There always seems to be a yin and yang in life and even as the station soared and “Ramondo and Blade in the Morning” hit new ratings heights, cracks started to appear.
Two years prior to my arrival at KROQ Raymond had been running an errand for the station. He was on his motorbike heading to Perkins Palace in Pasadena to drop off advertising copy when he was hit dead on in an intersection. His bike spun off the road and Raymond was flung over the hood of the car but his foot caught in the radiator grill and the jarring impact shattered multiple bones in his leg.
KROQ had no insurance coverage to offer Raymond, and with no money himself he had to settle for his leg being put in a cast and left to heal the best it could. Now, nearly three years later, his limp was becoming worse every day as the still-unhealed, jagged bones ground together causing him excruciating pain.
To deal with this daily agony Raymond tried self-medicating. Unfortunately his medicine came in a six-pack.
As 1983 rolled on Raymond’s drinking became worse and worse. Each morning he’d arrive in the studio with a brown bag holding his Budweisers. At first I was at a loss for what to say. He was obviously in pain, and the alcohol wasn’t affecting his on-air performance, but I knew it wasn’t right. When he moved from twelve ounce cans to sixteen-ouncers it reached the point where I had to do something; I had to step in to help my friend.
I had no medical training so I went to a doctor who had just joined the KROQ team to co-host the weekend show, “Loveline.” In truth he hadn’t finished his medical training yet and was still a resident but we all called him Dr. Drew.
I explained the situation to Drew the best I could and asked for his advice. Drew told me that with those kind of multiple fractures caused by a traumatic injury being improperly treated for so long there was danger of numerous complications which was probably why Raymond was in such constant pain. When I asked what a worst case scenario was Drew looked at me and said three words, “Worst case? Amputation.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of my friend, my partner on air, and the man who had willingly shared with me his amazing radio skills and impeccable timing possibly losing his leg. The next day, after our show, I had a serious talk with Raymond. I told him that from now on there would be no alcohol in the control room and if he brought any in there would be trouble.
The next morning Raymond showed up at the station in a shocking state, I had never seen him that bad before. Rather than bring the alcohol into the studio he’d sat in the parking lot out back and drank it, all of it, one sixteen ounce can after another! He was toasted. I couldn’t let him on the air like that; it wouldn’t have been fair to the station, it wouldn’t have been fair to me but most of all it wouldn’t have been fair to Raymond.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and walked him outside the small control room into the corridor. He slumped to the ground and went straight to sleep. He stayed like that throughout the duration of the show, even as the staff arrived and the station came to life.
After I got off the air I marched Raymond into Pat Welsh’s office and demanded that Raymond be given help. Pat listened intently and to Raymond’s and my surprise he promised to take care of it.
That morning marked an end and a beginning.
It was the beginning of Raymond’s long battle to recover from that work-related injury that KROQ should have taken care of years before. He first went through a series of operations which required that his leg be broken again, then pinned, reset and cast correctly. After that he was placed in rehab which he embraced with open arms.
But it marked the end of Ramondo and Blade. I was given something I didn’t want, a chance to fly solo in the mornings. If I’d had the choice I would have stayed Raymond’s partner for my entire radio career. I can think of no kinder, more talented, funnier person to have been blessed to work with. But it was not just a career choice; it was a matter of Raymond’s life.
When Raymond returned to the station almost six months later he was a new man: clean, sober and without even a trace of a limp. He was given the afternoon show and a chance to have a real life. I still talk with him often and refer to him as my Obi-Wan Kenobi. But to millions of KROQ listeners he’ll always be the anchor of the Ramondo and Blade show.
HOLLYWOOD SWINGING
What a difference a year makes! In late 1984 I had two hit TV series on the air, Video One and VideoBeat. In addition I was working on my second Christmas special for KCBS, Music Video Countdown ’84.
Eric Gold, my long-time agent and good friend, was transitioning from working at an agency to starting his own production company so I needed to find a new agent.
I signed with one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, who gave me a pep talk at our initial meeting that “Team Blade” would be out there pushing the studios to bring in all kinds of major projects for me. But I think they must have misplaced my number because it was always me calling them, not vice versa. Very quickly I started missing Eric’s hands-on, individual approach. I could feel myself getting hopelessly lost amongst the thousands of clients at that entertainment conglomerate.
It was in October 1984 during my morning show that my phone operator came into the studio and said they had a call for me from a Hollywood producer. My first thought was Right, Hollywood calling on the request line. Bogus!
I asked the phone op to get their number and I’d call them back. Two hours later I gave Chuck Russell a buzz and asked what the deal was, expecting to get hit up for concert tickets or a giveaway.
“I’m producing a movie,” said Chuck. “We think you’d be perfect for it. Would you like to talk?”
Still thinking this could be a put-on, I referred him to my new agency, thanked him, hung up and promptly forgot about it.
The next week Chuck called back. This time I was off the air and took his call.
“What did you think of the script?” he asked.
I was puzzled. “I didn’t see any script.”
“I sent it to your agent as you said. I thought you would have received a copy by now.”
