I want to thank my brother, Reed Farrel Coleman, who is a multi-award-winning mystery writer -- he's actually won every prize but the Edgar Award, and several others more than once. He and Richard Neer are good friends, and Reed introduced me to Richard a few years ago. That's Richard on the right. My brother was often a guest on Richard's weekend shows. When you are a fan of the Mets, Misery Loves Company is the name of the game
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Cautious Optimist (CO). We've discussed your time at the FAN, and judging by the responses in the comments, you have a lot of admirers for your work there -- especially your demeanor, respectfulness, thoughtfulness and decency.
Richard Neer (RN): Maybe we should just stop there.
CO: Not an option. I'd like to know how you got into radio in the first place.
RN: I was a college student at Adelphi and appeared often in plays. Certainly more than 20 of them. I guess acting was my first love. Adelphi had a radio station which was housed in a Quonset Hut adjacent to the dormitory. One Monday night while on the way back to the dormitory, I decided to take a peak in and see what the radio station set-up looked like. My Dad was totally hooked on radio and wanted to be a disc jockey, but needed to make a living so he ended up working at General Electric, Sears and a few other places. I wasn't into it the way my Dad was, but I guess it was a kind of unconscious bonding that fed my curiosity. The shows at the station had been completed for the night and I stepped into the Hut and there is one person in the place. And true to the era, we started a conversation and he tells me that the guy who was responsible for the last show of the night had failed to show up.
I expressed puzzlement that someone could just not show up for work and the guy says to me, well, we don't have many people on campus into working at the radio station. He lets me know that if I have an interest in learning more, I should come back and speak with the general manager, which I do. The GM asks me if I can do sports. I say I love sports. He says, can you read from a ticker. I say sure, but i have no idea what he is talking about. He says, ok kid, you got it. At 11pm during my show, we have a 90 second break for sports after the news. You come on and read the sports.
Great. I go into the library and look for books on how to do radio. There are none. I show up. They show me how to turn on the mic and present my 90 second sports roundup. It's 11pm, and the manager who is doing his shift says, and now with the sports, Richard Neer. I start reading for a good thirty seconds, but in my anxiety I forgot to turn on the mic. The engineer reaches over me and turn on the mic allowing me to be heard. and I complete the sports cast. Luckily, from acting I had developed a voice that sounded more authoritative than the young punk that I was. The expression: fake it till you make. That was me. The GM tells me I did great and apologizes for the engineer who must have forgotten to turn on the sound. I wasn't about to correct him.
The GM offered me a slot the next Monday night. I took it and I winged it until I got the hang of it, and that's how I got started. From sports to music. Full cycle right: from sports to music and finally back to sports.
CO: But you didn't stay at the university radio station for too long. I believe you moved to LIR, which you turned into the number one station on Long Island. I wish we had time to discuss that period, but we have to move on to how you went from LIR to WNEW.
RN: At LIR I met Michael Harrison and he talked the owner of the station into letting us have a rock and roll show. What we did was play the same bands that WNEW and WPLJ did, but we played the most popular songs, whereas they were fixated on deep cuts. Sometimes the cuts were so deep they were buried. Those stations were trying to be cool. Given a choice between 'Sunshine of Your Love' and 'SWLABR'. we played the former. The college kids loved it and soon we were the number one show on Long Island.
The problem was that our great success led in 1971 to a raise for both of us of to $2.00/hr. I kid you not. Even in 1971 you couldn't survive at $100/wk. So Harrison and I started sending our tapes around to NY radio stations. And when we discovered that there was an opening at WNEW after Rosco announced at the end of his show that he was leaving the station, we showed up the next day at the station with our tapes and waited for three hours to see if we could get into see Scott Muni. We did, left our tapes, didn't hear back for weeks; called in again and finally Scott Muni acknowledged us and asked us to meet with the general manager.
We did and were both hired. I was the music director and handled the overnight shift and Harrison was assigned the morning shift.
It was heaven. We played what we wanted. We were able to advocate for bands we loved, not always successfully however. We pushed the Strawbs, but they managed only a cult following. On the other hand, we pushed Frampton and he became a star.
CO: I hear you hand in shining a light on the kid from Asbury Park?
RN: True, though I probably take more credit than I deserve on that one. The truth is, I played his first album all the time. I loved it. He would call me on the ovenight shift regularly. We would talk for hours about evrything from girls to cars to music. I gave him the hotline number, but that's not who he was or is. He called on the regular listener number; and by the time Born to Run was released Sprngsteen was ready to explode. Which he did.
CO: I know there are million stories you can tell about the great times at WNEW, but it's more interesting to know what happened. How did it die?
