Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  Jimmy continued to dissect the ceiling, but he had relaxed now. It was clear that Dee would be okay. He let him keep talking.

  “Jim, you know how many shysters and con artists there are running around Music Row trying to siphon off all the money they can. All these wannabes and never-wases trying to cash in on somebody else's talent or ideas. How many crooks there are out there who would love to jump on board with us for the ride? I just want to make sure...”

  "Where's the nearest satellite uplink?"

  Detroit stopped cold in mid-sentence. He looked at Jimmy sideways once more with that familiar puzzled expression of his, as if he seriously suspected that Brother James had gone stone crazy. Lord knows, he should have been used to such questions by now.

  "The Grand Ole Opry House out at Opryland is building an uplink for all the network television specials and the like. Why?"

  "Do you know anybody over there?"

  "I know everybody over there. I helped them wire up the new mixing suite in the auditorium. It’s the world’s biggest radio studio, you know."

  Jimmy obviously did not care about the trivia. He rattled on.

  "Is it true you can put audio piggy-back on the television signal when it goes up to the satellites?"

  "Sure you can. They have plenty of subcarriers," Detroit said, impressed that Jimmy knew this much about a technical topic. "They mostly use it for backhaul and talkback and cue for the production crews on programs and stuff like that, but, yeah, they could be EQed to 25K I think. Plenty enough frequency response for FM radio."

  Jimmy did not understand all that gibberish but he nodded as if he did. Detroit had given the right answer: "Sure you can," and Jimmy had aroused his interest. Dee was sniffing the bait.

  "How about see what they would charge us to put a couple of stereo channels up, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

  "Okay. You going to make me guess what the hell you are talking about?" Dee nibbled.

  "We're fixing to put up a progressive rock and roll radio station in Atlanta, Georgia, aren’t we? And we’ll be playing exactly the same music that we play here in Nashville already. With the same type jocks, the same contests, the same everything else. Only the commercials and call letters will be different between here and there, right?"

  Detroit nodded, not following where Jimmy was going at all, but biting the barb of the hook anyway.

  "What if we sent The River's programming down to Atlanta on satellite, and just played the local commercials from there? Any ideas how we could do that, Dee?"

  Simmons was hooked solid. He twisted in his chair a few seconds, reeling himself in, lost in thought. He suddenly brightened.

  "Sure! Audio tones. Just like my black box that got us canned at WROG that time. Different dedicated tape machines and special tones to fire off jingles, use automation carousels for the commercials with a simple ASCII routine to rack them up from a file we could import directly off the traffic system computer..."

  Detroit Simmons was mentally spinning wonderful webs, pulling cable, wiring circuit boards, even as he sat there in the chair in Jimmy’s office. But then he remembered something.

  "Wait. You said two stereo channels?"

  "Picture this, Dee. A station that plays country music, with the biggest stars in the music business stopping by all the time to bring their latest records, do interviews, be a guest deejay, sort of like they do on WSM here. The only place in the world you could do that sort of stuff is right here in Nashville. But what if the radio station in question happens unfortunately to be located in Dallas, Texas, nine-hundred miles away?"

  Dee slapped his knees with both hands and cackled. It was suddenly clear to him.

  "Damn! We got to have an on-air studio somewhere and it might as well be here as out there in Texas!"

  "Right. And I don’t see why we can’t eventually put a lot of the stuff we are going to do on the AM stations up on the satellite and cut some more of our programming costs, too. Just don’t tell the folks at Opryland what we’re up to. They’ll steal our idea in minute."

  Jimmy began to spin his plan, to make the two AM stations true community bulletin boards, each like a giant 50,000-watt party line, with remote units popping in all the time with man-on-the-street interviews or direct reports from anything happening in town. And talk show hosts who could generate excitement and controversy and pull common folk into the debates on the turbulent times in which they found themselves as millions eavesdropped. And heavy involvement with sports in games-crazy Atlanta and Dallas, from play-by-play to sports talk shows. Music on AM would be dying a slow but sure death over the next few years as the better fidelity of FM claimed more and more of the available listeners, Jimmy believed. But no other medium could offer the immediacy and flexibility and broad coverage that made AM radio a natural for information and one-to-one communication. Much of the programming would have to originate locally to capture the feeling he wanted to achieve, but there was plenty of what Jimmy called “glue,” the stuff that held the formats together, that would be common to both markets that could be done by satellite from one or the other location.

  But before he could preach him the rest of that sermon, Detroit decided that he had heard enough. He jumped to his feet and sprinted toward his shop to start making calls and drawing schematics for all the notions he had conjured up already. But three minutes later, he was back at Jimmy’s office door, hopping with excitement until he could get him off a telephone conversation.

  “Yeah? What you got Dee?”

  "Footprints!"

  Now it was Jimmy Gill’s turn to look sideways at him, baffled.

  “What?”

  "Footprints, man! Satellites have big footprints. The area down on earth that the satellite's signal covers from space. Anybody with a satellite receiving dish at a station inside that footprint could pick up the stuff we put on the uplink. We could sell our programming to stations all over the country. Doesn’t matter if we have two or two-thousand stations that want to do it, it wouldn't cost us a penny more to put the music and stuff up there for them to tap into."

