By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Thursday, April 23, 2015
As a companion piece to my previous blog about Larry Wachs' modcast, here's proof what a strange, small world we live in.
Larry Wachs and I go back a long way. I was a teenager on Long Island and listened to Wachs when he was the evening jock on the top 40 station WBLI in the mid-1980s. I was (and still am) a radio geek who obsessively tracked top 40 music. His voice and the tunes of Culture Club and Michael Jackson were my high school soundtrack while doing copious amounts of homework in my kitchen in Oyster Bay, N.Y. I used the radio/intercom that came with the house and could be heard in multiple rooms.
He went on air as Larry Addams. Apparently, the program director at the time preferred he use his middle name as his last name. It was a pretense Wachs felt was stupid but he was only in his early 20s at the start of his career. Who was he to argue? "It was endemic of radio in the 1970s and 1980s," he said to me during the modcast earlier this month. "It came from an era when radio was afraid people might be offended by ethnic names."
Anyway, he would take votes for the top 6 at 10 around the 8 o'clock hour. I'd call in and feed him my favorite three songs. Then he'd play the top 6 at 10, which usually featured Duran Duran, and hold a quiz about it later that hour for a "three-album three-pack." I would call in regularly to try to win. A few times, I actually did. He even put me on the air on occasion. (I have a couple of those recordings on a cassette tape but I don't have a cassette player anymore to play the audio. If I ever get around to it, I'll add it here.) Oddly, those three packs of albums always seemed to include Foreigner's "Agent Provocateur." I still have four copies of that LP in my parent's basement on Long Island.
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
In 1985, when I was in 10th grade, my English teacher Frank Garone gave us an assignment: interview a person and make a oral presentation. I had never interviewed anybody in my life at that point, but in a sense, it was the beginning of my career.
The first person I decided to interview? Larry Wachs. Why? He felt like a surrogate friend, that friendly voice on the radio keeping me updated on the latest Bruce Springsteen or Prince single. (Larry on the modcast terms this both flattering and creepy at the same time.) I wrote him a letter asking if he'd agree to be interviewed. He was game. It was his first interview as well.
So in March, 1985, my mom drove me 40 minutes to Medford, Long Island where WBLI was located and met Wachs for a sit-down interview. She snapped that picture you see above. As you can see, Wachs used to have hair and a beard. I looked as geeky as you could imagine me to be.
Once we finished the talk, which probably went on for 40 minutes or so, he gave me a tour of the modest building. The one thing I remember was him showing me the closet where all the giveaway albums were.
I remember giving my speech in front of the class. I was hardly a raconteur but it was a subject I was comfortable with. I recall it went well. I ended up with a 98. The only critique from my teacher: I spoke too quickly. What else is new?
You can read my speech below, which includes the outline and my teacher's comments. I just re-read what I wrote as a 15 year old. It's a bit stilted, but I did use a couple of relatively fancy words like "discreet." And that classic radio phrase "theater of the mind" even pops up.
The part that always stuck out to me in retrospect is when I asked him about Howard Stern. I listened to Stern in the late afternoons on WNBC-AM at the time. He was a revelation for a teenager, marveling over his salty attitude toward management and bits like lesbian dial-a-date. I still listen to him on Siriux/XM today.
Wachs told me he thought he could do a Stern-type show but felt Stern took things too far. He thought Stern at the time was funny but too raw. A decade later, who knew that Wachs would end up being on an L.A. station that aired Stern in the mornings, that Stern would end up mocking said station and Wachs' show. Who knew that critics would eventually accuse the Regular Guys of being a Stern rip off.
But it's clear from this interview below that Wachs had ambitions far greater than being a night jock on a Long Island top 40 station. I called him an "intelligent, self-motivating man who was definitely a pleasure to talk to."
Fast forward 15 years or so. When I began hearing the Regular Guys in Atlanta in the late 1990s, I didn't make the connection between top 40 DJ Larry Addams and talk show host Larry Wachs. It wasn't until around 2003, two years after I began covering radio for the AJC that someone pointed out to me that they were one and the same. That someone? Sirius/XM host Kid Kelly. Thanks Kid!
Wachs didn't make the connection either until I mentioned it to him. I even brought this speech to his studio around 2003 and he looked it over. We had a nice nostalgic moment.
Go figure that I'm still interviewing Wachs three decades later. In 1985, he complained that the radio business was too corporate. It only got worse with consolidation in the 1990s and 2000s and cutbacks in talent development. Recent revenue stagnation has made radio stations even more cautious and less creative.
I'm sure the 23-year-old Wachs would be proud of the 53-year-old Wachs and what he accomplished, despite all the ups and downs.
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