"The Time a Stiff Caught Fire"

I WAS TYPING LETTERS TO THE EDITOR at night, often about the local concert calendar, then getting up early and slipping them under the door of the student newspaper office before anyone showed up.

One morning I was crouched down, silently feeding my latest missive through the gap at the bottom of the door, when it suddenly jerked wide open. I looked up at a stern, towering, bald man who thundered “Caught ya’!” I scrambled down the corridor like a scalded cat. “Stop! Come back! You’re not in trouble!” he hollered after me. “Come back, I’m offering you a job!” I slowed, then turned around, thought I could use some extra money, then cautiously made my way back.

When I got back to the door, he said, “You should write for the paper, Keith, have your own column, write about whatever you want. I can add you as a music reviewer if you want. You’ll get lots of free records and concert tickets. You can interview whatever rock stars are coming to town, and write up the concerts and interviews for the paper. You’ll need to take pictures for the story. Have you got a camera?”

I was trying to take it in, couldn’t get any words out. “Well, how about Music Editor?” he said. “Or Fine Arts Editor if you want―music, theater, dance, the whole thing.”

I stuttered that I couldn’t possibly continue writing under my real name. “You’re saying, what, you want to write under a pen name?” I kept quiet. “So what’s your pen name?”

“I’m Hooter McNabb!” I blurted out. He might have rolled his eyes a little.

“I’m Pete Lang, I run the journalism program and I’m faculty advisor of the student paper,” he said. “Come on inside, Hooter. Welcome aboard.”

THIS WAS THE ’70s, WHEN THINGS WERE LOOSER AND THE STUFF OF THE VINYL LP―oil―cost next to nothing, which only encouraged record companies to sign all manner of sketchy talent in the hopes that somehow one of them would catch on with the student crowd.

And Lang was right: These same companies were also dishing out free albums to any impecunious college kid who’d tacked “Music Critic” onto his letterhead, even small-town wannabe Rolling Stone scribblers like me, now hiding behind a hokey moniker in a smudgy student weekly called the Fresno City College Rampage. I was soon hauling in 20 to 30 new albums a week from all the majors―Columbia, Atlantic, Capitol, Warner Brothers, Elektra, RCA―and maybe a dozen smaller labels as well.

When not in class or writing reviews, I worked the counter at Sun Records, on the back side of the Sun Stereo store on Blackstone Avenue, Fresno’s main drag. I told myself it was only a short-term stepping-stone on my way to the stereo department, where the older sales guys drove Porsches to work and got to demonstrate Swiss-made turntables, McIntosh amplifiers, and big exotic speakers that made my Bose 901s look and sound like feckless pip-squeaks.

If I could nail down that promotion, I could start saving up for a real university where I could learn the engineering to design a sound system and listening room capable of raising goosebumps on me simply by playing records. If I studied and got good at it, maybe people would seek me out, ask me to design such a magical thing for them, too. I couldn’t imagine a better thing to do with my life.

Meanwhile, back in the record department, customers were asking what I thought of Hooter McNabb’s latest pronouncements, excerpts of which were being read on-air by the main FM rock station in town.

“Hooter McNabb?” I’d say, arching an eyebrow. “Does that sound like a guy’s real name to you? What kind of music critic hides behind a pen name?”

It had its tingly moments, living with this scrappy new alter ego of mine.

THANKS TO ALL THE FREE VINYL rolling in and my liberal discount privileges at the store, I’d exhausted my shelving unit’s 2,000-LP capacity, had been forced to lean new acquisitions 80 to 90 deep against the bedroom walls, and stack the rest in little piles around my waterbed, until I finally had to acknowledge that my shelving shortage had turned my treasures into tripping hazards.

A few minutes with the tape measure confirmed that if I could scoot my waterbed three feet toward the center of the room, it would open up a path to extend my existing shelves down the full length of the room, quintupling my total album capacity to roughly 10,000, a prospect that had been keeping me awake at night.

So on a Saturday morning in early January of ’74 I came back from the lumber yard with the requisite bricks and boards, piled them on the linoleum floor of the living room, then went to the backyard and fed the garden hose through the bedroom window so I could drain the mattress enough to horse the heavy, heaving thing out of the path of progress.

I got the siphon going, then turned to the last remaining obstacle: a dusty chest-high pile of promo LPs, albums I’d dismissed as beneath reviewing, selling, or even giving away. Stacked and abandoned at the far end of what would become my glorious new wall, these forlorn rejects had come to the end of their road, with nothing left to look forward to but imminent nocturnal relocation to the 10-yard dumpster behind Pepe’s Tacos three blocks east.

I scooped the first armful of the doomed from the top of the pile and deposited it in the hallway that ran between my room and my roommate’s, now a makeshift staging area for the midnight run to Pepe’s.

When I returned from the second haul, I noticed that the album now on top featured a close-up of a guy whose eyes seemed to be a little puffy, like he just woke up from a long nap. When I bent down to scoop up the third and final load, those eyes, now just 6 or 7 inches away from mine, seemed to lock on me, made me recoil a little, like I was violating the guy’s personal space or something. I grew defensive, thought, “What kind of wannabe rock star stakes his future on a sleepy cover shot?”

