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Where were you?

ChuckTiller

ChuckTiller

Program director and afternoon DJ Arch Yancey is on the air at Houston’s 1230 KNUZ when he gets a call from Memphis. The news isn’t good. Arch orders news reporter Jan Bellamy to go on the air, with the story. She refuses, saying that she needed confirmation. Arch looked at her and said, “I am confirmation!” Afterall, Arch knew the source personally. Bellamy still refused, so Yancey went on the air with the bulletin and read the story. She told Yancey that she would complain to news director Jack Piper. He told her, “Go ahead. I’m his boss.”

Meanwhile on 1010 KODA, the late Royce Edward Guinn, failed to put on a traffic report, opting to air the same breaking news. He would be fired next day for missing that traffic report.

That afternoon, Johnny Goyen called me and asked me what I would do at midnight on KNUZ. I gathered all of my albums and brought them to the station at 10PM. Johnny met me there. The idea was to transfer these albums to tape. There were no turntables in the controlroom. I was horrified to find only one 10” reel of tape in the production room. Johnny agreed to start recording albums to that one reel.

I got in the car and headed to 500 Lovett Blvd. My fingers were crossed. How was I going to get in? As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw four people standing outside the door shooting the breeze. I approached them as they looked at me cautiously. I introduced myself to Beau Weaver and Shelia Mayhew. I don’t remember the others. I explained my plight of having no tape. They laughed at me at 1st. I suppose, they took pity on me, and ushered me into the dead tape room. It was downstairs. It was filled with out of date production tapes. The majority of the tapes were 5” reels. Those would not do me any good. However, I was able to find about four or five 7” reels, which would give me 30 minutes per tape. I thanked them over and over, as I jumped into my 1976 AMC Pacer and disappeared into the night. I got to KNUZ with minutes to spare. As I went on the air, Johnny Goyen went to the production room with the tapes, began erasing them and started recording. That night I alternated between carts of the music and the tapes, which included “live” bootlegs of concerts. I filled the entire 6 hours. No, I didn’t record it. I didn’t have any tape. Plus, there was no cassette recorder in the KNUZ controlroom. I credited Johnny, Beau, Shelia and KILT at the end of the broadcast!

Where were you and what were you doing, when you got the news on August 16th, 1977; the news that Elvis Presley had died?
 
Where were you?

I was but a mere sparkle in my daddy's eyes.
 
I had just attended my very first concert just a couple of months before, which turned out to be the LAST show Elvis ever did. Market Square Arena, Indianapolis, June 26, 1977. Still have the ticket stubs and the concert program.

August 16, I'd just finished my afternoon paper route. My sister told me as I came in the house that something about Elvis had just scrawled across the bottom of the TV screen, but she didnt catch what it was. As she was telling me, the phone rang. It was my best friend Chuck who told me that he wasnt sure, but he thought he'd just heard that Elvis Presley died.
 
I was thirteen. I read about it in the newspaper and kept the full color multi-page tribute they published. I still have it along with the newspaper from the day John Lennon died. At thirteen though, my connection to Elvis was not as strong as my connection to The Beatles and the emerging Punk scene I had just begun to read about in Lisa Robinson's column in Circus magazine. It was there that I first read about The Clash, who two years later would release London Calling with it's album cover that pays homage to the debut album by Elvis Presley. Ironically, the title track contains the line, "phoney beatlemania has bitten the dust".
 
I was working as a TV news producer at KSAT-TV in San Antonio.

We treated it like a big story and covered it on all the local newcasts, using network clips and filming local reaction.

Interestingly, we watched the Big Three Network newscasts that night to see how they'd cover the Elvis story. ABC TV News was the only national newscast to lead with the Elvis story. CBS and NBC played it much later in their broadcasts. Wonder if it would be the same today?
 
Chuck,

Wow!! What a great post! I don't remember where I was when I heard the news, but I do remember the candlelight vigil KILT (It would be another year before I got there.) had hosted by Ed Shane at Miller Outdoor Theatre. But Man I gotta tell you, I was truly impressed with your post. You really painted a picture. I could just see all the action. It was almost the PERFECT post.....................but..........................you didn't say anything about Roula & Ryan, Clear Channel, Sam Malone, Cumulus, News/Talk on FM, trains, being drunk, prison, pickup trucks, Mama, and rain. So, try it again. K?


