The Real Don Steele, The Playmaker
Whenever he wanted to turn it on Steele could kick ass in tempo with any artist whose record he played. James Brown comes to mind as being on the same dynamic wave length.
Like any transcendent talent, Steele’s art seemed effortless — far from it. He probably expended more calories per hour than anyone in radio. Listen once to The Real and you would never forget him. The experience was like taking mescaline for the first time.
Steele’s air persona required an intense discipline to sound “wild and crazy” while he always remained within the boundaries of a complex music format. At work he resembled a Grand Prix driver — Velocity, Focus, Awareness, Heat and Smoke, passing anything that got in his way.
To be the Program Director from the moment Steele kicked off Boss Radio was an indescribable rush. To me it was like being the Flight Controller for the first NASA rocket launch.
The Real Don Steele and Robert W. Morgan comprised the most talented radio tag team to ever entertain an audience. They performed with consistency, each in his unique style while never letting you forget that they played on the same championship team.
I can’t envision KHJ accomplishing much of anything without both these guys pumping their blood, tears and sweat into what they did three hours every day. They would make anyone doing my gig look good. Without them I would be just another guy who passed unnoticed through the Los Angeles radio jungle. And that is not being modest. I don’t do modest. It is the fucking truth.
Robert W. Morgan (Email to Ron Jacobs, August 1, 1997.) Born 7-23-37, Mansfield, Ohio. Moved to Galion, age 2. Always a radio LISTENING junkie, it just never occurred to me to be ON it. In Jr. high my mother offered me ANYTHING if I got straight A’s. Said I’d do if for my own radio in my room. (Just had the big console in living room.) Did it and got a square, metal Arvin. Beautiful. Mother: Radio off by 10 p.m. Figured out how to extend speaker to under pillow. Never got busted.
College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio. Joined Jazz club. Local FM station gave club two hours a week PSA time where club President played jazz. One fateful weekend every club member was out of town. Asked to do show. With fear and loathing I agreed. First time I walked into a radio station was to go on air. WWST and WWST-FM, “Serving Agricultural Area.” Double-double W’s tough for a rookie. Try it now. Halfway thru the show I was “bitten by the bug.” Loved everything about the station including that wonderful “tube smell.” Manager was listening and offered me weekend gigfor $1 an hour. All day, Sunday. Ran Thesaurus music library shows in FM studio while doing live breaks in Cleveland Browns games in AM studio. Many close calls. The Browns didn't care about Thesaurus timing.
Main jock/station influence: Robert Q. Lewis, Arthur Godfrey and all jocks on KYW, Cleveland. They took all-night TELEGRAM requests. Big Wilson, Wes Hopkins, Joe Finan. Later met Finan as a Boss Jock and HE was thrilled to meet ME.
Ron Jacobs (From Email to Bill Mouzis, July 9, 2000): While thinking about our time together, with just you and me and Bob, his voice, your board, my words — three guys of one single mind when we were doing it — was as much a display of teamwork as any collective process I’ve ever been involved in. Ever. Only the three of us know the high we felt when we hit one out of the park.
To stay with the baseball metaphor, we weren’t doing it with juiced balls, short fences and mediocre pitching. And we were playing in the bigs. Starting in 1965 we were underdogs in a cerebral game. We stomped the competition so quickly we reached a point where we were out to surpass stiffer opposition: Ourselves.
Alone in our little sanctum, immune to the whirl around us, deep within a media fortress, we were insulated from the world outside out on Melrose Avenue. Think of the democracy of it. Zorba the Sleek Greek, a WASP with a thatch of hair the shade of Midwestern wheat fields and a hybrid Hawaiian-Jew with rapidly receding red hair. Alone in our hallway, we worshiped in a temple of sound, unexplainable to anyone. Crafted in a factory, it was our treasure alone to share.
Nothing in my professional experience has ever topped those days, that hallway, our variegated trio, minds creatively combined. Words to others will never convey our sense of achievement. Our dedication was not measured in terms of hours put in, but the tingle produced by a final take. The results of our workmanship in our windowless workshop “speak for themselves” whenever acetate tape passes a magnetic head, or howsoever the sounds are preserved . The smiles and excitement our audio squad brought to some people at the time is something that can never be revised or removed.