A few more seconds into our staring contest, I noticed the record label logo in the upper-left corner, got my dander up a little higher, thought, “You get yourself signed to Columbia Records, home of Dylan, Miles Davis, and the New York Philharmonic, and this is what you come up with? What’s wrong with you, man?” I decided to spin it up, settle the question while I continued working.

A FEW MINUTES INTO SIDE ONE I went back to the turntable, gave the album a wipe with my record brush, zapped it with my anti-static gun, brushed the stylus clean and spun it up again from the beginning. I turned up the volume and took a seat on the splintered wood frame that corralled my flaccid mattress.

The first track, “Travellin’ Prayer,” had a light, clean country-bluegrass feel that could have been a welcome addition to Pure Prairie League’s Bustin’ Out album.

Get Leon Russell to add a tight, sassy horn arrangement and track 2, “Ain’t No Crime,” could’ve pumped up the crowd on Joe Cocker’s raucous live double-album, Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

“You’re My Home” could’ve slotted right in on a laid-back John Denver or chiming Gordon Lightfoot album.

“The Ballad of Billy the Kid” wouldn’t have been out of place on Elton’s landmark Tumbleweed Connection LP.

The waltz-like sing-along title track had the biggest hook of the bunch – and I was still on Side One. By the time I got to the last track on Side Two, the anthemic “Captain Jack,” I was all in, puffy peekers notwithstanding.

The genres were varied, but the song-craft surprisingly even. It was nothing like my usual arty weekend fare―Genesis, Yes, King Crimson―but the tunes were catchy and the mix of influences fresh.

There was evidence of an easy, Randy Newman-like gift for melody; a storytelling gift that might make Harry Chapin sit up and take notice; and something akin to Tom Waits’ knack for lighting small, slice-of-life vignettes with an almost cinematic glow.

The whole vital and occasionally haunting thing was shot through with a confessional, regular-guy vibe that, though flirting with corniness now and then, was the perfect antidote to the sometimes-operatic bombast of my prog-rock indulgences of the day. This guy didn’t take himself all that seriously, didn’t need exotic time signatures and tricky polyrhythms, made it sound easy, like the songs had just popped into his noggin and out his fingertips while he effortlessly sang along.

This guy I’d never heard of had me, a greenhorn posing as a heard-it-all music critic, humming along on the first play.

MY ROOMMATE RETURNED, surveyed the ragged pile in the living room, the vinyl detritus clogging the path to his room, and the grimy garden hose in mine. He shot me an odd look.

“Take a seat, man,” I instructed. “You gotta hear this.”

He shrugged and hunkered on the bed frame while I dropped the needle on the last track, side 2, goosed the volume up.

“OK, here we go, Marty,” I barked over the music. “Listen how he’s settin’ us up, something’s comin’, you feel it, right? OK, hold on, Marty, here it comes, wait, wait, right … right … there! My God, isn’t that brilliant?”

Marty kept his eyes closed, shut out the running commentary, and just listened.

After we’d played through both sides, and with my waterbed still draining onto the scraggly lawn out back, Marty and I resolved to do whatever it was gonna take to get this new guy launched.

It would be my first such mission, but not Marty’s. Two years earlier, he’d come across an obscure track by an obscure Dutch duo during his stint as Music Director at Fresno’s big Top-40 radio station. He slipped Mouth & MacNeal’s “How Do You Do” into rotation, watched it take off and spread across the country, ended up a million-selling Top-10 hit nationally.

He had the framed Gold Record on his wall as a reminder that a good ear and a little effort can make a difference.

And I was Hooter McNabb, making a stop at the Rampage on my way to designing the world’s grooviest, goosey-ist  listening rooms… someday, maybe.

So, really, with bona fides like those, and this much talent and material to work with, how hard could it be?

ON MONDAY MORNING I PHONED COLUMBIA RECORDS’ West Coast college promotion man up in San Francisco, Ken Reuther, thanked him for sending the album, announced that Billy might be the most natural talent I’d heard in my entire eleven-month reviewing career, but that, somehow I must’ve misplaced the press kit. I wondered if he could resend the artist bio and photo right away for my upcoming feature in the Rampage.

Reuther said he didn’t have anything to send. I didn’t understand.

He explained that he’d worked the artist’s first record, on a tiny label, a couple years earlier, and most of the few people who bought it were probably friends or relatives. Said Columbia’s A&R [artists & repertoire] guys in New York heard some potential, signed him, but the new single and album had gone nowhere.

“Well, you must have a spare photo of the album cover I can run. I need something.”

He countered that Columbia was busy pushing out 4 or 5 new pop or rock releases a week, and that I “should’ve written it up when it was fresh, maybe it would’ve made a difference.” Once in a while a new artist takes off. The others disappear. “Just the way it works,” he said.

“But this guy’s got major talent, songs, and he can sing,” I protested. “There are some real hooks here, like radio hooks, man. This guy deserves a second shot.”

Reuther seemed to consider Billy’s Columbia debut as that second and final shot.

“C’mon, Ken, you gotta promote him a little, he’ll take off,” I pleaded.

“Hooter,” he said, as if to console me, “you work in a record store, right? When was the last time you saw a stiff catch fire?”

