hold off on their work, I would race back into the studio and stick on something loud and pumping like The Nails’ “88 Lines about 44 Women” or Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never.” That way, the driving beat covered up the click, click, click of the copy machine, and if the listeners did hear those noises they would hopefully think they were extra beats coming from an exclusive KROQ remix.
Another huge problem that KROQ had was getting the signal from the control room of the KROQ building in Pasadena up to the transmitter in the Verdugo mountains that ring the San Gabriel valley.
Most stations used a microwave signal to send the transmission but KROQ was stuck with an old-fashioned underground landline system. Unfortunately the line was prone to problems including flooding during heavy rains or after any earth movement; this meant the signal could be lost and suddenly, without any warning, KROQ would go off the air.
I was in my second week filling in at KROQ when a sudden transmitter failure happened to me. All four request lines blazed with listeners saying they couldn’t get KROQ. The music sounded fine in the control room but that’s where it stopped.
Scott Mason made some calls and found out that our line had been severed during a road excavation. He zipped off to assess the damage and I sat in the studio with nothing to do.
Thirty minutes later Scott called and said it was pretty serious and it could be hours before it was fixed. I told him to let the next DJ, Danny Elfman, know about it and not to come in and I would stay on at the station until it—hopefully—came back on the air.
Three hours passed and Pat Welsh walked into the studio. He was a salesman at heart and our lost signal had made him very upset. And that was understandable; we had missed playing almost forty minutes of scheduled commercials already. That meant a lot of refunds going back to the advertisers.
“This is terrible,” he said. I could see the frustration written across his face as he paced back and forth in the tiny control room.
I had an idea. “Can you let me have one hundred and six dollars and seven cents to give away?” I asked.
“KROQ never gives away money,” he stated. “And anyway, how would that help?”
“When we do get the transmitter line fixed I’ll play all of the commercials non-stop, back-to-back until they have all aired. Then you don’t have to do any refunds to our advertisers.”
“Okay. But why the money?” Pat asked.
“Because we’ll make it a contest. ‘Count the commercials.’ We’ve already missed so many. No one would sit through all of them without an incentive and your clients know that. But if we do a contest and give away the money to the first caller who has correctly counted the number of spots then we can keep everyone listening.”
It only took the businessman in Pat a moment to see the logic in my idea: spend one hundred and six dollars and seven cents to save thousands.
“I like it,” he said. “I can clear the money. Just get me the winner’s name and number. And tell me when we get the signal back.” With that Pat left the control room.
Twenty minutes later Scott called and said the problem was fixed and the transmitter was on the air.
I punched up my microphone, “And we are back. Hope you enjoyed that little quiet interlude for reflection and meditation, but now we return to punishment as usual with The Ramones, and right after that I’ll let you know how you can win money, real money—one hundred and six dollars and seven cents from 106.7, K-Rock.”
As the song played I readied the stack of commercials. Because we had been off the air for over four hours several of the commercials would play more than once so I had to keep track and make sure the listeners counted them each time they played.
I teased the contest again and spun two more songs to allow the listeners to return and then went over the rules of the contest. Each time a commercial played regardless of whether it was sixty seconds long, thirty seconds or a live read it counted as one. Keep track of them all, add them up and be the first caller with the correct total and you win the money!
I started on the longest commercial stop set in American radio history. We had been off for close to four and a half hours and on average had a commercial load of fourteen minutes an hour. That meant our poor listeners had to endure almost sixty-three minutes of ads back-to-back, a total of one hundred and eleven commercials!
Amazingly, all the request lines were blazing throughout and after I finished with the final sales pitch I started picking up the phone and by the fourth call we had a winner who screamed so loudly down the line that I thought she would blow out the transmitter a second time.
We had zero complaints from the sponsors or the listeners. Instead I received a thank you from Pat and from our sales manager, John McLaughlin. It made me feel good and I knew I was slowly building a legitimate place for myself at the station.
Quay Hays was the promotion director at KROQ. His job was to keep the radio station’s name out on the streets and make sure that our image came across as hip to the kids. Quay was perfect for the job. He oozed cool. He was tall, blonde, wore blue-tinted glasses and Italian leather shoes. He looked as if he had walked in from hanging out at an all-night movie premiere party in the Hollywood Hills. In truth he had just walked in from the airport.
Quay had come back from Hawaii more than a week early because he was needed to coordinate all of the activities that KROQ was involved in and to make sure they went off as planned. He strolled into the studio and waited until I was on a break.
“Next Tuesday afternoon at one you’ll be off the air, right?”
“I should be,” I replied. “What do you need?”
“We’re doing a free lunchtime concert at the Country Club in Reseda. I need someone to introduce the band. Can you do that?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to. Who’s the group?”
“It’s Joan Jett. Do you know her?”
Joan Jett! I’d loved her music since the days of The Runaways.
“No, I’ve never met her but I know her music of course.”
“Okay. So I can count on you being there?” Quay asked.
“Sure. It’ll be fun.”
“Great. I’ll get you the details by Monday. Feel free to talk about the show on the air.” Quay turned and left the studio.
It was already stinking hot by noon the day of the show. This was the kind of LA weather that alerts you to the fact that Southern California is in for a long, blistering summer. The Country Club was packed to the rafters for the free show and its already inadequate air conditioning system was struggling to even circulate the air, never mind cool it. With a capacity crowd jammed inside and the sun burning down outside, it was way too hot to change into jeans and a t-shirt so I hit the stage for my very first KROQ concert in a striped tank top and Dolphin shorts.
Even though I’d introduced much bigger shows in Bakersfield I was nervous; I wanted to make a good impression. Plus Joan Jett was famous as a “punk”; I didn’t know how she would be in person. But everything went incredibly well. I threw t-shirts out from the stage, got the crowd screaming and when Joan walked out she gave me a big smile and said into the microphone, “Let’s hear it for Richard Blade.”
Introducing Joan Jett at the Country Club, Reseda – June 1982
That was a big deal for me; it was the first time an artist had acknowledged me onstage. She didn’t have to do that but she did, and I was elated by her kindness.
As I started my second week on the air at KROQ I received a letter from Dad, one that touched me deeply. I had always hoped he was excited for me and not mad that I had walked away from my education, and as I read his hand-written words I realized that his love exceeded even my wildest dreams. His letter was dated Monday, 21June and read:
Hi—Congratulations on your appointment at such an important LA Radio Station as KROC. By the time this reaches you work may have commenced. We wish you all the best and sincerely hope you will be happy with your colleagues and programming etc. Thanks for phoning to tell us . . . we were really thrilled and talked of it for quite a while after we put the phone down! It is good too that your journey finally has been rewarded. Do tell us more when you have settled in . . . I expect that your present colleagues will miss you very much. We are so happy for you at the progress you are making, and determination, skill and professionalism like yours will surely get you to the top.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 23
