CHAPTER 3
I never really got back into my studies, however, I DID really get into the drama department. It was about the only part of college appealing to me. I was in "Look Homeward Angel", "Oklahoma", and other productions. By Spring of '66, I dropped out and the draft board got real interested in me. I joined the Navy on a deferred departure/guaranteed school of my choice/buddy program. My friend and I were to leave in the Fall. That Summer we signed on with a company that was clearing right of way for Interstate 85. My friend hurt his back and I re-injured my knee. We were both rejected for service and both overjoyed. I married my high school sweetheart and went back to work for a printing company, my job just before leaving for the Navy. I wanted to be in radio again and got an offer to go to Brunswick, Georgia to WMOG to be afternoon drive announcer. We packed everything we owned in a U-Haul trailer, so well known to radio gypsies, and headed for the Georgia coast. Within a few weeks the news director quit and I was promoted into that job. I was there in time for the 1966 United States Jaycees Convention on Jekyll Island and The Ten Outstanding Young Men Of The Years awards. I met some future superstars like Peter Jennings, the keynote speaker, Ralph Nader, Joseph Califano. I also met our Governor, Lester Maddox, famous for chasing black people out of his Atlanta restaurant with an ax handle. While attending the conference in my capacity of news director, someone asked me if they could get a copy of the tape of one of the addresses. A light bulb went off and I quickly put together a production line making dubs of the addresses at the conference. The tapes sold for $5.00 each or a package of 5 for $25.00. After buying the tape and making the dubs all night at the station for about a week, the tapes were shipped out and the profit was about $600.00, about a month and a half's salary at the station.
In the fall of 1966 I recorded Christmas Greetings for troops in Viet Nam
Georgia Governor Lester Maddox and me at Jaycees National Convention in 1966 at Jekyll Island
In early '67, Romeo called and asked me to come back to Atlanta to work for Mercury again. He had moved there and taken over as branch manager. In the few months at WMOG, a lot had changed. The guy who hired me left. Half the staff had resigned when the sales manager was made GM. The guy was always pretty nice to me. He'd come in about 10:00AM, open the mail then go next door to The Deck, a seafood restaurant which opened at 11:00AM. There he drank his lunch, then disappeared till about 4:00PM. Then he came back, rounded up as many staff members as would go and it was back to The Deck till about eight or nine. The handwriting was on the wall for the guy and everybody knew it. Romeo offered me pretty good money for 1967, $150.00 a week and expenses, plus he sent me a couple of hundred to move on. We found an apartment pretty close to Jimmy Davenport's house. My territory was North Alabama, Georgia, and East Tennessee and Romeo wanted me on the road as much as possible.
Dave Dudley and me in front of Mercury Branch in 1967. Where did I get that tie?
I went to Birmingham with our sales rep to call on stations and accounts. I called on the stations and came back to the motel. When I walked into the room, the sales rep was in bed with two girls. I was startled. Later, the girls took us to a BYOB club on the second floor of a warehouse type building, downtown. The place was dark and filled with smoke. We sat down in a booth and my eyes began to adjust. I had only heard of "dirty dancing" before; it was happening right before my eyes. The movie by the same name was tame compared to what went on there. The girls were telephone groupies sent over to the motel by the music director of a country station in town. The next morning I had to be up early to go over to a new station owned by two of the funniest guys I'd ever met, Doug Layton and Tommy Charles. They had worked at one of the stations but kept getting into trouble for their bawdy bits. They bought their own station, WAQY, Wacky Radio. We ate donuts in the control room and I laughed so hard that I cried. On the way back to Atlanta, they sales rep for the branch asked me if I'd do him a favor. He wanted a divorce and he figured that the only way to get one was to catch his wife with another guy. I might have been from a small Georgia town, BUT. It was my last road trip with the guy wackier than Layton & Charles.
I'll never forget working a Johnny Mathis concert and a Swingin' Medallions frat party on the same night at the University Of Georgia in Athens. Mathis had a reputation as a very demanding artist, so I was nervous. I looked forward to the Medallions party, calling a high school buddy who was going to Georgia and arranging to hook up after my visit with Mr. Mathis. Johnny's road manager met me backstage at the auditorium and informed me that he didn't see anyone before the show. I pleaded with him to at least just let me speak to him. What was really important was that Mathis knew that someone from the label was there because there were rumors that he wasn't going to re-sign. He relented and Johnny Mathis was one of the nicest people I've ever met. A quick hello turned into 30 minutes. He WAS impressed that someone from Mercury had showed up and I wish I could say that he re-signed; he moved to Columbia Records. It was homecoming and there were parties at every frat house. I saw Doug Clark & The Hot Nuts at one party. They were playing while wearing purple jock straps. They did "My Ding-A-Ling" and other rowdy songs to the delight of everyone. The Medallions, the Tams, and The Drifters were an institution on Southern campuses. Otis Redding and The Pine Toppers had been the hottest frat party band. I saw him at a party at Auburn, then his records started happening and his price went out of range of most fraternities. The Medallions were a bunch of South Carolina college guys who had a hit with "Double Shot (of my baby's love)" and put on a great show. I woke up the next morning in the room of another high school acquaintance. She was in grad school. We bumped into one another at one of the parties; I don't remember leaving with her.