OF ALL THE TERMS REUTHER COULD HAVE DROPPED ON ME, ‘STIFF’ was the most devastating in the music business, a word freighted with the same finality and fetid aroma that “liquidation bankruptcy” carries in banking. Dead and stinking.

Stiffs were melted down to make more vinyl for some other random hoser’s albums. Or, worse, they got a hole punched in their corners before being crammed into one of those decrepit 99-cent clearance bins in the dim corners of record stores across the land.

Every Saturday morning we’d drag Sun’s four scarred and wobbly cut-out bins to the parking lot, just outside the entry. Within an hour a certain species of circlers―gaunt guys with sunken eyes and soiled trousers―would catch the whiff and descend on the hapless no-names with talons out. Sometimes they’d bring the album into the store and pony up the 99 cents for it. Sometimes they’d just shamble off with it. It was a sickening spectacle either way.

The term “stiff” had been gaining currency for three or four years, as the pop record business evolved away from its artist-driven roots toward something increasingly impersonal, even clinical, driven by the corporate imperative to maximize the label’s bottom line.

In the early ‘70s, the era of the visionaries and “golden guts”―the talent scouts and A&R [artists & repertoire] guys with a gift for finding needle-in-a-haystack type artists and guiding and nurturing them―was winding down. Holdovers like Clive Davis and David Geffen stood out in the new order because their golden guts glittered against the dark backdrop of what the group-think machine had become.

COLUMBIA SIGNS BILLY TO THE LABEL. LEFT TO RIGHT: JON TROY, GODDARD LIEBERSON, BILLY, IRWIN SEGELSTEIN, IRWIN MAZUR 

Even the widely admired Davis, who’d recently brought Billy and Bruce Springsteen to the label, wasn’t immune: Columbia sacked him a few months later, replaced him with a cut-and-dried numbers guy, Irwin Segelstein, from the CBS TV division, where he’d kept an eye on advertising revenues.

A similarly cynical opportunism had infected the radio business back in the ‘60s, when the ranks of radio station Music Directors started growing thinner by the month, replaced by “automation.”

In both industries, creative vision and gut instincts were replaced by centralized corporate planning and automation. Relationships with artists had become coldly transactional: “No traction, no future.”

ONE OF THE NEW RULES was that fresh releases by well-established artists had 8 to 10 weeks to get traction―buzz, reviews, air-play, sales―before being written off as stiffs. New artists, Billy included, got roughly half as much runway: 4 weeks, rarely 5.

The raw arithmetic in Billy’s case was punishing: Piano Man hadn’t been languishing in stores for 3, 4 or even 5 weeks; it had been there for 10. I had a dark vision of the last copy of Billy’s big-label debut, maimed by a perforated corner, being picked clean by the cut-out bin carrion eaters, until no trace remained of his genius anywhere.

STEWING ON ‘STIFF’ AND VISITED BY VISIONS of dumpsters, ovens and cut-out bins forced me to confront the churning in my gut, and a familiar, acid-like taste in the back of my throat.

I had the same taste a few years earlier when I asked my Aunt Marsha―an American folk-singer living and concertizing in Europe, gifted with a voice that could glide from the tender lyricism of Judy Collins to the tremolo haunt of Grace Slick to the raspy howl of Janis Joplin, all in the same song―how her royalty income was doing, from her album and other songs playing in the background in department stores throughout Germany for a decade or more. She shrugged and said she’d never seen a single check. It was too late to fix it for her―she didn’t appear to care about money, anyway―but Marty and I had a shot at fixing it for Billy. This time I wasn’t going to just praise the artist from the sidelines; I was going to jump into the fight so he could have an actual career. No telling how far he could go. The world needed to hear this guy.

I’d start by calling over to K-FIG FM, where Ray Appleton presided over the local rock scene. Appleton was known to hang out with Bowie and other rock royalty I only scribbled about from a distance. It was principally Appleton who’d been quoting my reviews on the air.

I’d tell him about my new find and ask him to take a listen and maybe consider working a track or two into his playlist. The Rampage had published my feature write-up on Appleton six months earlier: He may figure he owes me a favor without my having to beg for it.

He took my call, sounded relaxed and happy to hear from me.

“Sounds like great stuff!” he said. “But didn’t it stiff? It stiffed, right?”

I couldn’t manage a response. As the seconds drug on I started hoping the silence would ask the favor I couldn’t. But we both knew it wasn’t going to happen.

“Bring me something fresh,” he offered, “and I’ll try to help.”

This was going to take more than a quick call to a sympathetic DJ. It was going to take playing the only card I had left. So I went to Marty, said it was time for him to call in a favor from his days at KYNO, that Top 40 station I mentioned.

ANYONE PRIVY TO THE INNER WORKINGS of American pop radio in those days would have said, “You’ve got an inside track at KYNO? Well, yeah, man, that ought to do the trick.”

To understand why they’d say such a thing, you need to know a little something about Fresno’s role in the remaking of the American radio business.

