There's Nothing Louder Than Dead Air: Stories from thirty years behind the mic

Introduction

I was thirteen and spending the night with Mac Hartman who was the same age, and while we were playing "Sorry", which was our fun that Friday night. His older sister, Beth, walked around the corner and stood in the doorway, wearing her white bathrobe. I looked up from the board for a second, Mac turned over his two-card and moved his red pawn. He couldn’t care less that his big sister was standing in the doorway, wearing just her bathrobe. I cared. She was sixteen.

Dad wants you to walk the dog, Mac. She wasn’t looking at Mac. She was looking at me.

Beth Hartman was standing there in just her bathrobe as Mac walked past her and out through the doorway to walk the dog. I looked at her bare legs and feet, and when I looked up, she was motioning with her finger for me to follow her.

Dumbfounded, I got up as quickly as I could and followed her down the hall and into her bedroom.

She pulled Déjà Vu out of its sleeve, put it on her turntable, and started it.

"This is Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I really like it. Do you?"

I said I did like it, because I really did.

Beth Hartman was the first to turn me on. To Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

1

Free

A quick thought before we get going here. Drugs are okay if you use good ones and use them sparingly. That is what avatar of the mind Dr. Timothy Leary told me in a radio interview in 1989. Now, that’s all fine, but I learned early on that I did not do anything sparingly. I was accepted to UNC-Wilmington after graduating high school at Fayetteville Terry Sanford in North Carolina. My GPA was a smooth 2.3, which translated to about a C. My SAT score was a resoundingly impotent 910. I headed off to college in the fall of 1977 with all the makings of one hell of an average college guy. Wally Hinkamp drove his brand-new 1977 beige Chevrolet Monte Carlo to my parents’ home to pick me up. My new roommates, John Harris and Mark Vick, were already in the car. They made new cars with built-in eight-track players back then, so Hinkamp pulled out the first Boston eight-track, inserted it, and we rolled out along Highway 24, blasting it loudly. I couldn’t believe it.

I was free.

Free from the deadlines and curfews of a military family, free from buzz cuts every two Saturdays, free from the oppression, free to do as I pleased.

My freshman year, I took a job at the local Baskin-Robbins, made it to class every now and then, started smoking pot, and hit every happy hour I could. I joined the Chi Phi fraternity. I am pleased to announce it was an encore performance by me for that second semester in early 1978. My roommates did the same as I did; they ultimately graduated and got ordinary jobs; I got a job before graduating, so as I see it, I was ahead of the game. By the way, I absolutely applaud anybody who got a college degree in the seventies.

I effing salute you.

After completing my first two semesters, I was asked to stay out one semester and reapply for winter classes in 1979. I do believe my 1.3 GPA had something to do with that. After two semesters of not even reasonable efforts at a college education, I moved back to Fayetteville for the summer of 1978 taking two jobs: one at the local library as a book-shelfer and desk clerk. The other was at the Capital Department Store on Hay Street as a stock boy and general worker. I also rented a temporary small home until I could get back into school for that January semester of 1979. I could have moved back into my parents’ house for the interim to save money, but I am not sure they wanted me there. In fact, I am sure they didn’t want me there. This old home was on Morganton Road in the Haymount District and had three bedrooms so Jon Mena and Don Styron (a couple of ne’er-do-well high school buddies) moved in with me. They never even made it out of Fayetteville after high school. At least I gave it a shot, they didn’t even bother. What ensued was nothing short of debauchery, or growing up, or the seventies, or whatever whichever you want to call it. That summer also heralded the most heartbreaking night of my life.

I was nineteen years old. You could legally drink at that age then, and that is what we did. We smoked pot, we listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Cheech and Chong, and we threw nightly parties. We had a regular lineup. There was Robin, a wacky, twenty-one-year-old fruitcake of a girl who lived next door with a young child and partied loyally with us. It was no surprise to find her sprawled out on our couch any given morning with her child screaming next door at dawn for food or a diaper change. One morning, I changed the kid’s diapers myself; I had changed my youngest sister Liza’s a time or two so I knew what I was doing. Peaches also moved in with us. She was a beautiful black girl with a big fantastic afro. She looked exactly like JJ’s sister, Thelma, on Good Times, and we told her so. She never paid us a dime, but we let her slide because she said she would put us in her book.