The Serendipity Singers were appearing at a small college in Northern Alabama. The town was so small it didn't have a motel or hotel so we stayed in Muscle Shoals at the Holiday Inn. The group wanted to unwind after the show and mentioned the town was dry. After some inquiring, it was discovered that the nearest place to buy beer and wine was about 50 miles away in Tennessee. Away we went into the backwoods. I wasn't uncomfortable at all at the roadside tavern we found. The two guys from the group had pretty long hair considering where we were. It was almost like that Charlie Daniel's Band's song. We purchased enough beer to fill the trunk and headed back South. After the show, everyone gathered at the pool and began to relax. Now keep in mind that this was a group whose last hit was "Beans In My Ears" so they were a little bohemian, to say the least. Soon clothes began to come off and almost everyone was skinny dipping. A guest called and complained. Soon, local law enforcement officers arrived. I hadn't participated in the swimming and at the sight of a police car made a bee line to the office to try and run interference. I managed to keep them at bay long enough for everyone to get something on. The officers confiscated the rest of the beer and just warned everyone to "behave" after the road manager broke out copies of their album for the group to autograph.
My favorite place to go was Knoxville. There, I called on Joe Sullivan, PD of WKGN and Johnny Pirkle, music director at WNOX and a couple of other stations, country, middle of the road, and r&b. One of the jocks at WKGN was a really nice guy named Wayne Bernard. Today he's Charlie Chase on TNN. At WNOX, the PD was Rex Miller. Rex had worked at a lot of big market stations including WQXI. He eventually quit or got fired every where he worked. Legend has it , he was let go at Quixie after saying "they don't really deliver those flowers do they?" immediately after playing an FTD Florists commercial. WNOX was a 10,000 watt clear channel station at 990 on the dial. At night, they had a directional signal that reached all the way to Myrtle Beach. "The Big Knox Music Box" is what Rex named it. It was the most soulful Top 40 station I'd ever heard. We played a lot of local and regional r&b records at WQXI, but the mix was about 50% at WNOX. Pirkle was an amazing guy. He did afternoons, managed bands, and ran record hops every weekend. On Friday nights, Johnny would have about four hops going at the same time in different little towns on the outskirts of Knoxville. He booked the bands he managed, rotating them through the different towns. He had a guy at each one, usually in an armory, who ran the show. Johnny would jump in his Buick Riviera after getting off the air headed to the first one. He'd go on stage, give away some records, then he was off to the next one. I cannot imagine how much money he was making, but a few years later he bought his own station. One of the bands was "Sweet William and The Zodiacs". They played mostly r&b and Sweet William was a character and a half. He liked to sniff glue and would put a tube or two in a lunch sack to which he had attached some wire or string or something. He'd put the bag on like a feed sack and play his ass off. There were plenty of young ladies hanging around WNOX; my trips to Knoxville were frequent and fun. During one visit, Rex Miller asked me if I missed being on the air, I said "yes". He listened to one of my air checks, then offered me the 12noon to 3PM air shift. I hated to leave Romeo, but the thought of doing something besides overnights at a big radio station was more than I could stand. Additionally, I loved the mountains and Knoxville. Once again, my wife and I packed up the U-haul and headed North.
We moved into an apartment about a mile down Whittle Springs Road from WNOX. I started my air shift and began settle in to my new routine. Because of the directional nighttime signal, the all night shift had to be done from the transmitter which was in a different location from the studios. The all night guy was Eddie Beacon (your swingin' deacon). We became friends and I would go to the transmitter some nights with a sack of Krystal hamburgers and we'd talk. Sometimes I would answer the request line. On the weekends, there was usually beer present and it was a party, particularly when University of Tennessee coeds showed up. Rex Miller taught me how to quit "yucking" on the radio, use my natural voice and speak from my diaphragm. He was the first PD who really ever coached me. He often asked me to help him put promotions together. Rex had so much talent and imagination that even the simplest promo for the station was a brilliant piece of radio drama. Many years later, I was coaching Paul Frees long distance during a promo recording session for WHBQ, and he paid me a great compliment. "You're a brilliant wordsmith" were his words. Frees in addition to voicing radio commercials, is famous as the voice of "Boris" on The Adventures Of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sadly, he passed away not long ago. I would have never received that compliment had I not worked for Rex. He sort of adopted me, I guess. The first hot clock I ever saw, he drew. He taught me how to use inflexion (do not end everything on an up) and how to phrase. I also learned to practice pre-reading something out loud; mistakes were less likely. Rex also taught me to make my words paint pictures.
