Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  And Green turned out to be a good hire, immediately taking pressure off Jimmy as he began solving convoluted logistical puzzles, bending bureaucratic rules like so much electrical conduit, and even managing to understand most of Detroit's engineering jargon.

  The Georges came through with the cash as they always had, but there was one curve thrown at him in the last minutes. DeWayne George hinted strongly that he would like to be at the closing to see his money change hands. Jimmy did his best tap dance, convincing him he did not really want to be there among all the suits and stuffed shirts. Duane wanted to go to Atlanta, simply so he could hit the strip-tease clubs and cruise Underground, but that was headed off, too. Besides, as it happened, they had pressing business of their own suddenly pop up somewhere else. Jimmy did not ask for details.

  Later, he wished he could have gotten a photo of the faces of the bankers and lawyers when he made the entire down payment in cash, pulling it all from the usual wrinkled brown grocery sack, piling the bundled stacks of bills ceremoniously in the middle of the conference table. Sol Goldberg and the old engineer-general manager merely puffed their cigarettes and smiled knowingly while the others at the table turned white and dropped their jaws at the sight of so much legal tender.

  Duane and DeWayne were excited about Wizard Broadcasting getting into the Dallas stations. It seemed that they had just established a "working relationship" with some colleagues there and business was already booming. Thanks to Cleo Michaels and her money, Jimmy only needed a small amount of their tainted cash to finish wrapping up the deal. He tried to ignore the implications of the George’s alliances in Texas and hoped it would all go away when the cash flow was such that he could pay them off again, finally and completely.

  And that would be that. No more loans from the twins. No more dealings with them at all.

  Thankfully, they had just enough time to test Detroit's mystical electronic systems before air date in Atlanta. The people there could only stand by and scratch their heads as they watched all the flashing lights blink crazily and listened to the rumbling tones that tripped into spasms of usefulness the equipment that had been lined up in row after row of racks.

  Detroit was good for far more, too. Jimmy realized more than ever how much he needed his almost mathematical voice of ordered reason.

  "If we lease the equipment, we can amortize, but if we finance we can write off the interest and depreciate. We need to see which would be best," he would say over a quick hamburger at The Varsity or while they drove from Nashville to Atlanta. They might have been talking about the weather or the food or whatever when Detroit would suddenly offer an observation that would stop Jimmy mid-bite with his face screwed up or twist him around in the car seat.

  "Dee, how the hell do you know this stuff? Last time I checked, you were building bikes out of scrap iron and swinging on vines over the creek."

  "I don't know. I'm just curious and I suck up a lot of information, I guess. Hey, here's something else. I'm thinking we might want to someday start our own company, buy the equipment outright and lease it back to ourselves and to other stations, too. That way..."

  Detroit would go on and on while Jimmy pretended to understand what he was saying. Instead he was listening to whatever song was on the juke box or the car radio while managing to nod at the appropriate times.

  The Atlanta advertising agencies already knew Wizard Broadcasting well. They had done business with them in Nashville. That meant they were able to pre-sign massive commercial business, guaranteeing the sponsors and their agencies that the station’s ratings would be above a five share in the first ratings "book," an eight share by spring. Even better in the target demographics. That was optimistic by the agencies’ standards. Jimmy was sure it could be done. It was no gamble at all on his part.

  He and Detroit continued the search for people. That was the hard part. Fortunately, the reputation Wizard Broadcasting was winning in the industry was leading the best to seek out Jimmy and Dee. They found a former ABC Radio Network news director named Lem Loxley who quickly convinced Jimmy that he shared his vision for the future of AM radio. Once Loxley was safely hired and under contract, Jimmy mentioned his satellite idea to him.

  "Let's do a news wheel," Lem responded, his sonorous voice rattling loose items on Jimmy’s desk. Jimmy replied with only a vacant expression.

