The dream became a nightmare for Jonathon Brandmeier on June 4, 1983, when he took the stage at Poplar Creek Music Theatre and the howls of outrage began.
He had finally made it, or so he thought. Five years earlier he had been sitting in the orange plastic pavilion seats of the Chicago area`s largest concert arena with his girlfriend, Lisa Nicelli, watching enviously as John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd danced around in dark suits and sunglasses, playing the Blues Brothers.
”God, I`d give anything to do that,” he said to Lisa. ”I`d give anything to get up there and be with those guys and play.”
At the time, Brandmeier was a loudmouthed, 21-year-old disc jockey based in Rockford who occasionally made extra money banging on drums and singing for lounge bands. From there his professional travels took him to Milwaukee and then to Phoenix, where he continued both his radio and musical acts. Word of his talents spread, and early in 1983 WLUP-FM (97.9), then the loudest, nastiest music station in Chicago, won a nationwide battle for his services and signed him to host its morning-drive program.
To help introduce Brandmeier to listeners, WLUP arranged for him and his good-time, comedy-rock band to be the opening act for Molly Hatchet and Scandal, two of the loudest, nastiest bands in the business. Their fans, the black-T-shirt crowd that annually made the WLUP rock stage at ChicagoFest an appalling tableau of the dissolution of modern youth, were horrified.
Debris sailed out of the audience. Get the hell off the stage! You stink! After half an hour Brandmeier scampered into the wings, devastated. He did not return to Poplar Creek in Hoffman Estates until June 6 of this year, nearly three years to the day after the Molly Hatchet/Scandal debacle. Again, he was there as part of a radio-station promotion. But this time he and his Leisure Suits band were the featured performers, not an opening act. And the surly teenagers were gone, replaced by a clean-cut, sellout crowd of 20,000 baby-boomers.
Brandmeier was to make his entrance from above on a hydraulic lift, lowered to the stage with his pants around his ankles. As he was poised to begin his descent, he looked out from his darkened perch in the rafters and saw thousands of flickering flames. He heard the rolling, insistent chant,
”John-nee! John-nee! John-nee!”, and he knew the dream was finally a reality.
In 36 months Brandmeier had made himself the single hottest performing act in Chicago and appeared well on his way to assuming the throne of WGN`s Wally Phillips, who was about to abdicate after having reigned for two decades as the king of local radio. The ratings for Brandmeier`s 5:30-10 a.m. air-shift were skyrocketing, while ratings for other area radio stars — Phillips, Larry Lujack, Bob Collins, Steve Dahl, Fred Winston, Dick Biondi and Bob Wall –were relatively flat or declining.
Now 30, Brandmeier is in the vanguard of a local radio revolution. He is leading the way as hip, youth-oriented FM stations begin to wrest power, wealth and influence away from the old-line, middle-of-the-road adult AM stations that have dominated this town since shortly after Marconi invented the wireless.
Soon, radio stations that used to bang out a steady diet of rock music for kids will be offering a line-up of sports play-by-play, interviews, telephone-talk, news and, of course, music–all for the very same kids. The Pepsi Generation is growing up, and it wants a looser, livelier, more irreverent style of radio entertainment.
It wants Jonathon Brandmeier.
Awake and bright-eyed ludicrously early on a Friday morning are several hundred of Brandmeier`s fans, standing in line at Navy Pier at the gangplank of the Star of Chicago cruise ship. The deejay has commandeered the vessel for a live broadcast on a summer`s morning, and he invited along only those who could prove they were worthy of his affections.
One woman in line is wearing a mermaid costume; another is in a clown suit; three others are in an articulated ”Love Boat” get-up; more than a dozen more are in grass skirts, having worn them in public to earn passage on the ship.
They are the winners of myriad impromptu contests, the takers of strange dares and the most piteous participants in begging sessions conducted over the air during the last few weeks. They have screamed into the phone, made Brandmeier laugh, known the answer to trivia questions, imitated dogs and otherwise debased themselves gratefully.
The dominant age appears to be around 25, though several passengers are clearly into their 40s and others are in their late teens. They file onto the ship and take up position in a thick but orderly cluster around a lower-deck dance floor where the microphones are set up.