“Okay, I’ll give her a call and find out what’s happening. Thanks for following up.” I hung up the phone and dialed my agency.
They put me through to my agent and I asked her about getting a script from some guy called Chuck Russell.
“Oh yeah, we got that, but it’s so not right for you. Just too big a stretch for what they want you to play,” she explained. “We’re actually looking at a couple of other major projects right now that you would be much more suited for so just hang tight.”
As I put the phone down I was left with the impression that maybe Chuck wanted to cast me as an axe murderer or a child molester or something that was definitely not in my wheelhouse. I put the script out of my thoughts.
Four days later it came screaming right back into my mind when Chuck called again. He was nothing if not persistent.
“What did your agent say?” Chuck asked.
“She read it and said it wasn’t right for me, that I couldn’t play it.”
Chuck was silent for a moment before he spoke. “You should know she sent someone else up for the part, but we really want you. I understand this is a lot to ask,” he said, “but could I send you the script to read? I’ll have it messengered right now to your house or to KROQ or wherever you want it. Just tell me. I really think you should read it and decide for yourself.”
The guy got an A for effort, that’s for sure. “Okay, I’ll be here at KROQ for about two more hours, then—”
Chuck cut me off, “I know where the studio is. It’ll be there in forty minutes. I’ll have a runner leave now.”
“Okay, I’ll look for it.” I went to hang up and then thought of something. “Hey Chuck, what part is it that I should be reading?”
There was a smile in his voice as he answered, “You’ll know, I promise you’ll know.”
The script arrived in a brown studio envelope from New World Pictures and as I had a spare hour before I had to head out to
the TV studio I sat down in the sales office and began to read through it.
It started in a classroom in Chicago and then on page three cut to a TV studio full of dancers. The host, Gary Woods, runs out and underneath his name was a brief description. This is common for Hollywood; when major characters are first introduced in a script there is nearly always one line explaining to the reader what they look like. For example it might say “Susie Barker, a former model who has not aged well” or “Steven Hardman, a handsome, lean thirty year old who can handle himself.” The description for the part Chuck Russell was thinking of for me was shorter and more to the point. It read:
GARY WOODS
(a Richard Blade type)
I was stunned. I read and re-read those four words and almost showed them to the other people in the sales office just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. I reached for the phone to scream at my agent but then thought better of it. Instead I called Chuck.
“Chuck, I got the script. When do you want to meet?”
It turned out that the writer, Amy Spies, was a big fan and had written the part of the DTV host with me in mind and had been pressuring Chuck to get me to join the cast. Chuck and I quickly made a deal and I was signed to appear in my first movie, Girls Just Want to Have Fun. But I had one thing to do first.
I drove to Beverly Hills, headed into the agency’s offices off of Wilshire and met with my agent. She was all smiles and clichés. According to her she was about to give me the world on a platter. I think I pulled off my best acting performance ever in that office.
“So, that script that was sent in a couple of weeks ago? Did anything come of it?” I inquired innocently.
“No, nothing. Not something we were interested in.”
“You didn’t send anyone else out for it?” I asked.
“No. I mean it was sent in for you but it just was something that you would have been so wrong for.”
“Really?” I reached into my bag and pulled out a photocopy of page three of the script where I had circled “a Richard Blade type” and held it up. “Just how would I have been wrong for that?”
She was at a loss for words. She struggled to speak as I continued.
“And you did send someone out to read for it. The producer told me. It was Mark, right?”
Mark was another of her clients who was also English.
“You were hoping that all they were concerned about was the accent and you wanted him to get the part, not me.”
“It’s not that, it’s . . .” she hesitated so I jumped in. I pointed again to the description.
“Read it out loud to me. Read it,” I said.
She shook her head. “I won’t do that.”
“Then I’ve got four words I’ll say out loud to you. You are fucking fired!”
I threw the paper at her as I got up.
“Put that up on your notice board and tell your bosses that the reason I left was because I wasn’t the right type for them!”
With that I stormed out of the office. By the time I reached the street I was smiling from ear to ear. I might not have had an agent any more but at least I was back working on my own terms.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun was a blast to be a part of. We shot on a soundstage in Silverlake, about ten minutes from downtown LA. I was reunited with Sarah Jessica Parker, who I’d worked with in Square Pegs and met her boyfriend, Robert Downey Jr., who had an uncredited part in the film as a party-crashing punk. Also in the cast were Helen Hunt, Terry McGovern and Shannon Doherty.
We shot my scenes for “DTV” in two weeks and most of my lines as the DTV host Gary Woods were ad-libbed based on my actual TV hosting with MV3. The dance scenes were especially fun as there was a lot of cross-cutting between Sarah, Lee Montgomery and their stunt doubles.
After the film was completed I went on the hunt for a new agent. I finally signed with William Morris, who actually decided that they would hustle to get me out there for auditions and reads. They told me it wouldn’t be easy but in all honesty I’ve never been frightened of hard work and I’d been hustling all my life. Only now, I was doing the Hollywood hustle!