I am assuming she never wrote it. I never saw any book.

She had a job, because we always had to drive her there and pick her up, but she never had any money for some reason. Nobody ever cared or pushed her for money. There was no point. She was very pleasant to be around and had one of the biggest, never-ending smiles I ever saw. We swore she slept that way. Jon Mena worked daily cutting hair, and Don Styron worked construction. He showed up for work possibly three times weekly out of his scheduled five because of our parties that ended at four in the morning. I was the boring one. The rest of these housemates were one hundred percent shits and giggles. Things happened. Things happen at that age when you are just finding out how the world works. I ended up in bed one night—and I do not know how—with some fourteen-year-old girl. She made it clear she wanted nothing to happen, so nothing did. I think I was too afraid anyway. I have no idea how a fourteen-year-old got to that house and ended up spending the night with me; but at nineteen years of age, I was not asking questions or looking for anyone’s life story. At fourteen, she didn’t have much of a life story anyway.

That was the summer I first set foot in a rock nightclub. All the bikes were parked side by side outside the main entrance in front of the big club in town called The Cellar. My roommates and I walked in, the worn-out door attendant carded us before we walked down that sticky carpeted hallway and let me tell you it is a proud moment when you are carded for the first time. You never forget it. Inside, the disco balls were rotating, smoke was everywhere, the girls were walking around in high heels with skirts up to their necks; all of them had lit cigarettes in their hands. The beginning of Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs starting up as I walked in is a memory that I will never forget. Rod Stewart was in his prime in the seventies. I look back and realize how lucky I am to have grown up in that era. Think about it: Hot Legs, Stay with Me, I Know (I’m Losing You), Maggie May. God bless Rod Stewart.

My family lived across town on Arsenal Avenue at that point; that included my dad, my mom, my two brothers, Brandy and Nicky, and my youngest sister, Liza. Mom and Dad had been married twenty years at this point, she was raised a southern belle in Richmond, my Dad, the son of a New Jersey banker. I was the oldest of five. Holly was the second child; she had just gone off to Greensboro to study theater at UNC-G. My father had been retired from the Air Force for three years by then and had become increasingly mentally ill. He had tried several lines of work, including real estate agent, electrician, and truck driver; each job lasted a few years or less. He didn’t get along with co-workers we said because he had that I’m right and everyone else is wrong attitude.

Maybe this attitude was part of his sickness, we weren’t sure. My dad was one of those military guys who, like some veterans, had difficulty adjusting to civilian life. The glazed look in his dark-brown eyes had become more pronounced as each day went by, and he began to drink daily. I know he was weird, but he was still nice to me, so I thought, what’s the big deal? My mother, frustrated, kept pushing him and pushing him to get psychiatric help for himself, but he didn’t understand. Chances are though, if you needed psychological help, you weren’t healthy enough to realize it.

My mother never got me, and I never got her. We just didn’t get each other. What she thought was funny I thought was corny. What I thought was funny she thought was juvenile. She was not too thrilled with what would end up being my choice of work saying it was not honorable, but frankly, I was thrilled simply to have work. I remember telling her once that I was making an honest living so that’s honorable as far as I am concerned. I thought that was a funny choice of words, she didn’t. We just never really connected so we stopped talking about anything of any real substance early on in our adult relationship; our relationship developed into that of mostly small talk. There’s nothing better than a quick conversation about how humid it is.

She was incredibly intelligent. Everyone said that about her.

My sister, Holly (the second child), had epic battles with my mother. My brother Nick (the fourth child), saw things eye to eye with her. My sister, Liza (the fifth and youngest child), was poker face. Don’t show don’t tell. Always accepting. My brother Brandy (the third and middle child), was a different case altogether. There was no greater love for a mother than this boy had.

