Ken Levine: I asked Bill Mouzis if he knew the origin of ‘Tina Delgado is alive.’ He reacted like I was asking for the secret formula of Coca-Cola, which if he did know, he would have to kill me if he told me. What cracked me up was his saying something like, “Actually, I don’t think too many people asked Steele, out of respect, you know?” The actual story I heard — and it may be bullshit — was that there was a tiny mention in a newspaper personal column that someone was trying to find a Tina Delgado. A few days later someone else wrote that Tina Delgado is dead. And a few days after that someone else wrote in that Tina Delgado is alive. At least that’s one of the legends.
Ron Jacobs: A key at KHJ was each guy having his own shtick that would sort of make him a personality image-wise, if not by performance. So Morgan’s the only guy that could put the phone on the air. Riddle would talk about the nighttime scene up on Sunset Strip and plug his TV dance show. Roger would talk about records. And so on. With Steele I asked him, “What is your thing, man?”
He said, “Well, there’s TINA DELGADO, you know.”
“What’s TINA DELGADO?”
“Well, there’s this liner.”
“All right, there’s a liner — but what’s your thing?”
He said, “Well, it’s this liner.”
I said, “I know but it’s a liner, man. But what do you do on the radio? Morgan told me that …"
He said, “You don’t get it, man, this thing really works. You just do it over and over again. It’s a liner. You do it over and over.”
“You do it over again?”
“No,” Steele says, “a woman screams it.”
“A woman screams this. Over and over. What does she scream?”
“TINA DELGADO is alive, alive.”
“OK. What kind of woman?”
“Shrieking.”
Bill Mouzis: One of the things people always ask us is, “Who the hell is Tina Delgado?” And I don’t know. That’s one I really don’t know. He just brought it in. Steele brought it in with him. I don’t know where he got it, I don’t know who that was. And I didn’t even want to ask him. I figured if he wasn’t about to volunteer I wasn’t going to ask. Remember Jimmy Durante? Remember what he said at the end of his TV show? “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Like, you’d go up to him and say, “Pardon me, Mr. Durante, but who is Mrs. Calabash?” Yeah, right.
Ron Jacobs: Now KHJ was a very unionized full-on Hollywood operation in 1965. The engineers were members of I.B.E.W. — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Anyone who spoke on the air had to be a member of A.F.T.R.A., the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. So I called them, trying to be cool, and said, “I need some women to come down and shriek.” The entire copy was “Tina Delgado is alive, alive.”
There were 25 actresses sitting in the KHJ lobby rehearsing. And Mouzis thought he’d seen everything, right? World War II, network radio, a show that Steve Allen and his wife did in bed, anything. He came into the production room. “Uh, Ronnn, there’s, ah, a bunch of women out there chanting ‘Morgado’ something. Uh, Ronnnn,” — that’s how he’d pronounce my name when he could see something really fucking weird coming — “what’s the deal, man?”
I said, “We bring ’em in one at a time, we say, ‘Sit down ma’am, please give us a level and scream this.’”
I mean, how do you direct a woman to scream that? Five words. I respect Johnny Mann because he knows that the shorter things are, the harder they are to do. I don’t know why exactly, but I saw John do more than 20 takes of our first jingle, “93/KHJ.”
And I’m in this room and I’ve been in Hollywood for like four minutes and these professional actresses who have done Hamlet on stage or Stella Dallas on network radio or national commercials for Oldsmobile, they sit down in the booth and all they have to do is belt out, “Tina Delgado is alive, alive!” And I don’t even know what it’s supposed to sound like, you know, except that it worked in San Francisco.
And Morgan had already gone home. Steele hadn’t come in yet and besides, anything would work as far as he’s concerned. But I was trying to think, “What, is it supposed to be fast? Is it supposed to sound like someone they just found in a flipped car after a train wreck?”
“Del-gah-doooooooooo!”
“IS alive!”
“Del-GAHHHHHH-do!”