  "We’ll put continuous newscasts on a satellite channel. Then our client stations can hop aboard anytime they need to. Or drop out for local programming and news. We’ll leave windows for local commercials. Here’s the good part. We can sell spot announcements on the entire network, charge the stations for the part they carry from us, and even sell long-form programming overnights and on weekends. Here’s a thought, Mr. Gill. We could have another whole dedicated channel for nothing but long-form shows. Maybe another with nothing but coast-to-coast two-way talk. Yet another for sports. Sports talk as well as sports play-by-play. Hell, man, the possibilities are endless. Give me a satellite!"

  Jimmy loved the way the man’s mind had taken off! Since the AM was half-way where they all wanted it to be already, the transition was a breeze, the pieces falling together even better than they could have hoped. It sounded like a constant audio merry-go-round, informing, entertaining, amazing those who dialed in, but never leaving them bored. The object was to make the listener afraid he would miss something if he tuned away to a competitor.

  A few technical glitches plagued the FM, and Jimmy was afraid Detroit or the engineers he had hired in Atlanta were going to have a stroke before they got the gremlins out. But two days before air-date, Dee came to Jimmy’s office, a pleased grin on his face. He had been able to pull the whole thing off with no model or prototype. The entire system had been concocted inside his head, just like his pieced-together bicycles and the black, flashing gadget boxes he had once built for fun at WROG.

  The key was that it was all still a hell of a lot of fun for Detroit Simmons.

  The programming formula was an instant hit, too, giving the city its first taste of a radio station that played the best of the previous fifteen years of rock and roll without the bubblegum and kid stuff and the incessantly chattering deejays they had grown so weary of on “top forty” AM radio. It was positioned as anti-radio radio. The personalities, the "sweetening" that held the record sets together like glue, a never-a-dull-moment audio smorgasbord, the constant aural rainbow they had strung together was unlike anything the listeners had heard before. Unless, of course, they had been to Nashville and tuned in to The River.

  No one even suspected the disk jockey he or she was hearing on the radio was sitting in a studio on the west bank of the Cumberland River, two-hundred-fifty miles away, giving the time from a clock with only one hand. It was "twenty minutes past the hour," never more exact because of the time zone difference.

  The Dallas station debuted with a frenzy once they got a staff together and ironed out some kinks in the satellite uplink. Then Detroit wired up a couple of old army surplus facsimile machines and they used them to send commercial copy and program logs back and forth between Atlanta and Texas and Tennessee.

  "Someday, everybody will be using these things," he predicted when he finally got the facsimile machines working. Jimmy never doubted him for a second.

  It was time for stunting in Dallas. Doing something to create curiosity and street talk about the new station. They preceded the change-over to country music with a week of nothing but ocean sounds on the radio, seagulls chirping, waves crashing against the shore. Even with only the few FM radios that were available then, it caused quite a stir and lots of speculation, including in the newspapers, who usually only mentioned radio when it was bad news.

  Then they played a country song called "Fadin' In, Fadin' Out" by Tommy Overstreet. Not only once, but over and over, continuously, for one full day. The song was about a girl's fickle affection coming and going like an AM radio signal that was constantly getting lost in the static. Its lyrics fit KBDC’s needs perfe
ctly. The message was that AM was on the wane. FM was the future for country music.

  Then, when the format finally started for real, they gave away $102 every one-hundred two minutes to the one-hundred-second caller. The telephone company made them pull the plug on the contest by mid-afternoon the first day when the whole exchange locked up and emergency calls could not get through, just as Dee had predicted. Somehow, a lot of people in Dallas, Texas, had found themselves an FM radio to listen to.

  No one in Dallas noticed the announcers being so far away, either, but they sure enjoyed Ronnie Milsap bringing in a tape of his latest recording, coming directly from the studio to try it out on the air. Or Mel Tillis stopping by for an interview on the way to the lake and a fishing trip. When Loretta Lynn took calls directly on the air over the toll-free number, the announcer had to limit each caller to one minute to accommodate the thousands who tried to get in.

  Jimmy Gill was in awe, too. His morning show was now being piped to two markets and a potential seven figure audience each day. He had to start spinning the records an hour early to hit the Georgians who were just crawling from slumber and craved something to get them going.