Set in the middle of central California’s vast San Joaquin Valley, Fresno is surrounded by the most fertile agricultural land in the world, but little else. If you wanted to escape the flat valley floor for, say, San Francisco to the north or Los Angeles to the south, you faced a drab 3-to-4 hour drive down Highway 99 either way, enlivened only by volleys of large, colorful insects splatting on your windshield, and the intermittent need to veer around tumbleweeds skittering across the highway or a mattress falling off the roof of a station wagon now and then.

In the ’60s and ’70s we young Fresnans assuaged our hipness deficit by reminding each other, “Well, yeah, maybe we’re clods, but if a song takes off here, look out, man, it’s gonna be a hit everywhere.”

Like most of my middle-school friends, I grew up hearing little snippets from adults and older kids that created a vague but abiding notion that there was something besides bugs in the thick Valley air, something invisible that somehow put us in the pop vanguard.

I would learn that it was all true. Its name was KYNO.

IT WASN’T IN NEW YORK OR L.A., IT WAS IN FRESNO that Top 40 programming―the formula of what songs, in what order, separated by what kinds of transitions, DJ chatter, commercials, news breaks, announcements, station jingles, and so on―was broken down, rearranged, tested, tuned, and ultimately re-engineered into a machine that disrupted radio from coast to coast. Bill Drake and his business partner, KYNO owner Gene Chenault, came up with “music sweeps” timed to get underway when competing stations went to the news break at the top of the hour, so when you punched through your radio’s presets they’d snare and hold you, unmolested by even a single commercial, for up to 40 minutes at a stretch.

Drake and Chenault used stop-watches to drill “boss jocks” on how to be smoother and briefer (“less talk, more rock”). They set up listening panels to decide which songs made the cut, and slashed the time allotted for commercials to under 14 minutes an hour. They deleted everything that wasn’t necessary, and smoothed the edges of what was left. Every detail was designed to seamlessly pull you through your day.

By the mid-’60s the list of stations that had turned over their programming to Drake-Chenault Enterprises had gone from one―KYNO―to 350, from powerhouses KFRC in San Francisco to KHJ in LA, WFIL in Philadelphia, WRKO in Boston and WOR-FM in New York. Drake’s “Boss Radio” juggernaut was chronicled in Time and other news outlets. In ’72 George Carlin couldn’t help chiming in on his comedy album FM and AM: “Hi gang. Scott Lame here. The Boss jock with the Boss sound from the Boss list of the Boss 30 that my Boss told me to play.”)

Drake’s success at KYNO in the ‘60s foretold what both the radio and the record industries would look like in the ‘70s: centralized, corporatized, automated.

That explained why, when I asked record company sales reps why they bothered to make the long, entomologically challenging drive to Sun, smack in the middle of nowhere, they’d usually mention that the Bay Area and LA pop radio stations “keyed” their programming on what was happening in Fresno.

If we could get Marty in front of his old KYNO comrades, persuade just one of them to slip Billy into rotation, get a toehold, there were paths, maybe more like highways, for it to fan out to hundreds of those other homogenized Drake-programmed stations across the land.

Might’ve been the first time I considered myself lucky to be from the buggy San Joaquin.

* * *

MARTY HAD HIS OWN REASONS to look forward to a reunion. Two years earlier, as KYNO’s Music Director, he’d pushed to get into rotation a track off the debut album of a couple of Americans living in a tent in England, convinced that these dopey, scraggly guys with their Neil Young Harvest vibe could be huge.

The album was initially released in the UK, where it stiffed. Before throwing in the towel, the label thought they’d add a song and test the waters in the US. Marty played it for his boss, Sean Conrad, who had the leeway to put the US release into rotation but didn’t share Marty’s enthusiasm.

Marty stuck with his gut, kept going back until Sean finally threw up his hands, said OK, he’d refer it to Drake’s lieutenant in LA, who came back with a resolute “No.” After that, each of Marty’s subsequent entreaties must have come off like, well, a broken record.

Later, another station in another market took the risk. Turned out that they, not Marty, KYNO and Bill Drake, were the ones to break America’s first single, “A Horse with No Name,” went to Number 1 and stayed there for weeks. By then Marty had been let go, a victim of “automation,” they told him. He took it pretty hard. He’d been couch-surfing at various friends’ apartments or sleeping in Toad, his old, battered green Volvo, prior to moving in with me.

In hindsight, Marty’s hope of persuading KYNO to roll the dice with Billy might’ve been about more than just reconnecting with the old gang. Might’ve been about feeling relevant again.

* * *

When reunion day came it was bear hugs all around. Marty beamed, suggested Billy and Piano Man could be huge. “KYNO has a special place in radio history. This guy could be part of that story,” he said. “Let’s do this together.” The senior KYNO guy went first: “Marty, we miss you and would do most anything to help, but you know the first rule of Top 40 radio because you drilled it into us: Never program a stiff. It sounds like an adventure, but it’s so basic we’d lose our jobs over it, man.”

No one else said a word, nor needed to. It hadn’t been just a week or two since the release of the 45 rpm single, “Piano Man”; it was now 12 weeks. Picking hits off a fresh release from some new artist was one thing; breaking out shovels to disinter a stiff was unthinkable.

Marty shuffled off to pitch a few other program managers and music directors around town, with the same result: A stiff’s a stiff, nothing to talk about, but, hey, great to see you again.