Just before the ship sets sail, Brandmeier bops into the stage area. He is wearing a brilliant white sea-captain`s outfit and tennis shoes. The crowd roars. He puts his fist in the air. There are no cobwebs on this man. No apologies that it`s 6 a.m. He is ready to misbehave.
He sings. He dances. He plays the drums. He cuts through the crowd to interview three guys out on the rear deck who are using a slingshot device to shoot water balloons at the veritable flotilla of boats that has followed the Star of Chicago out onto Lake Michigan. He urges people listening in their cars to hop the barriers on Lake Shore Drive and plunge into the water. He convinces a young woman following in a speedboat to bare her breasts for him. The show proceeds with the same kooky haphazardness as Brandmeier`s regular show, which he hosts from studios on the 37th floor of the John Hancock Center. He flits from interviews to songs to crowd games, shuffling in a few records, newscasts and commercials as needed. He has the attention-span of a small child and a taste for the absurd and unusual that at times stretches the definition of comedy.
An example is the presence on the ship of Rana Kahn, a Pakistani doughnut-shop manager. Kahn, whom Brandmeier calls ”Piranha Man,” is one of a score of semi-regular guests on the show, though he has no particular shtick other than being himself: an ingenuous, friendly immigrant who will happily do just about anything he`s told, such as dress as a woman or improvise love songs to Brandmeier in the haunting modalities of Far Eastern music.
”He`s a real person, not a character,” Brandmeier says. ”It`s not a script. He doesn`t do cab-driver or immigrant jokes. I do those jokes on him. He`s not a fake but a real person people really care about.”
Also aboard and featured prominently in the proceedings is Jim Weiser, Brandmeier`s frail, halting assistant producer. Weiser, 22, a former sports intern at WLUP who impressed Brandmeier with his genuine and unrelenting nerdiness, allows himself to be caught up in the vortex of the show and be teased, goaded and forced to sing in his whiney, off-key voice.
Interspersed among these radio verite players are Buzz Kilman, 42, the sad-eyed news reader whose expanding role as a sidekick and straight man for Brandmeier is not well defined but seems to include laughing at funny things, playing the harmonica in Brandmeier`s band and stopping Brandmeier just as he is about to go too far; and Bruce Wolf, 33, the smart-aleck sportscaster who works a day job as a lawyer for a LaSalle Street firm and brings to his reports the passionate irreverence of a true fan.
The unifying theme is spontaneous reality. Other youth-oriented radio performers frequently prerecord and script out huge portions of their shows, surround themselves with a cast of self-important, phony performers and so desperately try to sound like ”fun” and put on a ”show” that they become unspeakably boring after only hours.
If Brandmeier has a particular genius, it is borrowed wisdom from generations of entertainers who have recognized the inherent audience appeal of real people expressing honest emotion. Game shows work on this principle, as do call-in talk shows, ”Candid Camera”-type programs and the ever-innovative radio performances of Brandmeier`s WLUP afternoon counterparts Steve Dahl and Garry Meier.
He doesn`t perform so much as he reacts–to the newspapers, supermarket tabloids and the calls and letters from his listeners. ”I don`t prepare,” he is fond of saying, not because it is strictly true but because it reflects the end result. A typical morning might feature several live prank phone calls, at least one of which would bomb miserably; a contest to see who can best imitate the sound of an electric guitar; a call for people to gather at a phone booth somewhere to win T-shirts; and an ill-fated but running attempt to reach a celebrity or politician on the phone.
”I`m really not a good disc jockey,” Brandmeier says, speaking with a characteristic earnestness not to be confused with false modesty. ”I can`t do that `radio` stuff. I can`t decide to be funny or outrageous. I just do whatever I`m interested in doing that I think is entertaining. I am really into the audience, the people.”
If this sounds smarmy, consider that a frequent and classic Brandmeier routine is called ”The Shove-It Line.” It is usually done over the phone, but this morning he conducts it live on the Star of Chicago. One by one, participants come up to the microphone, give their first names, say where they work and, literally screaming, tell their bosses, ”Take this job and shove it!”
Their howls become louder and louder as Brandmeier and Kilman sternly exhort each person to new ululatory heights. It ends as a woman falls to the floor, shrieking, and Brandmeier, the impresario of the idiotic, stands over her beaming.
