Chapter Forty Four: The Last Chapter.

Tim The Rock N Roll Animal’s step out onto the ledge wasn’t just a stunt. He tapped into the collective consciousness of a generation that lived in the shadows of the “holier then thou” self absorbed, old hippies. This wasn’t Jim Ladd’s “people.” This was a new, harder rockin, band of cohorts, across the country saying,

“It’s our turn. ”

It was the sentiment of the times. Thus, the irony of using a Woodstock descended, burnt out, “has been” band that had come to view itself as “fairly insignificant” should not be lost. Their generation was singing “My Generation” for our generation. You could argue that, were they the band of past, they wouldn’t have been able to be slapped around by Arnold, Stroh’s and the public at large in such a condescending manner. That they’d lost their arrogance and that their empathy to Milwaukee’s cause and their need for the stimulation gave them away as weak, befuddled and failing. But it was actually much simpler than that.

The turnaround in the course of ONE WEEK from the bands business agents being angry with McElrath and trying to convince him to pressure the radio station to drop it to Bill Curbishley’s call to Arnold to discuss terms could have ONLY happened if the band members were behind it. No one else wields that much power to demand a late addition to the itinerary at any cost. And while Roger Daltrey was the early proponent, Townsend had come around too. In that interview with The Animal at the Rosemont he explained the bands take on it very eloquently:

“We were at first dumbfounded by… when we first heard about your…umm…action. And at first thought that maybe it was a gag, maybe it was a publicity stunt or whatever. But then we realized that you were stickin’ to your guns… I mean … to some extent, at first, we thought that “Hey this guys coercing us… it’s pressure”…and then we realized that it was backed up by a great response from the people of the city…so we’re gonna play there. You have to bow to pressure like that because it’s a nice gesture to the band.”

The Who heard Milwaukee’s message. They and the city had established a unique personal bond that went beyond radio station promotion, business managers and media hype. They weren’t leveraged, manipulated or sold. They were respected, quite a thing to handle for a band that had lost all respect for itself.

Both The Who and Milwaukee had a feeling of inferiority and were satisfying the others need for a boost. With The Who on it’s way down and Milwaukee on its way up, they had met in the middle. It was mutually beneficial. For this brief moment in time, the city had shown that they were no longer Chicago’s bitch having the 2ed greatest rock n roll band in the world as their brothers-in-arms.

The stunt brought attention to the need for a larger facility. The NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks threatened to leave the city for Minneapolis in the following year. Threats that ultimately led to Jane and Lloyd Bradley Pettit’s donation of $90 million to build the 20,000 seat concert capacity Bradley Center that broke ground in 1986 and opened in 1988. The domino effect of that project led to a Milwaukee boom that culminated with Architect Santiago Calatrava’s beautiful Milwaukee Art Museum Addition.

Sometimes it takes someone else’s belief in you in order for you to believe in yourself. Tim The Rock N Roll Animal’s belief in Milwaukee was, in my mind, the first sign of a real change in the city’s perception of itself.

For the state of Wisconsin, even The Green Bay Packers pitched in to help boast its’ self image making it to the playoffs that December for the first time since 1972. It was a Brewers/Who/Packers Trifecta.

Benjamin Franklin once said,

“The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.”

Tim The Rock N Roll Animal didn’t speak as well as Lee Arnold but he had a true rock n roll heart. Someone who was insincere and a poser would have been easily revealed, called out and ultimately ignored over the course of a taxing action such as this. Tim was like The Who in that he tried to be honest not only with himself but to his listeners. Clearly, in the hundreds of interviews and on-air breaks, Tim’s appeal had a harmonic resonance. It was a signature of a moment. As a spokesman for the struggle of a downtrodden, hard rockin’, beer drinking, blue collar city and its people, there have been few times in Milwaukee’s history when a voice has been more syncopatic. He said what everybody actually not only felt but knew to be the truth.

Excellence drives competitors to greatness. So while LPX’s Harris considers himself to have gotten “his but handed to him” in Milwaukee, he forgets that his formidable threat was the impetus for Arnold’s idea- the scare that created the desperation that drove Lee Arnold’s genius. And even though he may still harbor a bit of anger,

“This was a radio promotion! If you’re one of those who got caught up in the whole ‘Doing it for the community’ thing… That’s just bullshit!”

He freely admits,

“I learned more from Milwaukee than from any other place because…I’ll tell you…YOU LEARN FAR MORE FROM BATTLES THAT YOU DON”T WIN THAN YOU DO THE BATTLES THAT YOU WIN!”

A few months after The Who show, RJ Harris’ boss, John Hinkle, got in a very public media tussle with The Brewers President Bud Selig that resulted in WISN’s losing the broadcast back to WTMJ. On August 22ed of the following summer LPX changed formats to Hit Radio 97X. QFM attained the coveted #1- 12+ rating in the fall of ‘83 Arbitron book with an 8.5 share. Both Harris and Arnold were gone by the following spring.

Lee Arnold admits that his first thought after the band played Milwaukee was,

“LPX is over.”

The greater cause took a while to sink in as he left for greener pastures and didn’t return to Milwaukee until 1989.

“It wouldn’t have touched everybody the way that it touched ‘em if it was just a band coming to town.”

Or if it was just a rock radio station war either. The legacy,

“…would be that for the longest time after this people walked around with their heads held just a little higher.”

He’s one of them and that feeling goes a long way to explain his passion for the town.

“I love the vibe of this city. I worked in a lot of cities and I choose to make my home here. It’s a great, great town!”

Bill Lynett isn’t quite able to assign the success of it all to Lee Arnold’s skill set,

“The good thing about lucky is that it doesn’t take any practice.”

Harris found the home that he’d hoped Milwaukee would be at WHP in Harrisburg, PA where he has been doing a #1 AM radio morning show for nearly 20 years.

Jim Ladd can still be heard on the radio in the late nights in Los Angeles.

McElrath landed in Florida and is the Vice President for Southeast Music for the behemoth concert promoters Live Nation. He sees the accomplishment as a,

“personal commentary that we need to break out of our limitations.”

With the hundreds of concerts he has booked since then, he still sees The Who show as a very special one time thing,

“We did the improbable.”

Then he laughs out loud. That wasn’t quite right.

“The impossible!”

The handsome and glamorous Scott The Kid was fired in 1986 when QFM decided to skew toward an older audience in the wake of a new classic rock competitors stunning Milwaukee debut. He and his partner moved to a small town in central Wisconsin, popped out two more kids and did historic preservation work together.

Tim The Rock N Roll Animal’s newfound notoriety spurred a call from KMET’s boss Sam Bellamy who invited him to visit LA. Tim paid the airfare but was rewarded with a fancy Hollywood restaurant Italian dinner that had TV drama “LA Law” actress Veronica Hammel sitting in the booth next to them. She (Bellamy) took the “fish out of water” Animal on a limo tour specifically pointing out the steeple of the Beverly Hills Hotel as being that from the Eagles “Hotel California” album cover. She offered Tim a $40k weekend on-air slot that would be supplemented with syndicated Westwood One production work. Shockingly, upon his Milwaukee return, Lee Arnold had heard of his trip from a record rep that’d seen Bellamy and The Animal at the historic rock star hangout The Rainbow Club on Sunset Drive. Tim opted to stay in Milwaukee for a solid three year run.

The Animal fell from favor as the times changed and he stayed the same. But, still today, he hasn’t taken the liberty of thinking The Who event had much to do with him.

“The petition was the #1 thing. Without the signatures, without the support of the city the band wasn’t coming to Milwaukee. No matter how much pressure was exerted upon them, the bottom line is, to this day, that it never would have happened if people wouldn’t have collected those signatures because that’s what The Who wanted to see.”

In two “post ledge” correspondences that delineated the details of the agreement, Elliot Hoffman made it very clear who the band felt deserved credit for the show’s happening referring to “The Animals’ persistence and sense of balance” and saying,

“We think that you are now in a position to take full and accurate credit for the fact that your radio personality, The Animal, made THE WHO play Milwaukee on this tour.”

The Animal knew back then that it was one of those one time rare moments that was not likely to be repeated again anytime soon.

“I felt and still feel really proud of the City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin for getting the job done.”

In his mad quest to destroy WLPX, Lee Arnold was like a gold miner who had a greed inspired, single minded mission to strike that one rich gold vein that would make him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. And he did. But what he didn’t see, until many years later when he decided to make Milwaukee his permanent home, was that the rocks that had fallen all around his feet, that he had passionately quarried day after day, with every last bit of his physical and mental energies, were diamonds.

It’s beautiful that his reckless attempt to save himself resulted in his being saved by the very people he was surreptitiously using. His leap off the 26th floor ledge of his mind had fallen safely into the huge, cupped hands of the City of Milwaukee and the air staff and hard rockin’ community that was 93QFM.

ROCK ON MILWAUKEE!!!

End.

Chapter Forty: The Arrival.

The Animal and Lee Arnold spent the day waiting for the call from Curbishley that The Who’s plane was en route. One final reminder from Mother Nature of just who’s in charge had the plane stuck in fog on the airport tarmac in St. Louis. It would be hours of waiting that had both fearing a cancellation as the short winter day began to darken.

Finally, the call came. Curbishley told them that the band’s plane was in the air and they would likely be putting on a lively performance that night. He said,

“They always play with more fire after they’ve been in a row.”

He said that Townsend and Daltrey had an argument on the plane during the long wait to take off with Daltrey punching Townsend square in the nose and getting “the better end of things.” Curbishley guaranteed that,

“When they fight like that they really put on a great show later.”

A fan described the show three days earlier at The Cotton Bowl in Dallas:

By the time the Who came on, I believe they were almost an hour late, the sun had set and the cold of the December night had taken over. Pete and Roger appeared to be quite agitated, and Pete’s guitars were not staying in tune. Pete had a continuous running argument with Alan Cogan? I think that’s the gentleman’s name and was tossing his guitars mid song back to him in exchange for another. Midway through the show, Pete and Roger engaged in a yelling match with barely an inch to spare between their noses. A lot of “Fuck You’s” going back and forth. At the end of the night Pete did indeed begin to slam his black Schecter Tele on the stage, out of apparent frustration, I don’t know if you would call it smashing his guitar, but from where I was standing, a few rows from the front, his anger was evident. Turbulent tempers and great music, ahhhh just another great Who show.

In the darkness of the Wisconsin December night, The Who finally arrived and found a media hoard backed with a marching band attacking them at the gate. The anticipation and hoopla had grown so big in the intervening two months after The Animal had come in off the ledge that it was a struggle for Arnold to keep QFM’s name attached to it. So when The Animal had hospitality gifts to present: T-shirts, bratwurst and cheese, he did so very quickly and was practically tossed aside to make way for the media locusts who clamored for their attention. Oh well, no time to lament that, the show started in less than an hour. It was a mad dash to follow the band’s limo back to the Arena.

