Reno X. Nevada

This posting about RENO X. NEVADA was transferred from the original thread from May 2005, at the now-defunct Freeform Radio Forum.

If you've got any personal memories of Reno, please add a comment at the bottom of this post...



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FCC VISIT


There was so much "right" about the sounds KFML bounced off the Rocky Mountains in those days that it seemed inevitable they would collide with the Federal Government at some point.

Unannounced, an inspector from the Federal Communications Commission's Denver office knocked on the studio doors one early morning.

It would have created chaos whenever it came. But the urgent murmurs amid helpless scurrying to make the place presentable were only compounded by the fact the FCC had chosen to "inspect" on the shift that extended from past the midnight hour to the break of dawn.

Reno X. Nevada's shift.

Reno's hoarse, cigarette-burnished voice wasn't heard over the nervous, "No! You don't say! Well, I certainly will look into it..." replies heard from the office of station owner Joe McGoey.

The KFML support staff, the secretary outside that office and a young woman who logged the commericals in traffic did their best to appear calm and, in doing so, looked guilty as hell.

It wasn't that anyone thought something might have been amiss during the FCC inspection of the premises.

Hell, no. Everyone suspected that everything was wrong. There were endless possibilities. Frightening possibilities that would, could, should lead to the shutdown of KFML, we thought.

Reno was inside the control room, putting albums spun overnight back in order in the library. Calm, cool and collected.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Oh, the FCC surprised me...came knocking on the door at dawn," he said. It was accompanied by a nervous laugh that Reno tucked beneath a tight grin that flashed his dentures. It was embellished with a quick, wide-eyed stare beneath arched brows.

"The first thing he wanted to see were the logs," said Reno. Damn, I thought, those certainly weren't up to date...at least not on Reno's shift.

When I asked about that, Reno said "Oh, yeah they were up to date allright. I filled them all out when I got here last night."

"Whew!" I said, "Well, that's unbelievable! You had them up to date?"

"Well, actually, said Reno, laughing quietly at first until the grimace started being interuppted by spittle flying between his teeth. The laugh gave way to Reno's trademark coughing as the fallout from a couple of packs of Marlboro's interrupted.

"...I had them filled out all the way through 8 o'clock!"

Uh, that would have been transmitter readings miraculously entered on the log 3 hours before they should have been taken.

"Oh, did he threaten to suspend your Third Class Radio Operator's License?" I asked.

"Nah," said Reno.

"After about an hour of him snooping around here it was obvious there was so much ELSE wrong with this place," Reno smiled, "he forgot about it!"

...


Reno has gone to that great, free-form place in the sky some years ago. But his friends still remember him. From San Francisco to the Rockies, he carved out his own niche in the music, and the memories of radio that are repeated in stories to this day.

I was only 22 or 23, full of ideas and energy but eager to hear of Reno's vast experience, er exploits, in the field.

He just always seemed to know the right way to get the point across while maintaining the liklihood he would survive, unscathed.

Riding alongside me in my tattered old VW, he spotted a police car and said urgently: "I'll yell 'HEY!" and you give 'em the finger!"
_________________
Jim Clancy
former KFML Newsman

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I WOULD LIKE TO THANK JIM CLANCY FOR THIS KIND REQUEST TO HAVE PEOPLE WHO KNEW RENO GIVE THE MAN HIS DUE RESPECT.

I AM PROUD TO SAY THAT I WAS HIS FRIEND. LIKE MOST PEOPLE I GO MY OWN WAY, NOT THINKING OF OLD FRIENDS THAT OFTEN AND REGRET AFTER IT'S TOO LATE.

I MET RENO IN 1946 WHEN WE [were] BOTH 9 YEARS OLD IN "THE CITY". I SPENT A FEW NIGHTS WITH HIM AT KMPX AND KSAN AND HIS IDEA OF WHAT WAS FUNNY, WAS HIM HANDING ME THE STOCK MARKET REPORT AND POINTING AT ME, SAYING "YOUR ON " FLIPPED THE SWITCH AND WATCH ME TRY AND BLUFF IT OUT. TALK OF PANIC!

JIM CLANCY, RENO AND MYSELF I AM PROUD TO SAY WERE ROOMMATES IN MILL VALLEY IN THE EARLY 70'S... [Although Reno worked at KMPX and KSAN, there is] ALMOST NOTHING WRITTEN ABOUT RENO [at the Jive95 Website (KMPX and KSAN Archive Website). I hope this changes in the future, as no story about San Francisco or Denver radio would be complete without Reno.]