This kind of humor, often embarrassing and a bit naughty, only rarely slides into raw vulgarity for its own sake, an entertainment motif that has wormed its way into big-city radio and will not go away. It also avoids the stylistically hoary conventions of polished, repetitive comic radio that feature one-liners and the same bits–animal stories, Mister Rogers takeoffs, fake news items–over and over.
Brandmeier rotates his routines unpredictably and often drops them altogether after several months. Many of the set-pieces directly involve the listeners, who send in tapes of their own song parodies, set up practical jokes for Brandmeier to play on their friends or create their own characters, such as Joe the Love Potato, the last of the boorish sexists.
Brandmeier does not often exhibit the comedic nimbleness of NBC-TV`s
”Late Night” host David Letterman or the droll sensibilities of a great contemporary comedian such as Stephen Wright or Jay Leno. He is, instead, the apotheosis of a class clown: funny because he is fearless, conspiratorial, mischievous and deliciously unpredictable. He brings out the most
extraordinary and peculiar behavior in people, allowing them and himself to weave effortlessly across the boundaries of taste and sensitivity.
He is known to call unsuspecting persons on the phone and, breathless with excitement, tell them he is from a radio station and that they have just won the chance to lend him $1,000, interest-free. These are the ”Johnny Gets the Cash” calls, though he never gets the cash and usually is hung up on.
He frequently convinces listeners to go to busy intersections, run out into traffic and scream, ”I`m exploding! Help! I`m exploding!” This usually attracts a large crowd of other listeners and baffled police officers.
He has taken lately to calling visiting celebrities early in the morning in their Chicago hotel rooms. They are often so dazed that they talk to him, unable to tell if he wants to interview or tease them.
One of his favorite routines is to call people mentioned in offbeat news items or odd classified ads and, sometimes identifying himself clearly and sometimes not, ask them to retell their stories. He often begins quite seriously, as he does with the spokesman for the Hare Krishnas, who were attempting to get the right to solicit on CTA trains. Then he slides gradually into ridiculing and then mocking them.
”What makes you think I want to hear your bongo drums and see your stupid ponytails?” he asks the Krishna sharply. ”Aren`t you the guys who make love to animals?”
The Hare Krishna spokesman has no immediate retort.
Brandmeier`s victims usually don`t.
Jonathon Brandmeier`s insolence first became truly legendary at KZZP Phoenix, where he took the town by storm shortly after he arrived in February, 1981. His scrapbook from those days is huge, filled with scores of clippings detailing, for example, the time he told the audience that if someone brought him a bucket of fried chicken, he would sleep with it. Or the time he called former Secretary of State Alexander Haig to wish him a happy Secretary`s Day. Or the many times his loyal listeners, whom he dubbed ”The Loons,” wore underwear on their heads in public at his behest.
The story they are still telling is of Sheik Mohammed Al-Fassi, the billionaire Saudi Arabian potentate whom Brandmeier telephoned on a whim one day. Seems the reclusive sheik had run up a $1.5-million bill for room service in a Miami hotel, and Brandmeier wanted to know how this was possible. He left messages from ”the Ayatollah Granola” and called Al-Fassi`s chief aide an
”Arabian bonehead,” but eventually got through and wangled himself an invitation to the sheik`s Florida mansion.
Al-Fassi agreed after that to visit Phoenix in return, and Brandmeier promised him an elaborate reception. When it didn`t materialize, the sheik left in a snit. The local newspapers milked the controversy for all it was worth, and Brandmeier`s status as a cult figure was secured.
His ratings continued to soar, and competing radio stations in Phoenix reportedly began sending demo tapes of his work to stations in other states, hoping someone would lure him away, a common practice in the industry. It worked. The big stations that had shunned him two years earlier when he was looking for a job came to him, hats in hand. According to industry trade publications, stations in 11 of the top 20 markets in the country were wooing Brandmeier at the end of 1982. In Chicago, three stations–WLS, WKQX and WLUP –all made serious bids for his services.
Of the three, WLUP seemed the least likely contender. It was the top-rated awful station in the city, featuring a logo that looked like graffiti on a wall and raucous, dissonant music favored by 12- to 24-year-old males who still thought long hair was cool.
”It didn`t take a brain surgeon to realize that we were headed for trouble,” recalled station general manager Jim DeCastro. ”The total numbers of men under 24 were shrinking. At the same time, the movie industry, the record industry and the concert business were cutting way back on their radio advertising. More mainstream advertisers didn`t want to reach our listeners. We were going right into a wall.”
