Living On Air (8 page)

“You can’t leave. We’re in the middle of ratings.”

“I know Alan, I feel awful. But my health is more important.”

“Listen, do your shift today and I’ll talk to you after you get off the air.”

I was as nervous as I have ever been in my life, but I was also determined. This was war. Chew on that, fucking hardball.

After my shift I went into Alan’s office. His boss, Ernie Fears, was there, too.

“Joe, we’re going to let you go to Los Angeles, but first you have to agree to stay with us through the end of the November ratings. Then you can leave.”

I don’t know how I managed to stay so composed but somehow I calmly answered, “That’ll be just fine, Alan. No problem.” I thanked Alan and Ernie, then called Julian for the biggest thanks of all.

L.A. HERE I COME! I was stoked! My last day on the air was a blast. I said goodbye to the Q-107 listeners, see ya on the Left Coast! The last song I played on the air in D.C. was “My Life,” by Billy Joel. [
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Doug Limerick threw us a going-away party that night. Before we left town, Ann’s parents had all their relatives over for another send-off later in the week. Early on in our relationship, my in-laws, Audrey and Albert Gudelsky, accepted me as part of
their family. Before we met, I’m sure they thought Ann would marry someone who was Jewish, maybe even a nice doctor or a lawyer. But she fell in love with me, a disc jockey, a Catholic boy, who never went to college. Her parents trusted me and I respected them. Ann’s mom was full of energy and her dad was a wonderful, gentle soul. After the party, when we said goodnight, it suddenly hit me, I was taking their baby girl away from them. Moving her to the other side of the country. My father-in-law was a quiet, soft-spoken man but I could see he was choked up. As Ann and I walked to her childhood bedroom where we were spending our last night in Maryland, her dad called out to her, “I love you, baby.”

I can’t tell you how deeply I felt those words. As a parent now, I understand his sadness even more.

The next morning was a bright, new day. We flew up to Connecticut to say goodbye to my family, a little bit easier since I had been living away from home for the past six years. It was the end of November and we wouldn’t be able to come back east for at least a few months, so we celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving all in one. My mom outdid herself and woke up at four in the morning to put the turkey in the oven. We had all my favorite foods including cavatelli and pumpkin pie. She made Ann’s favorite, too, apple pie. I have never, ever left home without Mom giving me a package of something she made from scratch. Since we were flying out to Los Angeles she didn’t want to give me her sauce. She was afraid the container might leak on the plane. Instead we took a tin of her homemade Christmas cookies with a promise that Mom would send more later. We said our goodbyes the Saturday after Thanksgiving, then my big brother Hank drove us to New York for our flight to the West Coast.

I had booked two first-class tickets out of JFK Airport on American Airlines, nonstop to Los Angeles International. It was finally happening. We were on our way to L.A.

LOOKING FOR LUCK

I love to fly. Taking off, floating in the air, going to new places. I think that’s why I like that movie “Catch Me If You Can.” I probably just miss the days when it was more glamorous to fly. I still like to get dressed up when I travel, sports jacket, nice slacks, dress shoes. Sometimes I might wear a tie even though I may end up sitting next to someone wearing shorts and flip-flops. In this era of being treated like cattle when you travel, I think dressing up for a flight shows respect. Respect for the flight attendants, the pilots, and the airport crew. You may not believe this, but the respect is always returned. It’s almost as if I’ve found a great little secret no one knows about. I get a smile instead of a sneer, a welcome instead of a grunt. I’m actually treated better and it makes the flight more enjoyable.

Flying to Los Angeles, in December of 1980, was still a classy way to travel. I had booked two first-class tickets, on an American Airlines 747. That was back when the upstairs of a 747 was a lounge and bar area. Very swanky. As far as I was concerned it was the only way to make our way to my dream destination, Los Angeles.

It was a bright, warm day when we landed in L.A. We caught a cab to the Hyatt Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in downtown
L.A., a few blocks from the radio station. I was now working for the Greater Media Company, a much smaller outfit than the two networks I worked for in Washington, but it had some big-market stations. Surprisingly, KHTZ paid for our move to L.A. That was a big deal for us. It cost $8,000 to pack up and transport our stuff out west and remember, I took the new job at a pay cut. Someone once told me in L.A., “they pay you in sunshine,” and that was okay with me.

I still hadn’t met my new program director, Jim Conlee, in person. I had a lot of respect for him. He had kept a shift open for me during the entire legal mess, trying to get out of my ABC deal. But up until now we had only talked on the phone. We decided to meet at our hotel the day after Ann and I arrived. After working for NBC and ABC, I was used to powerful executives, wearing expensive suits. When Jim walked in, he looked a little rumpled, like he might have had a long night. His suit was a bit too big, his hair stuck out a little, I was surprised. But he was a great guy and I figured, this might just be the casual, West Coast lifestyle.