My mother was believer in the Montessori system of educating children and through this system, she provided (as a paid teacher) ingenious systems of teaching children about real life through the concept of freedom with limits and psychological development; she taught this to children throughout her life. My mother was also a lifesaver of a grandmother; she was reliable and available always for her nine grandchildren with a simple phone call. She thought it was very important for each of her grandchildren to visit our nation’s capital, so she paid for and traveled up I-95 in her automobile with each grandchild over their pre-teen summers. Not a one of her grandchildren grew up without the best history lesson of our nation you could get, a week in the capital of the United States, Washington D.C. itself. Looking back, we all grew up with a great love for the United States of America thanks to my parents. My mother loved the United States flag. When it became tattered and beaten on her flagpole outside her home later when she lived alone, I’d replace it with a new one and fold the old one properly into a triangle with only the blue field of stars showing, exactly as my father had taught me.

I believe my father’s sickness affected my mother the most. It absolutely turned her life upside down. What happened to Brandy not much later didn’t help either.

From time to time later on, my mother would say that she felt horrible for my father and that she thought she was doing the right thing by pushing for psychiatric help for him, and I believe that. For the life of me, I cannot pinpoint the man’s illness or attach a name to it, but I will try to describe it as best I can. While we all did not know what was wrong, we knew something was definitely wrong. The man was not a threat to society, so we could not have him committed to a crazy house. He would have had to voluntarily commit himself, which he never did.

My father would start to talk and we would immediately notice the glazed look in his eyes, he would talk about things without emotion or feeling and that was fine, but when we spoke back, it was as if he couldn’t understand us. He would ignore what we said and continue with another weird subject.

The best way to describe his affliction was out of touch I guess. Anybody could talk to the man and immediately think there was something wrong there. I couldn’t say he was mean or violent in his mental illness, in fact, he was nicer. Nicer in a very uncomfortable way. Like he thought things that weren’t important were too important. I don’t know, I’m doing the best I can here.

There was a story about my father crashing a friend of Holly’s party one night after he had been drinking and then getting into a physical fight with some of the guys there, I can totally picture that. I think what happened was that he went to this party wanting to hang out with his daughter and I am sure he insisted on playing Margaritaville repeatedly at a party where it was all about Deep Purple and one thing led to another.

Holly told me this story and it just broke me up.

I realize I did not know what it was like for my mother. I am sure she was miserable, frustrated, angry, and did not want to go through the rest of her life like that, but it left me feeling bitter and angry toward her. I have heard of this before. When parents separate, it is common for the children involved to feel forced to take sides.

We could not even really talk to my father at that point—he was in his own little world in 1978—playing the Beatles repeatedly, ad nauseam, and drinking away his days when home. He had stuck with driving as an independent truck driver and had arranged a loan for a cool, Peterbilt Class5 heavy-duty truck. When he returned on weekends, we heard about the confrontations he had with the guys who unloaded his deliveries. There was always a price battle, and we could picture Dad arguing nonsensically with these guys with that glazed look in his eye.

Everything was all wrong, but none of us knew why or what to do, so we just accepted it. All of us, with the exception of my mother.

As the days wore on, we all noticed that when my father talked to us, the look in his eyes just got sadder and sadder, further and further away. We were old enough to realize that he was totally out of touch, so we did not even try to talk back with him when he approached us, we would just nod or shake our heads after he said something, and then move into the next room. We all knew he was weird, but we shook it off.

Early that August of 1978, one afternoon while I still lived with Don, Jon, and Peaches, there came a knock at my door just as I was leaving for work. It was my father, and he had that glazed, very empty look in his eyes.

Hi, Bob. Can you believe your mother threw me out? I looked at him as he said all of this. His hair was all messed up, his eyeglasses were crooked on his face, and he wore dirty, unwashed clothes. His hygiene had gone south, a classic sign of mental illness.

Booted. At that very moment, my heart just cracked in half. I need a place to stay. Can I stay with you?