Chapter Forty One: Backstage.

The closing of the deal, the writing of checks, the payout for shows happens the day of the show. Regis Boeff was still trying to find more money for the band as he and McElrath carried out the transaction.

“Can’t we get a better deal on this? What about here?… or this?”

Tim The Rock N Roll Animal has seen dozens of backstage scenes, most of which are hardly worth remembering. This one is an exception. When I talked with him, his tone became soft and he faded in and out of his description, pausing often to enjoy his recollection.

Lee Arnold had pointed out Jim Ladd at the airport as both were surprised to see the LA freeform radio mogul traveling with The Who’s entourage. The Animal introduced himself to Ladd with the misconception that he had made a very personal connection in their late night interviews. Ladd was cordial but distracted and somewhat aloof as he was pursuing interviews with the band for his nationally syndicated show “Innerview.”

Tim remembers Roger Daltrey going through a pre-concert ritual of stretching and aerobics…thinking about the show….absorbed. He gave Tim a quick glance and said,

“’ello mate.”

The Animal moved on to Glyn Johns, The Who’s legendary Recording Engineer for the tour. John’s had a big glass of red wine and asked The Animal,

“Who are you?”

“I’m Tim.”

“Oh, you and all these crazy people- that’s why we’re here tonight?”

“Something like that…”

It was meant to be complimentary…funny… in that typical mellow English Gentlemen sort of way.

“Is Pete around?”

“Pete’s got a separate dressing room over there.”

It was very separate from the other band members. A security guard was escorting two very excited young women to Townsend’s door and then knocked. Townsend poked his head out dressed in only a bath towel. They all laughed as Pete signed autographs for each of them and then promptly disappeared back into his hiding place. In that Pete had just come out of the shower, Tim noticed Townsend’s beet red nose, evidence left from the impact of Daltrey’s fist a few hours earlier. He would powder that over before the show.

No disc jockey had directly introduced the band on this tour and, despite Curbishley’s promise, that would also be the case here as Tim’s stage announcement came before the opening act- Grey Star.

Tim introduced himself, thanked everyone and then made a special effort to let everybody know that THEY made this happen. He kept it short.

Grey Star was the local combination of Ruby Star and Mike Grey. Ruby’s most notable moment had been in the early 70’s when she toured with and sang backing vocals on Black Oak Arkansas’s “Jim Dandy.” Ruby was the chick who screamed,

“Go Jim Dandy! GOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

This band was more guitar chord melodic 80’s hair band rock. When lead guitarist Mike Grey started mimicking Pete Townsend’s famous “windmills” the audience, anxious and pumped for The Who, started to boo. Their set was otherwise well received.

The Who’s tour, in general, was being panned as lackluster and lost. Divina Infusino was a Milwaukee Journal music critic and staff writer who had spent the last two years detailing her complaints with the changes in the radio and music world and hating both LPX and QFM. For that, she had been purposely left out of the loop by Lee Arnold and was pissed about the successful “end around” Arnold had done when he gave the story to columnist Dave Begel. A week before the show she wrote an article entitled: “Why Some Don’t Give A Hoot.” There she used just a few selectively chosen lines from an extensive magazine article quoting Townsend as saying The Who,

“…had peaked a long time ago…people are putting far too much importance on this tour. In terms of rock n roll history, aside from the fact that we sell large numbers of tickets, we are fairly insignificant now…I really don’t like the band- that’s what it’s all about.”

While true, it lacked context and was used to complain that the type of acts she liked were not getting proper radio attention. She concluded that with The Who gone, new acts might get more of a chance. The message was that it was a show that was not worth seeing. Her anger got in the way of her seeing the real story which was that this show was actually going to be an exception and a return, for one brief moment, to the very thing she was lamenting the loss of. A show that would, in her words, be a,

“…living reminder that rock n roll once brought people together, once meant more than a diversion.”

Chapter Forty Two: The Show.

Photos from other shows on the tour have them in sleeveless tee’s and looking generally scruffy. For this show they dressed in their Sunday best. Townsend wore a creamy vanilla zoot suit with matching tie and slightly baggy pants with Nike tennis shoes. Even Daltrey wore a light suit jacket but teamed it up with jeans and a horizontally stripped muscle shirt and the typical rocker high top Converse All Star sneakers.

Every last seat was sold all the way around the back of the stage at the Mecca Arena. Likely many Standing Room Only seats too. Fear of counterfeit tickets led to close scrutiny and eerily familiar long lines at the entry doors. This crowd, however, was anxious but nicely patient. The stage monitors and drum kit were set somewhat low and the lighting and speaker array way above so most all could see the wide open space on stage that Daltrey and Townsend had to maneuver. There were 2 sets of four mini search lights on the floor on each side of the stage. They sprayed long tubes of bright white light in every direction as they spun around. I remember getting a little too close to them and feeling the blast furnace like heat they emanated. Tim Gorman was on keyboards and tucked off to stage left out of sight. Entwhistle was stage right and kept out of the way as Daltrey would let out ten feet of his heavily duct taped mike and cord and spin it over his head on a big loop that reached far over the audience. Pete was leaping as high as he could almost playfully, then getting a running start to try again to top one over the other.

I remember seeing this near constant smile on both Daltrey and Townsend’s faces. They seemed to be actually somewhat awestruck by the overwhelming response to everything they did. They were playful with each other. The Milwaukee crowd gave them so many standing ovations that Daltrey joked,

“It’s getting to be exercise with all that sitting down and standing up.”

The show had almost none of the anarchy and discord of the tours previous shows and even Townsend’s ever so worn out cliché theatrics seemed sincere. Of course, it may be that that’s what I wanted to see or that my hindsight has adjusted the memory, but I recall the attitude and the feel of the show, and while it may not have been their best, it was good. It felt magical because, for everybody from 93QFM, it was actually happening. What if the snake oil you bought actually did all the things that the huckster said it would do? You’d be surprised because you’d buffered your expectations as protection. So up until the moment The Who stepped on stage, we’d kept our excitement in, just in case. It was gonna take their actual presence on a stage right in front of us- live- to allow the acceptance and belief that it was all true.

It turned out that it wasn’t only the QFM air staff who felt that way. Everybody in that arena did. It was that opening, cathartic, shock- that,

“They are actually HERE!”

realization- that threw the place into a frenzy. That’s why Roger and Pete smiled. Seasoned as they were, burnt out and fucked up as they were, they still could be thrown for a loop by a truly thankful audience. This show WAS different. It was fun for them. It was right for them to come here, they thought, and a little better than just “playing the songs for the money” as the critics had complained.

Tim started watching the show from stage side then decided to pull Patti from out of her 10th row seat and ferry her up there with him. They spent most of the show on stage behind bass player John Entwhistle’s amplifier stack. They both went silent when I asked them to describe how it felt. They stumbled and groped for the words so I’ll summarize it for them both.

It was like jumping from an airplane and free falling for two hours without any fear of hitting the ground.

The set was:

My Generation, I Can’t Explain, Dangerous, Sister Disco, The Quiet One, It’s Hard, Eminence Front, Behind Blue Eyes, Baba O’Riley, Doctor Jimmy, Boris The Spider, Drowned, Cry If You Want, Who Are You, Pinball Wizard, See Me Feel Me, 5.15, Love Reign O’er Me, Long Live Rock, Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Then the encore(s) were:

Naked Eye, Squeeze Box and The Beatles Twist and Shout.

Part of the agreement between The Who and QFM allowed for the filming of the first song to be later used for promotional advertising purposes. The folks from David Joseph, who were charged with that assignment, overstayed their welcome filming several songs well into the show. Busted by representatives from the band, the film was confiscated and trashed. Lee Arnold missed the entire performance as he spent nearly the whole show trying to iron that severe infraction with a very angry Bill Curbishley.

Randy Mc Elrath said their show in Madison in 1976 had been their “full tilt” best show he had ever seen and found this show, comparatively, to be more subdued but,

“… special in a very unusual and different way because of the circumstance that surrounded it.”

Chapter Forty Three: The After Party

The after show party at the arena was packed so tightly that you could barely walk. It was a lush buffet layout that included everything including pork chops and dozens of stacked cases of Schlitz beer. The Animal saw Daltrey peak in and skip out. Tim briefly thanked Townsend saying,

“Great show!”

Townsend’s response was unexpected,

“It was like playing again for the first time.”

Townsend was being very accessible and full tilt in commiseration when Patti suddenly found herself literally squished face to face, bosom to bosom into him. It shocked her speechless and he was gone before she could muster anything to say.

The crowd was all unfamiliar as the guest list had been prepared by Stroh’s public relations agenda and thus most were strangers to Arnold, Tim and Patti. For Patti Genko, it was a last QFM hurrah as she would part ways with both QFM and Tim The Rock N Roll Animal in the coming months. (She later went on to an 18 year on-air midday stint at the new classic rock station that was literally across the street).

Tim noticed Kenny Jones, The Who’s drummer, sitting off to the side at a table by himself. He thought it was odd that nobody knew or cared about who Jones was. He could identify with the feeling. He knew Jones was likely tired of hearing people ask him about the difficult job of filling Keith Moon’s shoes and, as he sat down next to Jones, he got a look from him that said,

“Ok. Here we go again…”

The Animal knew to let well enough alone on that subject and opened with,

“You know. I’m not interested in hearing about The Who…tell me about your days with The Faces.”

Jones eyes just lit up. He spent the next 45 minutes telling The Animal wild Rod Stewart tour stories as they ate. During the entire time, nobody in the packed crowd of self congratulatory Stroh’s/Schlitz corporate politicos recognized Tim or Jones. The Animal sensed the final seconds of his fourteenth minute ticking away,

“We were nobody’s. It was back to reality now.”

The next day the spread of articles covering the show in the Milwaukee Journal started on the front page and continued to cover a full inside page with pictures and articles. Not one mentioned 93QFM, Tim The Rock N Roll Animal or Lee Arnold.

When The Animal asked him who his influences were, he droned:

“Nobody.”

He said there was a group in England called “The Shadows” that were about the only band with decent instruments at that time so everybody,

“… admired ‘em just for the instruments…not that they were that good musically.”

He said he learned to play bass by playing along with old rock n roll records by folks like Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy and Chuck Berry. He said he never really admired any other bass players because he always thought he was better than everyone else.

“A bit ‘a conceit (laughs) but that’s how I thought.”

