UNDERGROUND RADIOLAND MURDERS

"UNDERGROUND RADIOLAND MURDERS" by TED ALVY

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY SIMILARITY TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL AND EXISTS ONLY IN THE MIND OF THE READER.

Important Note: SEGUE (pronounced SEG-WAY) is a musical or visual transition point known as a "gapless bridge".

CHAPTER ONE: Something was terribly wrong at the radio station. Dead air can be explained by technical difficulties, but a record was repeating the scratchy whoosh of the inner groove signifying that the turntable arm had completed its journey to the center of the disc. It was after three o'clock in the morning and the KBZ-FM all night DJ was not answering the phone. Mister Midnight had been a fixture in Santa Barbara radio the past ten years. He was one of the few on-the-air survivors of the first Southern California FM Rock station from 1967 when the then fresh revolutionary broadcasting concept was called "Underground Radio." The Midnight to 6AM show was often called the graveyard shift. The irony of this was not lost on Chandler Phillips as he hurried along the empty palm tree lined streets of downtown Santa Barbara toward the KBZ-FM studios on top of the Newport Building.

Chandler Phillips was born in 1959. That was the year Raymond Chandler died. If his father completely had his way, he might have been named Marlowe Phillips. His mother had an English uncle named Chandler David, so a compromise was struck. Chandler David Phillips shared his late father's love of detective novels and would often quote from them in his own writings. He worked a radio show at Midnight Sundays on "The Buzz", the moniker of KBZ-FM. Mister Midnight worked the other six graveyard shifts, and never took vacations. Chandler moved to Santa Barbara in 1977 to study film writing at U.C.S.B., located on the ocean in Isla Vista. A graduate of North Pasadena High School, he was accepted at U.C.L.A. With the encouragement of his loving mother, he decided to leave the freeways behind for cleaner air. About the same time, Rick Albright had left a Hollywood radio station to become "Mister Midnight" in Santa Barbara. A quote from a 1943 interview with his namesake Raymond Chandler summed up his mixed feelings: "...anyone who doesn't like Hollywood is either crazy or sober."

Ross Macdonald had lived in Santa Barbara for years writing detective novels until his death in 1983. He took the name of his detective hero from Miles Archer, the partner of Sam Spade, who Dashiell Hammett had killed off early in "The Maltese Falcon". That was the only novel with Sam Spade as a character and Hammett only wrote one "Thin Man" novel with the Nick Charles character. There were many Lew Archer novels from Ross Macdonald, but only seven Philip Marlowe novels from Raymond Chandler. Chandler Phillips had yet to complete his first novel. He could have never guessed that its title would be "Underground Radioland Murders".

The only dent in the silence of the Newport Building was the hum of the elevator headed to the penthouse suite. Chandler saw that all the glass encased offices and studios were empty. He quickly flipped over the phonograph record spinning blindly on the turntable. It was the title track from "Bitches Brew", the pioneering jazz fusion double album by Miles Davis. As the twenty minute long cut on the flip side called "Pharoah's Dance" began to emerge from the studio speakers, Chandler made a quick check of the bathrooms, hallways, and other hidden spaces where an unconscious body might be found. He breathed an audible sigh releasing the nervous tightness in his throat when nothing was found. The tape decks were being repaired, so Mister Midnight could not have put on a long music tape before deserting his post. Playing one of the longest tracks on vinyl, with a running time of exactly twenty-seven minutes, would have given the disc jockey plenty of time to leave undetected. Maybe his choice of "Bitches Brew" was a clue to the disappearance of Mister Midnight.