I started to land parts on a number of different episodic TV shows and my first big network appearance was when I played an Australian killer opposite Fred Dryer in his hit detective show Hunter.
Hunter set things in motion and a number of parts quickly followed, including that of a lascivious playboy in Single Bars with Tony Danza and Paul Michael Glasser, a television personality in Studio 5-B which featured Jeffrey Tambor and Kim Myers, an aggressive British customs agent harassing Anthony Geary at Heathrow Airport in General Hospital, a DJ on Throb, a long-lost brother on Downtown with Michael Nouri and Robert Englund, and an adulterous tennis instructor on Superior Court.
Playing the psycho killer in Hunter
I was also booked for a number of cameos, guest stars and voice-overs for films which included Slamdance, Crystal Heart with Tawny Kitaen, She’s Having a Baby starring Kevin Bacon and the part of “Screamin’ Steve” in Rock’n’Roll High School Forever with Corey Feldman.
At the beginning of 1986 I read for a major part in a movie called Spellcaster. My role was to be the host of a fictitious MTV-like channel that was staging a treasure hunt in an Italian castle and giving away a million dollars to the winner.
My audition was incredibly easy. I just had to act as if I was a TV host. The director, Rafal Zielinski, gave me the part in the room. That’s when I found out the movie was actually being filmed on location in Italy at a real castle that Charles Band, the head of Empire Pictures, owned.
I arranged with Barbara and Larry Joachim to pre-shoot a month of Video One to cover my time in Italy and asked KROQ for the time off. They reluctantly agreed but only after I said I would take a group of KROQ winners to New York on July 4 of that year for a sponsored prize which included dinner at Windows on the World on the 106 floor of the World Trade Center. After that brief trip to the Big Apple the winners flew back to California and I continued on to Italy.
When I arrived I was handed the latest copy of the script and found that my part had been beefed up considerably. Now I was an unscrupulous host who was trying to steal the million dollars for himself while sleeping with all the female contestants. The script changed about a dozen more times during shooting, which is why the film became a mess, but that remained the essence of the flimsy plot.
The other members of the cast included Bunty Bailey, who had just starred in the A-ha video “Take On Me”; Kim Ulrich, a gorgeous soap star from Days of Our Lives and Gail O’Grady. But the big thrill for me was the casting of my long-time friend Adam Ant in the role of the supernatural villain, Senor Diablo.
Adam and I spent a lot of time together on and off the set. For the first two weeks we shot at Cinecitta Studios in Rome which had been home to many epics produced by Dino de Laurentiis.
The two of us, the DJ and the rock star, would head into the Eternal City at night to find a small piazza and sit under the stars and talk about music and girls as we shared freshly made, home-cooked local pasta. I was so impressed at how relaxed and fluid Adam was in front of the camera; as an actor he was a natural and could pick up on direction in the blink of an eye. It became obvious to all on the set why Adam’s videos had become so iconic—he had that charisma that shone right through the camera.
With Adam Ant on and off the set in Italy
Shooting Spellcaster on location in Italy
For the final two weeks of shooting we moved outside of Rome to Charlie Band’s castle. This was a truly spectacular medieval fortress which featured an armory, a dungeon and was ringed with battlements and watchtowers that commanded an endless view over a breathtaking lake.
As I was now the lead in the picture I was able to pick my shooting schedule, and being used to early mornings, I chose to shoot from 6am until noon. I would then be free for the afternoon and I would head down through the village to the lake and swim for hours along the shoreline. After gr
owing up in and around the ocean, I was not used to swimming in fresh water and found it warm and inviting and each time I would emerge refreshed and ready to go.
Shooting a movie is an unreal situation. You are there to create a celluloid fantasy, but the reality is that while the film is in production you are living in a fantasy world. You are waited on hand and foot. You are spoiled and coddled. You have your own dressing room, an assistant, makeup artist and wardrobe consultant who dresses you. All this creates an environment that you never want to leave. It also produces an intimate atmosphere for the cast and crew as you are bonded together on a mutual quest to hopefully accomplish something great. It’s no wonder romances blossom quickly on a movie set. It was no exception for me.
Within days I had started a relationship with a very beautiful girl involved in the movie and we spent much of our free time exploring not only the local sights but also each other. We both knew it was just “a thing” but the romance of being in Italy had kicked in and we enjoyed the amore e passione for the duration of the movie shoot.
As we got to the final scenes we all began to realize the ending made no sense at all. Word of how bad the film was becoming reached all the way back to the states and the head of the studio himself, Charles Band, flew out to take over the final two days of shooting but even with his experience the ending was still a confusing mish-mash with no real resolution or payoff.
After getting back to LA we all lost touch and went our separate ways. The movie disappeared into a Hollywood black hole for three years until it suddenly appeared on HBO. That’s where I saw it for the first time and was shocked to see I not only had top billing but my name came before the title! That was huge and had it been even a halfway decent film would have been a major stepping stone for my career. Instead it was simply “You were in that movie?” as if I should be embarrassed.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 32
