Living On Air (4 page)

THE GOODNIGHTS

Springtime is the luckiest time of year for me, ever since I was offered my first shot to go on the air as a real deejay on a real radio station. I remember the exact date. It was April 25, 1971. Still in tenth grade, I was at home with my family on a Sunday afternoon. Like always, my mom had cooked up one of her big Italian dinners with pasta, lamb chops, potatoes, fish, veggies, and of course a couple of pies for dessert. I was all stretched out on the couch, recovering from our big meal, talking to my brother Henry, his wife Eileen, and my mom and dad, when the phone rang. It was Rick Shay on the line. He was the program director for the FM country station.

“Hey, Davey Cipriano, this is Rick Shay. Listen I’m really in a bind. Do you think you’re ready to go on the air?”

“On the radio?”

He laughed, “Yeah, do you think you can do it? Hank Cee can’t make it tonight and I can’t find anybody and I just thought, you know, you’ve been around here since I don’t know how long, that maybe you’re ready to do it.”

Hank Cee was much older than me, probably in his thirties. He was on the air from nine until midnight every Sunday night.
He also had his own successful country music band and lately they were booking gigs a couple of nights a week, including Sunday. He just couldn’t do the weekend radio show anymore. His shift was only three hours long so I said, “Rick, yeah, I’m ready to do it. Yes, for sure!”

For the past two years, I had been wishing and waiting for that moment to happen. I wasn’t the least bit nervous. I had been “playing” at radio for so long, it felt natural. Besides, I was going on the FM station and other than my family, I couldn’t imagine anyone else would be listening. I only had one hour to get downtown. I parked my car out front, took the elevator up to the sixth floor and calmly walked into the studio. Bob Edmunds was on the air and he gave me a nod as he wrapped up his show, then stood up from his chair. I saw a stack of forty-fives next to the console and grinned. I was used to hiding under that turntable, not putting records on top of it. As Bob left the room, I sat down, adjusted the microphone, and said my first live disc jockey words:

“This is Tom Collins playing your favorite country songs on WWCO FM Radio. Here’s something I hope you’ll like.” [
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With the mic turned off, I finished the sentence in my head, “Because I have no idea what the hell I’m playing and I hope you don’t notice.” It was true, I didn’t know anything about country music. There wasn’t even a format to follow. You just had a stack of records and a rack on the wall full of country albums and you played whatever you liked. I figured that one of those records had to be a hit. I played a few songs I’d never heard of by groups I didn’t know, but I pretty much stuck to what was familiar to me: Credence Clearwater Revival, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Crosby, Stills and Nash. I was smart enough to throw in a few
old classic country songs as well from the albums lining the wall. I don’t remember making any terrible mistakes so I guess it went all right. Rick was listening and he called me on the hot line that night to say, “You’re doing great, kid, and I like the name!”

Then he asked me the most improbable question, “How would you like to do this every Sunday night?”

I thought, “Wow, he must have really been in a bind to offer me this job!” But I also know if you stick around long enough and work hard to learn the ropes, somebody will take notice and give you a break. And that’s how it happened for me.

I quickly became somewhat adept at country music. I had a little help from some very devoted listeners. Those country fans kindly educated me whenever I mangled a singer’s name, or made some other glaring mistake. Like the time I wondered out loud on the air if Jim Reeves would have a new song coming out soon. My next phone call was from a very nice lady in New Britain, Connecticut, who told me Jim Reeves wasn’t writing music anymore because he had died several years ago. Good to know, I thought. She wasn’t angry or making fun, she just wanted to help out. Since then, I’ve done a lot of different radio formats and I know, in my heart, there is no fan like a country fan.

I was still a junior in high school, working on the FM every Sunday night when just before the summer of ’71, the entire radio station moved to a new location out in the suburbs. It was a round, modern building, two stories high, on Straits Turnpike in Watertown. One day we were on the air downtown at 65 Bank Street, and the next day everyone showed up at the new place, called Commerce Campus. It was a big change. We went from
vintage hardwood floors to modern, bright carpet. I missed the layered paint on the walls, thick with the smell of cigarettes and greasy food. One had a past filled with colorful stories, the other seemed bland and unexciting. It was a little like going from the Isley Brothers to the Osmond Brothers. Even the green sofa was gone, replaced by a new orange one, unstained for the moment.