Colonel St. James
 
Great post Chuck. I was in Luckenbach, Texas when I heard the news about Elvis and my beloved Grandmother on the same day at about the same time. I was doing a high school newspaper story on the allure of Luckenbach and its founders (Willie and Hondo Crouch). Needless to say, I was crushed, but a day I'll never forget.
 
I received this email from Beau Weaver:

Chuck,

Nice to hear from you. Here is something I wrote for the Radio Daily News website a few years back:

I had been doing afternoon drive at Top 40 powerhouse KILT in Houston for some years, since returning to my Alma mater from a stint as swingman at KHJ, when the news director signaled to break in for a bulletin.

Elvis Aaaron Preley was dead. The king is dead, long live the king. I followed the newscast with a tympani roll, saying only "ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building," segue to Love Me Tender.

The next set, I gave it back to Jim Carolla, who read a beautiful four minute obituary, while I did ran a bed of Elvis instrumentals, from albums snagged from the production room, cross-faded live underneath, on the two control room turntables.

I asked Jim how he could have possibly written such a beautiful obit piece in two minutes! He sheepishly held up a copy of a World Almanac.

Program Director Bill Young was out of the building, but I made the decision to suspend all normal programming, and just take calls from listeners, and play Elvis music.

Houston had always been a big Elvis town. Elvis used to play little clubs around town during the Louisiana Hayride period, and a LOT of locals had personal remembrances.

Fans and collectors just instinctively knew to converge on the KILT studios, with all their rare recordings, and memorabilia, giving us a treasure trove of raw material for the programming that was to unfold in the days ahead.

When Bill Young finally reached me, he was in tears. Bill had known Elvis personally, and had deeply loved him. He told me to continue all Elvis until further notice, in what would become about six days of Elvis related programming.

A heart wrenching moment came when my trembling fingers dialed the number to Graceland, given to me by a long time friend of KILT, local singer made bigtime in the 70's, B.J. Thomas. B.J. was one of Elvis's inner circle, who had a key to the front door at Graceland. Elvis would watch downstairs on the security camera monitor, and if he felt like company would send someone down to invite you upstairs.

When the phone at Graceland answered, the voice on the other end was Dr. Nicopolos, Elvis's personal physician, who confirmed that he had been taking under the care of a dentist, and a combination of prescriptions medications may have hastened what he described as a heart attack. His voice was hushed, and there were sounds of weeping in the background. I felt like my on air call had inappropriately intruded on a deeply personal moment, and kept my condolences brief.

The air talent who followed me at 6pm, "Captain Jack" (Rick Candea, who later became KILT PD, after Bill Young's retirement) joined me on the air for tandem coverage. It was Rick who came up with two really great ideas to help involve the KILT listeners in expressing their very real grief at the loss of someone very important to them.

B.J. Thomas offered to take a sympathy card to Memphis for the family memorial service, to which he was invited. So, Rick invited listeners to sign the card. For the next three days, there was a line around the block, even through the night, of listeners who added their names to a continuous box of teletype paper. The "card" in the end, weighed about ten pounds. Houston Police Officers directed traffic that descended on our Montrose area studios.

With so many deeply emotional people standing on line for hours just to somehow get close to something that would memorialize their hero, Rick suggested, on the air, that maybe we should have a memorial service for Elvis of our own, in Houston. Of course we had to do it.

When the Houston Oilers had gone to the playoffs the year before, KILT hosted a "pep ralley" to welcome them home, and 60,000 people came to the Astrodome after one day of promotion, so we knew that, even in an era of declining numbers for AM stations, we had the clout to pull a crowd.

KILT GM, the late Dickie Rosenfeld had some pull on City Council, and in short order we had permission to use Miller Outdoor Amphitheatre, at Herman Park, home of the Houston Grand Opera Under the Stars, as our location, and the Houston Memorial Service for Elvis Aaron Presley was on.

The event drew a capacity crowd of 15,000, with thousands more opting to stay in their cars on the clogged side-streets, to listen to the live coverage on the air.

KILT Midday personality, Ed Shane (former KKDJ, now Shane Media Consultant), was the onstage MC, with myself and KILT midday talent Sheila Mayhew anchoring on air coverage.

The stage was designed by an art director who had worked on one of Elvis's movies. It consisted of an empty guitar case filled with roses, lit by a spotlight.

Local personalities who knew Elvis well, eulogized Elvis, and shared personal stories, including longtime Houston morning personality and KILT competitor, Paul Berlin, and KILT program director, Bill Young. A local Baptist minister led the assembled multitude in the sort of prayer Elvis would have been comfortable with.

