AROUND THE STATION

KROQ clock. An hourly guide for when to play commercials (green areas), play jingles, and most importantly, talk. They don’t remain the same for long. Circa 1994. Kevin Weatherly, program director.

From left: Poorman (what a name) Van Johnson, Dave Gahan, April who couldn’t keep her clothes on, below her Martin Gore, whose guitar skills are vastly overlooked, Alan Wilder, Freddy Snakeskin (never one to push forward for photos), Andy Fletcher, Jed The Fish below Andy, some schleb who ripped off KROQ, and long time WB promoter Chris Crist.

Muscle shirt, no muscles. INXS drummer Tim Ferriss is the clowner-arounder of the band, and I love that they didn't always send Michael Hutchence for interviews. Fun guy.

Here was the evolution of the Fishface Outline font adorning this site. The taped on numbers on the KROQ control room cart machines. ITC was our choice of cart machines. Certain songs came from private collectors such as Freddy Snakeskin. If it weren’t for these manually-recorded records, many songs would not have made it on KROQ. You would have done without Barbie and the Kens

Rodney Bingenheimer’s first question would be why does Jed The Fish get to hang out with Mila Jovovich. Kind of trying to not be attracted here, but the Reid Fleming shirt probably sabotaged me from the word go. At the time, it was fashionable to be clean and sober, but I actually did it to save myself. NA keychain. Mila came by the Burbank studio so she could be the movie star who was in Blue Lagoon. The 2000’s had Paris Hilton, and the nineties had Mila. But Hilton wasn’t really in a movie. Here she’s pawing my flab. What a face.

Baseball shirts were a thing. Jed The Fish, Pasadena KROQ control room. There were carts everywhere. Similar to the old 8-track cartridges, these had a continuous loop with a stop tone (to stop the machine the last time someone played it) just before the beginning of each recording. So when you plugged it in to play it, it was always ready. It was quite a reliable system, which is why the cart machines such as ITC existed for 50 years. Hassle recording the cart in the first place, but I did it for the Go-Gos, who gave me a demo lacquer of “Cool Jerk.”

My very funny girlfriend in 1989 had Calvary Baptist parents, who once had a sermon villainizing KROQ. Coincidentally, we had the first and only billboard campaign. (KROQ has never advertised since) But my billboard, located near her parents’ house was vandalized. By Jesus Freaks. One of them risked life and limb to remove my name from it. It was a dumbass campaign anyway.

Kate and Fred stopped by for an interview after I had carved a jack-o-lantern in the KROQ control room. It was a sad time for the band with Ricky having passed just months before. They did not tour for the album. Warner Bros. Promotion person Paul V. was outraged at my criticism of the album.

Edge and Bono did their first-ever streamed podcast from the KROQ control room in Burbank. They brought along Guinness, which was promptly consumed by non-air station personnel. I got Bono to imitate William Boroughs. Smoking like mad. September 19, 1997.

Jed The Fish and Dusty Street at a party in Santa Monica. Photo Debbie Leavitt.

Working at KROQ was fun, and I’m sure it sounded like it on the air. In back of me, albums, below my right elbow 7” 45rpm singles, the rest hundreds of carts, to my right and in front of me, shelved and stacked. The Grace Jones poster, seen in many photos, was directly to my right. We had creepy green carpet and awful green and red curtains which were never open. This control room had soul, the walls were covered with notes, flyers and photos. Ask me about Sly Stone.

Jed The Fish in the KROQ Control Room, Pasadena, 1983. The ubiquitous Sennheiser 421 microphones.

91X personality and smoker Mike Halloran at a 1997 Prodigy concert at the Spruce Goose in Long Beach, Ca.

Off-the-cuff fizzlebutt sound effects for Out of Order, my Westwood One syndicated radio show. Ron Harris thought to give you a behind-the-scenes video.

He was always such a genteel person. Shortly after this interview in 1982, he led a crowd of people from the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach across PCH into the Pacific Ocean. His last encore song that night was I Go Swimming, to be release the next year. Here, he's like a scraggly-headed vampire.

For a short time in 1978-79, I was actually the KROQ Music Director. I had only heard about the station less than a year before. It was my responsibility to gain the trust of the record company promotion people, wary of giving us product because so much of it had been stolen by former KROQ DJs. Four scoundrels stealing albums meant I needed twenty meetings with promotion people. One of my first “adds” as MD was to begin playing Dire Straits, which I hated but knew would be successful. Devo’s first album was a no brainer.