| Lincoln, Nebraska The Daily Nebraskan and KFMQ, Lincoln's Best Rock I went to high school in Bellevue Nebraska. In the summer I did ag work one year. I detasseled corn in 110 degree weather. Not for very long though. I came home exhausted and wrung out. One day I got separated from the rest of the crew I was working with. Up ahead as far as I could see was the muddy row, the corn towering above and arcing over my head. In back of me the same infinite tunnel of corn. I broke into a blind panic and began to run. I tripped, and tumbled face down into the mud, regaining my senses. It was a satori of sorts, an awakening of something deep inside of me. A nameless dread. The next summer I worked as a janitor for the school system. I worked at a little elementary school with an elderly man who seldom spoke to me and listened to easy listening radio station KFOR. I remember the haunting, ascending electric piano of Stevie Wonder on "You are the sunshine of my life" all summer long, the chills that tingled up my spine when the piano hit G# and twinged the central nervous system. I was lost in a dream, pushing my mop bucket down the long empty hallways. The next year I started selling records and stereos at the Brandies department store. That's where by chance I met radio announcer Jimmy O'Neill. Jimmy O'Neill was working at WOW in Omaha. He was famous. He had been the host of the ground breaking 1960s show "Shindig" on TV. I use to watch him in Spanish when I lived in Puerto Rico. I watched him work intensely on the phone doing a remote for the store. He gestured fanatically as he delivered the commercial. He enunciated every word. Boxed with the consonants. He literally shook when he talked he was so intense. He was as kinetic as hell even planted in the corner of the record shop. Between stop sets I asked him how to get into radio. I wanted to do what he did. I was already shaking. He told me I should go to the Columbia School of Broadcasting in Kansas City. I almost went. I got the catalog. I got some broadcast training in a special program in high school. I had decided that I wanted to be on the radio. That much I knew. I played guitar in the church choir. I played in a USO band. I played in a basement band called Queen Anne's Revenge which morphed into Grunt. I spent all my time playing guitar and piano. Don Fawn, a friend and guitar player in all those incarnation contacted me recently. He has a tape of us playing Carl Perkin's "Honey Don't." I didn't. We played the state prison once We got paid in cake. Another job one night promised real cash. It was at a church dance somewhere out in the country. We climbed into the van and did the dance. When it came time to be paid, the minister scratched his head and shrugged his shoulders. He mumbled bible words. We didn't get cash. We got a carton of hot dogs and a case of Orange Crush. We drove the van to the local drive in and watched "Fritz the Cat" the rest of the night, gorging ourselves on the best hot dogs and orange soda I ever had. We had it made. That is my work experience, summed up in three stories. I was still playing guitar and singing in a weak voice when I went to college. It was a big part of my self image and identity. The Italian blues kid. I sought out opportunities to play. At the Centennial education program, Jeff Table let me sit in with his bands, Crumbhunger and the Permanent Waves. Ric Marsh, my advisor and friend tolerated my lack of focus, timing and pitch and jammed with me. At the University one night I went solo. I played did a night in a little coffee house in the student union. It was big time. And truly awful. I decided that night that I would never be a great performer. Music went from 100% of my life to zero overnight. I decided to write instead. I got hired by the Daily Nebraskan in 1975. Vince Boucher was the editor at that time. I could write music and art pretty well. I was groomed to replace the star writer of that time, Dave Wood. My parents moved to Florida that year, leaving me at school in Lincoln. I started off at the University of Nebraska majoring in Journalism and Political Science. I was in the School of Broadcasting where I was told by the head of the department that there was "something wrong with my voice." I didn't sound like anybody else there. "I didn't have the pipes." My instructor sent me off to a doctor to get the vocal nodes sliced off my vocal chords like baloney at a deli. After the doctor stuck a mirror down my throat and noodled around for awhile, I passed on the operation. Despite the alleged grunge on my throat I carried on. I did OK in broadcast news and photography. I did good interviews and framed things well. I learned my base radio skills on the air at KRNU, the University of Nebraska radio station. A friend of my brothers, Dennis Dorgherty, who was the resident manager at my dorm knew Doug Agnew, the