Entwhistle, who passed away from a cocaine induced heart attack in Las Vegas in June of 2002, may have not been the prettiest or most showy of the bunch but he was very in touch with the psyche of the band. “It’s Your Turn” had no chorus or hook you could attach yourself to but the balance of the lyrics from his song supported the band’s “Farewell Tour” rap. It’s an elder rocker’s warning to the up-and-comers:

Chapter Thirty Six: WQFU

Having been primed by Lee Arnold that,

“Something’s gonna happen tomorrow”

The Animal had, what would hopefully be, his final sleepless night. It was his third Friday out on the ledge and something was horribly wrong with the morning team, they both were completely sober in spite of their After Dark nightclub gig from the night before.

Lee Arnold burst into the newsroom after the show,

“Roger Daltrey is going to call!”

Then he was gone to look for the engineer to record the call and then back again.

“Don’t say it on the air yet! Just record it when he calls!”

Slower than Heinz in a restaurant tabletop bottle, three hours passed with dozens of false alarms going off every time the newsroom phone would ring. There were still media calls coming in and those unfortunates who called today got quickly blown off. Finally, from the tarmac of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, it was Roger Daltrey himself. Anne Liebovitz was with him on a photo shoot for the upcoming November 11th Rolling Stone magazine cover. Tim bent in through the window and took the call on the over stretched newsroom phone. It was October 1st at 2:20 in the afternoon.

“You’re really here? This IS Roger Daltrey right?”

Daltrey assured Tim it was actually him, then kidded The Animal saying,

“The band was going to pull a joke and have you stay out there two more weeks.”

They began a fun banter. Then he told Tim that the band would be playing Milwaukee,

“So there’s not deejays’ getting on ledges all over the country.”

So could he come in now?

“There’s just one condition- you have to jump!”

It was the cap to a liquid and friendly interchange that went perfectly, just one little problem, it hadn’t been recorded.

The Animal couldn’t believe it but kept his political face on and said,

“Ah… Roger you’ve got to hold on a second…they’re telling me we didn’t get that..”

As Tim waited for someone to get a tape going on the newsroom phone, Lee Arnold came on to talk to Roger thinking he had yet to talk to anyone. He thanked him and said lots of nice things then encouraged Daltrey to include a mention of 93QFM in his statement. When The Animal came back on Daltrey played their next talk professionally as though it were the first. This is show business after all. They repeated everything nearly verbatim, only this time Roger Daltrey added one little caveat,

“I want to thank all the people of Milwaukee…and…It was made possible, really, by your radio station, 93QFM.”

For The Animal, that made the second run through more than worth it.

“You can come in now!”

Tim stepped in from the now mythical ledge to see the usually mild tempered General Manager Ralph Barnes holding up an oversized bottle of champagne and drinking directly from it with both hands. Ralph, God rest his soul, never did that kind of stuff. It tells of the unnoticed suffering he must have had behind his always closed office door. The ‘Big Guy’ was in the crystal palace! (Ralph’s recent newspaper obituary mistakenly listed the call letters of WQFM as WQFU. Showing that, no doubt, the first thing he did when he got to heaven was to straighten that middle finger!)

Whoops and hollers from the balance of the staff wrapped up a long and harrowing experience for all. It was a private celebration as none of it was put on the air. The Channel Six television crew had yet to arrive and the Milwaukee Sentinel photographer was en route also so it would all have to be staged once again.

After all her help and crucial contributions, Rosanne St. Aubin had been sent to Chicago to cover the Tylenol tampering story and wasn’t able to be there for the big day. Lucky, some might say, as The Animal had promised the many media types who asked,

“What’s the first thing you are going to do when you come in?

That he would,

“plant a big sloppy kiss on the first woman I see.”

As luck would have it, it wasn’t Patti. Karen Friedman, who drew the TV6 assignment, got the dubious honor as the reenacted step in from the ledge was played by Tim for all it’s worth. Patti was in the production room working on the promotional announcement that would introduce the landmark event to everybody listening. The “slobbered up” Friedman was shocked. Surprised. Then she thought,

“This is what makes great TV!”

Chapter Thirty Seven: Maximize the Shit Out of it.

Tim went home to clean up and return for his show later. He didn’t want to take the time off because it was going to be very important to follow-up on everything and say thanks to everyone that helped make it happen. Among them was a call to Jim Ladd to give special thanks for his industry help, sage advice and psychiatric counsel.

The Milwaukee Sentinel helped to pass on the sentiment to listeners the next day saying:

“Tim described the appearance as a triumph for the city. ‘There’s only so much I can do on a ledge,’ he said. ‘The entire city should feel a sense of accomplishment.’”

With all that done, the date for the show was still in play. So while the newspapers had said that December 6th would be the date. The band now was saying that the only date they could do it was December 7th. The only problem with that was that the Mecca Arena wasn’t available for the 7th. So The Milwaukee Admirals hockey team, who had booked the arena for league play that day, had to contact the league to get it moved. No way the league could stand in the way of this one, the momentum was way too strong and they relented with little effort.

Following Ned Yost’s exciting home run on the 29th, The Brewers lost the next four games but won the American League pennant on the final game of the season by beating the Orioles 10-2. They went on to beat The Angels in the ALCS and then lost a hard fought 7 game World Series. It’s hard not to feel there wasn’t some kind of karma between them and The Animal as they had 8 wins and 4 losses when Tim was on the ledge and went 7 and 9 after he came down.

It’s funky to realize that this had been a national event BEFORE it became a big local news story. The subsequent press conference a couple weeks later to announce the ticket information now was attended to by ALL the local media. This time the stations that had skipped the event for competitive reasons before were unabashedly “in.” Remmick Stroh was there to push the PR for Schlitz and remind the city who had heard the siren call. The companies’ damage repair in that press conference was priceless and he knew it. It was a smart and savvy play.

WLPX, who still hadn’t shut the fuck up, even after all this, was promising to be “Your station for The Who ticket Information.”

Arnold was nowhere near resting on his laurels. Now he was thinking,

“How do we really stick this up LPX’s ass? How do we maximize the shit out of this thing?”

He was still worried about what LPX was going to do. They weren’t out of the format yet. It wasn’t done. Thus, Arnold decided to omit having a post office box number address on the envelopes that would be sent to the ticket lottery. Opting, instead, for a simple:

Who Tickets
P.O. Box 93QFM
Milwaukee, WI 53202.

The design was ingenious as it wouldn’t allow LPX to mention the address on their air but the overall ticket distribution was a debacle that extended over three weeks and pissed a lot of people off. 40,000+ requests were received for less than 11,000 available seats. Oh well, ratings were over and QFM was now the #1 station in the city 12+ eclipsing even the stalwart AM WTMJ in the latest, but less reliable, Birch ratings. (The Arbitron ratings wouldn’t come out til January).

Chapter Thirty Three: “Just Bring Tim in.”

Three days had passed since Arnold had teased The Animal with the story about Curbishley’s call. The Animal was getting impatient was getting hard to contain his frustration. He had abandoned filling his porta potty plastic bag with both number one and number two choosing to piss in the ledge rainwater drain about 20′ down from his encampment just outside the window of the bookkeeping office of Rhonda Stratman. Rhonda was a dishwater blonde former party girl white chick who was now married with kids and settling in to a much more normal lifestyle and body type. The Animal would poke his head through the smaller ledge window into her office to warn her of the impending yellow liquid barrage and she would escape to get a bucket of warm sudsy water to pour down the drain after he’d tucked his cold, shrunken peter back in.

Patti Genko was starting to think Arnold’s claims of talking to the band were just complete bullshit. She started thinking,

“He has no IN there…It’s all a bunch of BS! This is baloney! Lee doesn’t even have an end to this. He’s just waiting for a miracle to happen!’”

She began to theorize that Arnold was purposely keeping Tim out there for the sake of all the attention. Arnold admits,

“I didn’t want Tim coming in too soon. I wanted him out there. It was Tim the Rock N Roll Animal against the elements!”

Arnold now was on the phone with Lynett lobbying for the $40,000 that would finalize the deal but making no headway. He had sold the idea, initially, as one that would be able to be done on sheer hutzpa- for free. Lynett, who was still waiting for the Plan A, had worried that there was no Plan B. Lynett:

“We talked that once and next thing I know Tim was on the ledge.”

This WAS Arnold’s Plan B. And now Arnold was having to argue how important this was to the station but,

“He (Lynett) just didn’t quite understand what it was. Bill was always a dollar short. It was all always about money.”

Lynett sees himself as an, “I’d like to think about it” kind of guy. He doesn’t generally say no right off the bat. But Arnold pressed him for an immediate answer, and when that happens,

“Well, things aren’t going to go your way.”

Arnold spent several hours over two days trying desperately to get him to loosen up the cash that would bring Tim in off the ledge. Now, too, Elliot Hoffman, the band’s attorney, was starting to get upset and threatening to move the open date they had created for Milwaukee to Hartford, CN. Arnold’s relentless pestering of Lynett, who claims to have been “consulting his partners”, resulted in a climatic statement from the battered recipient,

“Look! Just bring Tim in!”

That’s when the first real cracks in Arnold’s porcelain veneered smile began to show. He blew.

“Noooooooo!!!! Are you out of your mind!”

It had been an exhausting run. It was like the 20 mile mark of a marathon. Arnold had hit a wall. For runners, it is an actual physiological and mentally devastating blow that throws them into a slow motion twilight zone of sudden pain. It’s power exerts itself on the mind making even the most seasoned professionals question whether or not they can even finish the final 6 miles. For Arnold it was exactly the same. He worried that his face, his body and the truth that “it still might not come off” would be picked up on by other people in the office who were so closely keying in on his every emotion waiting for word.

They say that part of what makes a fiasco is that at some point all social order completely breaks down and events spin wildly out of control. Arnold was letting himself imagine the nightmare of his failure, of Tim “just coming in” and the chaos that would follow. They also say that we learn as much from those horrific experiences, if not more, than we do the perfectly managed ones. This was the moment when that nightmarish potential was greatest and Arnold’s zooming thoughts left him in a paralyzing state of shock. He needed to make a quick exit and get out of there without anybody seeing him. He needed sleep. So he skipped his usual end of the day stop at the ledge to fill Tim in, ducked his head down, tipped his wide brimmed hat to cover his face and made a brisk exit out.

But in the small penthouse environs, nothing Lee Arnold did went unnoticed and his hasty departure left a pall hanging over our tight knit group that felt like a death bed vigil.

Chapter Thirty Four: Yost Toast.