* * *

IT WAS TIME TO REGROUP, lower our gaze from galactic to grassroots. I toted my promo copy to Sun and asked my manager, Mike Chakerian, if I could give it a spin on the house system, try to kick up some interest among the walk-ins, people who didn’t know that an album by a new artist had an unofficial sell-by date, like a carton of milk.

Chakerian went along, offered to place an order for a 25-count carton or two, said I could get busy, set up a display and signage wherever I wanted, see how it goes, he’d order more when it gets a little traction.

He took my promo copy, disappeared into his office to place the order, re-emerged barely a minute later, handed it back. Piano Man had come and gone, he reported, no LPs available anywhere in the country, and no plans for it to go back into production.

Sun Records was the biggest record store in the 400 miles between San Francisco and LA, and we couldn’t get our hands on a single album, let alone 25 or 50.

I paced around the bins until the reality sank in that Chakerian’s OK to play my promo copy was the only play I had left. I set it on the turntable and dropped the jacket in the “Now Playing” holder. Somehow it got stuck at a funky angle. While jiggling it to square it up, it dawned on me that it might draw more attention if I left it crooked. I liked the effect, decided to take another lap around the bins for more inspiration.

This time I noticed that the rough-sawn barn-wood walls cast a dingy pall over the joint, which seemed to be aching for some vibrant, inspirational wall art to make the spirit soar. I fished around in the supplies closet, came up with some Marks-a-Lot pens and poster-size sheets of loud yellow construction paper to fill the void.

I wrote “SCREW THE ESTABLISHMENT, GET BEHIND THE NEW TALENT!” in bold, blocky six-inch high letters inspired by the cover of Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers album, whose title track called for revolution, and thumb-tacked my hortatory masterpiece to the wall, making sure it was maybe 10 degrees off-kilter, like the album jacket. Within ten minutes I’d tacked up two more.

With the posters up and Piano Man playing, I went back to the supplies closet, scrounged a legal-size yellow notepad, wrote “PETITION!!!” across the top in the same blocky style, made columns for names and phone numbers, and set it down in the middle of the counter where customers lined up to pay.

With my little tableau composed, it was time to work up some sort of presentation. I went with the first thing that popped into my head: When customers came to the counter to make their purchases, I’d motion to the posters and the kitty-wampus album cover next to the turntable, then the speakers playing. Then I’d say in a world-weary way, “Hear that? Music that solid and the guy’s own record company refuses to press any more albums, told him it’s over, get lost.”

I’d let the insult hang in the air for a moment, then say, “There’s the petition, man,” and turn around and fiddle with the cassette tapes and rolling papers displays until they’d done the right thing.

* * *

WE SNAGGED A LITTLE OVER A HUNDRED NAMES in barely two weeks. I felt like a regular Che Guevara, called Reuther, my heart pounding.

“I’ve been playing my promo copy in the store and people are getting riled up down here, man, a petition sprang up with a hundred signatures already. It’s like an underground movement kicked up out of nowhere. We need albums to sell and I really need that bio and photo so I can write the review, gonna be my biggest feature ever. Appleton’s probably gonna read the whole thing on the air!” I boasted.

They were extravagant claims for a 135-pound freshman with a minimum-wage job, a part-time alter ego, and a borrowed soapbox from a community college journalism department.

Reuther ignored the news of the insurrection brewing down in the sleepy Valley, repeated that he didn’t have any PR kits to send, then divulged that, like everyone in the company, he had to “work what’s on the Priority List” handed down from the New York office every Monday morning. His grave tone of voice made it clear that he could get himself fired for working something not on “The List.” He added that Piano Man had been stricken from that list many weeks ago.

* * *

REUTHER CALLED a couple days later, announced he’d gotten some branch managers to poke around and one of them had turned up a single left-over 25-count carton at Columbia’s Western US pressing plant down in Santa Maria, near Santa Barbara. He could get it shipped to the store. I registered a little whiff of co-conspiracy in his voice.

“That’s it, there aren’t any more anywhere,” he said. “And you understand that when those are gone, we can’t do a pressing run just for you guys in Fresno, right? We’re clear on that, right?”

When the carton showed up, I grabbed my Marks-a-Lot, wrote “Billy Joel” on a white plastic record divider and crammed it and all but five albums in the bin. I stuffed the five hold-backs behind the counter as “reserve stash,” as if it was a precious cache of exotic weed or something.

Marty and I started calling petitioners, announced we’d scored the last of Billy’s pop masterpiece, strictly first-come, first-served, so hurry in before they’re gone forever. People were mellow, even gracious about it, said they’d drop by next time they’re cruising down Blackstone, but precious few rolled up with the three ninety-nine.

After a couple days I started bugging random customers who’d come in for Dark Side of the Moon or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or whatever to spring for Piano Man as well.

It was slow going in the beginning and only got slower over time. Customers seemed to be getting used to the posters and petition, seemed to be tuning them out. Even the usually chatty stereo sales guys up front stopped dropping in to see how the revolution was going. By the time we sold the last Piano Man in the bin, we were spent.

* * *

IT WAS TIME TO FACE FACTS. Our pals in local radio wouldn’t touch it. The petition drive had stalled out. Columbia’s cupboard was completely bare, and now so was Sun’s.