station manager at KFMQ. He was the son of Steve Agnew, the owner of the progressive rock station. Dennis got me an interview. He knew they were desperate for an overnight personality. They had just lost their night announcer. Doug was going down to the station with a case of beer and a couple of friends to keep the station on the air. He usually shut it down by 3 a.m. They hired me for the midnight shift. I didn't have the pipes, but I was the first one in my class to get a radio job. Steve Agnew, the extraordinary air personality and engineer hired me. They told me not to talk. Maybe it was the uncut baloney on my vocal cords, I don't know. I do know I ended up talking anyway. They let me. I played "good sets" and segued records really well. Roger Agnew, who had the best radio voice I ever heard got me up to speed. He said they had hired someone from California to come and take over, but after he got to the station I could do weekends. He told me to have a good time. I was sad, but exhilarated to be on the air at alI. I was working seven days a week, midnight to six in the morning. The guy from California finally arrived. He got off a bus in the middle of the night and came down to the station. It was over just like that. Or so I thought. It turned out that he had a few problems. He was at the station 24 hours a day telling people how to cut commercials,how to run the station, what music to play and how to be on the air. He had all the signs of someone with a strong PTSD. He drank all the time. He didn't sleep. He couldn't stand to be alone. He was locked into his anger. He was a control freak. They fired him and hired me. I continued to work seven days a week. I'd sleep two hours in the morning and get up and go write and edit for the Daily Nebraskan. The fired guy called me a couple times a night. I could not get him off the phone. He said he didn't want me to get fired like he did. He'd tell me how to survive. He started off friendly and got increasingly hostile. He broke into the station one night drunk. And stole records. He threatened to castrate me. I was getting to the point where I was carrying empty coke bottles into the parking lot in case I needed something to defend myself. As Senator Dave Landis said, "A coke bottle, now there's the weapon of choice." Dave did a jazz show on the weekends. David Kappy, Captain Classics, the guy who did the weekend classical show agreed. I finally told the program director and the station called the police. It turns out he had just gotten out of prison for assault and did not want to go back. That was my introduction to radio. KFMQ was a one hundred and fifty watt station, one of the last in the country. The big ones were usually a hundred thousand watts. What you would call a "big stick station." We covered a tristate area, and sometime were heard as far away as Canada and Wyoming. I was there for ten years. That is my fourth and final telling work tale. I left ten years later to the day I was hired. On the staff at the Daily Nebraskan I did Columns as well as news stories and editing. I was there for eight years. The bi-weekly column was very popular. It came out of the haze of grief after Michelle died. I worked on the air the night she died. I didn't sleep afterward. I was going around the clock. My friend Doug Wiel (Rueters in Great Britain) and Carla Engstrom, then editor of the Daily told me they were convinced I was not going to make it. I'd come in looking so beat. Despite the hard times, something happened that I have yet to duplicate. As I said, the column was very popular for it’s time. They are funny and emotionally congruent. I got a lot of mail and was invited to a lot of parties as a result. Included here are a few examples of the columns that aren't too chewed up my cats to read. The only reason I have them at all is that my dad took the time to clip them. The time is the early 80s. The characters, Jason and Marie (and me) walk through the dreams of the time. Life is love and friendship. Time is a frozen Popsicle stuck in the empty 'o' of our mouths. It's an existential thing. The future coming on like a freight train. But it has not arrived yet. I started work on my first novel. To the left is a poster from my first reading at the Student Union of the University. It was a well attended event. And kicked off my fiction writing career. |