That Tuesday evening, the 28th of September, The Animal passed the time by watching the now out of town Brewers play the Boston Red Sox on the news room television from the ledge. They won 9-3. That night also, The Who played a show at the Civic Arena in Pittsburg, PA and had gotten creative during the encore. Townsend had decided on his own to start the encore with the unrehearsed song “Athena.” Kenny Jones wasn’t happy with how it came off complaining that when he makes a mistake everybody hears it and saying that their rendition sounded like,

“Dustbins falling from the stairs.”

Wednesday night they would be performing at The Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, IN.

By Wednesday morning The Animal had abandoned his porta potty for good. Now he was angrily coming in off the ledge and walking right through the lobby and sales offices whenever he had to use the bathroom. The path would take him right past Arnold’s office and he hammered on the closed door as he passed by to let his presence and feelings on the matter be known.

Lee Arnold was buried in there having returned refreshed and just plain mad. His call to Lynett was terse and to the point. He offered to let Lynett take $1,000 per month off his salary for the next 40 months to pay for the concert. He was making about $36-50k per year so the offer was not only substantial but just plain absurd.

“If you’re not gonna pay for it, I’m gonna pay for it because I’m NOT gonna let my career end in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I can’t let the greatest thing that I’ve ever done in radio not happen because of $40,000….I’ll pay for it!”

It may have been that nearly three days of listening to Lee Arnold just wore him down or it may have been that Arnold’s conviction finally showed him just how important this was. There’s also the possibility that Bill Lynett finally did understand that this would be a just plain old good investment. Whatever the reason, Lynett finally relented. “Really fucking cheap Bill Lynett” was actually going to fess up forty thousand 1982 dollars! For everyone who has ever worked under Bill Lynett, that will be Arnold’s greatest achievement. The Who? Well, The Who isn’t as powerful as Bill Lynett is cheap.

Lee Arnold had done it. He hung up the phone and threw his arms and head back and took a long, deep breath of the crisp, clean, 26th story air as he sat in his 21st story office. It was over.

Arnold kept his cards close to his chest as he worked to finalize the details with Curbishley. Another day was going to have to be added to The Animals ledge adventure. It was OK as Tim, Patti and Mike Wolf were enveloped in the Brewer game against the Boston Red Sox that night. It was a great distraction as backup catcher and future Brewer Manager Ned Yost’s top of the ninth pinch hit, his lone home run of the season hit with a borrowed bat, sailed over Fenway Park’s Green Monster to give the Brewers a four game lead with five games to play. It was one for the ages.

Chapter Thirty Five: The Cat on the Roof.

Arnold’s pleasure with his accomplishment wasn’t being hid too well. Even without the details, everybody could see his mood had changed for the better. It’s a look that we don’t get to see in people very often. That poor attempt at hiding your jump up and down happiness. The ability to verbally restrain yourself but a distinct inability to hold back all the other loud, nonverbal, interpersonal tells. We knew he had it and the anticipation of Tim’s emancipation announcement made the place spin and bounce like a merry go round at double speed.

The Who played the Pontiac Silverdome just outside Detroit on Thursday the 30th to a crowd of 70,000+ as Lee Arnold, Bill Curbishley, Shamrock and Elliot Hoffman firmed up the agreement.

The deal was done.

Late that night in the after hours, Tim heard an unusual sound coming from the roof just above him. He’d acclimated to the pigeons sudden wing flaps and the creaks of the steel blimp dock as it swayed in the wind, but this was more. He looked up.

“TIM THE FRUCKIN FROCK N FROLL HANIMAL!!!!”

It was a very drunk and wobbly “30 something” tall, thin man in an auto body shop work uniform standing at the roofs precipice and trying to light a cigarette.

“FFFFROCK ON MILFFFFFWAUKEE!!!”

That garbled sloop caused both the cigarette and his lighter to tumble down onto Tim’s cot on the ledge below. The drunken Spiderman made a quick attempt to catch each as they fell. That scared the living shit out of Tim as the inebriated tightrope walker teetered and then tipped dangerously forward to catch himself. Finally, he dropped to his knees and reached out his arm asking Tim to hand the lighter up to him as his other blackened, greasy hand fumbled for another cigarette from his shirt pocket. The Animal, relieved that there wasn’t a dead body lying in the 6th & Wisconsin Avenue intersection, encouraged him to come into the station and hang out. He did. He’d apparently made it through the front doors of the building, which sometimes were propped open with a mop by the cleaning crews, and up to the 21st floor only to be stuck outside the penthouse in the elevator corridor. One door there leads to the steps that go to roof and he had found it. He was now sharing a coffee with the soon to be victorious lion in Milwaukee’s Coliseum of Rock.

With the allegory taken care of The Animal was ready to end the story.

Chapter Thirty One: They Buckle.

Lee Arnold had been so busy sending out all these media messages in a bottle he’d nearly forgotten to think about if or when the band would call again. Beyond that he was struggling to manage the six headed serpent that included his boss Ralph Barnes, The Animal, the media, LPX, his own ad agency (David Joseph) and now he was dangerously on the radar of the station owner Bill Lynett. So when he picked up the phone and found it was Who manager Bill Curbishley, it was a surprising relief. Curbishley:

“Ohhhhh Kaaaaay. You proved it to me.”

Before that morning Curbishley had only known that a guy in Milwaukee had sent a telegram saying he was going to bring much greater attention to The Who’s tour. He didn’t know how or what “that guy” was going to do. He likely didn’t expect to even have to address it ever again because of the outlandish nature of the original promise. But immediately upon his Washington DC arrival the questions had started. There was a DJ out on a ledge in Milwaukee who was making an appeal,

“Was the band going to play Milwaukee?”

He told Arnold he had seen Rosanne St. Aubin’s Entertainment Tonight feature before the band’s first show as part of the pre-show coverage and acknowledged that Arnold had done just what he had said he would do. He also said that the idea had resonated with the band. He said Roger Daltrey, in particular, had also seen the coverage and was now sympathetic to the cause.

Now they both set about trying to work out the details of the deal. Arnold would be negotiating with management (Curbishley) and McElrath with the booking agents.

As most concert schedules are, The Who’s tour was packed so tightly that there were no available dates to squeeze in a show. There were dates when the band wasn’t playing, but those were days needed for set-up and transportation, etc. So Curbishley’s first offer was a compromise that would satisfy the cities need to see a show but also be economically efficient. He offered to do a closed circuit video broadcast of the upcoming Chicago Rosemont Horizon Shows at a theater in Milwaukee. He thought it was a great idea, he loved it.

Incredulous, Arnold grabbed his head,

“That’s exactly the worst thing you could do!”

Arnold explained to Curbishley that the entire appeal had been that Milwaukee was NOT a little sister to Chicago and wanted to be considered a premier rock n roll town in it’s own right. It just was not an option to simulcast a Chicago show. Curbishley nonetheless asked Arnold to take some time to consider the offer.

With good news for The Animal, Arnold broke the ice and let Tim know the negotiations were under way. He was careful not to oversell his progress. He told Tim what he thought was just enough to keep him going but not too much to generate expectations of a quick resolution. To no avail. The Animal took it as a sign that he was soon to be done and began to look forward to his descent. He was still taking interview calls from all over odd parts of the earth but was definitely starting to get sick of his own rap.

“Tomorrow would be just fine with me,” he thought.

The next day, Saturday September 25th, The Who played in the rickety old 1920’s JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, PA before a crowd of 90,000. Santana opened and was well received but The Clash was pummeled with all kinds of thrown debris including an apple that hit Joe Strummer squarely in the forehead. A fan account of The Who’s portion of the show:

“The enormous PA system was covered by a huge cloth “W” on one side, and an equally large “O” on the other. The stage itself was under a 70 foot wide “H”…Pete slipped and fell during Punk Meets the Godfather, knocking his Telecaster out of tune. He got up and tossed it to someone out of my line of sight. He strapped on another and carried on. Someone set a small fire in the photographer’s pit, but it was quickly extinguished. Roger was hit by a roll of toilet paper, which he promptly picked up and threw back. Moments later, he looked at who it bounced off of and said “sorry”. At one point Pete asked the crowd to move back. “A lot of very good looking girls are getting crushed,” he said. After Magic Bus, Roger said “Thank you Philly we’ve had some pretty good gigs here.”

Pete banged his guitar several times on the stage at the conclusion of “See Me, Feel Me” and then proceeded to toss it over the amps but the big surprise was at the conclusion of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Pete kept prolonging the ending and finally John unplugged his bass and tossed it up in the air and let it come crashing down on the stage as he walked off.”

They played Rich Stadium in Buffalo the next night, Sunday, as the Brewers lost the final two games of their home stand to the Baltimore Orioles.

Chapter Thirty Two: The Deal.

Monday the 27th of September, 1982 started with the debut of the new morning show, “Reitman & Mueller” on WKTI.

Lee Arnold continued his discussion with Curbishley. Roger Daltrey had made it clear to Curbishley that he had to find a date for a show saying he was even willing to rent a flatbed semi trailer and “Sing on the streets” if no date was available. But instead Curbishley had a December 6th date in St. Louis that had yet to be announced that he would consider blowing off for a Milwaukee show. That serious talk had Arnold just plain freakin’ out. Pumped. He kept repeating to himself,

“Gotta make this happen, Gotta make this happen, Gotta make this happen…”

Over the course of another couple days they went back and forth about the date because the St. Louis promoter didn’t want to give it up. At least that’s what Curbishley told Arnold. (Arnold had heard that David Joseph, QFM’s own ad agency, was pushing the promoter of the St. Louis show not to give up the date.) Next the band told Arnold that they would give up the St. Louis date for Milwaukee and said they would take the 6th as an off day and play Milwaukee on December 7th instead.

So, on that assumption, they proceeded to work on the money details.

For McElrath, it would be the only occasion in his long concert promotion life that he would find himself in this kind of catbird seat. Mc Elrath:

“It was like ready, shoot, aim.”

The Who’s business agents had now been told by the band that this was a show that had to be done. Thus, the sheer momentum and pressure that had been created by Arnold and The Animal took away the “power” end of the band’s negotiation and left them unable to dictate things in the manner that is typical of big acts. Now, not only did they play nice, they were in the dubious position of having to take whatever they could get.

The Milwaukee Mecca Arena held 11,300 people when filled to the gills for a concert. At $16. per seat the potential gross total was around $180,000. From that the union workers had to be paid and there was a standard promoters fee to be taken also. McElrath recalls The Who as wanting a guarantee in the neighborhood of $300-400,000. in the earlier negotiations, now they were likely going to accept a deal that was in the neighborhood of $100,000 less. He was, and to this day still is, astonished at the turnaround in attitude.

Part of the credit for the seemingly abrupt change came from a freak political offspring of Tim’s crawl out onto the ledge.