I slipped my promo album back in its jacket. Dumped the posters, stowed the petition behind the counter, next to the reserve stash. Shelved the review for the Rampage. Resumed playing established artists on the house stereo. Moved on to something else, something not so wrapped up with rage and righting wrongs. Something forgettable.

A week or two went by, then on a Saturday morning the store manager, Larry Henderson, rang me back in the Record department, said one of the sales guys up front, Steve Reimann, had just called, said he was stranded at home again: his little Porsche runabout was still waiting on parts and he couldn’t get the Norton Commando started. Henderson said he needed me up front to cover for him as it was the store’s big  one-day-only “Midnight Madness” annual sale event. People had been lining up outside and were now streaming in the front door.

It was the break I’d been waiting for since the day Sun hired me – my first chance to work in the audio department. If I survived the test, my days of working a cash register in the back for $1.65 an hour would be over. I could put money aside for university, get on the road to the acoustic engineering career I’d only been dreaming about.

I hung up and skipped down the connecting hall into the main sales floor, where, amongst all the hubbub I picked up an intriguingly resonant voice off to my left, made a little jog in that direction to see if I could put a face to it before reporting for duty at the sales counter.

As I approached, the salesman helping the guy gave me a desperate get-me-outta here! look and peeled off to wait on other customers.

The voice belonged to a David Butler, who introduced himself as an engineer in town who’d dropped by to have another listen to the ESS AMT-1B floor-standing speakers, and the amplifier and turntable packaged with them.

It was a righteous rock rig in the day but by Dave’s grim account, every time he’d dropped in, the sticker was still stuck at around $1,400 and his salary hadn’t changed for the better, either. The system was one of a handful of items excluded from the annual sale getting underway. He couldn’t swing it at the full retail price shown, but he wondered if I could explain how the strange, accordion-like “air-motion transformer” tweeters worked so he’d be informed “when the time comes.”

It was a pleasant enough chat, two audio propeller-heads indulging in a Saturday exploration of a shared passion, though there was a gauzy, one-of-these-days dreaminess about it. At some point the conversation began to peter out and I thought maybe I should wait on someone who’d come in intending to take advantage of the sale. I excused myself, got half-way to the sales counter to get my first assignment, when it occurred to me that, based on his questions, Dave had probably never gotten a full demo of what the system could do when exercised a little, let alone in pedal-to-the-metal mode.

I figured I could clear that up in less than two minutes, made a detour to the main sound-room, came back with Joe Walsh’s solo album, the one with “Rocky Mountain Way.” I spun it up, cranked the volume, made the whole store pulse and reverberate to the throbbing bass and Walsh’s power-chording guitar going tot-tot-tot ta-DAH and his high, whiney-nasal voice riding on top of it all:

Within seconds, people were putting their hands over their ears and hollering “Turn it down!!” while Dave and I hunched forward, staring fixedly at those big, squat, thumping speakers while swaying side to side and sporadically making kicking motions with our feet, and dipping a shoulder now and then – displaying what cooler guys from bigger cities might characterize not as dancing per se, but as a couple of long-haired Valley yokels suffering mild, upright seizures of some kind.

When the episode had run its course, we launched into a spirited discussion of the 12-inch woofers. Dave’s voice was booming.

That’s when it hit me: This guy standing in front of me, my new audio buddy, wasn’t just some generic engineer, he was a broadcast engineer, and an occasional on-air announcer.

That’s where I’d heard that voice: Sunday afternoons on KFYE, Fresno’s “soft rock Y94 FM.” And our random encounter presented one last chance to get Billy over the hump, a Hail Mary that in my gut I knew could end my hi-fi career in the first hour of its first day.

* * *

I MOTIONED TO THE FRONT DOOR. Dave followed me out to the parking lot and watched as I paced aimlessly among the parked cars, my heart racing while the rest of me was trying to summon the brash confidence of my inner McNabb. Finally, I strode up to Dave and laid it out: I was going back in there to sell him the system of his dreams at the store’s direct cost. Said I’d show him the dealer cost sheets, would probably come to seven, maybe seven-fifty out the door.

The guy who spent his Sundays purring into a microphone went silent, seemed to be staring into space,  maybe lost in calculating how much he had in his checking account, or possibly mulling the obvious question, “Why would a stranger risk getting fired to make such an offer?”

Before he could respond I asked if he would consider doing me a small personal favor in return: Play my favorite new album in its entirety the next day, Sunday, during his weekly New Album Preview show.

Dave acknowledged that he’d been doing that show for a few years, but the regular DJs had been announcing another album all week as his upcoming feature. No way could he pull a last-minute switch. We both stared at the asphalt in silence.

Then he must’ve gotten a vision of those walnut towers pumping “Rocky Mountain Way” into his living room because his next sentence was, “What if I play it next Sunday?”

He resumed staring at the asphalt, shifted from foot to foot, appeared to be organizing his thoughts.

“Now this album you like, it is soft rock, right?”

“Yup!”

“It doesn’t have language that could get me in trouble with my boss or the FCC, does it?” I thought about the last track on side two, took a moment to choose my words.

