CRUSIN' WITH MIKE ROYER

For a guy born in Waikiki in Territorial days, I have been blessed to know and collaborate with so many talented people along the way. One of them is legendary artist Mike Royer. The art director on most projects for Watermark, our new company, was Paul Gruwell. In 1970 he created the original AMERICAN TOP 40 logo. At the same time I conceived the CRUISIN' albums series. All of that came to me in one flash, sitting in our second story offices above an autograph gallery on La Cienega Blvd. I imagined what the records would sound like, how the liner notes would read and, most importantly, the overall cover concept. The idea was to follow a pair of young kids, Peg and Eddie, along with the series', beginning in 1955, (I named the couple after some folks who watched out for me in my terroristic late teens in Honolulu. Peggy Ryan was a former star movie dancer who had married local columnist, Eddie Sherman. They lived down by Kaneohe Bay, a few miles from here).  Each cover of the 12-inch vinyl albums would be a frame in a comic strip. Each frame a year, populated with suitable props. A 1957 Edsel would be parked in the background, evocative of that year. The 1960 cover showed the young couple at a drive-inn theater, with PSYCHO as the main feature.  But, the idea would only be as good as the person drawing it.

Gruwell knew of a young Canadian who had moved to Hollywood in 1965, He was Mike Royer (above). At the time he was assisting the man who did TARZAN and other popular comic books. One amazing thing about L.A., I learned at KHJ, was that the world's greatest talent was to be found there. If you had a budget. We did. Gruwell made a deal with Royer then he and I began work on a storyboard that would take Peg and Eddie from pre-teens to post-hippies. I began work with Ellen Pelissero, a Maui girl I found working at KHJ. She was a researcher for the HISTORY OF ROCK & ROLL and one of the folks who moved with me from Boss Radio. Ellen and I spent months researching what deejays from which cities we could line up without all manner of conflicts. Tom Bonetti of GRT Records, our partner in the deal, would handle song and performer clearances. And I headed to places like Dallas to search for radio jingles dating back to the Forties. These were to be our first Increase Records, no Mickey Mouse deal would they be.

I was 33, four years older than Royer. After years of doing radio, which was "invisible," my idea was in his hands. One day Gruwell burst in with Royer's sketches of each cover. My idea of a giant seven foot comic strip (if the LPs were laid on the floor) would actually happen. The hundreds of hours of drudgery evaporated. I knew that, when Royer letter our dialog, inked in the cool illustrations and splashed them with comic book color, the package would be a knockout. I was re-motivated. Finally it was time to hit the road. The plan was to visit one city a day to record the deejay's voice tracks. Bill Hergonson, ace of the razor blade, and I, would add all the songs and production later. I sat squashed in a small studio in Akron, Ohio, with Russ "The Weird Beard" Knight and tried to take him back to Dallas, and KLIF in 196?, when he ruled the airwaves. I recorded Dr. Don Rose at Philadelphia station as he did time signals and traffic reports from his earlier days in Atlanta. People who heard it thought we were nuts. Then it was back to L.A. and long nights in the studio. Hundreds of bits and pieces of quarter-inch tape hung on the walls. These were pre-digital times, children. Often we felt we were detectives, searching for clues: Which bit of tape held what precious gem?

When the masters were finally finished they were sent off to the record plant. I couldn't wait to see, touch and hear the results. I was in New York when the first discs were done. They arrived at my hotel. I spread them out on the floor. Didn't have a phonograph but I got high just staring at them. 

I wanted to learn every step of the recording process. On the road with veteran promo man, Dick Lapalm, we hit every city represented in the series. We visited record stores, distributors and radio stations. The deed had been done. These great jocks and their shows were frozen in time, Or at least in vinyl. Now, through June 29, my original audio demo is running on

ReelRadio (see link). I just looked at the comments left

there and discovered that Mike Royer is now a legend in

the field of commercial art. He did the animation for TV's

SPIDERMAN. In 1979 he joined Disney. Among the many projects there he created WINNIE THE POOH products. His list of credits is amazing. In 2001 he moved to Oregon, where he continues at the drawing board. After CRUISN' I began work on AMERICAN TOP 40 and then we built a larger studio in a farm house to record music. That's how I met our carpenter, a struggling actor named Harrison Ford. But that's another story, for another blog.