The staff all got along working and playing together. We were promoted on air as "The Magnificent Seven" using the Marlboro theme. Rex gave me my second radio name, Kincaid. At WQXI I had been Art Nelson. We had a news guy who had been at WNOX since the days when they used to broadcast the "Saturday Night Hayride". He could tell a story about every early country star who was on the show. He was getting up in years and wore dentures. He was a great guy. Sometimes when he was doing the news, his dentures would slip and you could hear them clacking. Often they slipped so bad that he couldn't speak. I had to leave the control room to keep from laughing in front of the glass that separated control room and newsroom. Nights were handled by Rob Galbreath, UT student and aspiring songwriter. Rob released at least one record on Columbia I believe in about '69 or '70. WNOX was a fun place lead by a fun GM who could literally hypnotize people. Every time you turned around, there was a get together either in the conference room or at a bar across the street. We got a new receptionist and at one of these parties, the GM hypnotized her and told her it was getting hot in the room. He stopped her just short of completely disrobing, at least at the station. He was completely unaware that she was my downstairs neighborhood until we bumped into each other as he was leaving her place one night about midnight. He stopped by the control room more frequently, complimenting me on my air work.
Postcard of WNOX studios on Whittle Springs Road
Otis Redding headlined a show sponsored by The Big 99; all of the jocks were there. Johnny Pirkle introduced Otis and the auditorium of 90 % white kids got really funky. After the show, I got Otis to sign a picture for me. Six months later, he died in a plane crash. Eddie had to leave early to be on the air by midnight. My wife and I had ridden to the concert with Rex and his wife. Someone suggested we go to the transmitter. We stopped and got beer on the way there. I went on the air with Eddie and we were playing Otis Redding, Willie T, The Tams, Medallions and having a ball. We were getting calls from all over the Carolinas requesting songs and making dedications. There was a guy who hung around the station a lot who went to UT and was entertainment director for one of the fraternities. He showed up and offered us a joint. I'd never seen one; never thought about smoking one. It didn't seem to have an effect on me. We were out of the control room and the phone rang. The guy said it was for me. I said "who is it", taking the receiver." Joe Sullivan" he said. I said "Joe Sullivan sucks" and the Audiomax (a piece of equipment that maintained the volume of the audio) in the audio chain feeding that 10,000 watt transmitter shot it through the ether and up and down the East coast from Virginia to Florida. Now using the word "suck" in 1967 was tantamount to accusing someone of being homosexual. It was a memorable night for one listener who happened to have a tape recorder on. That tape was Exhibit 1 in a lawsuit brought by Joe against Scripps-Howard Broadcasting. Rex, Eddie and I all got fired the same day. It was Christmas, I was blackballed & couldn't get a job. My wife and I once again packed everything in a U-haul and headed back to La Grange. I figured that I had ruined my chances of ever working in the business again. I gave serious consideration to going back to work at the printing company. I was pretty low. Rex went to work as GM of a Cincinnati daytime r&b station an old buddy of his owned. He offered me a job but the pay was lousy and I didn't have the money to move. Eddie went to work at WIMO in Winder, Georgia. After about a month, I got a job at a station in Douglas, Georgia. I knew from the minute I walked into the place it wasn't for me. I don't know what it was, I just hated the place. I called Eddie and he told me to rush a tape to him because someone at WIMO had just quit. I figured if I was going to be miserable, why not be miserable with someone I knew. I got hired and left Douglas after one week. I got my check and cashed it on the way out of town headed for the big city of Winder. We hadn't even bothered to look for a place in Douglas, living in a motel for a week and all our worldly possessions in...you guessed it, a U-haul trailer. Eddie had married one of the coeds who hung out at the WNOX transmitter and already had a place to live. We stayed with them a couple of days before we found our own place. As I said, WIMO wasn't the BIG TIME, but Eddie and I knew that it was just the tab we had to pay for that night of partying in Knoxville.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO ME (KINCAID) ON WNOX IN 1967
Rex Miller, his wife Carol and me the last time I saw him in 1979.