“IS ALIIIIIIIIIVE!”
“DELLLLLL-gato!”
“Tanya Del —
(Click) “Sorry, it’s TINA.”
“Oops, can I do it again?”
(Click) “OK, rolling.”
“Teeeeena Delgado —
Each audition took about a minute. The actresses, operating on the incorrect assumption that we had any idea of what we were doing, asked, “Will there be a call back?” I’d seen my share of Hollywood movies about Hollywood. “We’ll call you. Leave the name of your agent.”
And just as quickly as it hit like a tropical typhoon, Hurricane Tina was gone. Mouzis and I were happy that the thing was all over. But it wasn’t. We had two dozen women on tape shrieking.
Mouzis, a wise and patient man, locked the recorders and nodded in the direction of Nickodell’s. The coffee arrived and I asked him, “Billy, you’ve been doing this since radio was invented. What the fuck did we just do?”
“Hey, man, don’t ask me, you’re the program director.” That breaks the tension. We howl like hyenas. No one notices. This is Hollywood, babe.
Later, Steele came in to do his show. I dragged him into the production room where Mouzis was sitting with a 10-inch reel of tape racked up on a big Ampex recorder.
I said, “Listen to this.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Just listen up and tell me which one of these works for you.”
And The Real Don Steele listened. These were the Delgado finalists who had been selected from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to audition for this and one was going to receive a residual payment every thirteen weeks for years. And he listened to the first one and said, “That’s got it,” and walked out the door. He picked the first one. Then I remember that Steele was born in Hollywood and he expected this to happen some day. Hollywood, man, no biggie.
The Real Don Steele: Why do they like “Tina Delgado is ALIVE, ALIVE!” You tell me. I used that in Portland, Oregon and soon it was all over town like “Kilroy was here.” Dumb thing. I don’t have any idea why. I know it was a hit. I could feel it was a hit. I don’t know if “Roberto Delgado is alive, alive” would have been as heavy, I just don’t know. Even if I think I am caught up in some kind of insanity it doesn’t depress me, because I kind of enjoy it, you know?
Sitting there suddenly saying, “It ain’t bad if you fry it,” looking through the glass and there is an engineer in his early forties — Valley community, Little League baseball coach, Mr. Legitimate — cueing in noises that’ll go wowee rather than chooo. And I think to myself: What is this? A world situation this, and we’re in here giggling like did dad doo! I don’t feel ashamed of that. What a wonderful thing to have fun working. Not many people get that break.
Humble Harve: Coming on after Steele you felt like you were already on a rocket and you had to pick it up. Anybody who followed The Real Don Steele — if they didn’t jump on that rocket, man, they were six feet under. I can’t imagine doing anything low key after him. I mean, how could you? It’s just like it’s following an explosion. I had to stand off in the control room and egg him on. Jacobs told me what to do. “Get in there and rile him up,” for his final set, you know, the Delgado thing. Yeah, I was in there egging him on. I mean not in the same room. I would never go in the room with him, no, no, that wouldn’t work. But to stand outside with the engineer, looking in, that was the whole thing.
And come on, Steele didn’t need me. But it added to Jacobs’ whole Boss Jock team idea. It also made me feel better. Shit man, it’s like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the Yankees. You follow with another home run. There’s no let up, like passing the baton. Yeah. I think that was the greatest one-two punch that ever happened on the radio. There was no let-up, there was no breathing room, man. It was boom, boom. Here comes a left, here comes a right, boom, bang!
Ed Dela Pena: Eventually, we turned the mike around, andput it right in front of the jock’s face and hung it with some chains. I had had an Altec 604E in there and they’d pound the announcer’s desk. The volume would just go to the point where sometimes the engineer would have to cue up a record a little bit ahead of the playtime. Steele played the speaker so loud in there that the vibrations coming through the glass would make the turntable-needle skip. So they had to watch out for that and make sure it hadn’t skipped on them because of the acoustic problems with that big window we had in there. It really vibrated.