  Jimmy’s mouth fell open as he jumped to his feet, dashed around the desk and danced arm in arm with Detroit. They waltzed out into the lobby, frightening two job applicants, a couple of salesmen, and three singers, waiting to push their songs. Jimmy was amazed that he had not thought of such a natural extension of his original idea. He was ecstatic that Detroit had.

  A few of The River’s sales people stuck heads from their cubicles and looked on in shock as their president and the station manager did handstands and a wild square dance in the lobby. Sammie Criswell shielded the phone with her hand to keep a caller from hearing their maniacal screams and gales of wild laughter.

  Suddenly, just that quickly, Jimmy Gill and Detroit Simmons were dangling from the side of a tower so tall it touched the ionosphere. And before anyone else knew it, the two of them could be yelling to the wind, waving at the horizon.

  Twenty-three

  Several more weeks passed before Jimmy and Cleo's relationship had enough time, enough opportunity, to flourish the way they both suspected it would. It was no surprise to either of them when it did.

  James Gill was crushed under the weight of all that was going on around him. The sudden roller-coaster of business stopped and started and climbed and fell with such force and velocity it seemed to always be robbing him of breath. He spent every waking moment putting the complicated Atlanta deal together, checking out the information from DeWayne and Duane’s sources on the condition of the Dallas stations, working with Detroit on the plans for the satellite feeds, running the programming and sales departments for The River, and still doing a three-hour show on the radio every morning. The show that required that he get up at 4:30 each day to be at the station and prepared to entertain an eager audience by six o’clock.

  He was already pondering giving up the on-air program, especially when he dozed in important meetings or slurped gallons of black coffee to
try to stay alert enough so nothing got past him. But then he would argue with himself viciously because his ego craved the air shift. Sometimes, he thought he would probably stop breathing, that his body’s metabolism would grind to an abrupt halt, if he did not have that time in the ether every day. No, he could not give up being on the radio. He would work on delegating to someone else. He just did not know what or who that might be.

  Soon. Soon, he’d be able to step back and ease up and begin to concentrate only on the big picture.

  When Cleo and Jimmy did have a chance to see each other, it was always in one or the other’s office with her abrasive manager there and Jimmy’s pit bull lawyer, too. The two men’s personalities clashed from the outset, and Cleo and Jimmy spent as much time refereeing ego prize fights as they did talking business. And there were always teams of bankers and their attorneys, and, of course, the attorneys had their own attorneys along, too.

  Usually it was clear that the assembled money and legal people's only goal was to spend most of their time and effort firing fusillades, trying to shoot holes in what Cleo and Jimmy were attempting to put together. It was as if they used their collective skills and knowledge to find dozens of reasons why the deal would never work. The two of them had to spend all of their time and effort deflecting the bullets, repairing the damage, binding their wounds.

  Cleo Michaels had incorporated herself dozens of different ways, a convoluted complex of companies that fanned out into a mish-mash of expensive confusion when all the unraveling began. Wizard Broadcasting, on the other hand, had been put together loose and free, legally structured on the fly with a lick and a promise, just to get it going in a hurry. It all combined to cause the tidy legal minds to have fits as they tried to match the square peg and the round hole. Meantime, the bankers turned dyspeptic as they watched the money flow off into all directions with nothing but piles of paperwork to show for it. And Jimmy and Cleo grew more and more frustrated with all the trouble it was taking to consummate their hopeful union.

  "We ought to just shake hands on the thing and close this deal by ourselves," he pronounced to her one day.

  “Shoot, we could just get married and it would all be done with a couple of ‘I do’s’!” she said with a laugh.

  They were driving, alone at last, to a little meat-and-three restaurant not far from Music Row. The morning’s meeting at her office on a side street near the Vanderbilt University campus had dragged sluggishly along throughout the day, creeping and staggering until well past lunchtime. Jimmy had been fighting sleep, but mostly losing the battle, after his usual early wake-up. Cleo had been pacing and pawing like a pastured pony, dying to run free outside the confines of the office fence.

  Then, finally, they stood up together at some unseen and unheard cue and simply fled the room, leaving the suits to argue incorporation language, cure periods, and default clauses, and to draw up reams more paperwork for the two of them to later pretend to read then blindly sign. Cleo, out of the blue, had interrupted a hot discussion about the board of directors’ structure, mentioning how long it had been since she had tasted good fried okra. The attorneys looked at her as if she had spoken a few words to them in some exotic foreign language. Jimmy smiled and reminded her that Maggie's Diner had the best in town, with fresh sliced tomatoes on the side and hot, buttered cornbread.

  That did it. They slipped out of the office without anyone noticing they were gone.

  "Or maybe we ought to just make a double-secret Indian blood pact and that would settle it all once and for all," she laughed, and reached over, cranking The River to "ten" on the car radio’s volume control.

  "Aw, we'll get it done soon," he yelled over the frantic, bluesy rock and roll that was rattling the speakers under the car’s rear window. They rolled out of the parking space in her Mercedes. Once in the traffic along West End, he reached to turn the music down slightly so they could talk.

