HOW TO QUIT A JOB

I had never quit a job before so I was searching what recesses I could find at the ripe old age of 25 to try and come up with something more creative than the usual letter of resignation with the standard 2 weeks notice. It wasn't the worst job in the world for someone with virtually no experience in my then newly chosen field. I was actually doing an afternoon radio show. It was music that I abhorred at the time on a station that was so small that it sold other dayparts to specific special interests that provided about a dozen listeners to each show and allowed me to “play” for a couple of hours in the afternoon for those few stragglers who hadn't made the effort to cross the room and change the station. I was in the process of earning my “stripes” and thrilled to be there, learning my trade. The day would begin with “Cousin Stan Ozimek and the New England Polka Express.” “Woo, woo, what fun,” Cousin Stan would blurt out after a particularly rousing rendition of “Who Stole the Kishka,” as the entire Polish population of New Britain, Ct. basked in the knowledge that the morning airwaves of WRYM belonged to them and, of course, the few stragglers from the day before who hadn't made the effort to change radio stations prior to going to bed and didn't mind a healthy dose of the “Beer Barrel Polka” first thing in the morning. Cousin Stan's show ran until 10am when the station made a sharp turn in programming to make way for “La Voz Latino Americana” with Walter & Omar, two guys from Argentina who played music for Argentine audiences during the 2 hours they had purchased from the crack sales team, which consisted of one guy who sat at a desk in the back of the room outside the studio. I knew the audience for Walter & Omar was as specific as it was when, one day, they failed to show up to do their show and the general manager, who knew I had lived in Puerto Rico, summoned me into his office and demanded that I “Go on the air and do their show.” I was extraordinarily unqualified to do this but he insisted so, I went into the studio, turned on the microphone and began to speak the street Spanglish that I was accustomed to using and I played music that I was familiar with and enjoyed. The phones began to light up more than I had ever seen at a station that generally had more telephone lines than listeners. “Wow,” I thought, “they actually like what I'm doing. I'm pulling this off.” Well, I couldn't have been more mistaken in my assessment of the seeming barrage of calls. It seems the consensus of all of these callers was, “Where the hell are Walter & Omar? Get that Puerto Rican off the air.” Needless to say, management strongly encouraged Walter & Omar to NEVER miss their show again. They didn't. When Walter & Omar went off the air at noon, the booth was taken over by a charlatan named Pastor Wendell Mullen who purported to speak on behalf of the Farmington Avenue Baptist Church in West Hartford. He would, as many of today's TV evangelists do, beg for money for the church and use it for himself. I had seen his car and the mansion in which he lived. I had also seen the church. It was painfully obvious where the money went but, more about him later. I came on at about 12:15, right after the 1/4 hour begfest and, for the next four hours, played music that was placed within the confines of what was then referred to as a “nice & easy” format. We featured the safest music of the day......Mantovani, the Clebenoff Strings, an occasional Rosemary Clooney number, which was never to be played back to back with another female vocalist.......The likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and the Carpenters were too close to rock & roll and would never find a spot on WRYM's turntables and if Mantovani showed his cojones by doing a version of a Beatles song, it would be scratched out with a can opener so it would be impossible to even play it by mistake. Pretty miserable for a young rock & roll disc jockey wannabe who would listen to Ted Brown on WNEW in New York and repeat his show the next day while trying to find a flicker of a creative flame from deep within. After my rousing 4 hours of stealing and butchering other peoples material, Cousin Stan returned to steer the “New England Polka Express” to the end of another broadcast day. “Woo, woo......what fun.” My initial attitude when I began working there was that if the boss told me to carry tires out to his car (which he had) I would simply ask, “Back seat or trunk?” That's how badly I wanted this career. That all changed after a pretty short time when I found my conscience, which was pretty easy to do, given one particular policy that was, basically, just part of the thinking of the times. Radio stations allowed smoking in the studios with no thought to the damage it could do to very expensive broadcasting equipment, not to mention to the people who provided the voices behind the mic. It was socially acceptable and everyone did it. I smoked cigarettes but, I would always bring a pipe to work that was ½ filled with a very nice cherry blend tobacco and ½ filled with a very nice grade of marijuana. One way or another I was bound and determined to enjoy a Clebenoff Strings arrangement of some bad song from the 30's or 40's. Unfortunately, the pot was never quite that good. I did, however, began to see the hypocrisy of station management in general and the noon panhandler in particular. Was this the reality of everything I had dreamed about? Was this “show biz?” I had had about all I