CHAPTER TWO: The music that was on the air, a Josef Zawinul composition, was coming to an end. Chandler searched through the shelves of the record library at the back of the studio. He decided to continue a theme by choosing albums by Weather Report, Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane. Weather Report features founding members Josef Zawinul on keyboards and Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone. A recent Wayne Shorter album has a track with Chick Corea, who was in the Miles Davis "Bitches Brew" group, on keyboards . The Wayne Shorter LP "Ju Ju", on the Blue Note label, has Shorter playing tenor sax with longtime John Coltrane bandmate McCoy Tyner on piano, Reginald Workman on bass and longtime John Coltrane bandmate Elvin Jones on drums. John Coltrane played tenor sax on his 1961 "Live at the Village Vanguard" recording of "Chasin' The Trane" in a classic power trio setting with Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass. Chandler was born with rock and roll surging through his veins, but good jazz always helped expand his mind. He planned to segue records together until he could gather his anxious feelings into coherent thoughts.

A segue, pronounced "SEG-WAY", is a musical transition known as a "gapless bridge", a lost art among most robot clone disc jockeys of the eighties. The concept of playing sets of music related by some often invisible theme went back twenty years to the formative days of "free form" radio. Chandler learned this musical structuring from his artist mother at the impressionable age of nine while listening to disc jockeys like Rick Albright on KPBC-FM in Pasadena, California. The "gap" developing in his weary mind twenty years later was one of credibility. The lights on the telephones had been constantly blinking since he arrived. He started the record he had cued up on turntable number two while panning up its pot and panning down the pot on turntable number one. Segue! He switched off the spent turntable, punched the microphone on and intoned lightly over the music with the deep yet warm voice of a seasoned announcer: "KBZ-FM...One-Oh-One megahertz on your dial...The Buzz from Santa Barbara California."

He cued up his next selection before dealing with the listeners who were calling on the phones. It was about two hours before dawn when the morning music and news tandem would relieve him on the airwaves at six o'clock. By this time, most of the callers had given up, but one light continued to flash. At first the caller seemed in a daze until she realized that someone had finally answered. It was Sherry, a twenty-one year old singer with a body that seemed forever sweet sixteen. She shared a two bedroom and two bath duplex with Rick Albright on the Riviera near the Santa Barbara Mission in the foothills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Chandler got his usual instant excitement from the sound of her sultry voice. The empty studio intensified the loneliness that weighed heavy inside his chest.

CHAPTER THREE: Sherry was sleeping when she heard a car pulling into the carport. After some rustling noises in the other bedroom, the car left and headed down the windy roads into the city. Rick usually fell into bed immediately after his air shift. Sherry noticed that the illuminated clock face next to her antique brass bed read 3:25. First she thought that one of the irregularly scheduled regular power failures had occurred. She dreamily drifted into the living room to check the battery operated clock that Rick used to determine the length of any electrical outage so he could reset his VCR, answering machine and assorted electronic equipment. It also read 3:25. She punched the button on the stereo and the lush jazz sound of Miles Davis filled the morning night with a trumpet crescendo. A quick check of the other bedroom revealed the belongings of her roommate scattered among open drawers and littered closets. The music ended as she moved toward the kitchen. A scratchy whoosh began repeating its unattended mantra between the speakers filled with the frequency modulation of FM radio.

Sherry had been ringing the KBZ hotline for about fifteen minutes when she heard percussion and electric pianos melting into melody. She put the unanswering ringing tone on the speaker phone for another twenty minutes while she prepared some chamomile tea. She lounged comfortably on the long sofa absorbing the cerebral music between sips of tea and sleepy yawns. The recognizable voice of Chandler Phillips gave the station identification as he segued into a familiar track by Weather Report. The same voice was now talking to her from the speaker phone.

Sherry knew that Chandler had the hots for her and she had a warm feeling for him. They compared notes about the sudden departure of Mister Midnight. Rick was usually very predictable and worried concern slipped from between her sensual lips into his aroused ear. Chandler calmed her down and promised to come by as soon as he was relieved. He had never made love to Sherry in person, only in his dreams. She was the most frequent fantasy that wet his dreams when he was alone at night. He contemplated horniness as his mind drifted back to when he first met Rick Albright, the man who fixed him up with his first lay.

