CHAPTER 1 – The Miracle at Riker 7 [excerpt]
Let’s talk about music. It seems to us that for most people, music is a disposable commodity, a thing to be ignored when it’s not needed any more…. like a toaster. They will put on the same album every time company comes over. It always drove me crazy when people stored their ’45s without the covers, in one of those slotted metal holders. Or when I’d go to someone’s house and see their albums, all without jackets, in a heap on the floor, scratching against each other. When nobody was looking, I’d painstakingly put them back and arrange them alphabetically and chronologically. I don’t know why I bother. All I know is that those people were never getting their hands on my records!
In the Crazy House, music was more like a weapon in our crusade. Against what, I don’t know. Just, everything in the world that we hated. We were like agitators who fought the status quo. Some people quoted the Bible or Shakespeare. We quoted lines from Russ Meyer films and Monkees episodes.
We worked all our lives to get out of the suburbs and into the slums. Living in a roach infested attic in Jersey City was infinitely preferable to following the shining path of snagging a $90,000 entry level job on Wall Street, a husband (whose only qualification is that he has to be a CEO), a baby and a BMW. Before we had the term “Karen” to describe these people, we just called them “WASP cunts from Connecticut,” which is a line from the movie Liquid Sky.
I would like to report that we have changed, but we really haven’t. At least not much. However, we have softened toward some artists we used to think we despised. Thing is, back in the eighties it was all Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, and the Eagles. My early years were spent watching reruns of Ready Steady Go and A Hard Day’s Night and lamenting the fact that I missed it all. This set the pattern for all the stories of my life. I was convinced we had missed the best party of the century, and I was pretty pissed about it.
We graduated into a recession, and we worked in crummy offices, usually in phone jobs. We either entangled unsuspecting housewives into the Weekly Reader children’s book scam, or we answered phones for the “Has Been” service. A good many of our customers were ex-superstars like Eddie Fisher, Meredith “Petticoat Junction” McRae, and yes … Peter Tork. Eventually Bob graduated to a job at Tower Records, where drug testing was illegal.
Later, I landed in an educational film distribution company, specializing in titles involving blind Native American lesbian rainforest activists raising money for their cause by knitting sweaters made from hand-dyed llama wool. The two owners had a way of driving people crazy even if they really were nice enough. However, looking back, it certainly was not the worst job I ever had. Not even close! However, I did wish to be able to move on to bigger and better things, which was impossible there. But you know what they say, familiarity breeds contempt.
The good thing was, we did not spend money on anything but music, travel, alcohol, and drugs. People who made a lot more money than we did would ask, “How can you afford all those trips to Europe?”
“You just gotta have screwed-up priorities.” And I may be a loser, but I still have a good credit score.
As we chronicle the Legend of Crazy House in this and future episodes, we are always inspired by the Monkees cinematic masterpiece, Head: “We hope you’ll like our story, although there isn’t one. That is to say there’s many, that way there is more fun.”
Allow me to backtrack a little bit to high school. It’s where I learned that it’s not what’s inside that that counts, it’s what’s outside. In other words, it is the opinion others hold of you that determines your worth. Take gym class. Not to sound like Janis Ian, but I was always picked last, and I know I’m not that clumsy. Then there was the time my social studies teacher thought it would be great fun if the class re-enacted Germany’s WWI War Crimes Trial at The Hague. I was absent that day and returned to find that I had been appointed Germany. I worked hard on my defense but could not come up with a satisfactory explanation for why Kaiser Wilhelm was not overcompensating for a withered arm. The verdict? GUILTY. Being a superpower was not all it’s cracked up to be.
(I later attended a Model UN in Washington, DC. I didn’t give a damn about parliamentary procedure; I just knew there would be no chaperones. That, and our school was assigned to represent Malta, a country that nobody would miss (unlike the U.S.A or Russia). A fellow nerd outcast generated a phony drivers’ license on his computer, which enabled us to have a truly “Lost Weekend.” It was the first time I ever got truly drunk.
My main distraction from high school hatefulness was to keep an extensive “want” list of songs I heard on the radio that I liked, and to try to fill it. Eventually, I discovered the rock and roll conventions at the Hotel Diplomat. There was a film room showing TV show appearances by sixties bands all day long. You could not see that stuff anywhere else then. Then I would save the program which listed all the music I saw and get the catalogs from the various dealers.
There was no way I was ever going to get everything on the list right away. But I was amassing some unusual things “for a girl” my age. My father said something at the time which is very revealing, “You won’t get a job, but you’ll leave no stone unturned to locate some obscure Beatles record!”
I tried to explain that there is a big difference. Getting someone to pay me is a lot different than me giving money to someone else. I have no problem with the latter. However, he decreed that the situation would continue no longer, and my career as a candy-striper began … at gunpoint. Needless to say this did nothing to assuage my sense of misanthropy, especially since my job was to wait on doctors in the hospital coffee-shop and get chewed out for forgetting to toast the rye bread. My tips weren’t exactly large, and even that money went to the hospital piggy bank- after all, we were volunteers.