Around that time, rumors began to float that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission would ban the advertising of alcoholic beverages on radio and TV. Lobbying efforts to enact such a ban, still active today, prompted some beer and wine companies to try to take the heat off by cutting back on advertising campaigns–including commercials on hard-rock radio stations–that could be seen as directed at people under 21.
The audience for eardrum-damaging music was shrinking anyway. Yesterday`s hard-core, album-rock listener had become today`s ”weekend hippie,” an employed, 25- to 40-year-old raised on rock `n` roll and not ready to sell out to the soft sound of ”adult contemporary” music. But at the same time this listener wasn`t much interested in listening to preposterous Top 40 pop icons such as Boy George, Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper or the screaming deejays who spun their records.
So-called ”eclectic rock” stations, such as WXRT-FM, helped to fill the musical void on radio, but their deejays were typically colorless and earnest; more with-it than thou.
There was a window of opportunity for hipness in radio. David Letterman had filled a similar gap in television when he went on the air in February, 1982, with a talk show that playfully satirized, updated and ignored the conventions established by Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and a host of other stars who were seen by the new generation as certifiable dinosaurs. It wasn`t so much the Big Chill as the Big Wink.
When DeCastro realized he had to remake WLUP, he started looking for the radio equivalent of Letterman; a central, on-air personality who would turn radio conventions inside-out; who would make the guys still doing the daily
”bits” and juvenile double-entendres look like the 1960s retreads they were.
The most obvious candidate was Steve Dahl, the oft-imitated modern pioneer of freewheeling, irreverent rock-talk who had been fired from more than two dozen stations as he blazed his unorthodox and uncompromising trail through the wastelands of music radio. But WLUP, under previous management, had made the mistake of sacking Dahl and sidekick Garry Meier in early 1981 for ”violating community standards,” and in late 1982 the duo was trapped in a five-year contract at WLS.
Howard Stern of WXRK New York, a cruder and more arrogant version of Dahl, infamous for ”Lesbian Dial-a-Date” and humor that exploits racial stereotypes, was rejected as too raw to attract the mainstream audience. Other possibles, such as Robert Murphy, now the morning jester at WKQX-FM Chicago, were proven audience-getters but were on the cutting edge of a very old knife, too lame and predictable.
”No one we listened to could compare with Brandmeier,” says DeCastro, an evaluation with which many in the business concurred.
”He is very, very talented,” says John Gehron, program director at WLS who last year made his second serious bid for Brandmeier`s services. ”What I find fascinating about him and like so much is that he has his head screwed on straight. He works very hard. He is incredibly consistent on the air.”
Brandmeier`s first inclination was to accept an offer from WLS-AM, the station he had grown up listening to in Fond du Lac, Wis., but Gehron wanted him to compete head-to-head against Dahl and Meier, then doing afternoon-drive on WLS-FM.
”That would have been suicide,” says Brandmeier. ”My other choice was going to a station where I would be their No. 1 talent and where they wanted me bad. The decision became easy.”
DeCastro and his programmers at WLUP believed Brandmeier would single-handedly and immediately transform their station into a young-adult winner. They threw him into the water. He nearly sank.
”We went from playing Judas Priest to playing Billy Joel in one morning,” Brandmeier recalls. ”The phones rang off the hook: `Get this crap off the air . . . Go back where you came from.` ”
However unnerving, the ferocity of the hatred directed at Brandmeier by station listeners and the fans at the Molly Hatchet/Scandal concert at Poplar Creek did not particularly surprise WLUP management. But what did surprise them was that no matter how much money they put into TV commercials, billboards and bus signs promoting their purported savior, the ratings lagged badly. WLUP`s percentage share of the morning-drive audience dropped to 1.6 with Brandmeier. It had been 2.6 and higher before Brandmeier.
The ghost of Robert W. Morgan appeared to be haunting Chicago again. Morgan, a highly touted radio funnyman from the West Coast, arrived at WIND with much fanfare in 1970, met his ratings Waterloo and fled Chicago less than a year later. Ever since, he has served as a metaphorical reminder that Chicago radio audiences are difficult to impress and suspicious of outsiders. Some were all too ready to write Brandmeier`s epitaph.