could take from the good pastor and, on one particular occasion when the weed gave me a but of spunk, I took his theme music off the turntable and, as he was finishing his plea for funds (daddy needs a new Cadillac) I replaced it with “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. He was livid but, for some reason, I managed to keep my job. My world began to look up one afternoon when I got a call from a beautiful music station in Hartford that was looking for someone to play Mantovani and the Clebenoff Strings from 6pm to midnight on a much bigger station with a much bigger audience in a much bigger market. I was about to make the massive leap from New Britain radio, which consisted of one station, to Hartford radio with, maybe, 8 or 10 stations. “Woo woo....what fun.” I accepted their offer right then and there. Before I had hung up the phone, I had a new job for more money at a much bigger and better station and it took no time to make my decision to quit that dead end job and head for the open road of my up and coming broadcasting career. The offer of a better job in itself was enough to get a few creative juices moving towards the flow I needed to make it in my chosen field. My next move became apparent immediately. As a Percy Faith was wrapping up some innocuous tune that was as insipid in the background as it was as a foreground piece, I had Jethro Tull's “Aqualung” album cued up on turntable #2 and ready to go right from track number #1, “Aqualung,” which was about an old lecher who was “Sitting on the park bench --eyeing little girls with bad intent. Snot is running down his nose --greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.” That was followed by “Cross Eyed Mary,” the tale of a school girl prostitute. Just the kind of stuff that would cause management to blow a blood vessel or two. I started the record, turned on the microphone, walked out of the studio and got in my car to drive home, listening to the station and being entertained by the sounds of the GM scratching the record and cursing on the air. “Now THAT,” I concluded, "was some very good radio. Woo, woo.....what fun!”

FIRST DON'T PAY

I like to reminisce. I'm at an age and a stage of life where “looking back” can literally provide hours of entertainment but, I'm careful not to spend TOO much time in the past because.......well, you know what they say about your life flashing before your eyes. I don't want to give the guy in the dark cloak with the sickle too much ammunition. Over the course of my career, which spanned nearly a half century, I was involved in a number of “firsts,” none of which paid as well as they did for numbers two and beyond. Of course, doing something that had yet to be done was extremely satisfying and perfecting it so that someone else could come along and parlay it while I looked for another project to give away, always warmed the cockles but, honestly, who the hell needs warm cockles. I actually prefer my cockles a little on the chilled side. Maybe that's just me. In the mid 1970's, I was working as a disc jockey on what was then, the #2 rock station in Philadelphia, WYSP. Up until that time, morning shows, as well as pretty much all dayparts on FM stations, were whispered. It just sounded cool and laid back and made the DJ sound more like a musicologist. AM radio was king in those days. It had the credibility and massive listenership of it's longevity and FM was new and untested. A bastard stepchild where those who couldn't get jobs on the AM big boys went. That was where all the decent programming and the money were. There was quite a bit of experimentation on FM radio back then. We were all vying for the same ratings as the AM giants but we knew that our audiences would be appreciably smaller and, quite probably, stoned. I had gotten the job at WYSP because the powers that be at the FM station where I was at the time had told me, in no uncertain terms, that the insulting salary they were paying me was all I would ever see there. I made a couple of phone calls to program directors in town. One to the biggest AM player and the other to a struggling FM station that played the music I liked. I never heard from the AM station but the program director of the little FM, Sonny Fox, called back and told me to come by. After our initial interview, which consisted of smoking a joint while going for a ride in his Corvette, I was the new morning man at WYSP.....at a salary that wasn't much better than where I had been but there was room for growth and that, in itself, was a refreshing change, not to mention, the music was a hell of a lot better Sonny understood the nature of our uphill battle and was not averse to trying new things. That became evident the morning he called me into his office after my show and asked a simple question that changed my career and, subsequently, my life, “Have you ever heard of Bob & Ray?” My mouth hit the floor. I loved Bob & Ray and everything they were about. I had listened to the AM radio comedy duo for years on everything from Boston Radio to New York radio to NBC's Monitor and, eventually, Piels Beer commercials. They were heroes and I would have killed to do what they were doing. Fortunately, no-one had to die that day......all I had to do was answer, “Let's do it!” We created a form of theater of the mind that just wasn't being done on the FM airwaves We wrote comedy bits, brought in a cast of characters and became the first comedy morning team in rock & roll radio taking our little wannabe FM station