The Day Broadway Almost Ended My Radio Career

I can tell the story now because the statute of limitations has run its course many times over.

During the 50s and 60s popular music was heavily influenced by Broadway. Who can forget the music from the musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar that invaded the top 40? But there were so many more offerings. “Funny Girl”, “Fiddler On The Roof” and “Hello Dolly” all spun off top 40 songs in 1964. A decade before songs from “My Fair Lady” and a decade before that “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific” all made their way to the radio.

The Broadway play that may have had the biggest influence on the pop music back in the 60s was “West Side Story!” The 1957 recording of a Broadway production of the musical West Side Story was recorded 3 days after the show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre. The recording was released in October 1957 in both mono and stereo formats. In 1962, the album reached #5 on Billboard's Pop Album chart. It certified gold by the RIAA on January 12, 1962. “West Side Story” was made into a movie in 1961 and the soundtrack album released as a Columbia Masterworks album in October of ‘61. Five of the albums songs: “I Feel Pretty”, “Maria”, “America”, “Tonight” and “Somewhere” would become pop hits by the time the decade ended.

I had seen the movie as a high school student and like so many red blooded American boys of the day had become smitten with Natalie Wood in the role of Maria in my sophomore year.

So you can imagine my joy when I walked into WUSC’s immense library of 33 1/3 records and saw that bright red album cover adorned with the black drawing of a fire escape on the wall of a New York tenement. Yes! I finally had a copy of that Columbia Masterworks LP to play on the radio.

I need to take a small diversion here to bring in the snake in the grass of this story. There are certain words in the English language that were banned by the FCC as being obscene. George Carlin did a routine called “Seven dirty words that you can’t say on the radio” that pretty much summed up the forbidden utterances. I’m not going to list them here but you can look up “Seven dirty words” on Wikipedia if you want the gory details. There were others but these seven words are still on the FCC list of things that can get a radio station in trouble with the FCC. If the FCC finds a station in violation of its rules, it has the authority to revoke a station license, impose a fine or issue an admonishment or warning. Just ask Howard Stern if you don’t believe me. The last I heard the standard fine is $60,000 per violation today. So you get the idea that this is pretty serious business.

The third element to this story was my own naiveté. I had seen the movie out at the Lowes Normandy Drive in while on a double date and did not note anything untoward. Perhaps, the fact that it was a double date and I might have been distracted just a bit also came into play.

So I was almost brimming with glee that sunny afternoon during a live show in early 1964 as I grabbed the album out of the pile of records that I had retrieved from the library for my show. I queued up “I Feel Pretty”, the second track on side 2 of the album. I was ready to go. When the song before it ended I announced it and then began playing it on the radio.

Something was very wrong; instead of hearing Maria singing, I heard a gang of boys getting ready for a rumble. Sure enough, I had the record on the wrong side, I had queued up the second track of side 1 not side 2. The song that was playing was “The Jet Song” by the male ensemble that played the street gang in the movie. For a second I panicked I had not heard the song since the movie and was worried about the lyrics. Wait a minute, this is a soundtrack from a movie of a Broadway play, there was no way there would be a problem. I would just correct the song title after the record ended. That was a big honkin’ mistake. As I opened my microphone over the last four words of the song, to my horror, I heard “The whole (f-bomb) street!” I was totally speechless. This was live radio; there was no delay, no way to avoid getting the offending words on the air. What the audience heard at the ending of “The Jets Song” was a couple of seconds of silence; what we call “dead air” in the business and then a sloppy spin up of the next tune.

The station’s music director happened to be in the other room at the time and he walked into the studio to tell me how special that was. There was no marking on the album warning us not to play that particular track. He asked me to make sure that song could never be played again and I took out my pocket knife and carved three “X”s across that track. I spent the rest of the show waiting for a knock on the control room door to let me know that there guys from the FCC wearing sunglasses and trench coats that wanted to have a word with me. I didn’t sleep much that night either.

Some 15 years later, while driving around with the regional FCC field engineer taking intensity measurements of the directional AM where I was working at the time, I told him my “Jets Song” story. He told me that under those circumstances, it they had a complaint that I probably would have gotten a warning. Oh and one more thing, I needed to have my towers repainted. Oh MY!