My own father was knocking at my door, homeless and sick. The big, strong man who scared me, the man whom I respected like no other, and the man who had provided a roof over my head for my whole life now stood staring at me in my doorway, with no roof over his.

My roomies, Don and Jon had no problem with Dad staying there—bless them for that. I knew he was sick, because he didn’t even seem to notice us smoking pot, and he did not like pot-smoking, long-haired hippies, which is what two-thirds of us were (I never did grow my hair long). He was now a broken man. As it turned out, he moved into a small apartment next door after a week of staying with us. He lived there for just a short time. He was still driving his Peterbilt. This worked out well because, during the week while he was on the road, I could drive the orange Dodge Omni he owned, and then I didn’t have to walk or hitch the two miles to work and back.

Soon thereafter, Mom, Nicky, Brandy, and Liza moved out of our huge mansion on Arsenal Avenue. Holly was still at UNC-Greensboro, and Brandy was in and out of high school, eventually flunking out. He was so lost as a teen.

Brandy got his GED, and Mom enrolled him at Appalachian State University in Boone. He went off to see if he could make something of himself there.

The three of them that were left—Mom, Nicky, and Liza—moved into an apartment building a short distance away, and then Dad moved back into the Arsenal Avenue house, the big house the whole family used to live in, but everyone was gone now. He was all alone in that huge house. I would drive by to check up on him on weekends when he was home from truck driving. I would knock first, and when nobody answered, I would peer in the big living room window, where I would see my father in the blue chair.

He would sit in the middle of the now cavernous living room. There was no furniture, only the blue chair. With a lone blanket covering his body, there he would be, sitting upright, his head cocked to one side, fast asleep. All alone.

One Sunday I walked slowly into the living room, and he had a small television in front of him on a little coffee table. The TV was not on. There beside him was a small Panasonic cassette deck, and the repeat button was on. Alone Again (Naturally) played over and over. I tell you, I cannot hear that song today.

I do not have the time or the space to write about all the rock bands that were big that year; 1978 was one of rock’s greatest years. Dire Straits. Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band. Van Halen. The Cars. The Police. We all heard these bands on WQDR in Raleigh, which was an hour up the road. The station was a pioneer because mid-seventies rock radio consultants at the time, Kent Burkhart and Lee Abrams, had contracted about a hundred rock stations in the U.S. to use their Superstars format. This was not free-form rock like the stations had been using in the early to mid-seventies, it was what they called an album oriented format (or AOR, short for album oriented rock). They played select deep tracks from new albums, but also played a rotation of rock tracks that repeated like the Top 40 stations did with their hits.

WQDR was the first contracted station of the nearly one hundred. I still get the chills when I think of the day I first heard Dire Straits. The smoky-breathed female DJ came on one lunchtime when I was listening in my house of ill repute, she played Sultans of Swing and said something afterward; I don’t know what. That song blew me away. I had never heard anything like it, because there never was anything like it, and it made me feel so good to be alive! The song was way ahead of its time then and it still is. The DJ was Joleigh Ferris, and I remember thinking to myself, if you can get paid real money to talk on the radio and play songs like that, then that is what I will do. Where do I sign up?

Somehow I got organized enough to reapply to UNC-W, and I was re-accepted. They had a college radio station, WLOZ, which was a 10-watt rock station and it could cover about a quarter of the town of Wilmington. I would march right up to that station and learn everything I could.

2

Dire Straits

I moved back to Wilmington in January 1979. My family was going through the worst part of their lives while I was away. My father had gotten sicker and sicker. He’d really gone off the deep end. He was showing up at Mom and Nicky and Liza’s apartment door every morning, acting like it was his home. Liza and Nick were in middle school. Early in the morning before school, they would peer out of the apartment door eyehole when the doorbell buzzed and see my father there, but they were instructed not to talk to him.

I shut it all out as much as I could. I was twenty by that point, just learning about girls and music. In addition, I had a goal: get paid to play Dire Straits. I arrived back at school just in time to see the Steelers win the Super Bowl against the Rams, and I moved into Galloway dormitory on the campus of UNC-W. I still did not have a car, but everything was within walking distance, including the cafeteria. My meals were prepaid, so I would not starve like last time.