A native of San Francisco, Cosmic Charlie was one of the many music fanatics known collectively as "Dead Heads". His life had been filled with the music and philosophy of the Grateful Dead since the weekend he spent in June of 1967 at the Monterey International Pop Festival. He was introduced in psychedelic splendor there to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and so many other historically influential musicians during that "Summer of Love". He was currently writing a book about this experience called "The Weekend of Love" with Chandler's mother, Judy Phillips. He had met Judy and her then nine year old son at the Monterey Fairgrounds during the historic first rock festival there. She lost her husband Jack in a 1966 plane crash in Vietnam.

C.C., as Charlie is known in the music industry, is an audio whiz of magical proportions. He was still in high school when he began his cosmic career as a part time engineer at KXPX-FM in San Francisco, historically called the first FM Rock "Underground Radio" station in America. He tagged along with his father one chilly Marin County night and met the patriarchal guru known as "Big Daddy" who pioneered KXPX. C.C.'s family business was the procurement and dissemination of the finest marijuana from Jamaica, Southern Mexico, Western Oregon and Northern California. By the time the samples of weed had been consumed, Charlie had rewired the entire wall of stereo equipment in Big Daddy's cavernous music room and gotten a job at the hippest radio station on the planet.

CHAPTER FOUR: After an impressive few months of practicing wizardry on the ancient equipment at KXPX, Charlie headed to Pasadena to help get KPBC-FM on the air in Pasadena. This station was the first "Underground Radio" station in Southern California, and it was actually located "underground" in the basement of the Pasadena Baptist Church. The P-B-C in the station call letters represent the church that owned the station until Big Daddy convinced the owners of KXPX that a sister station in Los Angeles would be profitable. Charlie picked up Rick Albright who was hitchhiking to Pasadena to get a job at the rumored hippy radio station that was starting there. Charlie always had cosmic experiences like this one. When the Grateful Dead album AOXOMOXOA was released, he got his nickname of Cosmic Charlie from one of its songs. He moved into the Sierra Madre Canyon home of his new friend Judy Phillips and her son Chandler. Rick Albright lived on their sofa until he was hired as a weekend DJ, when he moved to a communal house in Old Town Pasadena. Young Chandler became the unofficial station mascot. His father figures were the teenage hipsters Charlie and Rick.

Judy Phillips never married Charlie, but they have been together all these years. Charlie had placed a phone call to Mister Midnight that caused his flight from reality. The old Pasadena Baptist Church was in the news. A broken water pipe had caused major structural damage to the basement, and the skeletal remains of a body had been found buried below the pulpit in a chamber that had been sealed since The Great Radio Strike of 1968. The only clue to the identity of the body was a silver chain around the neck with an Ankh pendant. In ancient Egyptian art, the Ankh is a cross with a loop on the top. It is the symbol of eternal life, and was a favorite of hippies in the sixties.

Charlie made several calls until late at night after he finagled the information about the Ankh pendant from a newspaper reporter friend. His first call was to Rick Albright. Rick was interested in the discovery but showed no signs of concern. Charlie then drove to Hollywood to talk to a friend in Laurel Canyon. In a rustic cabin among the trees, C.C. found the corpse of Jim Greco, a mid-morning disc jockey who had been on vacation the past few days from his radio show. He never got even decent "ratings" during survey periods, but his boss Harry Albion kept renewing his contract year after year. The apparent cause of death was a drug overdose. This would look plausible in the newspaper the next day, but there would be suspicion among those who knew him well. Jim had always been called "Mister Clean" behind his back because he had always avoided alcohol, cigarettes and recreational drugs while projecting to his radio audience the image of living in the fast lane. Jim Greco got his start in radio at KPBC back in 1968. A cosmic segue connected the two corpses in C.C.'s mind. He made a second phone call to Rick Albright, during which Charlie could sense a sudden agitation in the inflection of his usually mellow friend. He then called Judy with the information about the suspicious circumstances in the death of "Mister Clean" and the nervousness shown by Rick Albright. Judy tried to reach her son Chandler, but all she got was his answering machine. She would not find out about Mister Midnight until late in the afternoon when Charlie called her again after talking to Sherry in Santa Barbara.