“Major-label artist, man. Who’s cleaner than Columbia Records?”

“And it is a new release, right?” I froze up, went blank, saw it all slipping away. Then the cocky McNabb in me stepped up:

“Hasn’t even hit the airwaves yet!”

Dave didn’t ask whether it happened to be a certified, dead-and-stinking stiff, and I kept my mouth shut for once.

Though I’d just cleared Dave’s questions, it was beginning to dawn on me that I may have proposed something that wouldn’t just get me fired by Henderson, but could get me brought up on corruption charges in front of a judge. A decade earlier Congress had passed a package of anti-payola laws to crack down on record companies greasing the palms of radio DJs to get them to play specific records. I recalled news articles at the time reporting that the bribes averaged around $50 per incident. I wasn’t offering DJ Dave $50 to play Billy’s big-label debut, I was offering him a roughly $600 discount on a flagship sound system that Sun rarely discounted at all. The “favor” was 12 times the average inducement that Congress railed about and criminalized. It had been front page news everywhere. I wondered whether the fact that I didn’t stand to benefit a penny from Billy’s success would keep me from legal peril. I didn’t know the answer. What I did know was that I had a possibly life-changing decision to make that affected not just Billy, but me, too. Dave had grown quiet and introspective as well. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

Moments later, we wordlessly nodded to each other, split up and walked separately back into the store, milled around aimlessly, like two guys pretending not to know each other, two guys about to steal something. When the coast was clear we squirted behind the counter where I hurriedly showed him the cost sheets. While he hauled out his checkbook, I dashed back to the record department to grab one of the Piano Man albums I’d stashed under the counter. The deal was done.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Marty, his taciturn friend Veg, and I convened at the house to talk strategy. I laid the petition list on the kitchen table. We looked it over and quickly agreed that everyone who’d coughed up a number needed to get a call.

Marty laid out the basic plan, kept it simple:

• • Remind them they’d signed the petition;
  • Ask them to call the station next Sunday, a little after 2 o’clock, when Dave’s New Album Preview show starts;
  • Have them write down the time and call-in number; and
  • Make sure they tell whoever answers at the station that they love the album.

Veg was eager to help his best friend but wasn’t blessed with the kind of cranium that readily stores the fine points of sequencing and phraseology. After rehearsing for half an hour with only modest progress we agreed a live practice run might help loosen things up.

Marty picked a name on the list, dialed the number, handed Veg the phone. He managed to get through the first part of the call OK, considering. Then a stricken look came over him.

“Uh, Marty, the lady wants to know what to say if the station asks her, uh, why she, um, likes the record,” he said, his eyes big. He hadn’t put his hand over the phone, so the lady could probably hear the discussion, which made me nervous. Marty and I whispered some generic platitudes, which Veg did his best to repeat into the phone.

The lady balked. Veg looked at Marty and me, could tell it wasn’t going well, and started to panic. I was getting the queasy feeling our moonshot was destined to stall on the launchpad. Finally, I leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “Just tell her to say it might be the greatest album since Sergeant Pepper’s.” That didn’t seem to alter the look on Veg’s mug, so I added “… by, you know, the Beatles.” Veg shredded the syntax, but somehow the Sergeant Pepper’s part came through and the lady was satisfied.

Bouyed by his victory, Veg offered to take the whole petition home with him, said he’d try his best to call everyone on the list.

Six days later Veg rattled into the parking lot in the spastic Vegmobile, said in his soft, hesitant baritone that he’d dialed every number, managed to get over a hundred people to promise to call in on Sunday afternoon.

I was having trouble believing such a taciturn guy could’ve found the grit to dial up that many numbers and ask that many strangers for a favor. But Veg insisted he was telling the truth, offered to call some of them back on Sunday morning to remind them before the album went on the air, if we wanted.

Marty and I looked at each other. Yeah, that sounded like a real good idea.

* * *

AT 2 O’CLOCK ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1974, Dave Butler cued up the first track on side 1, “Travellin’ Prayer,” and played both sides of the album straight through, without interruption. I tried to call and thank him a couple times while it was playing, couldn’t get through. Tried again around 6 p.m., but the line was still busy.

Dave called me at the store on Monday morning.

“The switchboard was lit up for hours, jammed, man, never seen anything like it!” he boomed, betraying no sign that it could’ve been the result of something other than a spontaneous groundswell.

I was feeling pretty clever again, but, as usual, it didn’t last. Dave’s next sentence was, “Tell me, what’s the single, which cut am I running with?”

In that moment I realized that neither Marty Sherwood, owner of that Gold Record, nor I, Hooter McNabb, Music Critic, had a clue what we were doing. I’d been trumpeting an artist. Marty had been promoting an album. Together we’d been leading some cow-town counter-culture cause.

DJ Dave didn’t need any of those things: He needed a song. Marty and I hadn’t gotten that far.

“Gimme a second,” I said, my heart racing as I fast-forwarded through the most tuneful tracks in my head, but there were a couple of radio-worthy cuts on the album, and I was getting freaked out that we were this close and I could pick the wrong one, blow it a few yards from the goal line. I needed devil-may-care McNabb to step up and handle it, but he was nowhere to be found.