After we moved to Commerce Campus, WWCO became more popular than ever, with a new generation of disc jockeys taking to the airwaves. Over the past couple of years there had been quite a few staff changes on the AM station. That’s just how it is in radio. Disc jockeys come and go all of the time. Sometimes it’s because the station has a new owner who wants to bring in different talent, other times it’s a new program director, or even a format change. Now and then the jock needs a change of scenery, or he’s received an offer from out of town. Jerry Wolf had left more than one year ago. By now, Tim was gone too, and Ron had left for Washington, D.C. Mike was in Hartford at WDRC.

A bunch of new and talented guys had been hired to work on the AM station and I was about to become one of them. I was 16 years old, still playing country music Sunday night on the FM station when the program director on the AM side asked me to work the Saturday night shift playing Top 40 music. Finally, all my hard work paid off. I was going to be a Top 40 deejay. Unbelievable. I was on the AM Saturday and the FM on Sunday. Then it got even better. In a few short months, by the time school started up again, I was offered the job I set my heart on, so many years ago. I was finally going to go on the air, full time, on the most popular station in town.

It was the fall of 1971 when I became part of the family, a
member of that exclusive band of brothers playing the Top 40 hits on 1240 AM, WWCO. I had just turned 17 years old, a senior in high school, when that lone Saturday night shift I had been doing for the past six months turned into a full-time gig. I was on the air Monday through Friday, from six to ten every night, Mike Holland’s old shift, doing my homework while the records were playing. [
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] All those years of soaking up Jerry Wolf’s rappin’ and pumpin’ banter, running the elevator for Mike’s late-night visitors, and hanging out with Tim and Ron had brought me to this moment. Now it was my turn, my time, to show off what I had learned.

This was one of my first experiences with the power of theater of the mind, where words and sounds create a reality all in your imagination using only one of your senses, the sense of hearing. I was inspired by the wit and style of two major disc jockeys, Don Imus at WNBC in New York and John Records Landecker at WLS in Chicago. Imus in the Morning was outrageous and cantankerous. When he put people on the air with him, they had better be ready for scornful remarks and rude hang-ups. Landecker was a true Top 40 jock and his station, 89 WLS, was one of those clear-channel stations that barreled into Connecticut late at night when I was a kid. He had it all, timing, humor, and a great comedy bit he called “Boogie Check.” He put his listeners on the air just to talk, not for a contest, or to request a song, just to check their boogie, as he would say. I incorporated Imus’ sarcastic tone with Landecker’s humor and came up with something that was my own. Something I called “The Goodnights.”

When I turned on that microphone I believed I was turning on the entire town of Waterbury to something new. I had come up with a funny bit that I thought was both innocent and spicy,
that would appeal to everyone. It started out as a cute idea to take a few phone calls live on the air from listeners, saying goodnight to me at the end of my shift. I wanted to include the listeners in the show, create an atmosphere of a party where all of us were in this together, enjoying the music and having fun on the radio. The end of the show “goodnights” grew into a nightly ritual that became longer and longer and more and more popular. It was a playful, testosterone-fueled romp through the budding female flowers of Waterbury. The ultimate prize for a caller was to be one of the girls who were put on “hold.” So the girls that got through on the phone to say, “Goodnight, Tommy,” had two things on their minds, to lie about their age and to try and to talk as sexy as possible. Everyone played their part perfectly and it was good radio theater.

The voice is a wonderful thing. You can manipulate it to paint a mental picture that is not always based in reality. In this case there were a lot of 16-year-old girls who had the rather impressive skill to “sound like” what the actress Farrah Fawcett “looked like.” This made for some good radio and because I was a teenager too, it was all innocent. I wasn’t a dirty old man preying on young teenage girls. I was a horny high school kid preying on young teenage girls my own age. Did I meet and date some of them? Oh yeah! But nowhere near the listener’s imagination.

Every night on my show, girl after girl after girl would call in one after the other and I would act rather bored by their pussycat purring until they said something particularly titillating, whereupon I’d ask, “Excuse me, how old are you, honey?” Here I am at 17 years of age calling a girl “honey”! I was overextending the bounds of my own reality. If they said 14 or 15, I’d make a
rude comment such as “Call me back in a few years” or “Does your mother know you call ridiculously handsome disc jockeys late at night?” and then hang up on them.

