I left off yesterday with the revelation that KZZO's owner Jid was gay and that he had eyes for Heid. However, that feeling was not reciprocated. But just because Jid wasn't getting any didn't mean that Heid still wasn't his Golden Boy. Jid was able to get Heid a job at an R&B station in Dallas. For many years, I thought Jid was able to pull strings to get Heid that job. However, I recently found out that the station actually held a nationwide talent search and selected Heid. I think Jid still had a lot to do with Heid being chosen. Somehow, Jid was able to broker the deal and got Heid a salary of more than $40,000. WHAT? I wasn't even making $10,000 a year at that point in my life!
The three of us full-timers were very jealous of this, and it wasn't just us at the station who kind of felt like life was unfair. When I told our previous Program Director Tod where Heid wound up, he said he wished the station had never held that Guest DJ contest. Without it, Heid would have remained a student at ENMU and joined the Marines full-time after graduating. There was no way we would have hired him based solely on his ability to announce. Tod was very upset that Jid pulled out all the stops for Heid. Tod said when he approached Jid about trying to get his help in landing a job in a larger market, he was just unwilling to do anything.
But the good news was that we weren't going to have to deal with Heid's shenanigans anymore. He was about to become someone else's problem.
For his last show at KZZO, Heid went all crazy and did what he wanted. The last song he played was "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns 'n' Roses, a song we just plain were not allowed to play, even though it was one of the most famous songs on the planet at that point in time.
A few weeks later, Heid called me during my overnight shift. (Why I wasn't back to working the six to midnight shift is another story). That station in Dallas had him working overnights to start, but he was going to be moving up to the evening shift later. He told me that all the DJs worked four hour shifts, but a couple of them wanted to only work three hours instead and have Heid work six hours. He said the people in charge told him they weren't doing it to punish him. What was going through my mind was, "Hey, these guys get paid $40,000 a year to work four hours a day, and they think that's working too much? On top of that, they're going to work one hour less, but still get paid the same amount of money? Heid is getting screwed!"
The last time I talked to Heid was after I had gotten a part-time job at a station in Denver. One thing I found out was that DJs like Heid were becoming a trend in larger cities. Y108 in Denver had a nighttime jock named Michael Moon. He was a funny guy, but again, he was not an announcer. The main differences between him and Heid were that Moon did not pretend he was trying to announce and he was a lot funnier without having to go into the gray areas.
However, that radio gig only lasted four years. I don't know what happened, but he stopped working at that station. (When I used to believe he had prior knowledge that I was going to get the shaft at KZZO, I had hoped that eventually the same thing would happen to him, that someone he considered a friend knew what was going down and wouldn't tell him. But as I mentioned yesterday, he may not have known, so that probably wouldn't have been true karma.) According to an on-line bio, he went back to school and worked a series of odd jobs, including as a DJ at a nightclub before landing another radio job in Waco. That station got bought out about a year later and he, along with several other staff members, got dumped. He then worked for Southwestern Bell/AT&T for about 10 years. During this time he got married, had a couple of kids, got divorced and got married again to another woman.
He decided to try to get back into radio and went to school to learn about the latest technological advances in broadcasting. (Trust me, there were a LOT.) He was able to land a morning show job in a small town country station about two hours southwest of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.
It was around this time that I had gotten back into radio at a news station in San Jose. I got curious and looked him up on the Internet. I found him at that country station. I tried to send him e-mails letting him know about how it was funny that we had managed to get back into radio about the same time after being out of it for several years. He never responded. I don't know if he ever got them or if he just decided to ignore me.
But then Facebook came along. Since I don't use my real name on my account and he has several listeners he's never met listed as friends, it was easy to get him to accept my friend request. We have been connected on Facebook for more than four years, and up until about now, he hasn't realized that I've been his "friend" all this time.
And just within the last five weeks, Heid has managed to get a morning show and Program Director job in Abilene. He said his children would continue to go to school in the town he left and that he'd still go to church there, but the offer in Abilene was too good to pass up.
I mentioned yesterday that he now sounds like a radio announcer. It also looks like he has left behind his desire to be a primadonna diva. I'll bet he's a lot easier to work with now. It's too bad we couldn't have worked with that guy in 1988. There wouldn't have been so many hard feelings.
I am glad for his recent success after the struggles he's been through. But they're probably nothing compared to what I've had to deal with.
I've got a couple more stories to tell about Heid when we were working together at KZZO in Clovis, NM. Those will be coming up in the near future.
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