2021
Meeting Patti Smith in Texas, c. 1978 fr a n k wag n e r
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t’s strange perhaps that when your world falls apart, when you are devastated and think you’ve got no place to go, it is the very time you get a treasure delivered to your doorstep. I went off to college in the fall, really late summer, of 1973, still infused with plenty of 1960s idealism about changing and rearranging the world. We knew the world back then. An insanely corrupt president at a time of extreme world tensions, oil embargoes, and always war. By the time I graduated from what was then Southwest Texas State (now Texas State) in San Marcos, in December of 1977, I felt I was the last one standing for the peace, love, and understanding times just ten years earlier. On the other hand, I was flat broke and I did not have the courage of my new-found hero, Jack Kerouac, to hit the road and head out to San Francisco to write. Instead, I thought I’d do what I wanted to do as a kid and make a name for myself. Then, once known, I would write and get published. That the economy was down in the dumps actually helped. Much to the disgust and disappointment of my dad, I couldn’t get a decent job, maybe at a law firm, or selling stocks. I went full bore for the career my dad never wanted me to go to: a radio disc jockey. A rock and roll radio disc jockey. Through a long series of incidents, I ended up with a parttime job at my hometown’s AOR (album-oriented rock) station, C101. For those in south Texas, this station is a legend for its legal ID at the top of the hour: “The time is 1:01 at C101, KNCN, Sinton, Taft, Corpus Christi.” Always intoned with a deep, resonate, very hip sounding voice. “We just heard from the Doors, the latest from Queen, those Fat Bottom Girls, and there is something from a new artist, Ricky Lee Jones.” Again, sounding hip, well almost as if I was just a little bit stoned. Here I was, the part-time midnight DJ, for THE STATION, the really cool, really hip radio station, in MY HOMETOWN. It would be like say, for this blog, a kid growing up in Boston, and his first job was to play centerfield for the Red Sox, or power forward for the Celtics. That’s the way I felt about being the midnight jock for Corpus Christi’s C101. The pay was almost nothing, but there were perks, something I learned about as I took over. I got into to every rock concert in town. I had only been on the job for a few weeks, really only working weekends, when the program director, Debbie Lee Miller, told me that Sunday night, before I went into the midnight shift, I should go to the old Ritz Theater downtown and see Patti Smith. The Ritz was once the premier movie house in Corpus Christi. In the days before multiplexes, it was the place that the big blockbusters would play first. I saw Dr. Zhivago, 98
The Lowell Review