Getting hung up on during the goodnights was just about as good as getting put on hold. But when a girl would say she was 18, my indifferent attitude would change to mock interest, “Really? So uh, tell me what do you look like, Tanya?” Or Heather or Brandy or whatever other name the caller had made up to make herself sound even sexier. They’d give an enticing description of what they looked like, including intimate body measurements, hair color, and their various state of undress, upon which every male hormone of every male listener would go into warp-speed overdrive. She might say, “Well, Tommy, I’m 5 foot 2 and blonde and my measurements are 36-24-36.” I would let a beat go by, clear my throat, and say, “Hmm, why don’t you hold on a minute here,” and I’d hit the hold button that would give the most delicious comical sound effect on the air. The reverb of that hold button, clunk-clunk, meant Tom had a hot one on the line and then I’d quickly move on to the next caller.

As the weeks and months rolled by, the girls played along in the game and learned from past callers how to be even sexier and push it to the next level within the limits set by the Federal Communications Commission. The guys on the other hand would be driven to hormonal nirvana. It was better than paying for a Playboy Magazine because each guy listening conjured up a different image in his head of what each girl must look like and because it was all in their imagination, the image was ten times better than any Playboy Bunny. I would amp it up by having five or six girls on hold at one time and in between taking new calls I’d go
back to the girls on hold, remembering each and every one of their names for follow-ups. It was all comically timed to occur right after I unceremoniously hung up on a 15-year-old girl, slapping her with a snide remark, then I’d zip back to one of the girls on hold with an audible telephone clunk and whisper, “So, uh, Heather, you say you’re blonde and you’re 36-24-36, huh? So…ahem, what would a night with you be like, I mean if we had the opportunity to accidentally meet each other in a quiet place, such as the back seat of my car in the WWCO parking lot? Could you tell me...ahem, what would happen?” Then would come that beautiful AM radio phenomenon caused by “silence.” The audio processing equipment at the transmitter would leap into Defcon One mode: dead air was happening!! The dead air would cause the audio compressors in the equipment rack to frantically seek out something, anything that was audible. The end result is similar to reaching over to your sound system and cranking the volume knob all the way up to ten. The equipment would search and lock in on the only sound it could find at that particular moment, the light breathing of a sensuous, theater-of-the-mind Christie Brinkley model look-alike, as her lips lightly touched the mouthpiece of her Princess telephone and she would purr in a whisper, “Anything you want, Tommy.”

You could feel it, almost hear it. At that very moment at 9:59 p.m. and 50 seconds, as my on-air shift came to an end, all over Waterbury the sound of every teenage boy’s head exploding and every girl giggling with the newfound knowledge of how to drive a boy absolutely crazy. As the clock on the studio wall clicked 9:59 and 52 seconds, 53 seconds, I’d pause and clear my throat and say, “Ahem...could you hold on a moment?” And then hit the button for the WWCO jingle, igniting the fuse which set off a mellifluous chorus of singers belting out, “Double-U, Double-U,
SEE OHHH” right into “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” or some other Number 1 song on the chart that week, as I screamed over the top of the song intro, “Goodnight evrahbawdyyyy!”

The beauty of it was in the unknown and the perception of what just happened. Did Tom really meet that girl after the show? Oh my God, was she really that freaking gorgeous and did she really do “anything he wants?” Reality could never live up to the wild imagination of every listener out there. But it sure gave everyone a damn good reason to tune in tomorrow night to take this sexual ride all over again.

I was living my dream. From the top of that AM transmitter, for as far as the eye could see, I was a star. Beyond that, of course, I was a nobody. I lived in a bubble created by the magic of a small-town Top 40 radio station. I was completely intoxicated by that world of imagination. Dialing in stations from thousands of miles away, meeting other guys who were as excited to be on the air as I was, making friends and becoming part of a team, that was what it was like to be in the radio business back then. Most of us were young and a little bit stupid, but we sure had a good time. Kind of like misfits, in a fraternity of radio geeks. And I was just a kid, the youngest deejay at C-O, making mistakes, not knowing any better. The kind of guy who liked to push my limits.