It was completely fortuitous for Lee Arnold that the sponsor for the Who’s tour was Schlitz. It was,

“Schlitz Rocks America!”

Stroh’s owned Schlitz and, as mentioned earlier, had taken “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous” to Detroit practically in the dark of the night. Milwaukee hated Schlitz. Remmick Stroh had seen the network coverage of the ledge stunt in several different ways and called Arnold with an offer to help underwrite some of the concerts anticipated losses. While the exact amount and details of what Stroh’s pitched in remains a mystery because it was negotiated between the band and Stroh’s, it’s value was easily over $100,000 when you include the after show parties and promotional premiums. Also, as sponsor, Remmick Stroh’s want for the band to play Milwaukee was part of the “leverage” needed to get the band to accept a below market, and possibly barely break even, fee. It can be said with great confidence that for all Arnold’s and The Animal’s efforts, without Stroh’s, the show may not have happened.

But, even with the contribution Stroh’s was making, the band still wanted QFM to pitch in too. After about a weeks worth of haggling, it all came down to $40,000. It was a standard tour business practice to demand money from radio stations in exchange for the rights to have exclusive ownership or to “Present” the show. One Texas deal went for $1.4 million and another had gone for $975,000 as they would also buy all the tickets for the show to give away and/or sell as they wish guaranteeing the band’s take while cutting out competitors’ participation.

For Lee Arnold, the specific money demand was a major break thru because now Arnold knew for sure that they wanted to do it. With all his positive karma up to that point, he never really felt they were “in it.” Now, the specific money demand left there no question. They were no longer “entertaining the idea”, they really wanted to do it.

“It’s done!” he thought, “It’s done! All I have to do now is come up with forty grand!”

His celebration and self congratulations didn’t last long as he began to realize that “All he has to do…” was get Bill Lynett, the man who he viewed as the “cheapest man in the whole world”, to cough up $40,000.

Chapter Twenty Eight: It Blows Up Real Good.

Having simmered nicely over the weekend, the story began to blossom Monday morning as the idea of calling out to encourage coverage quickly became overshadowed by the demand to handle the calls that were coming in. Channel 6 was the local CBS affiliate and now dispatched St. Aubin to also create a piece for the CBS News network that was to air on the Evening News and on Tuesday’s CBS Morning News Show. Genko was soon over her head with people on hold wanting to talk to the “Crazy DJ on the Ledge.” At first, it was mostly newspapers and radio stations from just about everywhere in mostly rural America responding, but as the day went on some bigger names from farther away started to enter the picture and managing the onslaught was starting to become dizzying for both Arnold and Genko.

RJ Harris fired Bobbin Beam that day citing low ratings (this was two days before the actual ratings period start). She was replaced by Eddie Democelli on the air and Susie Austin dove in head first into the rock radio war as Beam’s Music Director replacement firing off a blast to the FMQB radio trade/rag saying:

“Lee Arnold, everyone knows you’re off your rocker. Why don’t you quit calling attention to the fact?… Our station blows yours off the dial right now and you know it…everyone knows you’re full of it. I’m sick of this.These people who read these trades are not our listeners—they’re professional radio people who are tired of reading all your bogus comments. Quit using this trade to badmouth us. Try talking about your own station for once. Your Who promotion is almost over, and so are you. My dad still thinks you’re an idiot.” (Austin explains that RJ Harris’ work nickname was “dad.”)

No time for The Animal to pay any attention to the Brewers defeat of the Boston Red Sox 4-3 that evening as he had an interview with Bob Coburn for the syndicated show “Rockline.” Rockline aired in over 100 markets in a combination of live and taped shows. In Milwaukee, Rockline aired live on Monday Nights on QFM.

The cities karma was just hummin’ as The Packers beat the Vikings that night on Monday Night Football by a score of 27-19. It was the last league game before a league wide strike that lasted until November 21st.

Tuesday morning Lee Arnold fired back at Harris “counter petition” editorial.

“We welcome the support of EVERYBODY who wants to help 93QFM in OUR quest to bring The Who to Milwaukee. It’s not too late…”

This wasn’t a back room battle fought by underlings. It was the OK Corral with both leaders standing alone out in the middle of the street, face to face, taking direct shots at each other.

The tit for tat was nearing childish proportions as the morning team fielded a call from a listener who said they had taken a small hand held sign to the Brewers game the night before that said:

“Milwaukee loves The Who.”

It prompted a call to everybody who was a rocker and who’d be attending this home stand to do the same.

The CBS News and Morning Show coverage spawned NBC News to dispatch their local affiliate, Channel 4 to get video footage for The Today Show. While they passed that footage on to the network, they themselves continued to ignore the story locally. Didn’t matter. A total of more than 70 American and 8 Canadian radio stations, over 100 newspapers and two of the BBC Network channels would call before the week was out.

Legendary KMET freeform LA DJ Jim Ladd was considered “the master of the moment,” always in tune with the sentiment of the times. He called Tim at 10pm California time- midnight Milwaukee time- for the first time Tuesday to get the lowdown. Having read Ladd’s book, “Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial” I know that Ladd was in a funk at the time mourning the end of radio’s progressive freeform era. His closest friends had all moved on or passed on and he was the last of his breed. It must have been invigorating for him to listen to The Animal’s passion for the cause because he jumped on with vigor encouraging everybody in LA who listened to “Honk for The Who in Milwaukee.” Record reps in LA tell of the city spontaneously ringing out with car horns as though it was a citywide mass wedding. Ladd had dusted off the old tribal drum and it rung gloriously for the next generations cause.

After that The Animal and Ladd had nightly conversations sometimes running 10-15 minutes. Ladd’s good friend was MTV founding VJ J.J. Jackson. He too began doing daily reports on the story for the relatively new music video channel. KMET’s afternoon drive jock Paraquat Kelly and Rodney Bingenheimer (as seen in the 2003 Independent Spirit Award winning movie “Mayor of the Sunset Strip”) also called Tim for regular updates. Chris Connelly, who today can be seen doing Academy Award red carpet interviews, also called as he covered the story as the writer for Rolling Stone Magazines “Random Notes” column.(The “ledge stunt” mention occurred in issue #382 on 11/11/82 on page 30).

Among the live rock star interviews was April Wine’s Jerry Cantrell who liked to get high but not in that way. Cantrell couldn’t be coaxed out onto the ledge and stayed in the newsroom forcing The Animal to jockey his short arm in and out of the window for the pre Palms Club concert hype.

With The Brewers getting closer to winning the league pennant, every game was being watched closely by ESPN and the mainstream sports media. No progress Tuesday, though, as they lost to Boston 3-4.

Chapter Twenty Nine: Postcards from the Ledge.

Having landed in the US, The Who were to be playing the first of two shows Wednesday night at The Capitol Centre in Landover, MD (Washington, DC). (The now demolished 20,000 capacity venue was later the subject of the underground cult classic video documentary “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” which chronicled the tailgating antics of Judas Priest fans before a 1986 show.) As the band awoke there Thursday morning, Milwaukee’s efforts were virtually splattered everywhere. ESPN had coverage of the Brewers win over Boston (3-1) that showed two home runs and dozens of giant “Bring the Who To Milwaukee” banners spanning the width of the bleachers. More importantly, the local Washington D.C. CBS affiliate added Rosanne St. Aubin’s CBS News feature to the end of their local concert coverage turning what would have otherwise been a 60 second mention into a three to four minute feature. NBC’s “Today Show” aired their piece that morning too. But would the band see any of it? Had it been enough?

The long week of interviews had been exhausting for Tim The Rock N Roll Animal who began feeling the effects of living outside in fall Wisconsin weather being buffeted by both the 21st story winds and the unrelenting media. Lee Arnold had kept Tim abreast of the attention they were getting but had not said anything about the status of communications with the band. For good reason, there hadn’t been any.

That Thursday night as The Who played their second Landover show, The Animal’s ever optimistic and hopeful demeanor gave way during his talk with Jim Ladd. Ladd:

“Tim we’re seeing a different side of you tonight then we’ve seen before…. you don’t sound too good. A little bit more on edge. You sound tired, you OK?”

He wasn’t. It was starting to get to him because he wasn’t seeing that the band had made any overtures. He was fatigued. Dirty. And tired of having to gather up his own excrement in the plastic bag beneath the porta potty. The very act of handing his own shit into the window to the always cringing Patti Genko turned his stomach. She would encase it into another paper bag for disguise and traverse the elevator to the street and then the alley behind the building where a dumpster would be the final receptacle.

“I really became sequestered out there…shut off from the world.. The isolation was starting to get to me and I started feeling really strange and really weird and out of touch with everything and everybody.”

He also had begun to see what the consequences of failure would mean should the band decide not to come.

“I began to feel like I would be some kind of personal failure… if it didn’t happen.”

He was getting the way people get when they’re in the midst of a maelstrom and haven’t had much sleep. He was personifying the event as his own and it wasn’t like him to do that. It went against what the message had been becom, that this was a Milwaukee cause, that there was a greater purpose.

Ladd’s comments shocked him into making a recharge of his effort to stay focused and stay on message. He turned to reading the cards and letters of support that had been sent to the station to remind himself that this was a matter of pride for everyone, not just him. Then he paged through the hundreds of pages of petition signatures, all 76,000 of them, to drive the point home. It was calming and it was the first night he would allow himself to sleep well. And he did.

Chapter Thirty: The Cause Celeb.

Friday morning found the “Morning Sickness” team in even worse shape than the previous week. Their usual Thursday night wine cooler vomit extravaganza had the added feature of Milwaukee Brewer Paul Molitor as a judge for the bikini contest. Their down and recovering mental/physical state fit the vibe of the Who event as the frenzy had peaked and was finally starting to taper off a little. The reverse could be said for Molitor who scored three runs off four hits in five at bats to help the Brewers demolish the Orioles 15-6 that Friday afternoon.

The Animal arose out of his near comatose hibernation with his mind reset and ready to start again. A tape from a former QFM jock who was now working as the production director at another station was making the rounds. Steve Palec, who had wanted a similar position at QFM but was beat out by the creation of the research department at budget time, had misgivings about his decision to leave QFM a few months earlier. With all the excitement of The Who stunt he was wishing he was still there. So when he heard an AP radio news feed that featured someone from The Who commenting about “that guy on the ledge” he thought he’d pass it on. For the weary Animal, the timing of it was great. It added an extra shot of espresso to his morning’s first cup of coffee.

“That was a really, really, big deal because it was the first time, the first acknowledgment that the band even knew what was going on and that they were even talking about it.”