CHAPTER FIVE: As dawn approached, Chandler changed gears from progressive jazz instrumentals to early rock and roll music. He started by playing Chuck Berry music, beginning with him singing "Johnny B. Goode"; followed by The Beatles doing their version of his song "Rock and Roll Music" and their version of the Carl Perkins record "Matchbox"; then he played the original "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins followed by the Elvis Presley version; and to close the set, the classic hit "Don't Be Cruel". After a brief interruption to get the remaining commercials out of the way, he combined songs written by Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry sung by the composers with early Rolling Stones versions of both their works, and ended with more Beatles music. His journey through the late fifties and early sixties was ending, but his trip through the late eighties was gathering momentum.

The morning disc jockey was Sonny Daley who teamed with the KBZ-FM newsman Justin Scoop. They played off each other well enough and the music from six o'clock until nine was always cheerful and stimulating. To explain his being on the air this morning, Chandler used the excuse of Rick suffering an acute attack of food poisoning . Daley and Scoop just shrugged and went into their regular routine billed as "The Morning Buzz".

Chandler thought of Sherry as a merging of the stage persona of a teenage Nancy Wilson of the group Heart with the wise voice of a knowing young Billie Holiday: the face of innocent eroticism dripping with the truth of the naked blues. Chandler drove his Volvo into the foothills above the coastal town. The high peaks of the Santa Ynez Mountains stood outlined above the awakening orange and gray sky as the sunrise slowly erased the shadows from the road. The beaches in Santa Barbara face mostly toward the south, unlike most of the rest of Southern California. The seasonal movement of the constantly worshipped sun and the cool Pacific Ocean breezes wash this paradise with a year round temperate climate. When the Channel Islands are clearly visible offshore, one can inhale the majestic view and breathe a freshness of purpose.

The feminine perfume of Sherry Hayworth added new fragrant feelings to this earthy view. She smiled and waved as he twisted along the narrow footpath that cut through the bright flowers filling the sloping garden. Sherry was wrapped in a powder blue bathrobe. She hugged Chandler.

CHAPTER SIX: Rick Albright had expressed his new age philosophy of celibacy to Chandler. He began practicing abstinence after a nasty breakup with the flower child bride he had met in the Pasadena commune he moved into twenty years earlier. He lived with her until 1977 when he moved to Santa Barbara to escape the pain of betrayal by a close friend. Adultery had spoiled his world and diminished his once powerful drive.

Sherry was a virgin when she fell in love with a football jock while attending Santa Barbara High School. She married her boyfriend after graduation and he went off immediately to serve in the Navy. They divorced two years later, after constant loneliness and marital turmoil left her chronically frustrated and somewhat naive sexually. She had been sharing the duplex with Rick for the past year. Her roommate became her best friend and mentor. Mister Midnight has an extensive record collection. She was exposed to all forms of music from all periods of time. The major influence in her singing is "The Blues". She developed a mature attitude from this education and was growing out of her emotional stagnation. He introduced her to songwriters and lyricists who were inspired by the richness of her vocals and the impulse of her beauty. Rick also protected her from the sharks in the music business. Sherry loved him in a very special way.

