10:30am | During the twice annually KLON fund-drives, we’d hear from celebrities who enjoyed the music in which the station specialized. Johnny Carson listened and pledged for the jazz he loved so much. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t into the R&B I played, but I had my own celeb listeners. Comedian George Carlin was one. He pledged to my show and someone at the station thought he’d make a great guest.
Apparently George agreed, because on August 7, 1988, Carlin appeared on my show. He had sent me a series of cassette tapes of records he loved. As I learned during our interview, Carlin was born and grew up in White Harlem, a largely Irish part of Manhattan. As he phrased it:
“…because of our proximity to Harlem we had a big jump in the appreciation of black music, especially rhythm and blues, especially vocal groups at the same time other kids were still stuck in the Perry Como, Patti Page and Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett area. We had progressed to the Clovers, the Drifters, the Vocaleers, the Dominoes, the Five Willows and we had a two or three year jump. When the switched was made, when the white music industry recognized the goldmine there was in this black music and created rock and roll, we were kind of affronted and a little and about that because it was our music and they were changing. That’s the way we felt about it.”
During this conversation, I played some of Carlin’s favorites and he commented on each record and how he went over to a radio station just blocks away, held a sign up to a window for a request and asked to delay the playing of the record for a few minutes, so he could run home and hear it.
He later went into the Air Force, got a radio job in Shreveport, LA and then to Los Angeles, where he was a KDAY DJ for a year or so in 1960. From then on, it was stand-up, but he never forgot his R&B roots.
Local TV personality Steve Edwards, who also came down to KLON for the spinning of some sides he loved when growing up in N.Y.C. was more into later post-Carlin mid-1950s doo wop. It was that later doo wop that helped end my show… well, we’ll save that for the next part.