  But even that was not enough. He could not resist the impulse to reach an even bigger audience. A couple of times, he used the name "Jimmy Gee" and pulled a weekend shift on the Dallas FM country station. He needed to feel the rush as all seven incoming WATS lines stayed lighted, brightly blinking to the beat of the country music he was sending up to space from Nashville and then back down to eager Texas ears.

  He even broke his own format and played more of Cleo Michael’s records than the playlist said that he was supposed to. Hell, he figured, the boss has some privileges!

  Then the radio-television critic for one of the Dallas papers, Christopher Julian, wrote a scathing front-page article about KBDC...Big D Country. He was frothing about Wizard Broadcasting riding into town like a Texas tornado and replacing the fifteen-year-old classical and jazz format with "caterwauling and cow-calling of the worst ilk". He fussed about the "sticky-sweet-voiced 'talking heads' who rambled and ranted about the hillbilly songs they play over and over until we are all sick of them," and even hinted that Cleo's partial ownership of the station was just a way to salvage a fading singing career by giving her a personal one-hundred-kilowatt juke box. Except for Jimmy’s few appearances on the weekends, everyone had carefully avoided favoring her songs, but Jimmy could tell she was stung by the charge when he showed her the column over supper that night.

  “Don’t play any of my songs on the station,” she said bluntly.

  “Then we can’t play any of Waylon Jennings’s or Willie Nelson’s songs, either.”

  “Sure we can! Just don’t play...”

  She had paused mid-thought. God, she was even beautiful when she was mad, too! Then she relaxed and smiled at him.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I sound like a cry baby, don’t I? Shoot, I’ve had my share of bad reviews. Why does this one make me so goofy?”

  “Because you know it’s not true. If you sing flat or don’t work hard at a show, that’s one thing. This jerk is just mad at us because we took ‘his’ station off the air. And I’ll bet you a dollar he never even listened to it. A damn critic’s got to criticize or he’s got no job. It’ll all shake out. You’ll see.”

  Jimmy’s opinion had always been that any publicity was great, so long as they spelled the call letters right. He had even hung the scathing article on the "Dallas" control room wall for grins. The disk jockeys seized the moment and gave Christopher Julian a hard time all the next day on the air. They even dedicated the hokiest few songs they played on the station especially to him.

  Jimmy was relieved. He had been right. It blew over.

  The Dallas newspapers were flown to Nashville each day so the on-air personalities could talk on the air about the important things that were going on in town. Act as if they were actually sitting in the middle of Dallas. Detroit found them a college student intern from Middle Tennessee State University whose primary daily job it was to retrieve the paper from the airport and place it in the disk jockey lounge.

  A couple of days after the appearance of the critic’s column, the intern tapped timidly on Jimmy’s door.

  "You better check out today’s paper first, Mr. Gill. Before the jocks see it," the kid said. He tossed the paper on Jimmy’s desk like a grenade and fled before it exploded.

  "Staffer Serious After Attack," the front-page headline screeched. Jimmy held his breath as he read. Someone had snatched Christopher Julian as he parked his car near his apartment the night before and proceeded to beat the holy hell out of him. Whoever did the job knew exactly what he was doing, inflicting just enough punishment to put Julian out of commission for a while but not enough damage to permanently cripple or kill him. The attacker or attackers had left no clues at all.

  There were a couple of things, though. The attacker did not bother taking his victim’s wallet. Robbery was not the motive. Whoever beat up Julian did, however, take the time to spray-paint the call letters "KBDC" in blaring black writing all over the reporter’s automobile. Julian only recalled a shadowy figure and some muttered threats that were hard to remember. There was plenty of blood and pain.

  Jimmy Gill felt dizzy until he realized he was still holding his breath. Then the anger took over.

  He tracked down DeWayne George on his car telephone, driving somewhere in southern Mississippi. When the twin answered, he sounded either half-asleep or half-stoned through the scratchy static.