Chandler could take advantage of the vulnerability of the lady of his dreams, but since the initial attraction they felt when they first met, they have had an unspoken agreement to wait until the time was right to make love for the first time. His many sexual encounters began in his early teens with hippy chicks and free love advocates, but he always avoided long term relationships. With the guidance of Rick Albright during his decade in Santa Barbara, he has become very selective sexually as he developed an appreciation of the many other feminine virtues and mysterious charms. Although mostly sleeping alone, he led a very active fantasy life. Sherry had spoken to him about her secret fantasies. He knew he was one of them, but it was time for them to comfort each other. They slept together side by side but never touched in any carnal way. Sherry let him rest while she took the phone call from Charlie. She filled him in on the events in Santa Barbara and promised to have Chandler call his mother when he awoke.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Big Daddy left Philadelphia for San Francisco in the early 1960's. Hushed rumors hinted of a pending payola scandal, but he and his partner Johnny Tripp never were indicted. They put on the first big Bay Area concerts, including The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. FM Radio was in its infancy. The novelty of stereo was just emerging from the high fidelity audio equipment in the age of Hi Fi. If television was being criticized as the "vast wasteland", then FM Radio was the toxic waste dump. Lots of easy listening elevator music filled the airwaves. Rock and Roll was rare outside of AM radio and good Rock and Roll was not heard at all. Big Daddy called all the FM stations in the San Francisco area until he found one with its phone disconnected. He approached the station owner with a proposition. He would buy time on the station at night when nothing was on the air. During the day the station was making some money running foreign language programs. Big Daddy would sell commercial time in lieu of a salary. There were always assorted characters who would gather at his home and relax in the music room turning each other on to phonograph records and tapes of all types of music like Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues, Psychedelic Rock, Jazz, Blues, Folk, Classical, Indian Ragas and some that could not be categorized easily. It became apparent that the only way to label music was either good or bad. These friends were musicians, artists, writers and street people who were part of the emerging cultural Renaissance of the San Francisco hippy spirit.

North Beach still had remnants of the Beat Generation of the fifties. The Acid Tests; and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters; and the Grateful Dead Family; and the Family Dog; and The Jefferson Airplane; and the Human Be Ins; and the Love Ins; and the Golden Gate Park Free Concerts all contributed to a cultural upheaval. Now the gathering of the tribes was available on the FM airwaves. Hip oriented businesses were the first sponsors along with concert promoters and record companies. These anti-establishment disc jockeys created a new capitalism. And Big Daddy was the three hundred pound spiritual "Guru". The birth in early 1967 of "Underground Radio" helped ignite the June Weekend known as the Monterey International Pop Festival. This meeting of the music centers of New York, Los Angeles, London and the revolutionary "San Francisco Sound" was the first explosive musical orgasm felt around the world. At the center fueling the fire was "The Baby Boom Generation" comprised of the first generation of teenagers who lived their entire lives under the cultural influence of television and under the daily doomsday threat of complete destruction by "The Bomb".

The owners of the first twenty-four hour FM Rock radio station in America broadcasting in San Francisco were convinced by Big Daddy to purchase a low power Pasadena FM station from the Pasadena Baptist Church to infiltrate the Los Angeles market. It never made much money for the church, but they could broadcast sermons and community affairs programs to the local conservative community. When the "longhairs" moved to town to spread the new musical gospel, a conflict began to brew. It would finally boil over and lead to "The Great Radio Strike of 1968". FM was completely devoid of rock programming. Three AM stations competed for the Top Forty audience. One station was so tight playlisted that it only had a Top Thirty records that it would play. It billed itself as "Boss Radio" before Bruce Springsteen was high school age. Album cuts were almost never played. With FM stations playing some form of contemporary music all over the dial today, it is hard to judge how radical it was to play the Long Album Version of "Light My Fire" by The Doors, even though the 45 r.p.m. version was a Top Forty Hit that eventually reached Number One on the national Billboard Magazine chart.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The basement of the Pasadena Baptist Church was like a catacombs. The concrete entrance hall was dark and musty. Pieces of an old pipe organ were scattered in the corner. The signal was monaural. The basement studio was intimate. Broadcast equipment was funky. "Please do not stand in front of the speaker, you are blocking the sounds, man." Two old DX-77 microphones pictured in photos of old time radio shows were used by this new breed of "Underground Radio" Disc Jockeys. Most radio stations had what was called a "format". This was a playlist picked by the music director in close consultation with the Program Director. The playlist could be described as tight or rigid. The Program Director was responsible for the "sound" of the station. Underground Radio was unique in that the announcer or disc jockey also chose the music to be played. To categorize this new concept, format descriptions of "Free Form" or "Progressive Rock" were coined. Los Angeles has always been the home of the recording industry and Hollywood attracted international media attention. The seed of Underground Radio was planted in San Francisco in early 1967, and it was spread throughout the country later that year when the tiny Pasadena FM Mono station in a church basement exploded into the airwaves. The coverage of the signal was sporadic. Rube Goldberg FM antennae sprung up all over the cities and towns of the sprawling landscape of Radioland as random patterns of wires were strung inside homes to try to capture some of the magic contained in the weak FM Mono signal.