| Performing Novelist and Poet I was performing more by the end of 1984. I read my fiction and poetry when ever I could. I got paid for it. I liked that. The last reading I did in Lincoln is available on interlibrary loan. I read for the Heritage Room for Nebraska writers. The video tape of that performance is archived there. I had bronchitis and was on a lot of codeine, but it ended was a really good night with a really good audience. A lot of the people I worked with at the Library came to the reading as well as my core Lincoln audience. A lot of friends. I met the future Avant Gard composer John Moran that year. He was in a formative stage when we started performing together. He met Philip Glass and was off to New York in a flash. Still, we performed at the 11th Street Gallery and at a local theatre. I read at the Zoo Bar with Warren Fine, the popular experimental novelist who had been at peak success in the 1960s. He had gotten better with time. In the 1980s he was seasoned just right. He was a tremendous presence. He gave me billing. I always appreciated that. Even though I was embarrassed by it. I was lucky to meet these people, let alone perform with them. The Zoo Bar performance was not my best. But it was really important for me. The Zoo was largely a blues bar, my essential college hang out. I didn't really hang out. I was too busy working. But I went a couple times a year. It was like Christmas and Easter mass to a lapsed Catholic. Being the triple 'A' type person I am I also bartender there for awhile. I am told I was not the worst bar tender in the history of the Zoo Bar, but I was close. I was rivaled in my terribleness only by Harry the Hippie who evidently worked the bar and tables there on LSD. People wanted to talk to me. They had me in one place. They could chase me around as I carried pitchers of beer through the dancing chaos to the pews and tables by the wall. I couldn't get anything done there. The beers and tequila sunrises just weren't flowing like milk and honey. I didn't know what to do when people tipped me. I did not have a lot of bar tending experience and it really showed. It was all a blur. A blur that didn't last too long. The cool basement, where the beer cases were stacked and the silence of the walk in freezer was my only breathing space. After I got fired, I still went there to be in the noise and wildness. I still do when I'm in town. Even though it's been awhile. Is the Zoo still there? The bar I mean? It still there in my mind. A little juke box back lit box car with Buddy Guy and Jr. Wells, Magic Slim and the Teardrops, Charlie Burton and Rock Therapy (and the Hiccups). Little Jimmy Valentine and the Heart Murmurs or Luther Allison up there on the wooden creight stage of my mind. |
Richard Braughtigan
I spent the night with Richard Braughtigan
after a short interview. We met at a bar and
listened to Irish folk music. He ordered drink
after drink. Jack Daniels straight up. He had
a credit card from his publishers. He bought
my drinks too. “Were off the record now” he
said, looking into my eyes. We were. He
had spent part of the interview talking about
how betrayed he had felt at one of his
lovers selling his love letters. Braughtigan
was not into hiding pain. He wore it like his
bonnet. A crown of it. I sipped at my drink. I
had to work at midnight at the radio station.
He drank, sang along with the music and
pounded the table. At a quarter till, we
walked down to the station. Braughtigan sat
in. I thought he would go on the air, but he
didn’t want to. He made requests and I
played them. We talked.
He could sense my hunger as a novelist.
It was like he could read my mind.
I imagine he was surrounded by hungry
young novelist and had gotten to the point
where he could smell read the urgency and
need in their eyes.
He said, “Commercial success is luck. There’
s no explaining it. If you’re not having a
good time, don’t do it.”
It was the best advice I ever got.
I spent the night with Richard Braughtigan
after a short interview. We met at a bar and
listened to Irish folk music. He ordered drink
after drink. Jack Daniels straight up. He had
a credit card from his publishers. He bought
my drinks too. “Were off the record now” he
said, looking into my eyes. We were. He
had spent part of the interview talking about
how betrayed he had felt at one of his
lovers selling his love letters. Braughtigan
was not into hiding pain. He wore it like his
bonnet. A crown of it. I sipped at my drink. I
had to work at midnight at the radio station.
He drank, sang along with the music and
pounded the table. At a quarter till, we
walked down to the station. Braughtigan sat
in. I thought he would go on the air, but he
didn’t want to. He made requests and I
played them. We talked.
He could sense my hunger as a novelist.
It was like he could read my mind.
I imagine he was surrounded by hungry
young novelist and had gotten to the point
where he could smell read the urgency and
need in their eyes.
He said, “Commercial success is luck. There’
s no explaining it. If you’re not having a
good time, don’t do it.”
It was the best advice I ever got.
| zoobar.com See Photographer Ted Kirk's Slide show of historic photos from the zoo bar and a contemporary schedule of bands and events. |
The Way We Were
The adventures of Jason, Marie and Me
The Daily Nebraskan Columns
The adventures of Jason, Marie and Me
The Daily Nebraskan Columns