to the top of Philadelphia's ratings. We have since been referred to as the “precursor to the morning zoo format,” which, of course, made a lot of cash for a lot of people. The Fox & Leonard Morning Show only lasted about 4 years and we had a lot of fun......but, nobody ever showed US the money. After my stint at WYSP, I moved on to WLS in Chicago where I was, once again, relegated to the position of disc jockey, reading image liners and “playin' the hits.” After 2 years or so, I moved on to WEFM to do a morning show playing beautiful music because it paid the bills. One day I received a call from a young programmer in Canada, but originally from Philly, named Robert G. Hall. Robert was familiar with Fox & Leonard and was calling to tell me about an experimental project that he was involved with. It was a satellite delivered radio network that would provide 24 hour formats for small and medium markets from coast to coast and beyond. It was a very ambitious venture. There had been a few individual shows sent to stations this way but never programming that ran 24 – 7. I was being offered the morning show on the adult contemporary format and my timing and placement couldn't have been better. The network had to broadcast from the south suburbs of Chicago because WGN had its satellite uplink there and, as the technology of the times dictated, it was the only place in the country we could broadcast from. I just happened to live there and hated my job, so my answer, even with the mediocre pay they could afford, was an unqualified, “When do we start?” We physically built the studios ourselves in a strip mall in Mokena, Ill., a suburb about 30 miles south west of Chicago and about 4 miles from my house. We dubbed all the music from vinyl onto carts and, on Oct. 1, 1981, I became the first person to turn on a microphone on the Satellite Music Network. We started with two formats and two affiliates and never knew, from week to week, whether the checks would bounce. We struggled through all kinds of issues and would often have to brainstorm to come up with solutions to problems that had never before existed. Before long, we became a success, added formats and were, eventually, were sold to ABC. We were now the ABC Radio Network and growing in leaps and bounds, trying to fend off the the other companies that were trying to knock this upstart off it's throne. That gave way to the Clear Channels and Cumuluses that would come along and monopolize the radio business so that people like Howard Stern and Ryan Seacrest could make obscene amounts of money off the ideas that we had implemented, fine tuned and ran on a shoestring. You're welcome! I stayed with the network for 25 years but never saw the kind of cash that became the norm for a select few. During my time at ABC, I was approached with another new idea that I found to be exciting and a good prospect to finally “cash in.” The network had worked out a deal with the Peoples Republic of China wherein we would provide a daily, one hour show for Radio Shanghai called “The American Music Hour.” I figured that, if this took off, the sky was, conceivably, the limit. The week was divided into formats and specialty shows, providing one hour of different programming each day. Mine was the very first show recorded and, soon, I was given 2 slots per week. One was a “pop music” format which highlighted the biggest pop hits of the week and, for the other, I designed a show that would spend an hour each week spotlighting one particular artist. The shows were a huge success. The loved us in China and, before we knew it, we had expanded to 3 more markets in different provinces giving us a potential audience of about a billion listeners a day. That is probably a slight exaggeration, but not by much. I did the show for 7 years. “Could this finally be my goldmine?” I thought, assuming that such a massive audience had to be worth at least a small stipend. That was about the time that the fine folks who ran the The Peoples Republic decided they didn't feel like paying ABC for the programming any longer and the plug was pulled. Another one bites the dust. After I left ABC I was involved in a couple of more “firsts.” One was an IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) company that was so small and run by criminals and really doesn't deserve much of a mention, so, I will only say that I was once again the first. As it turns out, in that particular venture, I was also the last. Unless you count the owner who was eventually found in the Turks and Caicos Islands and extradited back to the jail where he is now spending his days.....and nights. Not only was there no money in that little sidetrack but for the last 8 weeks, I worked for free. That didn't seem to be the direction I should have been going at that point in my career. It wasn't long before I retired and was able to do so with the knowledge that I was instrumental in a lot of changes in the industry by virtue of being the first in any number of projects that were revolutionary in concept and paid nothing, paving the way for many talented folks to make “the big bucks.” Too bad you can't eat satisfaction. I have now embarked on a new first, at least for me.....blogging. I like to write and I hope people enjoy what they read as I still hold on to the hope that I can find a dollar or two in the written word. So, how's that working for me? Well, as I sit here in the process of filing for bankruptcy, one question comes immediately to mind - “Anybody wanna buy a blog?”