I moved my stuff in on move-in day and waited for my roommate, Gene Jones from Greensboro, to move in a little later that afternoon, I didn’t know the guy. I had to kill some time because I was one of the first to arrive, so I smoked pot in my dorm, blowing the smoke and holding the joint out the window, listening repeatedly to Toys in the Attic. I had a few albums, some clothes, and a small bag of pot—that was it. That cold and sunny afternoon, I walked the half mile to the trailer where WLOZ was located, knocked on the trailer door, and Martin Brown answered. He was a geeky-looking, tall, thin guy with glasses, but he seemed approachable enough.

Hi! I said. I was thinking of signing up for a few air shifts. Do you guys have room?

Do we have room? Ha, ha, ha!

Martin seemed about my age, and you could not help but like the guy right away. I walked up the three cinder block steps and stepped into the lobby, which was a beaten-up couch, one fake plant, and a coffee table. A couch is one of the two most important elements of any radio station.

Please know there must be a couch in all radio stations; it’s necessary for sleeping.

Engineers slept on this couch, as did overnight disc jockeys, afternoon disc jockeys, friends of disc jockeys . . . you could doze on the couch after your shift because the person with the nine-to-eleven shift was not coming in and you were filling in, that sort of thing. You could live there and sleep there because you had no life, exactly like Paul Johnson.

Paul Johnson lived at WLOZ. We often wondered if he had a mother or father, and we eventually decided that he must have been born in the back office. Maybe he just formed in the back office. Maybe he evolved from a microorganism that grew from a leftover Wendy’s cheeseburger back there.

The dude had no family as far as we could tell. He smoked pot and fiddled with stuff at the station—and yes, he slept there. We weren’t sure if he had a home, so where did he shower? We had to assume he never showered; he sure looked like he never did. When you look up yellow teeth in the dictionary, there is Paul Johnson’s picture. Those were the yellowest teeth I had ever seen. He was tough to take, very annoying, and the crowning blow was that he was arrogant. He thought he was smarter than everyone.

Back to the two most important elements of any radio station: a couch (as described) and a coffee machine. These two necessities are of equal importance. The station did have a coffee maker, and I knew enough after being there for fifteen minutes to know that there had to be some sort of symbiotic relationship forming inside the filter basket between the leftover coffee grounds and the coffee filter. I was not going to look to confirm.

Martin took me to the back portion of the trailer; the station control room was on the left. As we walked, I peered in and saw a preppy-looking guy cuing up a track from an album. He started the song by pushing a button and I was amazed at how quickly the turntable started the song! With the push of a button, that turntable was rotating instantly and whirring perfectly. There were two of those turntables. So that is how they get the songs to play so close together and to overlap on the radio! He was cuing up Gold Dust Woman. That is one cool-sounding song.

We got to the back portion of the trailer, and seated at the one desk in the room was a big burly-looking guy with a full beard. He wore a porkpie hat, and his name was Paul Jackson. We later added Stonewall to his name. This was not in reference to the Confederate general, but in reference to the fact that we felt we were talking to an actual stone wall when we spoke to him. When I first saw him that day, he was leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk, fast asleep. Hell, most times later on we were never sure he was awake when we spoke to him standing up. Martin pulled a laminated sheet out from under the guy’s outstretched feet and looked at it.

Let’s see if we have room . . . , Martin mumbled.

We have today at four thirty, tonight at seven thirty, and tonight at ten thirty; we have the entire overnight shift available. I’d say we have room.

I can go on just like that?

Yeah, why not? Are you a student?

Yeah, sure.

Do you want to go on overnight to try it out?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. I will meet you here at eleven thirty tonight, and I will go over the stuff with you. It’s pretty easy.

That’s it? I mean, nobody could really have any idea how clear it was to me at that moment what I was going to do with my life; this was the moment when I knew. I walked back to the dorm, and Gene was moving his stuff in. He was tall and slow and seemed