Forty years later, interviewing for jobs is no easier. In fact, it is worse! I do not get better at it with practice. It’s all so painful that I cannot get the words out in a way that would convince anyone of the veracity of what I am saying… because I sure as hell don’t believe a word of it. Like “Yes, I am very proud that I was selected to be Miss Baton Twirler of 1968 and I was given the blue ribbon for a painting I did in high school, and I actually managed to figure out how to collate the company invoices into an excel spreadsheet!” WOWEEE!
But I digress. It’s all in another work in progress I call Who Cut My Cheese
Two weeks later you’re a freakin’ alcoholic
Things improved in college. I went to Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. I was drawn to Drew’s abysmal little ten-watt radio station, along with a few other people who, like me, cared about nothing but finding obscure records. On a good night we were lucky to attract twenty listeners. But it was better to be a little dictator than no dictator at all. What surprised me the most was just how many people simply wanted to do carbon copies of the “classic rock” format. Surely if people had wanted to hear that, they wouldn’t have had to suffer the ceaseless roommate dedications for hours between songs. (Of course, this was in the years B.N. – Before Nirvana.)
I knew I had to do an all-sixties show, just so I’d be exempt from playing all those Jackson Browne albums the record labels wanted us to play. There was one cool guy at the station who had the premier collection of punk music. I did not know a lot about punk at the time. There were few places to hear it, and it was not easy to buy the records. I was very focused on the 1960s at the time. All I knew about punk was from a mannequin at Macy’s department store I’d seen once. But then I discovered the Sex Pistols, and knew I’d found the saviors of rock and roll. (It would be safe to say I was one of those “disco sucks” people then. I thought Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night” was a good thing even if I have since revised my opinion of a lot of “disco” music, if not Toto.)
My only problem with punk rockers was that they despised the Beatles, while I thought they were similar in the great scheme of things. Let’s face it: Billy Joel, Toto, Journey, and Fleetwood Mac were the real enemies!
However, as much as being on the radio in college gave me some sense of doing what I enjoyed and turning people on to MY music, my internship at WHN killed that ambition. I often wonder if other people have as many truly terrible job/internship experiences as I did. I mean, everyone has some. But mine were all bad. I mentioned the candy striper job where I got screamed at regularly, and WHN was no different. I really hated country music more than “disco” at the time, so you might be wondering how this whole thing came about?
It happened because of this woman named Jamie who did some PR work for my dad. From what he told me, he made the terrible mistake of mentioning to her in passing that I was interested in radio.
“OH!! I can get your daughter an internship at WHN. I used to work for the music director there, Pam Green.” He was reluctant to accept the offer, because “NOW I WILL OWE HER, AND I WILL HAVE TO DO HER A FAVOR. AND I DON’T EVEN LIKE HER.”
But, if I had known what kind of a snake pit I was being sent into, I would have very unequivocally said, “DON’T DO ME ANY FAVORS!!” Jamie even mentioned to my father that Pam Green was a little temperamental. That was an understatement although I am sure that Jamie was never on the receiving end of the kind of shrieking banshee abuse Pam regularly doled out to interns. She never shouted at her colleagues that way.
Before I realized all this though, I was moderately excited about it. I mean, I would have been over the moon if it had been WPLJ or WNEW which were both reasonably cool at the time. WHN was all-country music, even if it slanted in more of a pop direction. They played Elvis and Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” and other things that I did not mind.
The one reassuring thing I found was that none of the other interns liked country music either. I do not think most of the staff, except for Pam, liked it even if they all claimed they did. Although I never thought it was a great movie (not punk enough!), I recently re-watched the beginning of the film FM, and realized how perfectly they captured the whole late seventies radio station vibe. It reminded me a lot of the kind of people I met working at WHN. In other words, they could have been working at any MOR/progressive FM station at the time, and they certainly did not look like country fans.
Anyway, at WHN, I found myself in the “music research” department doing total busy-work, calling up record stores every Friday and asking them for their “top sellers.” This was before Soundscan so people could just make shit up. But whatever. Sitting in the back room with other interns was not so bad and there was some camaraderie there. But any kind of interaction with Pam was, I am sure, reminiscent of White House staffers walking on eggshells around Donald Trump. The slightest thing would set her off and she would be bellowing insults at you that could be heard a block away.
If this internship had not been set up by someone with a connection to my father, I would have probably said something back to her. But as it was, I had to sit there and seethe and take it; and show up every single day. But I never once told anyone how much I hated it and how awful it was.
The other paid employee that we all sat next to was named Pearl (forgot her last name). She oversaw music research which consisted of playing snippets of songs and asking the dumb housewife on the other end, “would you rate this as 1. Don’t like it; 2. Indifferent; 3. My favorite!!”
I assume she succeeded – or at least remained in the music biz, which is quite an accomplishment these days — on the strength of being Pam’s favorite. I ran into her at a show years later in the 1990s. “Did you used to work at WHN?? I remember you from when I was an intern for Pam Green!!” All I received in return was a dismissive blank stare. What else is new! Story of my life. If I ask a train conductor, “when is the next train?” they ignore me and hope I will go away. It must be great to be one of those people that everybody likes and wants to talk to all day long.