The most moving part of the service was a 15 minute slide and video collage, that illustrated an audio collage of Elvis interviews and music. It culminated in Elvis' live performance of a medley of Mickey Newbury's "American Trilogy", which had become the unofficial theme of our Elvis tribute coverage that week.

Backstage, Houston Police had become worried about controlling the crowd, as exits were blocked by thousands who insisted on standing, despite the efforts of Police and Fire Marshall efforts to clear the isles. So, thinking fast, Ed Shane asked the crowd to join together for a minute of silent prayer after the music montage, and then to walk to their cars in silence.

They did.

It is sad to find that 25 years after his death, any media coverage of Elvis Presley makes him look like a John Belushi parody. But he touched many of us deeply. I will never forget that week on the air in Houston, when we Baby-Boomers came face to face with our own mortality, perhaps for the first time.

The King is Dead. Long live the King.

Beau Weaver
 
On the air at KCMO in Kansas City. It was a horrible day, made worse with the news of Elvis's death. Due to my friendship with Wolfman Jack, I was able to get him on the air to talk about The King.
 


Getting ready to drive to my station,and do my shift. I saw a quick mention on the CBS evening news about it. I thought how strange that just a few days earlier the Soviet union's news agency Tass was talking about Elvis,and how he was fat,lost his voice,and demonstrated that Americans are not as successful as they.
I got to the station 40 min later. The phones were lit,the Pd was frustrated because we had only 2 Elvis albums at the time,:Elvis Country" and his latest "Moody Blue". I asked where the oldies vault was"and played Pre -Beatle hits mixed with the Elvis cuts,plus I took calls. I also read the wires stories, read the obit, and finally the PD brought in a BOX set of Elvis's 50 hits. I mixed them up with the Shirelles,Jerry Lee Lewis,etc. It worked for the next 5 hours. The next day it was all Elvis.
 
Chuck,

Great story and a cool email from the voice of the "My Super X Girlfriend" movie trailer, Beau Weaver. I remember watching one of the local channels (Ch. 2 with Ron Stone & Doug Johnson? Or was it good ol' Dave Ward on 13?) and seeing footage that they shot that day at the KILT studios while Beau was on the air ( I think that was him with the scruffy beard). They showed that old Gates Diplomat board with those big honkin' VU meters. I had just started in radio a year earlier, so I was facinated to get a glimpse inside the Big 610 studio.

I don't think I was on the air that day at my first gig, KIKR in Conroe, but I remember the days to follow and having to play "The King is Gone" over & over again. I wish I could forget that song.

Tom
 
I remember as if it were yesterday. Helping my brother wash his truck near an open window on the side of our house. The bedroom stereo was blasting KZFM. The announcer interrupted Alan O'Day's "Undercover Angel" with the news that Elvis had died. After the announcment, the song continued, but Elvis songs soon followed
 
Great post! I was on the air at KHYT-AM in Tucson. My very first gig! I was talking to some girl on the request line when the hot-line rang. It was my buddy Jack Costello who was on the air across town at KIKX-AM. He said, "Go look at your AP wire NOW!" I hung up and ran out of the studio to see the flash on the wire services. I was all of 17 and there I was holding the offical bulletin that Elvis was dead! I went back into the studio, waited for the song to end while rehearsing how I was going to read this thing. My luck...the news guy had taped his normal newscast ealier and was down the street at Bob's Big Boy having a sandwich! The task of reading the damn thing on the air fell on my shoulders! I did it flawlessly.

My program director burst through the door a few seconds later looking pissed and demanding to see the bulletin. He apparently thought I was joking. In short order the station manager and the sales manager were in the studio. Honest to God... that station was just like WKRP!!! Anyway, we immediately started playing Elvis songs back to back and fielding phone calls. The thing that struck me much later about that day was that somebody somewhere would always remember that they heard the news about Elvis from ME! A seventeen year-old kid who couldn't possible grasp how big the news I had just delivered actually was.
 
KNUZ went all Elvis, as well. When I got off at 6AM, I stayed awake. I couldn't go to sleep. I planned to do it again at midnight. I purchased a lot of tape that day and was prepared for an even bigger show.

However, I was overcome by a very strange malady, which required emergency surgery. I was off the air for 6 weeks, while I recuperated. Charlie Seay was doing 7-Midnight during that time. However, on that night he was on from 7PM-6AM.
 
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