Mister Midnight stared through the windshield at the passing white lines on the highway. The Flying Burrito Bros. were singing the Merle Haggard song "White Line Fever" from the tape deck speakers as his Chevy headed over the San Marcos Pass toward Lake Cachuma. He would drive until dawn and sleep at a motel somewhere near Morro Bay. Whenever he was on the central coast near here, he thought about Hearst Castle and the movie "Citizen Caine". Film Buff Chandler said that the real reason William Randolph Hearst was pissed off at Orson Welles for making the film "Citizen Caine" was that "Rosebud" was a pet name that Hearst used for a private part of his paramour Marion Davies. This was another version of the innocent mystery of a childhood sled. Rick always pictured Big Daddy as a benevolent presence in the style of Orson Welles. As his fellow disc jockey Max Leslie once said, "Did you ever see Big Daddy and Orson Welles having lunch together? Maybe that was because they are the same person."

Rick remembered the Egyptian Ankh pendant, the only clue to the identity of the long decomposed corpse. He knew it must have belonged to the teenage girl who frequently got high with staff members at KPBC-FM in 1968. He also knew that his life could be in danger. While he was a novice disc jockey as a young man, he had witnessed the murder. There were so many runaways and groupies hanging out in the basement studios that she was never missed. The sales manager was having a little fun with a hippy chick and it had just got out of hand. Since a body was never found, he thought it must have been a marijuana induced hallucination.

CHAPTER NINE: Maybe she did not die that night. Back then he had just recently strayed from the condition of being "virgin to the weed" and the bright colors and enhanced aural pleasures often made all his experiences run together in youthful ecstasy. That sales manager was now the General Manager of KBLA-FM, the top rated FM station in Los Angeles. Harry Albion had a nasty reputation concerning young girls. Charges were never filed against him, but he made the movie studio casting couch ritual into a radio station art form. Jim Greco, now with KBLA-FM, also was a potential witness to the murder. His religious upbringing by a preacher father had kept all drugs and alcohol from his lips or other body orifices. Jim was also at KPBC-FM that night when the party quest for hippy nookie that turned into a violent rape and now probable murder was going on inside the sales office. The identity of the dead girl had to be discovered. "Cosmic Charlie" was the whiz kid engineer at the station. When Rick got the news on the phone a couple of hours ago, neither he nor Charlie could remember the name of the hippy girl. In the age of flower children, runaways and other seekers drifted in and out of the lives of Underground Radio Disc Jockeys and Hippy Musicians. Some were talented. Some just naive and horny. Some were searching for themselves. Some were just searching for a good time. After taking needed rest, Mister Midnight would drive straight up Highway 101 to Eureka. His friend Barry has a music store up there and could possibly have some clues that could help solve the unraveling drama of this "murder mystery".

Barry worked wonders on string instruments and was the stage manager for Pandora's Box, the sometimes house band at KPBC in the early days. He was always hanging around the station. Barry had kept in touch with the former KPBC DJ Parker Knight who still worked in radio up north in Seattle. "It's HIGH NOON on the other side of the world...Midnight in Seattle. There are thousands of insomniacs in the Naked Emerald City, I am just one of them...YOUR MID KNIGHT RIDER". It seemed that most former hippy disc jockeys seemed to be working graveyard shifts if they were still alive or residing in a cemetery if they had found nirvana in hippy heaven.