The fact that what we assembled during a daily “shift” is still being discussed in cyberspace more than a third of a century later — rightfully or wrongly, with or without all the facts — qualifies the work as “legendary” in the most literal sense. I know who did what, Bill. Who cares what anyone else knows, thinks or perpetuates? Did any other announcer-engineer-producer crew get to take that radio ride most weekdays at around eleven in the morning? I think not. Or, how about, “Not a clue”?
Charlie Tuna: Bobby Tripp, who followed me on the air from noon to three, gave me what probably was the best piece of advice I ever received. Tripp’s motto was, “The wheel turns, baby!” Meaning that you can be on top of the ratings or at the height of your career but nothing lasts forever. However, if you hang onto the wheel, eventually you’ll come around, even hitting bottom — but stay on that wheel and you'll be back on top again and again. I’ve never forgotten that, which is why I’m still in the toughest radio market in the world and still on morning drive playing the hits.
Geraldine Ostrow: It wasn’t long after Bobby got to L.A. that his wife called us and told me he had this problem. So I would call him very often and talk to him and I’d get reports that way. And he was a little bit modest. We used to actually get to his wife and say, “Joyce, send us information, send us little clippings.” So I have some clippings … he was in a publication. I think it was a broadcasting publication and there were little snippets about him.
Ron Jacobs: My conversations with Bobby Tripp were right up there with anything I ever read philosophically or heard in any of the Twelve Step meetings. His thing all boiled down to “Life is a wheel, baby.” And the secondary one, when he would be in the silliest situations he would just shrug and say, “Show business is my life.”
We had to change his air name because of Johnny Mitchell and all the things that led to that. I thought that we had named him when he got to L.A. But the jock that Bobby hated the most in San Francisco was a guy from New York who allegedly was one of the big bust-outs of the payola scheme, Peter Tripp. So Bobby Tripp with his irony said “Fuck it, I’ll be Bobby Tripp!” And “Tripp” was also cool with the psychedelics and all that shit going on then. So Bobby Tripp was OK. I don’t know that it was the best name but it didn’t matter because under any name he would be good.
And he never, ever played to the fact that he knew that he was dying. I mean he never missed a jock meeting. He’s the only guy of that whole crew that I can think of that ever came to my house socially, just to hang out. A Mensch.
Geraldine Ostrow: Mike … I mean Bobby … really was a mensch in every sense of the word. He had such a feeling for everybody. I called him one day — and I would almost be afraid to call my brother because I knew he had been in remission — and he always let the people believe that maybe he didn’t feel well because it was the air conditioning at the station. He never wanted to complain. But one day my sister had gone out to visit with him and said, “Ger, you better keep calling him, he’s not well, he isn’t right.”
Ron Jacobs: Jocks have missed shifts because of a hangnail or some made up intricate bullshit to cover up a hangover. I mean Tripp was in there with people whose egos, by then, were rampant and Tripp had produced hit records, promoted major concerts, owned a stable of race horses, seen and spent more money than these guys had ever known, hung out with top people and never laid out anything about those things, at least not to me.
Geraldine Ostrow: He never told anyone his son was diagnosed with leukemia. He said, “You know, we went out in the driveway and he just lay there so debilitated, like on his little face and tummy. And he was just a darling, brilliant little boy.” I would try to keep up his morale. And he continued, “Jesus Christ, here I am sick and then I have a sick kid,” and I said, “Mike look, you’re going to be OK.”
The night that I spoke with him, his wife had just wanted a little relief and went to the movies with someone. I spoke to him for four hours on the phone. “God, Ger, you’re good for me. Look, my temperature went down!” It was like 104 when I called him and he said, “Ger, it went down.”
Ron Jacobs: When Tripp was hospitalized, Frank Terry jumped in. I don’t know how long. But of course you know that the deal was to Terry, “It’s the Bobby Tripp Show, absolutely, positively,” and I just maintained my youthful optimism because, what year was this that Tripp died? ’68, OK.
See, I hadn’t lost the first really close friend in my peer group so I had this vision of we’re all immortal and he’s not really going to die and they’ll fix him; it’s UCLA. I didn’t care how long it was, Terry would do the show. I really believed that Tripp was going to make it, which he didn’t — and the last thing he ever said to me was, “Life is a wheel, baby.”
Tripp was the best, man.
2 B continued . . .
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