”He`s not just waiting to happen,” said Seth Mason, general manager of album rock station WXRT, reflecting on Brandmeier`s first six months on the air. ”Anyone mildly interested in hearing Brandmeier has heard him, and he has already generated all the interest he`s going to generate.”
Dan Kening, writing in the Illinois Entertainer, dismissed Brandmeier as a feeble clone of Steve Dahl: ”Let`s face it,” he wrote. ”This town just ain`t big enough for two rock radio personalities as similar as Dahl and Brandmeier.”
A lifelong self-confidence so powerful that it borders on superstition kept Brandmeier from ever seriously worrying he would fail in Chicago. He was not the type to fall on his face or fade into the background. Everyone noticed him sooner or later. He always saw to that.
”He had to be No. 1 all the time,” remembers his father, Frank Brandmeier Jr., a construction contractor in Fond du Lac. ”There`d be a school play, and if he wasn`t in it, he`d jump up on the stage.”
”When we were real young, Dad took home movies,” says Mike Brandmeier, 27, one of five boys in the family and now the bass player for the Leisure Suits. ”When the camera was on us, Johnny, being the oldest, would push us out of the way and dance in front of the camera.”
Their mother, Frances, a nurse who is heard occasionally on the radio show using her nickname, Hanky, allows that John was ”never a quiet baby.”
She says, ”I used to get mad at him because he would manipulate his younger brothers and sisters into doing his chores. He would say, `I`m really lucky I get to do this, and because I like you, I`ll share it with you.` ”
Joe Brandmeier, 26, remembers the early years when John invented the
”Hit the Guy on the Head” game: ”It was like Simon Says,” he says.
”All of us kids would sit on the couch, and Johnny would stand behind us and tell us to do stuff and say stuff. When we`d mess up, he`d hit us real hard with a rolled-up newspaper. We stayed put and took it because we all looked up to him. Then the next day he`d laugh and laugh about how we`d just sit there and let him hit us.”
The conceptual foundation of ”Hit the Guy on the Head” seems still to inspire Brandmeier as he amuses himself on the air at the lengths to which people will go to curry his favor. He has made senior citizens bark like dogs, convinced fans to writhe about on stage imitating horses with no legs, coaxed would-be streakers out of their clothes and, in perhaps the sharpest example, encouraged a black parking-lot attendant to stand out in front of his post and sing cotton-picking slave songs at the top of his voice.
Some of Brandmeier`s lunatic bent is apparently inherited. The late Frank Brandmeier Sr., his grandfather, was ”a classic, crazy old guy,” according to Joe Brandmeier. ”He was a hunter, a drunk and a man.” Frank Jr., his son, is ”the kind of guy who walks into a bar and has everyone slapping him on the back,” according to Jonathon.
In Catholic grade school in Fond du Lac, the first Brandmeier child established himself quickly as a class clown to be reckoned with. In an oft-told family tale, one of the nuns called Mrs. Brandmeier in for a parent-teacher conference when John was in 2d grade. She told Mrs. Brandmeier confidently that if her boy could find a way to make a living using his smart mouth, he would become a rich man.
”I always had respect,” says Brandmeier. ”I could always get the teacher on my side. I could leave study hall and go to the principal`s office and say, `Hey, Sister, I want to go to Hardee`s. I`m hungry. I`ll bring you something back.` She`d say, `John Brandmeier, you get out of here.` I`d say,
`No, really, Sister, I`ll bring you a burger and a shake. Maybe some fries.` Then she`d laugh and say, `Just go.` ”
The Brandmeier brothers became local legends. Mark Wilhelms, who grew up in Fond du Lac and now helps Brandmeier manage the Leisure Suits, says the boys ”were the most energetic, extroverted, crazy, carefree guys I`ve ever met. Some people didn`t know what to make of them at first; they were so overwhelming, but most people loved them.”
True to form ever since, Brandmeier has always managed to stir up lots of trouble without getting into much of it himself. He escaped unscathed in October, 1984, after allowing Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt to utter, under the guise of campaign statements, every conceivable vile and profane slander against President Reagan. And his wide-eyed ”Who, me? I`m just havin` fun” pose has forestalled official complaints and allowed him to continually violate the FCC rule against putting an unsuspecting or unwilling person on the air.
