We continue with my life as I remember it through a bunch of old desk calendars I recently found in a junk drawer. The year is 1982.
OK, folks. This is very weird! I’m listening to the radio as I type this and the song “Message in a Bottle” by the Police is on. I’m listening to an oldies-type station and that song is about 25 years old. As I look at the February 1982 calendar, I see “WLHA 9-12 64AM” written down on Feb. 20. That was my first gig as a radio DJ. My roommate and I saw that the station was looking for DJs for its 9 p.m.-midnight shift on Saturdays. As neither of us were big party animals at the time, we offered our pathetic services. I recalled that I had, for some reason, written down every single song we played on the air during our shows. So, I went and found the folder that housed these songs. Opening up the playlist from that very first S.O.S. Show (I think we named it that cause we needed help) was that very same Police song, “Message in a Bottle.” Now, that’s wack.
Our first show was quite interesting as we had never been trained to run a sound board, a cart machine, turntables or pretty much anything else you’d need to know in order to get a radio show out on the air. We got to the station a little before our show was to start. Mary, one of the station’s student leaders, and Tony, the DJ who had the shift before us, were there.
We told them we were the next guys but didn’t know what we were doing. They rolled their eyes, and offered to stay and show us the ropes quickly. So, our show got off to a shaky start … not that it ever really stopped being shaky. However, we learned how to say “WLHA Lakeshore 64,” turn the record back a quarter turn so it would get up to fell speed before the song started and put commercials and PSAs into the cart machines. I don’t think we ever perfected timing the newscasts that came though at whatever time it came on.
Our first show featured blocks by the Doors and U2. We got to combine our musical tastes into one power-packed show … when we weren’t talking. It was good for us novices to have each other to bounce things off of since neither of us really knew what we were doing. Our first show concluded with “My Way” by the Sex Pistols. The song symbolized the fact that we did our show our way … badly. Hey, at least we actually played a few songs off the WLHA playlist … there weren’t all that many we liked and we never heard some of them either. We also played Devo’s “Working in a Coalmine” single at 33 RPM instead of 45 RPM. Slowing it down really created some artsy effect probably.
Over the next 14 months or so that I did the college DJ gig, my show was named the Amateur Hour, Morning Madness (although there was very litte madness), Music Explosion and Paul I Show. Seems I got the itch to change about every four weeks or so. I also went by some wacky radio names such as Mr. Dynamite and J.D. Morrison (back from the dead apparently).
The music varied, although I can saw mostly the stuff I played consisted of early 1980s new wave and punk, stuff by local artists if I had it and some regular old rock like Doors, Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, etc. … and we’re not talking just the hits from those bands. Pretty much it was anything I liked or thought I might like if I’d never heard it before. The musical mix led to some interesting segments. I’d go from the GoGo’s to Jimi Hendrix to the Sex Pistols to the Raspberries, the Ringo Starr, Duran Duran and back to Hendrix and The Byrds. That was an actual segment from a March 6, 1982 Amateur Hour with your host, Paul I.
I actually ended up getting the first real date of my life through this DJ gig. The first weekend in April, the radio station conducted a 24-hour trivia contest in which all the Lakeshore dorms participated. All the station personnel took turns on the air spinning records and asking trivia questions. The dorms had teams that would call in and try to answer the questions correctly. If they did, they scored points for their team. Once they got the right answer, they kept calling back trying to clog up the phone lines so that the other teams couldn’t get through. We also had station alumni return for guest shows, and I recall some big-time Madison DJ came back while we were there.
Anyway, you get a little wacky answering phones over and over and over at 2:30 in the morning after a few hours. So you’d have brief conversations with the people who called. I started telling female callers that they had the wrong answer, but they had a nice voice. Actually, there was one in particular, by the name of Faye, that I kept telling that to. She seemed to appreciate that.
When the trivia contest had ended, I looked up all Fayes in the campus phone book who could possible have lived in the dorm that her team was from. I found just one, and called. We talked for a while and I asked her to go see The Shivvers the following Saturday at Headliner’s. She said yes. I was shocked that I asked and shocked that she said yes. I had no clue what to do.
But I showed up at her dorm room, and a very cute brunette answered. I was hoping it was her. But that was her roommate. However, when Faye came to the door, she was very pretty. She was blonde and had glasses and I don’t remember anything else about her really. I had problems concentrating on anything she had to say because I really couldn’t even believe I was on a date.
