FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio by Richard Neer

Author:Richard Neer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Genres & Styles, History & Criticism, History and criticism, General, New York, Music, Nonfiction, Rock, Rock music, Radio, New York (State), Disc jockeys, Biography
ISBN: 9780679462958
Publisher: Villard Books
Published: 2001-09-25T04:51:23+00:00

Good-bye Yellow Brick Road

Jonathan Schwartz was tired.

The grind of working seven days a week had become too much for him. He was entangled in a romantic situation that was strangling him, and he always had taken such attachments very seriously. One of them had landed him in a mental ward two weeks before he was supposed to start at WNEW-FM in 1967. This time, it was a young coworker, and Schwartz was feeling trapped.

His quest for love in many of the wrong places could be traced back to his childhood in Beverly Hills. His famous father wasn’t around much and his mother was often bedridden, so he spent his early years largely unattended by family. It was here where he developed his radio skills, closing himself inside a closet and practicing play-by-play for his beloved baseball. As he grew older, he began to break into houses in his neighborhood, where many people left their doors unlocked. He would rifle through his neighbors’ personal items, perhaps in search of some kind of human connection. (He once rummaged through a house he later discovered was Gene Kelly’s.) He always left everything as it was, but he admits to stealing a few 78s.

He was also tired of rock and roll. Like anything new and uncharted, the gradual revelation of its mysteries had been fascinating at first. Schwartz probed and experimented, exploring its limitations and taboos further and further. He defined rock as “jazz, under pressure.” But he was rooted in Sinatra and the standards of his father’s era and eventually found playing the Doors wanting. The music rarely spoke to him anymore—it was time to move on.

He’d come to the realization in the spring of 1975 that his radio work was interfering with his writing. It was all too easy to put in a full evening behind a hot microphone, have a late supper and stay up until nearly dawn, sleep away the day, and then get up and do it again, without ever putting pen to paper. He was earning a nice living between the two stations, AM and FM, and was revered by the fans of each.

But the old gang wasn’t around much anymore: Paulsen was gone, Duncan was on the road a lot; he even missed fighting with his old nemesis, Rosko. His new boss, Mel Karmazin, wasn’t enthralled by his habit of dialing up the radio station that carried the Boston Red Sox games and listening in while doing his show. But it was that and the alcohol that kept him going. His relationship with Alison Steele had never been good—he’d never had much use for her other than as a target for derisive flirtation. His appreciation for Scott Muni was only as a comrade in arms, a fellow drinker; but he was disdainful of what he saw as Muni’s substandard intellect.

Muni regarded him as a spoiled eccentric with peculiar tastes in everything but scotch. One of the characteristics Scottso found most disquieting was Jonathan’s habit of eating food from garbage cans.

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