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.
Back in the seventies, KTSH had a New Year's Eve tradition, the annual holiday bash, where we threw open the doors and invited all the luminaries and misfits of the Los Angeles music scene to an all-night shindig right at the station.
In any case, it was a wild party. Walter always took over DJ duties for the night, so all his employees could join the festivities. That night, however, Walter started to feel under the weather. He called me an hour before the show and asked if I could get the broadcast started for him while he ran to the drug store for some Alka-Seltzer. That's how I found myself doing my first-ever nighttime broadcast.
At first, it was very exciting. I loved being on after the sun had gone down, my voice and music blazing a trail into the darkness with only the stars and moonlight to guide them. It felt like a big step forward in my young career. But there were some bumps in the road. I wanted to do justice to the mix of holiday tunes and stories that Oliver usually played -- he often pointed out that Dec. 31st was the seventh day of Christmas -- but all his records were with him in the trunk of his car, so I had to make do with whatever seasonal numbers I could scrounge out of my own collection. I was proud of what I cobbled together, but I can understand how some of the selections -- Stewart and Morgenstern's arguably unsuccessful jingle "Donna the Christmas Girl," Roger Wodehouse's erotically charged Hanukkah ballad "Personal Menorah," the surprisingly detailed 19th century nativity carol "Christ His Head Is Crowning" -- might have seemed a little unorthodox. My colleagues who popped their heads into the booth over the course of the evening invariably labeled my line-up "pretty weird" but attempted to reassure me with statements like, "Nobody really listens to tonight's broadcast anyway. They're all out partying!"Meanwhile, the social gathering of the century seemed to be raging just outside my door, and I was missing it, as a couple of hours ticked by and Walter still hadn't arrived. All my favorite musicians were there, having a blast, playing impromptu sets together. (David Bowie and Marvin Gaye did a cover of "High Hopes" that is still talked about.) I'd also hoped the evening would finally give me a chance to hang out off-the-clock with my work crush, KTSH's assistant office manager, Allison. Unfortunately, not only was I stuck in the booth, but Allison was there on a date with another DJ, the very popular Coyote Joe.
Then came the most shocking blow of all. Mrs. Tishman called the station with the news that the reason Walter had never shown up at the station was that they'd taken him to Cedars-Sinai, and he was there now being treated for a possible coronary.
My first night on the air hadn't turned out the way I'd planned, that was for sure.
But then things started to turn a corner. Allison snuck out of the party to visit me in my booth. (She brought a bottle of whiskey she'd swiped from the Chateau Marmont earlier in the evening.) While my records played, we sat there and talked and watched the stars through the skylight in the booth's ceiling (an architectural eccentricity Walter had installed and which I'd never fully appreciated before that moment). I pointed out Jupiter and told her about the planet's many moons. She hadn't realized I knew so much about space, and I told her how into astronomy I was as a kid. She asked why I never talked about that stuff on my show and I ... well, I didn't really have an answer. It just didn't seem very rock and roll.
After she left, I kept hoping she'd come back. As I led the on-air countdown to midnight, I kept hoping she'd come bursting through that door, so I could sweep her up and kiss her. But the hour passed and she didn't appear.
She showed up at about 12:03, dragging the office telephone. Walter was calling. He was okay, for the time being, and throughout the evening's medical crisis he'd kept a transistor radio by his side. It turned out he'd heard most of my show! I was about to apologize for what a jumbled mess it was, but before I could, he started praising it, praising it for the eclectic stew that it was, praising it for the way it felt like me. "Not too weird?" I asked.
And Walter -- and I'll forget it -- Walter told me: "We're all weird, Jack. That's why I love radio. It's your own particular voice in the darkness, reaching out, and somewhere out there, an audience made just for you will be listening. And they might be weirdos. But you know what? The weirdos need a home too."
Walter said goodnight and got off the phone. And that's when I kissed Allison.
Why do I find myself thinking back on that night? New Year's Eve, 1976? Because that was the night I dreamed up Lost Moon Radio. I doodled a rocket on a scrap of paper, whispered the name "Jupiter Jack" for the first time, realized what a show that was really my own would sound like. A few months later Allison and I were married. She was the one who helped me build my rocket, out of scrap metal and love. And she was the one seeing me off on April 1st, 1977, when I blasted off from a makeshift launchpad in our backyard, and sent my first broadcast down to the planet I'd left behind.
Why is this so important? Because it reminds of the thing I'd really let myself forget, these past months. I did it. I built this show, out of nothing but stardust and dreams, for all the weirdos out there who needed some radio of their own. And I can do it again. Retired? You must be joking. There's work to be done.
So here's my New Year's Resolution for 2011:
LOST MOON RADIO IS GETTING BACK ON THE AIR!
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