My first night on the air was not what I expected, either. It started out fine. The studios were beautiful. Each one had a Neumann microphone, absolutely top of the line. Everybody wanted to talk through a Neumann but not every station could afford to buy one. They sounded incredible. I was hired for the five to nine shift at night but first Jim wanted me to get used to the format by doing an overnight shift. That’s when the unexpected happened.

I met the overnight jock, Daniel, who showed me the audio board. We talked for a bit, then before I took over I excused myself to use the bathroom. I ran straight to the toilet and immediately
tossed my cookies. That was the first and only time I have ever thrown up before going on the air. This was my big dream, yet here I was at 1:45 in the morning about to say, “Hello Los Angeles,” and I was driving the porcelain bus on the floor in the bathroom.

By two a.m. I recovered, put on my headphones, cranked up the music, and flicked on the Neumann, lighting up the red blinking “ON AIR” sign. Then I said my first words on the radio since leaving D.C., “K-Hits 97…hello L.A.! My name’s Joe Cipriano. I think we’re gonna have a great time together!”

And we did. More than 30 years later, Los Angeles is still my home. The first place we lived was Pacific Palisades, close to the beach. It’s a small town, nestled on the outside of the sprawling city that is L.A. It looked perfect, as if a movie director had designed the set and hired actors to live there. Most importantly, it fit the small-town feel that I craved. There was no indication that you were in a big city. On any given day young mothers pushed their baby strollers down the sidewalk, kids played at the park or walked to the local library, people smiled and waved to one another across the street. Local residents owned most of the stores: Mort’s Deli, Harrington’s Camera Shop, Benton’s Sporting Goods. One afternoon I had just missed getting to the bank before it closed. I was about ten minutes late. The manager saw me try the door, came over, opened it up and let me in to take care of business. That had never happened to me in Washington. Every year the Chamber of Commerce elected an honorary mayor, always a celebrity. When we moved there, in the 1980s, there were Chevy Chase, Larry Hagman, and Dom DeLuise. More recently boxer Sugar Ray Leonard served as mayor. On the Fourth of July there’s a parade down Sunset Boulevard with skydivers, marching bands,
and a huge fireworks display at night. We had cool ocean breezes during the day and on a quiet evening, we could hear waves crashing on the beach. Pacific Palisades was where we lived when our children, Dayna and Alex, were born. It was better than I ever imagined. My roller coaster ride seemed to have smoothed out.

Monday, December 8, 1980, was my first full night on the job at K-Hits. By seven that night, the office staff was gone and I was alone in the building. A few minutes after eight the Associated Press news wire started going nuts in the next room, ringing non-stop, spewing out pages and pages of some sort of bulletin. I grabbed the copy and this is what I saw:

BULLETIN (AP) (NEW YORK) — THERE’S A REPORT THAT JOHN LENNON HAS BEEN SHOT. IT HAPPENED IN NEW YORK, ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE. POLICE SAY A MAN TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED AS THE FORMER BEATLE WAS SHOT AND WOUNDED AND HAS BEEN TAKEN IN A POLICE CAR TO ROOSEVELT HOSPITAL. A SUSPECT HAS BEEN TAKEN INTO CUSTODY. NO WORD JUST YET ON HOW SERIOUS IT IS.

AP-MP-12-08-80

I wasn’t sure how they handled that sort of story in L.A. but back in D.C. we would break into the song that was currently playing to read an urgent news headline. There wasn’t anyone around to ask, so I just did what I thought was right. I slowly brought down the volume on the song, then read the bulletin live on the air. When I finished, I grabbed a John Lennon song out of the rack and let it play. The phones went crazy. Some people
called to ask if it was true, others called with updates for me that they had heard on television. About ten minutes later there was another AP bulletin. Four words came across the wire:

JOHN LENNON SHOT DEAD

I tossed out the format and began to play all Lennon and Beatles songs the rest of the night. People called in by the hundreds. I thought it would be a good idea to let them express their grief, share their sorrow on the air. In my own little way, it seemed like I was doing something, at a time when there was really nothing any of us could do. It was a sad and emotional evening.

My time at KHTZ turned out to be as unpredictable as that first night. It was a mixture of joy and frustration. Charlie Tuna was our morning man, which was a real kick. He’s a legendary disc jockey and I was thrilled to be on a station with him, in Los Angeles. But the format was unlike anything I had ever done before. We played soft rock hits, Dan Fogelberg, Billy Joel, James Taylor. The music was nice but the format of the station was extremely tight, almost every word we said on the air was overly controlled. Even the way we said the call letters was strictly formatted. There was a card in the studio with a visual example of the proper way to say the name of the station:

Good grief. It was not the most stimulating work I’ve ever done, so I looked for something else to do to stay creative. That’s what I do. I can’t sit still for long. I’ve got to keep moving, keep going forward.

