Radio daze
A long time ago I worked in the radio business and I made some good old friends. Since then once a year Larry Gogan, Howard Stern, Rick Dees and I meet for a weekend of beer, discussion about the state of the radio industry and to reminisce about the time we tried to make a clone of Stern which went horrifically wrong and we ended up with Ryan Tubridy. I told them we should have just waited and extracted a bit more DNA rather than using some of Larry’s poo but they wouldn’t listen.
We used to be 5 though as part of our group was Valdimir ‘the impaler’ Vladovic. He was the main man of Russian radio. He started as a 16 year old on a pirate station in Saint Petersburg called KISH FM. His zany style and wicked impersonations soon saw him gain a massive audience and by the time he was 21 he was on Moscow’s hottest top 40 station. Within 3 years his show was being syndicated across the whole of the country and his Russian Top 40 countdown was earning him a fortune.
He was a true Soviet celebrity, super-wealthy and he, following the lead of many others, decided to buy his own radio network. It wasn’t too long before he was known as the king of Russian radio.
Naturally he fitted in well with all of us and our annual weekends became legendary in the radio world. They were debauched, they were non-stop, they were great fun. Sadly one of them ended in tragedy. We used to vary the location. One year New York with Howard Stern, one year in LA with Rick Dees, one year in Moscow with Vlad and then a year in Dublin with me and Larry.
It was the Dublin weekend of 1983 that cost Vlad his life. Having been in Dublin before he was a huge fan of fish and chips and especially those in Leo Burdock’s on Werburgh Street. We were staying in the Berkley Court Hotel, Stern had insisted on a suite in which we could ‘paaaaarty’. So we were there drinking and carousing and singing and certainly not snorting enormous lines of cocaine because there was no cocaine in Ireland back then. Really.
Anyway, mid-party Vlad got peckish and decided to nip over to Burdock’s for a cod supper. No harm, we all just carried on. Larry Gogan was in a hotel bathrobe strumming a guitar and singing Thin Lizzy hits in that rich, baritone of his. Rick Dees was entertaining a young Finglas girl called Jacinta in the jacuzzi while Howard Stern had two blondes on a four-poster bed and I can’t tell you what he was doing as it’s still illegal.
After a while Stern decided he’d give us all a treat. He gotten into home cinema and had made his own ‘home movies’. Although we weren’t really into seeing any more of him than we’d already witnessed during the party he’s just not the kind of guy you can say not to. So he stopped doing what he was doing to the blondes, which took about 10 minutes, and pulled a tape out of his suitcase and put it in the machine. However, instead of the adult entertainment he was hoping to show us we got a taped from TV version of the Omen II.
To say he lost his temper is an understatement. He went beserk, throwing things around, kicking things over and at one point he vomited and some of it came out of the corners of his eyes. Lastly he went over to the machine that had offended him so and hurled it through the window. Real rock and roll style. We were all silent after his outburst and a minute or two later Rick Dees went over to look out the window.
“Oh Jesus!”, he said. “I think you’ve hit someone.”
We all rushed downstairs as fast as our little legs would carry us and once we pushed through the crowd we were greeted with a terrible sight. Our chum Vlad, having stuffed his face with the best fish and chips in Dublin, was on his way back to the hotel to carry on the party when a Sony SL-C7UB Betamax landed on his head, killing him instantly. The king of Russian radio’s brains were spread all over the pavement.
“Oh fuck!”, I said.
“I’ll be right back after these tears”, said Rick Dees. Stern just looked shellshocked and slightly guilty.
There was a plaintive sob from behind us. Larry Gogan stood there, his bathrobe open, his eyes welling as his genitals swayed gently in the autumn breeze.
“Oh no. I can’t believe it”, he cried.
“Video killed the radio Tsar….”