Milo Perichitch: I always had a weakness for The Real Don Steele because I felt he was really basically an honest person. And I liked Morgan too. Oh, yeah, Gary Mack. He was cool, he was a good guy. Humble Harve was fun. I didn’t know these guys that well; I was pretty busy with the TV show, “Boss City.” Really what I knew of the jocks off the air was whatever went down at our table at Nickodell’s. In 1966 it felt like KHJ was on top of the heap and it also sort of demanded responsible behavior and getting the tasks done. It was definitely a good feeling being with the #1 radio station.
Cyrus Faryar: Radio guys at that time were always fascinating. Most of the jocks — there is probably a term, a medical term, for the personality of a Top 40 disc jockey — their radio persona was very vibrant. Out of the booth they could either be very modest and sort of conservative in their demeanor or off-the-charts crazy. But they found a common ground in radio as the name of the game and success was to have a distinct, immediately recognizable radio voice, personality and manner, so that people knew immediately who they were listening to. Whether it was The Real Don Steele or Robert W. Morgan or whoever. The first time I walked around the station in my full Sitar the Pirate outfit, Morgan’s demeanor was to be totally charged and quite urbane and he probably was just, you know, cool with the whole thing. Steele probably rolled his eyes.
Mitch Fisher: The Monkees concert at the Hollywood Bowl was their first major appearance in L.A., right? KHJ was presenting it. There were going to be 18,000 screaming 13-year-old girls there, right? So we decided that the disk jockeys should all wear different costumes from Western Costume. Really like bizarre outlandish stuff, fit right in with the Monkees, you know? I have one of Jacobs’ infamous memos. “Instead of coming on hip,” which is in quotes, “or anything formal, since the audience will be younger and because the Monkees are zany, you will be wearing grand costumes from Western Costume.” Then it says to check with Mitch Fisher. “These costumes are assignments and will only be changed if they don’t fit or with Mitch’s permission if you have a better idea.”
The jocks were supposed to dress like this:
Robert W. Morgan: Giant, muscle bound rooster from “The Danny Kaye TV Show.”
Johnny Williams: Caveman.
Bobby Tripp: Pancho Villa.
Real Don Steele: Lord High Executioner, as worn by Groucho Marx in the motion picture “The Mikado.” (Laughs.)
Humble Harve: Merlin The Magician.
Sam Riddle: Beau Brummel.
Gary Mack: Astronaut.
The night of the concert when it came time before the show for everybody to get into their costumes, Steele put on the oversized stuffed rooster outfit, looked at himself in the mirror and said, “This is fucking ridiculous, I can’t go out there like this!”
To which I replied, “Don, you have to go out there like this. This is the way it’s all set up. This guy’s going to be Merlin, this guy’s going to be that, you gotta be — damnit, this is your costume! You picked it out.”
“No, I’m not doing it. I ain’t going on, sorry, man, that’s it. I ain’t doing it. I’m going on in my suit.” So he took off all the rooster costume stuff and he put on his blue serge suit with his tie and everything, right? While he’s doing this of course as soon as he said he’s not going on like that, I went out to find Jacobs and told him that Steele refused to go on wearing the rooster suit. And Jacobs said to me, “That’s your department. I got nothing to do with it, it’s up to you, deal with it.”
So I went back to the dressing room and I said, “Steele …” who was now in a blue serge suit with a tie and everything, right? And I said, “Steele, you’re not going on in that suit. You’re going on in the rooster suit or you’re not going on at all!”
Steele said, “Then I’m going to leave.”
I said, “Fine, we can do very well without you. Goodbye.”
So he stormed out the door. Probably went crying to find Jacobs. And Jacobs probably told Steele, “Hey, Mitch is running all of that.” So Steele came slinking back in, put on the rooster suit and went on. When you think about it, it was really ridiculous, a real scene. Steele or Morgan or both of them were always pulling shit. Those guys would’ve rolled over anyone but Jacobs.
2 B continued . . .
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