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 lashed 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.
Martinez’s friend had gotten another job the day before his scheduled interview with Gordon, but rather than cancel the appointment, he sent Marty in his place. Gordon wasn’t sure that his qualifications fit what WNEW-AM was looking for, but FM had broken away from the AM news operation by hiring Ed Brown and Robin Sagon, and they also needed some help. Gordon sent him down the hall to talk to a man he simply referred to as Scott. Although Martinez was a big fan of the station, it didn’t occur to him that the “Scott” in question was Scott Muni. Upon entering his office, it wasn’t until the older man spoke that Marty realized whose presence he was in.
But in typical Scottso fashion, Muni’s rambling stories dominated the discourse until he suddenly held up a hand to silence Martinez as the younger man attempted to get a word in edgewise. Muni slowly reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a pistol. Marty recoiled in fear but quickly regained his balance when he realized that Muni now pointed a water gun toward the open door, arms extended in a classic firing position.
“You bug-eyed motherfuc—” A corpulent older black man sprung from behind the doorway and fired off a couple of rounds, but Muni was prepared and doused the intruder with a steady spray from his larger and more powerful weapon. The man beat a hasty retreat down the hallway, yelling racial epithets behind him with Scott in close pursuit, drenching his foe down to his socks.
When Muni returned several minutes later, he was panting from the exertion but wearing a smile. “Robinson, you tired old sack of shit,” he yelled out the doorway. “You’re too fat and old to sneak up on anybody. Go back and cry to your mother Tammy.” He then proceeded to extract several squirt guns of all shapes and sizes from the drawers of his notoriously cluttered desk.
“You gotta be prepared around here, Fats,” he said to a still bewildered Martinez. “You seem okay, kid. Go down and talk to Gordon.”
When Jim Gordon asked him how it had gone with Muni, he replied, “Good. I guess I got the job.” With that, he filled out some forms and started his long, strange trip working for WNEW, a journey that would last twenty years and see him go from newsman to jock to producer to morning sidekick and back to producer. After his bizarre initiation, he was later to find that Robinson was Chuck Robinson, an elderly black man who had worked in the WNEW mailroom for decades and an ally of Tom Tracy’s against Muni in their many water gun battles. Marty could see that this was going to be no ordinary job.
Blessed with a roguish personality that everyone at the station loved, he was quickly made part of the Butch and the Brick Show with Scelsa and Morrera. Marty liked to say that he was “invited to every party to make sure there was a party, if you catch my meaning.” I always assumed that his bark was worse than his bite when it came to his stories of late-night drug-induced revelry at the station, but I was later to discover that the wild accounts were understated.
But on this winter’s night toward the end of 1980, Marty had broken through from being an outlaw on the outskirts of the station, who technically serviced the newsroom, to a full-fledged staff member. Muni had personally invited him to the party that night. It was WNEW’s annual Christmas concert, and the party afterward would be held backstage at the prestigious Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. When Muni had seen Martinez in the hallway the previous week, he’d casually asked, “Going to the party Monday, Fats?”
Upon being told that he was on duty that night, Muni replied, “I think we can arrange for you to take off a few hours. Party doesn’t start ’til eleven or so. Stop by then.”
He handed him an invitation, and it was the first time that the young desk assistant felt that he actually belonged. The Christmas shows were part of a rich tradition at the station, starting in 1971, when for sixteen thousand dollars the band Genesis was imported to do their first U.S. concert. There was a grand party at Tavern on the Green afterward, and every year since, WNEW hosted a major concert at venues like Madison Square Garden, the Beacon Theater, the Westchester Premiere Theater, the Academy of Music, or Philharmonic Hall. Over the years, we had artists like Melissa Etheridge, Renaissance, Hall and Oates, the Kinks, Yes, and Meatloaf perform for no charge, save expenses. Net proceeds went to United Cerebral Palsy, and Scott would dress up like Santa Claus and bring out a couple of the UCP kids to sing carols between acts. Before the concert, the staff would gather around a large tree in the lobby and accept gifts for needy children. It was a warm and fulfilling experience, and it gave the staff a chance to get together for a classy affair at an elegant location.
Muni had gotten on board with charity early on as a result of a singular experience that had caused an epiphany in his life. He had been asked to accompany Geraldo Rivera to Willowbrook, the infamous Staten Island mental facility whose exposure catapulted Rivera into national prominence. Muni realized that the cerebral palsy children, who had been carelessly thrown in with the mental patients, responded to his voice and some of the older ones knew him from the WABC days. Rather than regard them as wards of the state who couldn’t be helped and merely had to be cared for, he believed that with research these unfortunates could have more meaningful lives. So when WNEW initiated the Christmas concerts, or Bikeathons, or a station calendar, he found a willing partner in United Cerebral Palsy. He discovered that most of the executives were retired or semiretired business or professional people who drew no salary, so the money raised all went to where it could help the most, rather than to administrative fees. Unlike most radio stations that used such events to enrich their coffers, WNEW made sure that the net proceeds from all of its nonradio activities went entirely to charity, including the revenues from the softball games that reached out to communities each summer.
Martinez was working at the station until a concert with the Marshall Tucker Band ended, and then planned to go to the party. He probably could have skipped work entirely, but he didn’t want to desert Vin Scelsa, who often needed hand-holding to help him make it through the night. Depending on his mood, Scelsa would come in, sequester himself in the studio, do a four-hour show, and resent any intrusions, or he might arrive full of piss and vinegar and invite Marty into his inner sanctum to rail against the station’s oppressive management. Martinez’s upbeat personality would often soothe the undirected anger residing in Scelsa and convince him that he still had one of the best jobs in the world. But Vin was becoming increasingly bitter about the music business, which he saw as a bunch of corporate exploiters bent on making a profit over the broken backs of poor artists. He hated most record promoters, rejected their company, and despised the ornate parties that they threw. He easily could have taken the night off and attended the show, but preferred being on the air to celebrating with a bunch of hacks whom he felt were destroying the music that he loved. This attitude made it increasingly hard to work at a station that was feeling the economic pressure from Metromedia. But other than noncommercial radio, there was nowhere else where Scelsa could still play whatever he wanted with only occasional brushes with management.
