I'll preface by saying that Heid probably never did anything against me that would cause me to think of him as an enemy. However, he had developed an attitude at one point that simply rubbed everyone he worked with the wrong way at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM.
Our main rival, KTQM-FM, used to have a contest each month in which one of their listeners would get to be a guest DJ. According to their promos, the guest DJ would get to go on the air and pick the music they wanted to play for an hour. (I have a feeling the winner only got to choose from a limited selection of songs provided by the station for his or her show. I'm pretty certain it was always metalheads who won and they probably got ticked off they they couldn't bring their own music from home.)
In April of 1987, we decided to do something similar. The winner would just get to come on our morning program and get to make comments during the stop sets. They wouldn't choose the songs, but they would get to be on the entire three hours.
We asked listeners to send in cassettes of them saying funny things and the one we liked the best would get to come on the show. My friend Diid actually tried to enter and enlisted my help. I came up with a lot of good material for her, but she wouldn't take any of my advice and only wanted to repeat the show's catch phrases. I don't think she ever got around to actually recording her audition. (She wouldn't have gotten it anyway.)
The powers that be selected a guy named Heid as the winner. He was a 19-year-old student studying Radio/TV at Eastern New Mexico University. He had graduated from Portales High School the year before. He was also in the Marine Reserves. He had something resembling a jarhead haircut and piercing blue eyes. I never heard his audition, but I was told he was pretty funny on it.
He performed well on the morning show. I don't know who made this decision, but he was offered a part-time position. He came in and trained on a Sunday afternoon, when we were running our syndicated programs. During the shows, he was required to announce this on-air promotion we had going on with some sort of safety quiz. One thing was apparent from this: Heid was not an announcer.
The next day was the day that Tod and Daz quit. Dod, who was working overnights at the time was changed to Tod's afternoon drive shift. I remained in my shift and Heid was offered a full-time position working overnights. It bothered me a little that I had to work part-time for a year and a half before I got offered full-time and Heid got the job after only working one day. However, this was a drastic moment, so I really didn't have time to get mad about it.
Heid got into trouble with Jid one time during his first couple of weeks. When working the overnight on a Friday night, he decided to invite his friends over to the station for an impromptu party that involved alcohol. He said later that Jid "read him the riot act." He also once accidentally said the F-word on the air.
During the next couple of months, Heid got quite a reputation for saying outrageous things. It bordered between Howard Stern and Jay Thomas. A couple of months in, I listened to his show almost every night for one week and I was simply appalled at how many times he would break format by not following the clock, coming on and talking whenever and for as long as he wanted. I heard him talk for five minutes straight about nothing in particular. We're supposed to be playing music, not performing comedy monologues. And of course, there was his cutting-the-edge-of-the-envelope sense of humor. I'll be the first to admit that he was never outright vulgar, but it was probably too much for the tender and conservative ears of those who lived in the area.
I was not the only one who had problems with Heid. The Program Director disliked how he couldn't sound like an actual DJ. He hadn't shown any improvement in that area over the last couple of months. Dod didn't like him because he felt Heid was giving the station a bad name. But I have to admit that we were actually all rather jealous that he was being given the freedom to do these things by Jid, the owner. After all, he had only worked part-time one day before being elevated to full-time. The three of us had all been through the radio wringer and it seemed like Heid hadn't paid his dues. The only consolation that we had was that he was just on during the overnight hours.
I talked to the Program Director the Monday after I had been hearing Heid's show and told him he was just going way over the line with his format-breaking. He said he would see if he could do something about it. Two days later, the Program Director gave me the bad news that Jid was switching the shifts for me and Heid. WAIT! WHAT? I had been playing by the rules all this time! It wasn't fair that the person who had been breaking them got my shift.
But I really got angry at Heid when I overheard a conversation he had with someone. He talked about how, fairly soon after he started working full-time, Jid told him that he was going to move him to the six to midnight shift in three months. WHAT? HE KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AND DIDN'T TELL ME I WAS GOING TO GET THE SHAFT? I had to do everything in my power to keep this anger inside when I had to deal with him on a nightly basis before beginning my shift. But over time, I came to realize that he may not have known that I was going to be put back to working overnights. I'd like to think that if Jid had informed him that was going to happen, he would have told me and I could have been more prepared for the inevitable. So, I don't blame him for that anymore. (But I could have been right in the first place. Heid never told me he was sorry that I had to go back to working overnights.)