RN: As you know, I wrote a book called FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio in which I discussed what I believed would lead to the death of rock radio. Basically, independent rock radio became AOR-- Album Oriented Rock. Harrison actually came up with that term! Everyone played the same songs, in rotation, and only those songs that had been approved by focus groups. It was all data driven, rather than quality driven. What make rock and roll radio great was the energy, passion, the risk taking, the belief in various artists, the curatorship. Listeners turned to us to learn something new they could get excited about, not for confirmation of popularity.
CO: In a phrase, they took monopoly power and turned it into a commodity, sold by price, not by expertise or uniqueness.
RN: Hadn't thought of it that way, but that's the nub of it.
CO: I could do this with you for days, but that wouldn't be fair to you. So let's maybe share different stories about a place and a person we both know pretty well: Alan Pepper, the founder and owner of Greenwich Village's preeminent rock venue, The Bottom Line. You go first.
RN: I loved the Bottom Line. The best show I ever saw -- ever -- was Bruce Springsteen at the Bottom Line in 1975. It was a smallish venue on Mercer Street at 4th in the village. Held no more than a few hundred people. The sound was fantastic The performers came alive there. All the seats were good. The food was reasonably priced. Even the drinks were reasonable. You found yourself at every show feeling like the audience was your community.
But alas, the Bottom Line is no more. I still speak with Alan Pepper who ran the place. He's over 80 now and for him a big accomplishment is going for a 45 minute walk. Given the relatively small size of the venue and the fair pricing, I could never figure out if they made any money. Do you know if they did?
CO: Funny you should ask. I lived in NYU housing from 2001-2016 or so. During that period I was first an advisor to the President of NYU, who was a good friend of mine, John Sexton, and eventually I took a position as Senior Vice Provost for Academic Planning while also being a professor both of Philosophy and Recorded Music. I lived on 3rd and Mercer. I spent too many evening hours at the Bottom Line, though I did spend my Thursday evenings at the Time Cafe listening to various iterations of the Mingus Big Band.
Someday, I'll tell you the story of the time my son, Jeremy, who with my daughter, Laura, were half of the popular NYC pop indie band, Murder Mystery, went to the Time Cafe and were seated at the table with Sue Mingus and the band's arranger, who happened to have been born in Hamden, CT where my wife and I raised our kids. Well, after the first set ends, we strike up a conversation and the two of them turn to us, and ask, 'Hey, have you ever heard of this guy, Elvis Costello? He's gotten in touch with us but nobody in the band has ever heard of him." It gets stranger from there.
Well, as you may know, the Bottom Line was located in a building that NYU owned. It turns out that, while Alan was a great guy, with even better taste in music, he adopted a rather lax attitude toward paying his rent to NYU. The President knew that I was a 'music' guy and asked me to act as an intermediary with Alan and see if I could get him to pay his rent.
I am sure there will be some disagreements about the numbers, but according to the keeper of the books at NYU, Alan hadn't paid rent for several years. How far behind in rent he was may be open for discussion. That he was very far behind is not. Alan and I became friends. My kids, two of whom had a successful pop indie band in NY worked part time at the Bottom Line and I was a regular. Still I was there to collect the rent.
Alan came up with one incredibly imaginative approach to how he was going to raise the rent money -- from holding charity concerts on his behalf headlined by the likes of Springsteen to offers to pipe in music from the Bottom Line shows into the dorms for free.
The truth is that the University was short of classroom space and they were more interested in removing the Bottom Line from the building than in getting his back rent money.
Eventually I found myself in a sticky situation. Alan began referring to me as his rabbi, which was worrisome and the President began wondering why he had given me this task. I knew I had to do something to move the ball along, and so I asked Alan, how it came to pass that the previous President of the University, Jay Oliva, who was an extremely nice and welcoming person, had never apparently pushed Alan to pay the rent.
Alan told me that he would give me the honest answer to this question provided I did not share it with the new President, who had been and continues to be, among my two or three closest friends. I said I would take it under advisement and consider his request, but couldn't guarantee that I would not share the story with the current President.
So Alan sits me down and tells me the following. He asks, 'Did you know that Jay Oliva loves to tap dance?' I assured him that I was unaware of this fact, but that I would ask my daughter who waa at the time a sophomore at NYU, the drummer in a band with her brother, and a professional tap dancer since the age of 13. She too was unaware of this. So Alan continued. I knew that nothing made Jay happier than to dance tap in front of an audience, and so every year, I put up in lights that next week, the Bottom Line would be presenting a night of tap dancing featuring Jay Oliva, the current President of NYU. In other words, he never asked me for the rent. Fact or fiction, this seems like a good way to end this interview.
RN: Thanks. this was great fun.
CO: I can't thank you enough for you time and generosity. And before I close, I want to bring this back to the Mets. How about being my guest -- indeed the guest of all of Mack's Mets writers -- at a Brooklyn Cyclones' game this summer. We can grab lunch at Nathans and dinner at Spumoni Gardens Pizzeria
Deal?