  "I’ve been reading my morning paper, DeWayne. There’s an article in there about a newspaper guy in Dallas who had something of a rough night last night," Jimmy told him right off, skipping any pleasantries, fighting the irate quaver that threatened to take over his voice.

  "Yeah?"

  "You know who did it?"

  "Sumbitch deserved worse. Bet you he leaves us alone from now on."

  "Damn, DeWayne! He didn't hurt us. He probably did us a big favor. And he damn sure didn’t hurt you. You can't be doing stuff like this..."

  "Hey, we don't know who's listenin' in on this mobile phone, man," he interrupted. “We’ll talk later.”

  George obviously did not want to discuss it. Jimmy could hear him gunning the car’s engine, cursing under his breath, just before the crazy bastard slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  Jimmy had to fall back into damage control mode. He fought a feeling of dread as he began to return the stack of calls from the Dallas media that he had been pointedly ignoring all morning. He had assumed until he read the newspaper story that they were merely asking about KBDC, about its new format. Not that they would be inquiring about attempted murder against one of their own.

  It was a fact. Newspapers loved to jump on radio stations any chance they got. They were competitors for some of the same advertising dollars, after all. DeWayne George's mess presented a ribbon-wrapped opportunity for them to do just that.

  Jimmy Gill knew he could put it off no longer. He had to tell them something. He fought back a sudden attack of the dry-mouth, lifted the phone off the hook as if it was a hundred-pound weight, and prepared to lie his ass off.

  Twenty-five

  Cleo tried not to show her disappointment, but it was clearly there when Jimmy had to beg off supper for three nights running. She had promised him she would cook a huge, authentic country dinner, especially for him. A dinner better than any his mother had ever cooked. He did not tell her his mother ever cooked a dinner. He was sorry. He told her so. But the fact was that he simply did not have the time right then. In a few days though, for sure.

  That same week, Lulu Dooley had driven up from Birmingham to visit Detroit and his girlfriend, Rachel. Lulu wanted to treat them all to a meal at her favorite soul-food place in North Nashville. The only place in town that cooked fit to eat, she claimed. It was to be a special occasion besides, to celebrate her resignation as cleaning lady at WROG. After all, by then she was making more money
in a week from her tiny investment in Wizard Broadcasting, Incorporated, than WROG was paying her in a month’s salary. But Jimmy had to ask Dee to please make excuses for him. He had meetings late into each night. Paperwork piled to the ceiling seemed to be mating and birthing more paperwork. And he had more contracts to read when he got home.

  "Jimmy, you need to take a little while and unwind with us," Detroit told him when he stuck his head in Gill’s office doorway.

  "Maybe I can catch up with you later. I need to..."

  But he was interrupted by the bleating of the telephone. Detroit intended to further make his point, but when it became clear this would be a long call, he quietly backed out the office door, shaking his head, and went off to meet Lulu.

  Sammie Criswell had given Jimmy several messages from Grandmama but he seemed to always be tied up when she tried to reach him. And something always came up that had to be taken care of, so he never got the chance to call her back. He did want to hear from her, he kept telling himself. Wanted to tell her all the exciting things that were happening with the stations. Somehow, before he realized it, more than two months had passed since she had last managed to get in touch with him and since they had actually talked with each other.

  It was an awfully busy time, and he felt bad about it, but Cleo Michaels and Detroit Simmons and Lulu Dooley and Grandmama would simply have to understand if he could not always match up his schedule with whatever it was that they had in mind for him. He had conference calls with the sales staff in Atlanta to make sure he kept them on quota. He had to review the promotion and advertising plans for the fall rating book with the Nashville management team. This sweep was a crucial one. They had a shot at being number one in all the key demographics for the first time. A possible clean sweep. And the engineer’s union had held a vote and was already in the door in the Dallas stations before Jimmy or Detroit knew anything was happening. They wanted to talk contract immediately. Jimmy vowed loudly to chop off some managers’ heads for not seeing it all coming and giving him fair warning. He also gave Detroit public grief for not anticipating such a thing.