WIMO was owned by a guy named Cecil Girder. The guy who actually ran the place was Bud somebody, a former semi-successful jock who also had fallen from grace for some reason. Bud liked to bust our chops. We were so poor, it was funny. The Welcome Wagon lady came to visit and gave us all these coupons for various merchants. One was a $5.00 gift certificate for a drug store. Eddie and I headed straight there and bought three or four cartons of cigarettes. As long as we had smokes, we could do without food. We let our wives handle meals that and they came up with some really creative combinations. I did mornings and Eddie did afternoons. We played mostly Top 40. Mid-mornings were a mix of "Women's World" hosted by Mrs. Grider, local shows featuring the county agent, and ministers. Early afternoons were handled by a guy named "Kinky" who had worked at the station for years. Kinky was also music director, news director, public service director. He guarded the new records like a hawk. Many times he would like the flip side of an up and coming hit. To prevent the two renegades, Eddie & me from playing the "hit" side, he'd take a soldering iron and melt the grooves. To repay him, Eddie and I would hide the trade magazines and his cherished TV Guide from him. Fortunately, I still had contacts in the music business in Atlanta, and my buddies would send care packages of 45's to the house so we could play the hits. WIMO had a production room that rivaled any Atlanta station. That was one of the selling points when Eddie had originally interested me in coming there. We figured that when the station signed off we could make good quality audition tapes and eventually get back to a decent size station. The only problem was that Bud, station manager and self-styled Lord Of Production, kept it locked. He had somehow convinced Cecil that they could make a fortune producing spots for Atlanta agencies. True he did a lot of production work for the agencies, but Eddie and I figured that he was pocketing some of the bucks. We managed to get the key and make a copy.
Funny stuff was always happening at WIMO. Torturing Kinky was Eddies daily mission. The toilet was right next to the control room. Kinky kept the doors to the control room open, so while he would be doing the noon news, Eddie would go in and flush the toilet several times. Kinky would get furious. Another time, Eddie caught a mouse and put it behind the console. As luck would have it Kinky was reading a commercial or the news and the mouse ran across the desk. He had to take the rest of the afternoon off complaining of chest pains. One morning, I signed on and was reading news and happened to notice smoke coming up from the transmitter, then flames, then a big flash and everything was burning. I jumped up grabbed a fire extinguisher and put the fire out. We were off the air for two days, waiting for parts. Eddie told me if I had waited a few more minutes we could have had the week off. After a few months, Eddies got a job in Huntsville. I was even more determined to get out of Winder. Now it was just me and Kinky. Bud launched a nationwide search for a replacement, placing ads in Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World. He convinced Cecil that we needed a "big voice" for the production company. The ad made the job sound like heaven. I was dispatched to the bus station to pickup a guy who was hired sight unseen from Los Angeles. This guy was named J Paul something, weighed about 500 pounds, and when he fell off that bus after an two day ride from LA he smelled really foul. Unlike Eddie and me, Bud arranged for the guy to stay at a local hotel for a few days, however he never made it past he first week. With Eddie gone, Kinky and I had sort of made up and decided that this guy would do nothing but cause us grief and after just one day we were ready to kill him. "Well out in LA, we so on and so forth" got old instantly. We made his life a living hell. He didn't have a car, so he took a cab to and from the station. We'd hide part of his production assignments before he got to work. After he was on the air, Kinky would pile them back in his box. One night he stayed so late that the cab company had closed and he had to sleep on the production room floor. He was miserable. Kinky really hated him because Bud had given him the Billboard magazine first when it came in. It's funny how such trivial things become so important when you're working in hell. I took J Paul back to the bus station and his escape from "wonderful y-mo". Cecil and Mrs. Grider were always nice to me. Bud was Bud and I learned to just let anything he said go over my head. I decided that if I had to do time, I was going to perfect some skills. I knew that the chance to get out of there would come and I had to be ready.
A few other memorable things happened while I was in Winder. Otis Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. I wanted to go to the funeral in Macon; Bud wouldn't let me off. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. I was in Atlanta that day. I was glued to the radio driving home after dark. The nation was on pins and needles. As I neared Winder, I saw a red glow in the sky. As I pulled into town, there were cops everywhere. Someone had set fire to an abandoned warehouse. When I pulled into the driveway at my apartment, a kid who hung around the radio station came running up and handed me a rifle. "What's this for", I asked. "Protection" he said, "the n------s are trying to burn down the town". I had never owned a gun in my life. I am not a racist. I handed it back to him; "no thanks, I'm not afraid". A few months later, on June 5, 1968, I went to work as usual. I hadn't listened to the radio on the way to the station early that morning. When I walked in the station, the AP teletype machine bulletin alarm was ringing continuously. "What in the world is going on", I thought to myself. I went over to the machine and read that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. On September 6th, 1968, my wife and I lost our first child. Jay Long was born with Hiyaline Membrane Disease and died within 24 hours at a hospital in Athens, Georgia.
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