WHOoPLA: Chapters 36 & 37

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).

~ by Scott on November 29, 2007.