Parker Knight used to live in Humboldt County. While there he wrote the lyrics to the song recorded by the group Mallard called "She's Long and She's Lean" about an imagined sexual liaison with the talented mural artist named Cindy Lu. She lived in an apartment above the bar where she worked. Most everyone who was a part of the scene gathered at this local hippy "after hours" hangout called The Oldtown Palace Bar located on Second Street. Barry let Parker crash on a sofa at the back of his tiny music store in Arcata. Arcata was the hip Humboldt State College town waiting for University status among some redwood trees overlooking Humboldt Bay. It was a ten mile hitchhike or drive south to Oldtown Eureka. Parker pulled a weekly shift on the small college FM station while he wrote song lyrics with musicians who had left the congested cities for the spacey inspiration of The Great Pacific Northwest. Barry was an "unofficial" historian of the early FM Rock days as he kept in touch with most of the still living members of the tribe.

CHAPTER TEN: A friendly voice in the night. Darkness fills the bedrooms of the city. The all night DJ sends music to every lonely person. It is easy to fantasize about who is behind the voice speaking from the radio. Playing music for a living seems glamorous. But what about the human being behind the microphone? The stomach is the first consideration. Food for nourishment. The need for occasional bowel movements and the draining of urine from the kidneys. A record ends and another must begin. The radio station is usually empty after business hours and all day on weekends. One man or one woman must keep the music flowing and the commercials added at the right time. One must answer the phone calls from those faceless strangers still awake. Mister Midnight is one of the last of the "artistes of the airwaves" who has roots back to late sixties Underground Radio. He puts music together with a purposeful flow that communicates on several subtle levels like an audio movie.

Most radio today is more "Underfed" than "Underground". Playlists are put together from meaningless surveys based on listener demographics. FM radio has become the embodiment of what killed AM radio where music is used only as filler between commercials. The airwaves belong to the people but the "bottom line" takes precedence over creativity. Radio "personalities" project a "party" feeling and lose sight of the magic of the music that they play or that they should be playing. It has been two decades since Big Daddy spoke the prophetic words, "The disc jockeys have become robots. AM radio is dead and its corpse is stinking up the airwaves". If he were alive today, he could say the same about FM radio, but he would understand that the incredible cost of owning a radio station in the eighties will keep rotting corpses on the air forever just as a mortuary is an eternal business.

Big Daddy's words seem frozen in a time warp, as they continue to echo his perception about most radio announcers. He said DJs continue "...performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound, and reducing it to a series of blips and bleeps and happy, oh yes, always happy, sounding cretins who are poured from bottles every three hours. They have succeeded in making everyone on the station staff sound the same: assine. This is the much coveted 'station sound'...". On his late sixties album "Absolutely Free", Frank Zappa expounded "Kill Ugly Radio". Maybe somebody thinks this includes disc jockeys.

The "Original" Staff of KPBC FM Circa January, 1968: Rick Albright; "Cosmic Charlie"; Burton M. Williams (BMW); Max Leslie and Sarah Leslie; Parker Knight; "The Thin Man"; Heather Sunshine; Jim Greco; and "The Prophet"...

With the burst of teenage energy that propels one into their early twenties with eyes wide open and the desire to try anything, we accomplished impossible feats because we did not know that anything was impossible. When one approaches the thirties, the body does not heal as quickly as before and the mind is so full of crap that the magic is somehow gone. To be naive is not as bad as it is often portrayed by Hollywood.

In his original screenplay "The Blue Dahlia", Raymond Chandler expressed the need for simplicity by having a character say "just don't get too complicated...when a guy gets too complicated, he's unhappy...and when he's unhappy, his luck runs out...".

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY SIMILARITY TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL AND EXISTS ONLY IN THE MIND OF THE READER.

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