However, once he became Jid's Golden Boy, Heid became a primadonna diva. We're supposed to show up for our shift at least 15 minutes ahead of time, but it wasn't long before he started coming in literally a minute before his air shift started. After a few weeks of working the shift, he threw a fit at the Program Director for scheduling him on Saturday nights while the rest of us got four-hour shifts during the day. (I had this same issue when I worked the six to midnight shift.) The Program Director said he didn't really have a say in the matter, that Jid wanted him working that shift on Saturday nights. He didn't win that battle. (Good.)
I did have a hard time getting him to respect my authority as Music Director. During the night shift, he broke format about as often as he did when he was doing overnights. One of the things that really got on my nerves was that every time he played Van Halen's "Jump" off of the CD, he would play the album intro "1984" before it. That instrumental piece is NOT part of "Jump" and there's a five-second pause between the tracks on the CD. I complained to Jid and he said he would talk to Heid. After that, Heid would still play the "1984" intro, then put in a quick KZZO jingle in-between. THAT SOUNDED EVEN WORSE!
Another thing that ticked me off was his handling of our nightly feature "Love it or Shove It." It was my favorite feature when I was working the night shift because it allowed us to get the newest music on the air before KTQM. People would call in and let me know whether or not they liked the song. Sometimes, we would use the reactions to gauge whether or not we should add the song to the rotation. Most of the time, listeners just told me to "Shove it," but if we got a really strong reaction, like we did with Los Lobos' "La Bamba," we knew we had to fly with it.
When Heid took over my shift, I would ask him about the reaction to the "Love It or Shove It" song. I needed this information so I could decide whether to present the song to Jid as a possible add. Heid would usually respond, "Oh, I didn't get any calls." No calls? I got calls every single night on the songs when I was working the shift. Why wasn't he getting calls? I listened to him and found out a few things. First, he was goofing around with the name of the feature. He called it by a half-dozen other names using the same rhyme scheme. (One of them was "Jam It or Ram It," in which both terms could be used to mean the same thing.) Second, he didn't backsell the song or ask for people to call in to tell what they thought. The new song would end and he would just play the next song without saying anything. Again, I complained to Jid, who said he would talk to Heid. But the only thing that happened was that Jid canceled the feature because we weren't getting any reactions.
And we had some other issues in trying to deal with him. One time, during an air staff meeting with Jid, Heid complained that he wasn't being given any production to do. The three of us other full-timers were all thinking, "You're a funny guy, but YOU ARE NOT AN ANNOUNCER!" Jid ordered Dod (who was the Production Manager) to give Heid some easy copy to produce. Heid did one spot and it just did not sound professional. In fact, it was so bad that the client called us and complained. Dod re-did the ad to the client's satisfaction, but said that Heid came in that night screaming at him for re-doing the spot.
Another problem was that every part-timer we hired during this period felt like they were allowed to act the same way on the air. The real issue was that they tended to sound like Bruno Kirby in "Good Morning Vietnam" after taking over Robin Williams' radio show. Any time the Program Director tried to get them to step back into line, they would respond with "Heid gets to do that!" Firing them meant that we would just have to hire other part-timers who would do the exact same thing.
I do know of one time that Heid got yelled at by Jid for something he said on the air during this time. Heid said something to the effect that there was no Santa Claus and Jid really ripped into him. I thought, "Wait, all that other stuff he says and this is the one thing you're going to get upset about? REALLY? No one who listens at that time still believes anyway."
But there was an unexpected encounter between the two. Heid said that one night, Jid came into the studio while he was working his shift and asked, "Heid, how would you like a blow job, right now?" Heid said he thought for a moment and replied, "You know, Jid, that sounds like a good idea. Let me call my girlfriend and see if she'll come over here right now to give me one!" Jid supposedly sulked out of the studio.
All of us who worked at the station knew that Jid was gay, but were mostly unaware about his intense interest in Heid. Dod later told me that once, he heard Jid say out loud, "I would love to get into his pants!"
But Heid didn't stay with KZZO forever. In tomorrow's Part 2, I'll explain how he got to leave Clovis behind for the big city and what happened after that. One thing I will say ahead of time is that he eventually became an actual radio announcer. I never saw that coming.
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