The only cool thing about WHN was meeting and getting to talk to the DJs who were all hired away from CBS FM, like Mike Fitzgerald, Brian Kelly, and Del De Montreaux. Those guys were all surprisingly nice. There was definitely no prima donna Hitler bullshit there. “Why on earth would you leave CBS?” [for this hell hole I wanted to say]. Answer: The money on AM was a lot better. If I remember right, a DJ on an FM station, even one as popular as WCBS FM, only made something like thirty-five thousand dollars per year, whereas on AM it was more like fifty-five thousand. That was a decent amount of money in 1980.
One time they gave away John Denver tickets and because I wanted to get some sort of perk from this awful experience and knowing that my friend Edith was a big fan, I accepted the tickets. I was impressed that he could command such a big stadium like the Brendan Byrne Arena.
Another thing I did was transcribe interviews. I don’t think I was berated for that task. But maybe I blocked it out…HA! Basically, anything that involved contact with Pam was just horrible. Like sorting 45s in her office.
One thing that was obvious, and everyone commented on, was that Pam was frequently drunk in the office. (I am sure this explained a lot of her erratic behavior). But one time she invited her favorite intern, Lenny, out for drinks. He went because he knew he wanted her as a glowing reference. But when he came back to the office afterward, he told us that Pam hit on him. He was like, “Pam, I am very flattered, but I don’t think it would be appropriate.” Or something like that. I mean, her feelings for him were certainly not reciprocated.
It is funny how the only instance of sexual harassment I have ever witnessed on the job was a woman harassing a man for sex. BELIEVE IT OR NOT!!
The weird thing about all this is she was from the “deep south” … like Alabama or someplace like that. This is significant, because this damn Yankee thinks that she is the rudest person on planet earth. I have met Mafiosos who were more pleasant to deal with than her!
After seeing that her favorite, Lenny, got to do actual production work, I asked if I could learn to do the same thing (like tape editing promos and that sort of thing). In response to my query, I was condescendingly handed an engineering manual that was like a giant calculus formula that began on page one and ended on page four hundred. It was all about various radio frequencies, oscillation rates, and mathematical formulas. “When you understand this, we will let you know!” I am sorry, but I call BS because the male interns were not required to know all that.
However, the nadir was when I was in the studio while the DJs were working (at that time it was Brian Kelly) and she was trying to explain this colored dot system on the “carts” which I could not follow and made no sense. I had no prior understanding of how this convoluted system worked, what it was used for, what the colors meant, or anything.
“You see a red dot, these are the ‘hots’ then you take it off and replace it with a blue dot….” What criterion necessitates the change I did not know. She ranted out this brief and confusing directive and left. Stupidly, I just started replacing red dots with blue…. or whatever it was. It was about as incomprehensible as handing me a chart from Arthur Miller’s dancing school and saying, “Here you go. Just start tap dancing and make sure you do it perfectly or I will scream at you!! And I am not even going to show you what I mean. I am just going to walk away and let you struggle and wring your hands. And if you so much as dare ask a question, I am GOING TO SCREAM WHAT A LOSER AND AN IDIOT YOU ARE IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE WORLD.”
So yes, I was truly stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do nothing and I am a moron. Do something and fuck it up and I am a moron. Do a “Hail Mary” and hope by some miracle it is not wrong. Needless to say, I fucked it up.
She came back and exploded when it was not done correctly, ‘YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST PERSON WHO EVER WORKED HERE. IF ONE WRONG THING GOES OUT OVER THE AIR….” and it went on and on and on.
After she left, Brian Kelly said, “Wow, I cannot believe anyone has the right to talk to another human being that way! That was just awful!”
The whole experience pretty much ended with a cruise around Manhattan during which I sat there and did not talk to anyone (as per uzhe).
And in a very misguided attempt to adhere to some “golden rule” about leaving any job on good terms – even the worst — without a massive tirade, I tried to be big about it and “thank her and tell her how much I enjoyed working there.” Like someone who was about to end their misery with a gun to the head, I am sure I projected a reasonable facsimile of “happiness.” I must have confused her because she said, “You’re kidding right?”
I learned my lesson. One of my biggest regrets is that I did not tell that bitch exactly what I thought. The only thing that stopped me then was that it would get back to my dad. And because I was not honest about it, a year later he insisted I call WHN and ask if I could come back as an intern again. I would rather have spent ten years in a tiger box in Vietnam, but I could not say that. I kept hoping that suggestion would simply go away, but he would not let it go and I was forced – practically at gunpoint – to make the humiliating call. And of course, the answer was a resounding, “No.”
“I don’t know why they don’t want you back? It’s probably because you are not a go-getter, and you are a hangdog loser.” Yadda, yadda.
I thought I knew, thanks to Pam Green, that I would never work in this town again. I continued with my 1960s radio show for the remainder of my sophomore year. The problem with commercial radio was that it was the worst possible place to be for someone who actually liked music.
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