You see, it's been 177 days since I quit my job at KTSH (not that I've been obsessively counting). And even though I've e-mailed quite a few résumés down to that spinning blue marble called Earth, I'm still not back on the air. These past few weeks I caught myself turning a phrase over in my mind, one I never expected: "I'm retired."
Anyway, last night seemed like a good time to finally buckle down and write my book, Riding the Waves: The Story of One Disc Jockey's Four-Decade Journey through the Solar System and FM Radio, by Jupiter Jack. (Introduction by Don Henley). I dusted off my old Dictaphone and sat down to compose.
I wasn't sure where to begin. My birth? The first time I heard Big Joe Turner? Starting points, sure, but they were things that happened to me. As I sat there in my captain's chair, Dictaphone microphone clutched in my hand, a winter wind was blowing across the surface of the Lost Moon, and I suddenly vividly remembered a very specific night, long ago, from my early days in radio. Maybe there's something in the December air that makes a person want to look back on the choices that he's made -- the moments where he adjusted the course of his own destiny, for better or worse -- George Bailey style.
I decided at last to tell the story of December 31st, 1976, maybe the biggest turning point in my whole career. Among other things, it was my first time broadcasting at night. I'd been on the air before, but I'd been doing my show in the morning, 8:00 to 10:00am, not exactly the hippest time slot. (This was back in the days before the morning show craze.) I played rock and roll for the morning drive, while the more established DJs were sleeping off their Sunset Strip adventures of the night before. My show wasn't called "Lost Moon Radio," and I had a distinctly less space-age handle. They called me "Jalopy Jack," and I "blasted out the rockingest records to all the congestion cats on our fabulously freaky freeways." I had a bunch of car horn sound effects, revving engines, the whole deal. The truth is, in those days I was just a young, idealistic DJ with a head full of dreams, but no idea what to do with them.