Marty was sorry that his friend couldn’t share his excitement about going to the party. Warner Bros., which was footing the bill for the festivities, boasted many of his favorite artists, so he didn’t feel he was betraying any of Vin’s principles by attending. As he spiffed up at his desk, he heard the distinctive warning bells of the police scanner proclaim a bulletin coming.
He pulled the story off the wire and shrugged it off, making only a mental note that the incident reported was near Avery Fisher Hall and that he might have to tell his cabby to use Broadway instead of Central Park West. A man had been shot on West Seventy-second Street, near the park. Shootings were not an uncommon occurrence on the night shift in the city, so Martinez merely left the page for the AM news anchor. There were no details, other than that several shots were fired.
Monday Night Football
was softly providing the background din, but since no one on the premises was a sports fan, they paid it little mind. But as he was on his way to the studio to say good night to Vin, Marty heard Howard Cosell say something about John Lennon being shot. The AP and police-scanner alarms went off, almost simultaneously, confirming that the former Beatle had been the victim. Scelsa came bursting into the newsroom—a listener had called after hearing Cosell make the announcement at the football game. He had just put Springsteen’s “Jungleland” on the turntable, and he agonized over what to do. “I can’t tell people that John Lennon is dead. I just can’t do it.” Both men went back to the studio, unsure of how to treat the situation on the air.
As “Jungleland” reached a quiet passage, Marty finally said, “Either you tell them or I’ll have to tell them, Vin.”
Scelsa faded down the record and for the first time in his career was at a loss for words. As Martinez stood behind him, he reported that Lennon had been shot and that details were sketchy. Both of them found tears welling up in their eyes as their throats grew thick with emotion. Martinez went back to the wire room where the grisly story was being confirmed—not only had Lennon been shot but he had died on the way to the hospital. He brought the news to Scelsa, and the disoriented disc jockey called Muni at Avery Fisher Hall for counsel.
The show had just ended and Scott and I were just walking back into the room for the postconcert celebration when Vin’s call came through. The news went through the small gathering like a windblown shroud of fog, spreading from one group to the next. I’ve never seen a room empty so quickly. Robin Sagon and Andy Fischer, our FM news people at that time, were dispatched to gather details and confirm the story through other sources. Everyone quietly filed out, at a loss for what to do, say, or where to go. There would be no party and the tables laden with gourmet delights went untouched. The food would later be distributed to the homeless.
I knew that my place was back at the station, and without prompting, every jock reacted the same way. When I got back to the studio, Scelsa was playing only Lennon’s work, pausing to recapitulate the tragedy tersely before breaking down in tears again. Dennis Elsas sought out a copy of his famous interview with the former Beatle. He also recalled the time that he had filled in for Muni on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1975. Elton John had been a guest on the program, during which he told him of a bet he had made with Lennon. Elton had recorded “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” earlier that year with Lennon on backup vocals. Lennon considered the song a throwaway B-side, but Elton insisted it was a number one record. The ex-Beatle swore that if it ever reached that vaunted chart position, he’d sing it onstage the next time Elton played the city. The previous night at Madison Square Garden, Lennon had kept his promise. That would be the last live performance that John would ever give before an audience in New York.
Muni was completely shaken. Although he’d met all the Beatles when the band first came to America in 1964 while Muni was still at WABC, he felt a special kinship with John. Several months after the Elsas interview, Lennon released
Rock ’n’ Roll,
and came to the station to debut the album on Scott’s show. But their bond went deeper than that. When Muni was anxiously awaiting the birth of his daughter Tiffany, he found another expectant father in the same hospital. Yoko Ono was about to give birth to Sean and it was not an easy delivery. Lennon and he sat together for hours, drinking coffee and sharing stories of fatherhood. John had become a full-fledged New Yorker by then, often seen strolling through the city’s streets during his battle with immigration authorities. He loved Manhattan and wanted to live in the city, fighting the government as it sued for his deportation due to prior marijuana convictions in England. Muni chose to honor his departed friend by starting his show with the Beatles every day thereafter.
The night of December 8, 1980, was the single most important in the history of the station. Still free form, we were able to react instantly to every nuance of the story. We had long talk segments with each jock and their personal reminiscences of Lennon. We took phone calls from grieving listeners, and played nothing but John’s music for the next twenty-four hours. WNEW-FM became the heart of the story, a sanctuary for a generation stunned beyond belief that such a beloved musician, that
any
musician, could be assassinated. Raw emotions overflowed as we reflected on the unfairness of it all, how this single violent act could strike down a titan. As the man himself had sung in “God,” “The dream is over . . . What can I say?”
It marked the end of so much. Beatle babies who prayed for a reunion realized that it could never happen now. Those of us he had touched were outraged at the waste of it all, that a man with so much yet to give was cut down, just as he was starting to get his life on track again. The bitterness of the split with McCartney was dissipating, and his music was taking on a more optimistic tone. He’d reconciled with Yoko and was revisiting the joys of parenthood with a boy he absolutely adored. Just as his life and art were about to enter a happier phase, his mortal being was cashiered in a pool of blood outside his Dakota apartment.