Things took their first turn for the bizarre as Republican candidate for Governor arch conservative Terry Kohler visited. He was way behind in the polls and must have had an aide who thought it would prop up his poor numbers with “the kids.” He signed a petition and climbed out onto the ledge for a photo opp with Tim. To no avail, he lost in a landslide to democrat Tony Earl.

Kohler’s visit was confirmation that this was an event that transcended the radio battle between LPX and QFM and had touched everybody in a way that meant more than just a band coming to town to play a concert.

So now people who had no thought of ever going to the show wanted this concert to happen. It had become a cause celeb.

Chapter Twenty Five: The Splash.

Even with little sleep The Animal was in better shape than the newly configured morning team who had made a mess of themselves at their weekly “After Dark” West Allis nightclub appearance. For good reason, given all the shit that was flying. Abdul was doing sports drop-ins while lying under the newsroom desk and flat on his back on the floor wrapped in the extension cord of The Animal’s ledge mic. He slept between his breaks and, like Rodeo, was still wearing his clothes from the night before that wreaked of the sweated out cheap wine coolers that were the night club special. Patti hadn’t gotten drunk while babysitting her lover boy ledge dweller but now wished she could. She rattled off short news bits with Rodeo at the control board. Rodeo had made no attempt at rest prior to their 6am start which he was a half hour late for. No problem, for Rodeo it was his normal schedule and he pounded out a funny, tight show in spite of the patchwork crew. Pros do that. For this day, the “Morning Sickness” show was perfectly named.

The Animals crawl out onto the ledge had been somewhat anti-climatic and now they were going to need to make it news. The banter between Rodeo, The Animal and Abdul was priceless as all were in a slap happy, semi-delusional, lack of sleep state yet skilled enough to keep on message. Lee Arnold made an early arrival to get moving on the press releases and he and Patti started making cold calls to radio and television stations everywhere telling them of the event.

“I told them I had a great human interest story and if they didn’t cover it they were stupid.”

That would be Arnold talking. As an attest to both Arnold’s and Genko’s verbal sales skills, many decided to put Tim on live immediately. Patti also produced what would be the first of her daily one minute reports to the ABC Source Radio Network. It was her first and, only ever, nationally distributed radio work in her 25 years on-air.

Arnold had tipped off Milwaukee Journal columnist Dave Begel that “something is going to happen tomorrow” and so photographer William Meyer was there first thing that morning taking pictures of The Animals lair from the roof just above. The large photo dominated the front page of the second section that afternoon as it spread across all but one column of the width of the paper. The one paragraph mention started off with:

“All the worst fears of parents have finally been realized- rock n roll really does fry the brain.”

Begel went on to tell of the event from the evening before and the plea for petitions to help create pressure. It was a major coup for Arnold who, upon first getting to town the year before, had instructed his then Promotions Director, Patti Genko, to arrange lunches with all the big media honchos. Begel, like Randy McElrath, had been one of them. The Milwaukee Journal owned WTMJ AM, Channel 4 and FM competitor WKTI, so they were loathe to mention competitors and had a reputation for ignoring even the biggest of their competitors events. Coverage like this rarely, if ever, happened and if it did it would be cynically criticized by their patsy “Radio & TV Media” critic, the prematurely balding Mike Drew. But Begel was a freak at The Journal. He had free reign to print whatever he found newsworthy for his gossip, politics and media column “Leave It To Begel.” Thus, his writings weren’t subject to an editors’ politically/competitively biased leanings. This was a human interest story that went beyond the trappings of “Radio & TV.” Still, and it may just be a coincidence, he couldn’t resist mentioning in the last paragraph of the same piece that Gene Mueller was to be teaming up for mornings with Reitman at KTI starting in 10 days on the 29th.

Begel’s “fry the brain” set up had left him plenty of room to cover it whichever way it fell but was very important because it resulted in it’s placement on the AP International News Service wire. At QFM, it was the job of the overnight dj’s to rip the stories from the wire and put them into a basket for the news person to read that morning. I was stunned to see the “ledge” story appear and tore it off from the wire late that night. Its’ copy was clearly taken from Begel’s piece. We pinned it up on the newsroom bulletin board as an award. With a national orientation, the wire seldom had anything that pertained to Milwaukee on it. That 3″ tall piece of cheap rolled paper was a big deal to us. The reaction to it was like Steve Martin’s discovery of his name in the new phone book in the movie “The Jerk.” It had people staring at it and reading its’ few short sentences over and over again.

“It’s on the fucking wire!”

For TV coverage, there was only one unmarried, available date. That was Channel 6, another one of Arnold’s early lunch guests. The only other large television media outlet back then was Channel 12 who was literally across the hall from arch rock radio rival LPX, so you knew they weren’t coming. Thus, Arnold gave the “exclusive” to Channel 6 who dispatched reporter Rosanne St. Aubin.

St. Aubin’s feature played that evening on the Channel Six news. As the local Entertainment Tonight affiliate, it was also sent up on “the bird” as part of the syndicate’s feature offerings to all the other affiliates in the country. Entertainment Tonight had regional directors who had feelers out with all their affiliates in their given area. Milwaukee was the Midwest region. Stories submitted to the regional directors were filtered for strength and then, when they were good, sent up to the satellite to be downloaded and used in whatever manner a station choose to use it. Larger markets would chop up the pieces and create what looked like a local interview. Smaller markets would just run St. Aubin’s piece unedited in its’ entirety. Friday’s were a great day to put stories out there because there would be almost no weekend news generated and, thus, Friday pieces would be rehashed all weekend long. St. Aubin’s coverage of this first day hit with a bang, first making it onto Entertainment Tonight’s nightly show and then getting picked up off the feed by dozens of countrywide affiliates. This made St. Aubin very happy in that it was a service they had to pay for. She now had a good incentive to stay with the story and pump it as much as possible.

Thus, by Friday’s end, the story had been picked up by three major distributors of news and entertainment: AP, ABC radio and Entertainment Tonight.

That Friday also featured the goodbye party for the final stop on the popular Schlitz brewery tour. The Brown Bottle was a Chateauesque Oak beamed tavern that featured free samples. It had survived since 1938. Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Channing, Bob Hope and Tony Curtis were among the celebrities who had imbibed in the past and much was being made of Stroh’s plans to dismantle the pub and ship it too Detroit. The many who gathered had mixed feelings that went from anger to tears. (Stroh’s shipped many of the 1930’s, German imported, furnishings to Detroit but never built their re-creation and thus ended up donating the furnishings to local Detroit community centers. Nonetheless, The Brown Bottle re-emerged as a restaurant in in Milwaukee in 1986, surviving until 2004.)

Chapter Twenty Six: Shit work.

That same Friday was the day that The Brewers started their big nine day home stand by trouncing the Yankees 14-0. The games proved to be a great opportunity for listeners in support of the cause to get thousands of petitions signed and they were out there in mass.

With Patti exhausted and taking a quick chance at catching up on sleep that evening, the first loaded porta potty plastic bag disposal duty fell on Mike Wolf. It was full to the brim with two days of Tim The Rock N Roll Animal excrement. At first he refused.

“That is NOT part of my job description!!!!”

This was his reward for handling the king pig on the first night? The Animal just stood there with his arm reaching into the newsroom window and the full clear plastic bag at the end of it.

“Nobody else is here buddy. You got something else to put this in?”

Wolf’s Irish temper gave way to Tim’s frank assessment. The next day he made it clear to Lee Arnold that he would not be repeating the “shit work.”

As the weekend came a lot had been sent out but not much was coming back. The Animal did his Saturday weekend shift from the ledge remembering that it was only a week ago when he had gotten the “How would you like to be the most famous DJ in the country” call from Arnold. The location of his perch high above the west side of the downtown had become widely known and “Honk for the Who,” his favorite mantra, was hardly needed as all of his on-air breaks were riddled with the distant but beautifully warm accents of support.

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Fun.

Midway into his Saturday afternoon show the bell at the station front doors rang. The “lives in the woodwork” be speckled station groupie/ kid engineer, Rick Rotaro, answered and signed for a telegram. He gave it to The Animal. It looked very official. Just below the Western Union Telegram Banner it showed a Hollywood, CA origin. It said:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, WE ARE AMAZED AT THE INTEREST OF THE CITIZENS OF MILWAUKEE FOR THE ROCK GROUP “THE WHO” TO APEAR IN MILWAUKEE. BECAUSE OF THE HUGE ACCEPTANCE WE LEAN HEAVILY TOWARDS A PERFORMANCE IN MILWAUKEE AT THE MILWAUKEE ARENA. THE FACT OF A CONCERT IN MILWAUKEE BY “THE WHO” CAN BE CALLED DEFINITE BUT WE WOULD LIKE A LIST OF OPEN DATES OF THE MILWAUKEE ARENA TO ARRANGE FOR A SUITABLE PERFORMANCE DATE. CORRESPONDENCE AND AN ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION CAN BE ADDRESSED TO WHO ENTERPRISES INC. , PO BOX 19575, HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA 90028. AT THIS STAGE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION AS WE WILL DESCRIBE IN OUR NEXT TELEGRAM WHICH WILL ARRIVE ON OR ABOUT SEPTEMBER 21ST. FROM NOW UNTIL SEPTEMBER 21ST HOWEVER WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO START ADVERTISEMENTS FOR THIS CONCERT. THIS PUBLICITY CAN BE THE SIMPLE FACT THAT “THE WHO” WILL BE APPEARING AT THE ARENA, CALL-INS TO GENERATE PUBLIC INTEREST, OR OTHER FORMS OF PUBLICITY. WE REMIND YOU ONCE AGAIN TO CONTACT THE MILWAUKEE ARENA FOR A SUITABLE DATE AND SEND THEIR RESPONSE TO US AT THE ABOVE ADDRESS BY TELEGRAM TO WHICH WE WILL REPLY WITH A LIST OF OUR OPEN DATES. PLEASE SEND THIS LIST TO US AFTER OUR NEXT TELEGRAM ARRIVES AT YOUR RADIO STATION, AS OUR NEXT TELEGRAM WILL SIMPLY BE A REPETITION OF THIS MESSAGE AND “THE BUSINESS SIDE OF THINGS”. AS IT IS OUR DEFINITE INTENTION TO APPEAR IN MILWAUKEE, WE WISH THAT YOU WOULD START PROMOTION OF THIS EVENT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MAY I REPEAT, AS – SOON – AS – POSSIBLE. TO REITERATE, WE ARE EXTREMELY PLEASED AT THE RESPONSE OF THE CITIZENS OF MILWAUKEE AND LOOK FORWARD TO BOTH A GOOD CONCERT AND A GOOD ASSOCIATION WITH 93QFM-WQFM-FM.

(SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE—ALL CORRESPONDENCE FOR THIS CONCERT WILL NOW BE CARRIED THROUGH WHO ENTERPRISES AND WQFM WITH THE CODE WORD “DESK”. ALL FUTURE CORRESPONDENCE SHOULD BEGIN AND END WITH THE CODE WORD “DESK”, AND ALL PREVIOUS CORRESPONDENCE – ADDRESSES, NAMES, DATES – SHOULD BE IGNORED.)

SINCERELY YOURS,
ROGER DALTREY AND JOHN ENTWHISTLE OF “THE WHO”

The Animal was elated. He read the telegram a couple times with the rose colored hopefulness of a kid at Christmas and contemplated announcing his apparent success to the radio listening world on his next break when the current song set would end. As he considered what words to use, he checked his excitement. Something didn’t feel right. It may have been the cloak and dagger mystery or the fact that there were so many words written rather poorly. He decided to have Rick get Lee Arnold on the phone and get his reaction.

“Lee said it just can’t be because he hadn’t heard anything from the band since that one talk with Regis and that if that had been the case- they would call.”

Arnold told The Animal he felt it was bogus but did not elaborate any further. I’m sure LPX’s RJ Harris takes great solace in knowing that he came close to knocking out Arnold with one of Arnold’s own favorite weapons. Harris:

“Hey I don’t remember it but it sounds brilliant- that certainly would have been part of the fun.”

Both had learned that kind of “straight from the play book” tactic from format consultant guru Lee Abrams. Harris found it to be mostly “a chuckle.” For Lee Arnold it was a lifestyle so, while he didn’t tell The Animal why he knew the telegram was bogus, the sequence of events and “fun” he and Harris were having made it obvious.

Clearly, by the telegrams content, we can see that Harris was looking to expand the embarrassment that would come to Arnold and QFM from the show not happening and he was confident enough about the possibility of that to go so far as to attempt to push The Animal and Arnold in deeper than they already were. With QFM doing the equivalent of standing on an elevated trap door, the telegram was the rope that Harris hoped Arnold would use to hang himself.

That day the Brewers narrowly beat the Yankees again by a score of 6-4.

The following day, Sunday, was the day of the much ballyhooed WLPX Pro Rock Rally. With traffic heading straight down Wisconsin Avenue past The Animals nest toward the lakefront, it gave Tim a chance to make an appeal to everyone who was to attend to sign petitions. With the street getting backed up with the competitors Pro Rock Rally traffic, the sound of their honking during Tim’s raps was ironic. Tim played it perfectly.

“Hey I know you’re all headed down to our competitors’ event but no problem- we’re all in this together- so make sure while you’re there you sign those petitions and make this happen!”

It was a perfect appeal because it was real. From the heart. The “greater cause” was beginning to simmer out there and people were starting to hear it. People everywhere.

The threatened police confrontation for the rally didn’t happen as the “gooks” stood down for the night. It may have been the sucky bands, I mean, whose going to jail over The Shoes and Blackfoot? Or it may have been the fact that there were several paddy wagons lined up with doors open to purposely send a message that they were ready should there be a repeat of the arena trashing Black Sabbath performance from the year before. With a crowd of about 10-12,000, it was a mildly successful lakefront rock concert that was…. well protected. Not the killer Arbitron ratings boosting monster LPX needed.

Both had now played their cards and Harris was starting to see that he was coming up short.

Having sat back and played it relatively cool up til now on the air, with exception to the faux Townsend interview, Harris had tried diligently to ignore QFM’s stunt and Arnold’s editorials. They were Hearst. They had money. QFM was completely fucked up on the inside. He knew. He had a direct line into QFM’s “goings on” and all the signals he was getting said that this was something that was going to flop big time. Did he have a mole feeding him secrets?

“DJ’s like to talk. There was always somebody at QFM who was willing to tell. There was a certain power in knowing and being the one to tell…”

(And while I found no real proof of it, we have to remember QFM’s ad agency, David Joseph, had pitted itself against Arnold too and may possibly also have been a helpful source.)

Either way, Harris wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing any longer. Or, for lack of a better phrase, now he was fucking pissed. HE now took to the air with forceful on-air editorials of his own. He said,

“This isn’t just ONE cause for ONE radio station. We at WLPX believe that this is a matter for ALL of Milwaukee’s rockers!”

And he introduced what would be the WLPX “counter-petition.” Arnold:

“They were just digging themselves deeper.”

He hadn’t achieved the goal of bringing The Who to Milwaukee but it was now clear that his “flying by the seat of his pants” quickly thrown together promotion was working and Harris’s well laid plans had flopped. I say that because you don’t respond angrily when you are winning. You don’t respond angrily when you are in a close battle. You respond angrily when you feel you are going down. Harris response gave QFM’s quest legitimacy. It’s exactly what Arnold could have wanted. It fed Arnold’s lust to make it a bigger conflict between the two. One must win and the other must lose and up to that point LPX had not been engaged. They had been aloof. Now they were turning to do direct battle. But with the tide now turned, it was in the context of a civil war retreat with LPX as the rebs. For Arnold, whether he knew it not, it was the tipping point in the Milwaukee rock radio battle, it was won.

Chapter Twenty Two: No Guarantees.

The next step in his thousand mile journey had Tim The Rock N Roll Animal stepping out onto the 21st story crystal palace/newsroom ledge. As encouragement, Arnold briefed Tim on Boeff’s call and the status of things. He was very careful to limit Tim’s expectations, even overcompensating by dramatically underplaying the potential for success. Tim:

“He kept telling me over and over that there’s no guarantee that the bands gonna come here and play…You’re really laying yourself out on the line for a while here…You may have to stay out there for some time …4, 5, 6 weeks.”

Arnold told The Animal this just a few hours before he was to make his leap. Tim was already committed, so whatever he thought of it, there was no backing out.

One of the ways Tim, Patti and many other staffers would buffer their fears was to believe that maybe Arnold knew more than he was saying. That he actually had this in the bag all along and was just playing a big game. That was a comforting thought to all of us because, at this point in time, it was beyond our ability to comprehend how it could be done any other way.

Thus, as Tim prepared to head out onto the ledge it had been a telegram and then one conversation with the band’s Asst. Manager. That was it. Oh, and a wild plan to create this big….

The studio was crowded with people as Tim began his rant. The logistics of his starting his well rehearsed spiel had been hastily considered. The microphone that we used when we were on the air was permanently fixed to a flexible arm that hung over the control board- so it couldn’t be taken outside. Further, someone would have to be on the board after Tim left to run commercials, play songs and so forth so the choreography was going to be a bit tricky as someone was going to have to slip in after him to engineer.

As he began to speak, he had the strangest look on his face that stood in contrast to his angry but tempered gripe. He was smiling. Trying to bite his smile but nonetheless, smiling. Why?

“It was thinking ‘What the hell…Oh my God…What have I gotten myself into?’”

His rap was splendid. He wasn’t selling anything. He was just mad. The Who are a great band and Milwaukee is a great city. He wasn’t whining, vulgar or tactless. He made sense. He was right.

Rock On Milwaukee!

As he walked with the substituted hand held microphone in his hand through the newsroom and toward the window, we all silently made way. When he opened the window to crawl out there was one small problem, the microphone extension cord was too short and stopped at the windows edge. So Tim had to crawl out feet first while still talking on the mic that was hovering about one foot inside the room. It left him in the dubious but rather appropriate position of being bent over half in and half out for the balance of his rave as the engineer scrambled for more cord. Now he even looked like he was ready for anything.

Chapter Twenty Three: Honk for The Who.

After a moment to catch his breath and do the quick change to a longer cord, Tim stood up and surveyed the city from his 21st story perch. I love the way cities look at night from high above. Especially when the view is unrestricted by glass, open to the elements. Tim’s view looked southeast from mid downtown. It included an unblocked sight line toward the South side of Milwaukee, QFM’s stronghold. It also allowed you to view a couple miles of the East West running main drag- Wisconsin Avenue. From the ledge you could literally hear QFM blasting from the open windows of the cars that cruised below. It echoed off the stone and brick walls of the other nearby tall buildings. The giant red neon sign atop the Marc Plaza Hotel directly kitty corner glowed brightly but not such that it drowned out the mosaic of multi-colored L.E.D’s of streetlights, stop signs and moving automobile headlights. About a mile directly to the east the flashes ended where Lake Michigan began. The pitch black backdrop made the lights from the jets that approached General Mitchel Airport look like UFO’s in 3-D. I can’t tell you how many times I got caught out there “nightdreaming” with a song suddenly ending quicker than expected then making the mad dash through the window back into the studio to start the next one just in time- or, many tmes, after a short, embarrassing moment of dead air.

Tim was a person who liked his creature comforts so, while there would be no better person to make the appeal that was needed, there are many others of us who would have been better suited to appreciate the beauty of the space and the time spent there. On the ledge, you were on the top of the Milwaukee mountain and it wouldn’t be hard to get excited about your cause when merely looking up and around gives you inspiration.

But that’s way to earthy for a Rock N Roll Animal. Tim had a job to do.

Mr. Midday, Jeff Petersen, played the live on-air part of the completely surprised first responder with a cynical and mildly convincing performance. Peterson was the 10a- 2p weekday anchor of the crew. He was a gentle and calming presence, exactly the essence of what a midday jock was to be. He smoked dope all the time in the well ventilated studio and loved to gossip. He loved coke too in the nighttimes and was feeling fine after he’d just completed a listener concert limo escort gig. He had left the winning couple at the MECCA Arena show and skipped out with the cool stretched ride to bang a newly divorced very drunk woman the group had met at the giant Major Goolsby’s sports bar just before the show. The lakefront romp was one of Jeff’s few dalliances and had him feeling nicely full of himself.

“Tim- what are you doing out here?”

“Jeffery!”

“What’s this about The Who?”

“Are you sober Jeff?’

“Nooo… not too… but I’m not out on the ledge buddy!”

“I’m gonna be out here. I’m stayin’ here. I’m gonna brave the elements and I’m staying out here ‘til somebody from the band calls or somebody tells me they’re gonna come to town!”

With a police car spotlight now shining up from the street he figured he better add one more little caveat.

“But I’m not gonna jump… I wanna stress that right now…I’m not gonna jump.”

“For The Who? I mean…THAT would really be nuts!”

Petersen’s sarcastic naughty dig at the band may have seemed ironic to some but was perfect. It wasn’t the band Tim was doing this for. It was the city, the hard rockin core fan base that had long been suffering in the shadows of that loud fat ass to the South. (The Bears still suck!)