We went to see The Shivvers on April 10 (I, of course, have that written down on my calendar). We sat at a table for most of the show, as I’d never danced with a girl before and had no clue what to do. We talked, although I couldn’t hear much of anything except the music. The band dedicated a song to us, as my roommate spilled the beans to them that I actually had a date. So I told Faye we had to dance to that one as the band dedicated it to us. I also took her backstage afterward to meet the band. I felt so awkward. I walked her home and probably didn’t hug her or kiss her or anything. Again, I was so completely clueless.
I called her a few days later and asked her if she wanted to come to the radio station sometime to see what goes on inside the studio (not much). But she said I woke her up from sleeping and I’d have to call her again. I never did. Guess I got scared. I wasn’t sure what to do. I saw her once after that … that I know of. We passed each other on campus and she said “hi” as I passed. I hadn’t recognized her until she spoke, so I didn’t even get out a return hello until she was past me. Not exactly a grand start to a dating career.
Anyway, my final radio show was Dec. 9, 1982 as I would be transferring from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the Milwaukee campus at the end of that semester. The final song? “The End” by the Doors.
Getting back to the calendars I’ve been reminiscing over…
On Feb. 22, 1982, I saw U2 at Headliner’s, a club in Madison, Wis. This was well before the band became a megahuge, stadium-filling rock act. The band, in fact, would not crack America’s Top 40 for almost three more years. But those of us with an ear for that kind of music could tell they were something special. My roommate used to write for the Mad City Music Mirror, a small paper that covered the local music scene. So he would interview all these bands as they came into town for gigs. He interviewed the likes of Nick Lowe, and Paul Carrack, not to mention Bono of U2.
I saw some good bands in Madison, including U2 and X. X put on one of the best concerts I’ve seen. U2 was good, too, but the only thing I really recall from the concert was that they let some goofball on stage at some point to sing Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” The dude in Army fatigues yelling into a mic and the song blasting Southern folk didn’t really fit in with the rest of the show.
I attended the Marquette/Wisconsin men’s basketball game on March 9, taking a Wisconsin fan bus from Madison to Milwaukee for the game. I sat in the nosebleed seats at the MECCA, previously called the Milwaukee Arena. The fan bus featured lots of beer, of which I did not partake, and several rowdy fans, some of whom I had to sit near during the game. Now, I grew up a fan of both teams. I followed the Marquette Warriors as national powers throughout the 1970s. I was as excited as anyone when the Warriors won the NCAA championship in 1977. But I was always a Wisconsin fan, too. I rooted for the football team through the Dark Ages of Badger football, listening to the games each Saturday afternoon on the radio while helping Dad change the oil on the car or whatever other task had to be done. I was also a big Wisconsin hockey fan as the Badgers won national titles a few times in the 70s. The basketball team was usually horrible, but I rooted for them anyway. And when it came to Wisconsin/Marquette, I opted for Wisconsin.
Although I wanted Wisconsin to win this game, the behavior of one or two adult males rooting for my Badgers sitting in front of me left me with a bad taste. I’ve always been pretty much a guy who enjoys rotting for a team and not against the other team. Some of the insults leveled Marquette’s way included assaults on the Warriors’ head coach, Hank Raymonds, who went to the same church I did while I was growing up. I knew this guy and it upset me that people who never met the man were yelling out that he was not very smart (in a not-so-nice way).
So, this 18-year-old, snot-nosed, sober little punk actually worked up the nerve to tell these 40-some-year-old, inebriated, red sweater-wearing guys in front of me that Hank Raymonds was a nice guy and didn’t deserve such comments. One of the guys turned around and said he didn’t mean to insult me, as I was obviously a Marquette fan. I told him I wanted Wisconsin to win and was a student at UW, but that I knew Hank Raymonds and knew the kind of person he was.
The guy actually said he was sorry or someting like that and said he didn’t mean anything personal. He kind of toned it down the rest of the way.
I’d also been through something similar in Madison the year before when Marquette visited UW. I sat next to two high school friends during that game and wasn’t real pleased with some of the negative comments tossed the Badgers’ way. After these two incidents, I was kind of over that rivalry for a while and haven’t been to anymore Wisconsin/Marquette games since. I watch that rivalry from afar.
March 28- Went to see the Police concert at the Rosemont Horizon in suburban Chicago. Joan Jett opened. I sat really far away and didn’t see all that much.