  "The trouble is that the bankers and lawyers and accountants are squeezing the life out of the broadcasting business. It’s just not as much fun as it used to be, Cleo."

  He knew he sounded like some old fart, lamenting the long lost good old days, but that was exactly the way he felt sometimes.

  "Same thing in the music business. You got to have a guitar player, a drummer and a team of accountants before you can record a song now."

  He glanced over at her and her beauty affected him the way it always did. Her lips moved as she mouthed the words along with the singer on the radio, as she danced in the seat to the Allman Brothers song Jimmy’s station was playing at that moment. A truck driver stopped at the light next to them and did a double-take when he recognized the beautiful driver behind the wheel of the rich red car. Jimmy knew exactly how the trucker felt. He could not believe he was sitting next to Cleo Michaels, either.

  "That's one thing I always loved about radio," he said to her when they were moving again, after the song’s instrumental bridge halted her singing. "You don't need a meeting of the board of directors to do something fresh and creative. Just open the microphone and say something clever, put a listener on the air for a minute, or cross-fade a couple of records that fit together perfectly, or spend ten minutes with a razor blade in the tape-editing room, and you can create some magic right then and there. You can really touch somebody with what you’re able to do with only a little creativity and imagination. I’ve had people tell me I’ve made them laugh or cry, fall in love, break up a relationship...all simply by something I’ve done on the air."

  "Yeah, I know what you mean, Jimmy. The best stuff ever committed to vinyl was off-the-cuff when some old boys were just goofing around in the studio. Nowadays, you need a memo from some vice-president on the west coast just to make a chord change!"

  Then they turned to each other at the same instant and laughed in unison, aware again of how closely in tune their thoughts so often turned out to be.

  They stopped alongside the same truck at the next light and the driver again looked over at the two of them, singing along with the radio, laughing at each other like a couple of kids. The trucker had no doubts at all. These show business types were already into some heavy drugs, right there in the middle of the damn day! He was shaking his head as he drove on, while Cleo peeled the Mercedes away and into the crowded parking lot at Maggie’s.

  The okra was fresh and crisp, as delicious as Jimmy had promised, the cornbread hot and smoking, the iced-tea perfectly pre-sweetened and icy cold, the lemon icebox pie obviously homemade. They ate and laughed and talked like a couple of teenagers on prom night. Even the autograph seekers were cool for once and did not come over to bother them.

  There was never any conscious decision on either of their parts to drive back to his house. It simply happened. Going back to the legal wars was not an option. There was never any hesitation on her part to follow him to the door and inside. She did it without need for an invitation. He was not even aware of being embarrassed by the mess of albums and tapes strewn around the floor, or the suit coats and slacks and ties and underwear slung haphazardly across his new furniture.

  As the door closed behind them, she came to him as naturally, as easily as a warm summer rain. Their faces instinctively turned at exactly the proper angle, as if pre-measured and calculated so that everything fit perfectly. Their lips met softly in the beginning, then more imperatively, with the urgency of thunder. He felt her body against his own, at first as flitting as a cool breeze, then as emphatic and demanding as a hot wind.

  Somehow, they each anticipated the other’s moves, responded to the other’s touches like a choreographed ballet. It was as if they had rehearsed the moves beforehand so they could be accomplished without awkwardness or fear. There was no hesitation, no holding back.

  And later, there was no self-consciousness either when she hopped from his bed to run and sit Indian-style in the middle of the living room, searching through the records to find something for the turntable. He joined her, helped her turn the correct knobs on the s
tereo system to fill the room with the opening sounds of a Grateful Dead song.

  And then he held her closely again, stroked her gently, and listened as she sang along with the music, surprised she knew the words, that she could sing the perfect harmony parts in a voice so beautiful he hurt inside when he heard it. Then, when they made love again, she sang softly into his ear. He loved the way her song grew more urgent, her voice breathier and huskier until she was no longer singing but moaning, laughing and crying a wonderful melody.

  They were in tune, in harmony, in love.

  Of course, they eventually had to return to their damned meeting. The lawyers and money men either hid their thoughts well or never missed them at all. They presented both of them with massive stacks of legalese, hot off the Xerox machine, and tried to explain the ins and outs of their deal. Their minds were not on the corporation, though. They only wanted to sign what needed to be signed and get on with it.

  On their own, they had already managed to complete the merger, just as they had vowed to do from the very beginning. They had no doubt that it would be a wonderful partnership.

  Wizard Broadcasting Network

  Twenty-four

  Jimmy Gill sandbagged for all he was worth. He deliberately stalled the closing of the sale on the Atlanta stations while Detroit pulled every string he could to get the satellite transmission deal put together, the equipment built and tested. And Jimmy searched for the perfect captain to pilot the strange ship they would be floating down there in Georgia. It was Jerry Morrow who brought him Vester Green. Once the two men met and compared notes on all the call letters they could remember from the fifties, the stations they had each grown up listening to, Jimmy knew for certain that the man would fit perfectly into Wizard Broadcasting’s expansion plans.