“Well, uh, Marty used to break singles at KYNO, he’s got a Gold Record on his wall, I swear, man. I’ll ask when I see him and call you right back,” I said, a little tentatively.

The quiet engineer with the mahogany vocal cords positively bellowed: “I need the answer now!” I froze, my heart thumping. Finally, I managed to answer, timidly defaulting to the safest option: “Think maybe you could just play the title track until Marty tells us what the hit’s gonna be?”

I figured that if that track didn’t take off, it’d be Columbia’s fault for picking the wrong song for the title of the whole album. It was an act of cowardice, and I knew it before I got the sentence out.

After a few moments of dead air, Dave said, “OK, I’ll run with that for now. Call me right away if Marty says it’s a different cut.”

Then, in a quizzical tone that still rings in my ears fifty years later, he asked, “Do you think the album sounds like Sergeant Pepper’s? I don’t hear that. Funny, almost all the call-ins mentioned it.” I felt my face turn red.

* * *

KFYE PUT ‘PIANO MAN’ INTO HEAVY ROTATION on Monday, March 4. The following day, one of Marty’s old KYNO colleagues rang Sun to confirm that the new song in hit rotation on Y94 was by the same guy Marty had pitched a while back, the one that stiffed. I told him Marty was out, will call him back, but, yeah, same artist, Billy Joel.

Same guy called again less than an hour later, rattled, said he just got off the phone with Columbia, and they had nothing to send, no album, no single, nothing in the entire country. Who’s ever heard of such a thing?

Marty returned, confirmed “Piano Man” as the future hit, then dialed KYNO from the phone near the cash register, held the receiver out a little so I could lean in and hear, then said, “I’m on my way.”

He reached down and pulled all four remaining albums from the reserve stash. We looked at each other, thinking the same thing: “Can this really be happening?” After his KYNO stop, Marty dropped off a copy at three other, now-forgotten pop stations in town. When he sputtered back into the parking lot in Toad an hour later, there were no albums left.

Billy’s future was no longer in our hands. It was in the hands of a very particular, storied radio station in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley.

* * *

KYNO USED THE RESERVE-STASH LP to make a “cart” of the title track, and debuted it that afternoon, Tuesday, March 5, 17 weeks after the single’s initial release on November 2 of ’73. By the time I connected with Reuther later in the day he’d already relayed the breakthrough to his boss down in LA, Terry Powell, who’d relayed it up the chain to Columbia in New York.

They were already scrambling to pull together the stampers, masters, artwork, everything needed to do another press run down in Santa Maria, where it was all-hands-on-deck. Albums and the single would start shipping in quantity within 24 hours.

“Hooter,” Reuther said, “If this thing catches on in the Bay Area and down in LA, that little stiff of yours could go national!”

* * *

Four days later our “little stiff’s” title track was the subject of a blurb in Billboard‘s March 9 issue, with a photo of Billy and a lead that read: “It took some three months of dogged promotion by Columbia to get the writer-singer-pianist’s first single on their label charted. But their faith is repaid as the album jumped 25 chart positions in a week.”

The part about Columbia’s “faith” and “dogged promotion” caused a few paroxysms of eye-rolling at Sun, KYNO, and Reuther’s office up in San Francisco. As he’d said at the beginning: “Just the way it works.”

But the song I timidly suggested that DJ Dave play as a stalling tactic “until Marty tells us what the hit’s gonna be” was just getting started.

On March 13, KYNO moved “Piano Man” into A-list (Top 30) rotation, something not missed by the hundreds of Drake-programmed stations around the country. The following month it entered the Billboard Top 25 list. It would eventually be enshrined in Rolling Stone’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” It’s still going, been reissued, special deluxe editions, the works.

THE PIANO MAN PHENOMENON wasn’t limited to a radio single with that ear-wormy “sing us a song, you’re the piano man” hook. The album with the puffy eyes turned out to have big legs as well. Eighteen months after Dave spun the whole thing on his commercial-free New Album Preview Show, the RIAA certified it Gold. Platinum certification followed, then Double-Platinum, Triple-Platinum and Quadruple-Platinum.

Presumably, once the album got the traction it deserved, Columbia CEO Irwin Segelstein called Billy and his producer, Mike Stewart, back into his office to apologize and retract the insulting, closed-door “It’s-over” announcement he’d personally delivered a month earlier. Apology or not, Billy stuck with the label. New albums and radio hits followed, resulting in sales of 160 million records, making him one of the best selling artists of all time.

Amazing journey for something that started its belated rise from the bottom of a 4-foot high rejects pile next to a waterbed in the middle of the sleepy San Joaquin Valley 50 years ago.

* * *

BARELY A WEEK AFTER PIANO MAN TOOK OFF, I flipped a switch I didn’t know I had: Mailed in a late application for the Fall term at UC Santa Barbara; turned in my notice at Sun; and spent the summer working for a speaker company and selling off my stereo gear and LPs to come up with tuition.

That fall, I crammed my books and clothes into my Beetle and headed to Santa Barbara. I made room for just a few keepsakes―maybe more like talismans―from my Fresno Hooter McNabb days: a box of my now-yellowed Rampage clippings, and that promo copy of Billy’s Piano Man. I still have them.