It was time to start work on getting that voice-over career going here in my new city. That was the ultimate goal in moving to L.A., so let’s have at it. That meant working on it at least one hour a day but I had no idea where to start. I needed to get in touch with all the ad agencies in town but I didn’t know where to find that list. Then I realized every single audiotape that came into KHTZ with commercials had the name of the ad agency and the studio where the commercials were recorded right on the label. Whenever a new box was delivered, I wrote down the names, then sent whatever agency it was my own demo tape with a note to introduce myself, then a follow-up card one week later. I wrote letters to every voice-over agent in L.A. I did most of the work at home before my shift, then made copies of my demo tape later that night when I got off the air. I dragged a typewriter into the studio to print address labels for my demo boxes. I was relentless.

Gradually, I started to make some headway in voice-overs. I got an agent from all the submissions I sent, and started to book a few jobs here and there. By the spring of 1982, I got a big break. Jim Gibbons owned a company called Flamingo Films and he did movie trailers. At that time he was working on the TV and radio commercials for a little film called “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” It was a teen movie that turned into a somewhat iconic film, launching the careers of Sean Penn, Cameron Crowe, and Amy Heckerling. Jim put me on everything, the trailer, television commercials, and radio spots. It was a real thrill, my first big voice-
over gig. I was booked a few times a week to record voice track after voice track, change after change. I was surprised by how much work went into this and by how well it paid. The movie was released in August of ’82 and I made enough money to bank for the future and also refurbish my little red Niki Lauda, Alfa Romeo convertible sports car. A total win-win.

Also during this time, the nine p.m. shift opened up at the station and I told Stoney he should send in his aircheck. About three months after Ann and I had moved to Los Angeles, Stoney and Barbara came out, too. Neither one of them had any work lined up and it was tough going for a while. Stoney took any job he could find while he pursued his acting career. He drove a truck for the Department of Water and Power for a few weeks, and he worked as a bar-back at the Palomino in the San Fernando Valley. When I heard about the opening at KHTZ, I made sure he sent me his demo and then I walked it into the PD’s office. I said, “You gotta hear this guy,” and by the end of the week, Stoney got the job. Our shifts had flipped since we first met. Instead of me following him as I did at WKYS, he followed me every night at nine p.m. To his credit, Stoney was NEVER late.

By now, two years had gone by since we moved to L.A. Earlier, I know I complained about the format at KHTZ and how strict everything was, but I had grown up enough to know that job was a great opportunity. Now it was time to negotiate a new contract with the station and I was ready to take another risk. I had toyed with the idea of moving full time into voice-overs, but the realist in me knew I needed to continue with radio as my “day job.” Meanwhile, Ann had found a job she loved at KABC-TV. She was writing the news and producing mini-documentaries for the
six and eleven o’clock newscasts, surrounded by smart, creative reporters, camera operators, and editors. She was inspired by the work, and making a great salary. I was happy for her and relieved she had a good job. That was the atmosphere at home when I entered into contract talks with the general manager at KHTZ, an all-around nice guy named Bob Moore. The station was doing pretty well, nothing like the successes of WKYS and Q107, but respectable. [
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] I hoped to start making up for the pay cut I took when I came to L.A. When I asked Bob for a pay raise, he told me there just wasn’t any more money in the budget. Whatever I made in the previous year was what I was going to get the next year, take it or leave it. Finally he said, “And furthermore, if you can’t DOUBLE what I’m paying you on those voice-overs you’re doing, you should just pack up and go back to D.C.”

We agreed to disagree. Here I was, making the same decision my friend Stoney had made a few years earlier when he walked away from Q107. Should I give up my full-time job to gamble on a freelance career, just like he did to find work as an actor? My voice-over income was nowhere near what I could make in radio but I still decided to resign from the station. When I found out I wasn’t getting that raise, I felt as if I had stopped moving forward. I needed to keep some momentum going with voice-overs despite the risk of giving up a full-time job. Annie’s paycheck would have to pay the bills for a while.

The management at KHTZ was actually very nice and gave me a Saturday night shift to keep me going while I figured out what to do next. To this day, whenever I bump into Bob Moore at party or event in town, he always says to anyone within earshot, “I am the one that gave Joe Cipriano his voice-over career. I
told him he could double the money I was paying him, so if it weren’t for me, Cipriano would never have done promos.” He loves telling that story and I get a good laugh out of it, too.

My life slowed down considerably when I gave up my full-time shift for weekends. Once again, I didn’t have a job only this time I did it to myself. I spent every day sending out voice-over demos and radio airchecks to stations in L.A. looking for a new gig, but nothing happened. I started to feel like I had made the worst choice of my life. Then, out of the blue, I got lucky.