As Petersen exited, Tim started calling out the names of the street level Wisconsin Avenue businesses he was just above to give listeners an idea of where he was at. The HoJo’s, The Ham & Egger, The Denmark Adult Bookstore, the Greyhound Bus station. Almost immediately car horns from below started to honk and, as they heard themselves and others on the radio, the action snowballed. Tim jumped on it.

“Yeah! Honk for The Who! Honk if you wanna see The Who in Milwaukee!”

It was another magical moment that gave us all a tingle, like fairy dust had just been sprinkled over the whole city. Word came later that the popular cruising strips on South 27th street, Villard Avenue and Highway 100 rang out too. This was on a Thursday night at 10:30pm no less.

Chapter Twenty Four: The Blue Crue.

The sweet air of serenity was abruptly interrupted by two of Milwaukee’s finest who had keys to the station front doors and walked right in. A much bigger and more powerful trailer mounted mobile police spotlight shone on Tim up from the ground adding a Hollywood/Batman air. I’m picturing The Animals silhouetted head shape high up in the sky as the thugs from Police Chief Harold Brier’s loose gang of thugs made their way into the tiny newsroom. That’s not an exaggerated description when you remember that they had beat the shit out of manic lead singer Wendy O. Williams after her Plastmatics punk speed metal raunch band concert a few months before when her electrical tape costume fell almost completely off during her chainsaw thrusting, intercourse simulating performance at The Palms night club. These guys owned the town and did what they want. The Animal had good reason to be concerned.

“I was thinking this thing isn’t even gonna get off the ground and they’re gonna shut us down.”

Mike Wolf, the 6p-10p jock that preceded The Animal on the air talked with the elder upper mid-life alpha pig. Wolf explained in firm but forceful terms what the deal was. Wolf was a red bearded, fair skinned Irishman who could call upon his heritage when needed for the proper way to help people to see things his way. A good choice for this circumstance. The hog took a look out the newsroom window and said,

“Just checkin’ out the situation here…got some calls…”

(I know it sounds like Dragnet…But that’s what he said!)

Tim was silent for the first time in an hour.

“So that’s what’s going on here?”

He tuned in closely to The Animals ever important response.

“Yeah…ah…it’s…you know….it’s…radio…”

He gave the Animal a disgusted smirk. Exhaled.

“OK…alright.”

He turned around and started to leave. On his way out he tossed out a verbal fortune cookie for relief,

“Good luck!”

Moments later, the spotlight went out. The excitement was over. Everybody left and The Animal found himself out there all alone. Pondering. The $1,000 bonus Arnold had promised. The lobster and steak he would be eating from the restaurants that Arnold said would be standing in line to bring him food. Then a 180 degree turn. The scary thought that there was no end in sight.

“No guarantees,”

Arnold had gone out of his way to emphasize.

“Four to six weeks”

it might take.

“Maybe it would have been better if the cops had shut it down…”

he thought.

So much was buzzing around in his head. The strange new environment. The cars honking. He was way too jazzed to sleep on the crooked army cot. But he tried and the sun came up after what seemed like a blink.

Chapter Nineteen: Patti.

Among the few personnel “adjustments” Lee Arnold made was to “reassign” Promotions Director, Patti Genko, to the 15th floor research phone cubicles and bring in a key long time friend, John Duncan, to replace her.

John Duncan was,

“Lee’s Boy.”

He was known to jokingly hide behind Arnold with his hands on Arnold’s shoulders and bob his head up and down and make “nah, nah, na nah nah” type comments. He was a tall, skinny, soft spoken, dark haired California kid. Even though he had followed Arnold from Gainesville to Tampa to Boston, his mid seventies dark blue Corvette still bore the blue and gold California license plates. Lee and John were nicknamed “The Bobbsey Twins” due to their childlike interactions that many times had Duncan crying out loud after a tumultuous shouting match. That intensity told you that there was great passion between them. Arnold,

“He was my best friend in the world. I trusted him with my life.”

Duncan’s job during all this was to “hold down the fort” with the everyday general station duties.

Genko took the demotion professionally- on the outside. She was really fucking pissed on the inside.

Having grown up in The Northern suburbs of Chicago, Patti Genko was a WLUP Patti Hayes groupie. WLUP was Chicago’s hardest rocker and Patti’s father couldn’t help but notice her knowledge of every single song they played. He encouraged her to pursue a radio career and, strangely enough, she took his advice. She earned a Broadcast/Mass Communication degree from Western Illinois University and had made an attempt at an internship at “The Loop” but was turned down. Thus, her first gig was a low paying one writing commercials and station promotional announcements at a local Rockford Television station. She was suffering from the blatantly male biased sexism that existed in rock radio back then and decided to just play into it by putting on a short shirt and “workin’ it” to get Brent Alberts to hire her at Rockford rocker Y95.

“He said I had great legs.”

Knowing Patti, her legs, at the time, weren’t her biggest asset. If Alberts had managed to keep his eyes on them then he must have been a very disciplined man. Patti was stacked. She didn’t, however, flaunt it. Not the cleavage type. She was very Midwest but with an east coast, nasal ring that she dampened on the air.

It was during her tenure at Y95 that she partnered up with Tim The Rock N Roll Animal and later was promised work in Milwaukee as part of Alberts inducement to The Animal to make the jump. Genko felt unappreciated and betrayed by her demotion in that her 2-3 years of promotional efforts were part and parcel of QFM’s resurgence but, at the time, she had nowhere else to go. Aside from the lowly QFM research department part time work, she continued to work on-air weekends and on miscellaneous other fill-in duties but, for a time, was reduced to fobbing off her boyfriend for financial help.

Now Arnold, who was oblivious to the impact of his actions on her, pleaded for her help. He knew she had the ability to be unstoppably tenacious (aka bossy) in whatever she was pursuing. He needed her to take Gene Mueller’s News Director position immediately and be his PR person for the event. Fortunately for Patti, things were going to be moving too fast for her to carry around any baggage about her treatment. After the wacky staff meeting she had worried about her partner Tim sleeping on the ledge and figured as News Director, with his perch being just outside the newsroom window, she’d be right next to him for the duration to make sure he wouldn’t sleep walk or drowsily tumble over the edge. Patti Genko is the best childless mama bear you will ever meet. She was fiercely loyal. At the very least, she thought, she’d know where he was. That’s something she had begun to have serious concerns about.

Chapter Twenty: The First Attempt.

Wednesday night was the day that had been set for the rant and jump out but it rained so the secret had to be muzzled for one more day. They were flying so wildly by the seat of their pants and so anxious to get Tim out there that they hadn’t even thought of the need for some kind of protection or for necessities. So first thing Thursday Arnold, Duncan, The Animal and Patti raided the Army/Navy Surplus Store across the street from the building for free supplies that included a porta potty, tarp, army cot and flashlight. OK, now even if it rains he can go out! And if he has to shit, he can do that too! (Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Wise guy eh?)

Chapter Twenty One: The Call.

When the call from the band finally did come, it wasn’t even Bill Curbishley, it was Regis Boeff, Curbishley’s assistant. Arnold wasn’t fazed. He was ready with a well thought out presentation.

Boeff had a “wise and loyal British butler/Sir John Gielgud” demeanor. Of Arnold’s baited telegram he said,

“We’ve never been approached by a radio station in quite this manner before.”

Arnold’s record business experience gave him a cocky confidence that Boeff may not have been used to seeing come from the radio side of things. Arnold’s attack bordered on vicious.

“I’m looking in Variety Magazine and you guys are running an ad seeking a co-sponsor of your tour? You’re the greatest rock n roll band in the world and you have to run an ad to get somebody to sponsor you? It’s your “Farewell Tour!”

He was being demeaning, degrading and complimentary at the same time. It was a complicated tact that was based on his knowledge of a band’s insecurities and how they could be used against them as a motivational tool. His National Record Rep years had been spent at RCA Records. The Who was unrelated at MCA records but that didn’t matter.

“All bands are the same. They all want to make money. They all want it to work good and if you play on their insecurities, you can get them to listen to you.”

That was all Arnold needed at this point was for the band to just listen to him. To get them engaged. To begin to… well… you see it don’t you?

Back in 1982 the only competition for The Who for the title of “The Greatest Rock N Roll Band in the World” was The Rolling Stones.

“The Who bridled under that and always felt that they just didn’t get the respect The Stones had. They had done Woodstock and this and that but still The Stones mattered more.”

Arnold also knew that The Stones had responded to a petition drive led by KTI’s new PD Dallas Cole in the year before at his former Rockford radio station that had successfully resulted in their playing in the tiny Rockford Civic Center Auditorium.

Next he threw the Jovan sponsorship of The Stones recent tour up in Boeff’s face.

“They didn’t have to run an ad to get that!”

He was pushing all the right buttons, pulling their ego chain.

“I used The Stones on them because that’s who I knew they compared themselves to.”

Whatever Boeff’s impression of it was, he was listening. At the very least, the carnival barker had his attention. And if you, the reader, have been paying attention then you know what Arnold would do next right? The outrageous offer followed by the request for….

“If I can get you the kind of national publicity… the kind where everybody’s talking about The Who Tour… and you know it’s because of me…because of this radio station… Would you be willing to return the favor and bring the band to Milwaukee for a show?” Boeff:

“If you can…”

“If I can generate this great hoopla…”

There was one of those dramatic pauses that always happen when the “mark” is contemplating the outrageous offer. Then Boeff bit.

“Go for it.”

It didn’t sound British, it sounded 80’s. It wasn’t much of a commitment. Arnold’s assessment was realistic.

“He figured I was crazy and didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about and he wouldn’t have to deal with it ever again.”

But, for a gifted salesman, it was enough. Now all he had to do was… everything…again.

“If you have the confidence in yourself that you can pull off anything and if you leave yourself flexible enough to bob and weave where you have to… the goal stays the same… How you’re going to get there may change but “Here’s where the journeys gonna end”- How we’ll get there we’ll have to figure out along the way.”

Boeff was apparently much more pissed off than he appeared to Arnold because it was just after that when Randy McElrath talked with Barbara Skytell, one of The Who’s booking agents, who was just plain hostile. She screamed,

“What the fuck are you guys doing!?”

Big acts like The Who have a lot of people who insulate them from somebody trying to pressure them. McElrath:

“That’s what we were trying to do. We were definitely trying to leverage ‘em.”

McElrath’s tack was,

“… but it’s the radio station. What am I going to do to these guys?”

“You buy advertising don’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t buy ALL their advertising…”

The bands agents were trying to get McElrath to use his influence to pressure Arnold and QFM to drop it. They were nowhere near even thinking about the idea that the show would make a Milwaukee stop.

“They were just plain mad at us.”