In 1978, my late great friend, Jack "Big Z" Zukerkorn. whipped out about $3000 -- when you could still buy lots of stuff with that amount of money to -- to get us a computer. We rode in his new Caddy Coupe De Ville to Radio Shack on South King Street and left with something called a TRS-80. It has been called many things since, none of them very complimentary. Early nerds (this was before "geek" came into general usage) referred to the thngs as the "Trash Eighty."
From that primal contraption I began to learn about these modern computer devices. The thing was slightly larger than a toaster, showed only neon letters on a black screen, used a cassette tape for memory storage and came with a 9-pin dot matrix printer. Or maybe that was extra.
I refuse to look up any further specs because I have been through way to much hardware and software for a guy whose first radio job was at a station where the accountant used an abacus. Yes! Lin Hon Au, also known as the notorious Coolidge Nakamura.
In 1982 I bought something on for sale on special at Sears for $349. It was made by a failed British computer company started by a soccer club owner. He dumped his wretched excess on American idiots like me. The only person who knew how to run it was ol' Harley Ristad in Hawthorne, CA. An early IBM engineer, Harley looked and acted just like Christopher Lloyd in BACK TO THE FUTURE.
With the Internet yet to be invented by Al Gore, Harley and I spoke by long distance phone. Soon the bills added up to more than the price of the machine. I think I've deliberately purged the brand name from my brain. All I know is that it used floppies made in the UK, so they matched nothing available this side of London.
Writing in ASCII and finally adding a 28K dial-up modem, equal now to a 28 horsepower car. I managed to write scores of magazine pieces for which I got paid by the word. That never happened in radio even though the amounts were manini.
In the mid-80s, Bill Bigelow brought back the legendary HAWAII CALLS radio show and brought me aboard to produce. I did it because the best Hawaiian musicians comprised our orchestra, playing every Saturday on Waikiki Beach at the Hawaiian Village Hotel. But I was equally motivated because we mixed it down at Dunbar Wakayama's venerable Audio Media Studio on Waimanu Street. Dunbar's teenage son, Billy, could be called an "IT savant". He was the fastest keyboarder I've ever known, made the early version of Pro Tools work like NASA and he put up with my total lack of knowledge about what we were doing. But it sounded great.
Arriving back in Hollywood in 1984 we co-created the follow up to AMERICAN TOP 40. It is THE WORLD CHART and is still heard globally today. My justification to return to the bad air and some bum attitudes was to work with the new technology. There was this thing called "fax" that allowed us to tabulate hit charts from around the globe. Tom Rounds, who thought up the show had been prodding me for a while to use something called email. And 28-year-old Brandon D'Amore, half my age, filled me in on the fine points of digital editing -- in return for my analog tales of Elvis and other people I knew. The house tech, Randy Massey, issued me an Apple device called a Duo Dock. This was the predecessor of the laptop in many ways. I could yank my Mac out of its slot at work and haul it home where I mostly used it to contact women when AOL was invented.
I returned home in 1997, having accomplished my goals, been mugged in West L. A. and avoiding another earthquake. How I got into webcasting is covered somewhat in the first blog in this series. About a month after launch we were ready to host our first live musicians. Roy Sakuma came first, then David Kahiapo and the award winning group Kaukahi. The sound has only improved. Except for the one JPG at the top, this is a photo-free entry. I learned most of this blogosheric stuff in Week One. Now we can boogie a bit.
Below is Whodavideo One, featuring Ed Kanoi trying to sound like Casey Kasem and Jordan Eceves-Foster doing what interns usually do with nothing assigned them. If the video plays, man, I have stuff in da files that might even be bad enough for My Space.
PLAYING SOON LIVE ON WHODAGUY HAWAII: The people that showed me that Hawaiian music had grown up when I returned home: Jerrry Santos (Olomana)May 28 and The Makaha Sons (Moon Kaukahe, John and Jerome Koko) June 4. Jerry performs Friday nights at the Hawaiian Village. The Sons will be playing some off-island dates in June. Like June 21 at the David Marr Theater in Redding, CA.
In Memory of William Dain Tsunao Wakayama, 1974-2006
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