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Who doesn't have a memory or 6 of Reno X. Nevada, of the infamous Hursh gang. One is particular comes to mind. One evening as I was stumbling toward oblivion (as usual) on my 6-10P shift at KFML, Reno appeared. He seemed to be on a mission and he was. He seemed to think it was time for me to take a vacation from the mess that KFML was becoming, so He and I began playing every song that celebrated the F Bomb that we could think of. There were actually more than I realized. We culminated this unabashed hootenanny with the Mother of all F Bomb Tributes, Nilsson's 'You're Breaking My Heart, You're Tearing it Apart so.........". That was one of several "last shifts" that I pulled at KFML. I always loved Reno and his brother, Buffalo and now I guess I especially do.

Bill Ashford

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RENO'S PARKING TICKETS

Another Reno story from Jim Clancy:


Reno told me the story of having gotten a parking ticket a DAY while
working at KSAN.

He got caught.

He came up before the judge who said something to the effect of $1500 or 30 days in jail. Reno replied, "I'll take the jail time, your honor,
I've never made that much in a month!"

I'm sure there are plenty of KSAN people who could weigh in. As noted,
I can't remember whether it was Reno or Buffalo that fell asleep at KFML
on the early shift and the police broke down the glass doors to get into
the building, only to discover them sleeping on the floor.

Jim
_________________

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SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR

I can't speak to the sleeping thing at KFML, but I do remember when Trunnel, Burke, Mitchell, Don Bridges and I went full time at KMYR. The studios were located in office space, 2nd floor of the old Villa Italia Shopping Center. Great place to be a hippie. One of us got punched out at the lunch counter and another got screamed at in the donut shop by some hysterical woman who was convinced the length of the hair equated with the depth of the war. Jefferson County Sheriff's deputies used to put us on the wall and search us at night on the way into the shopping center. They finally stopped when Craig Bowers called the sheriff and complained.

Anyway, Craig called me at 3 in the morning one night and said I had to go to the station right away. Why? asked I. Apparently the sheriffs office listened to us and called Bowers, concerned that Bridges might have killed himself.

The inside groove to the British Sgt. Pepper lp was playing over and over and they were certain the Boys were chanting over and over..."it's the only way out". What am I supposed to do? Go see if he hanged himself of something, sez Craig. Great. So off I went. Deputies waiting outside, where they stayed. I went upstairs, unlocked the door and found Bridges sleeping in the studio. Probably a crash from being up for a week. He started another record. Everybody went home or where ever. End of story.

Bill

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Oops, I left Kreizenbeck off the KMYR staff list. Unforgivable.

jclancy-kfml
Intern

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Where is Brian?

The last I heard he married a Polish girl and was living there.

Brian was great. Creative and always entertaining. But that went for you, Bill, Thom and the rest of the gang as well.

I wish corporations were banned from owning media. Both the employees and the audience would enjoy it more.
_________________
Jim Clancy
former KFML Newsman

Bill Ashford's Top 10

A while back, someone posted a comment asking Bill for his Top 10 All Time Albums. It took him a while, but Bill zero'd in and recently wrote (Thanks, Bill!):

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OK,it's gotten silly, at some point you just have to stop and claim. So, for the time being, knowing that at least 6 of these will stand for all time with me, here is the list I'd take with me today.

EXILE ON MAINSTREET ROLLING STONES
STICKY FINGERS ROLLING STONES
RUBBER SOUL BEATLES
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS BOB DYLAN
LAYLA & OTHER LOVE SONGS DEREK & THE DOMINOES
BLUE JONI MITCHELL
HOTEL CALIFORNIA EAGLES
AFTER THE GOLDRUSH SHAKEY YOUNG
KIND OF BLUE MILES DAVIS
STEP INSIDE THIS HOUSE LYLE LOVETT

I can live with it. Have a great day!

Bill Ashford Time Change

(Bill Ashford, KFML AM & FM, Denver, Colorado, circa 1971. Image courtesy of http://denverradio.tripod.com/kfml.html)

Good news for those of us from the Rocky Mountains westward: Bill Ashford's show on the Rock Garden has shifted to 10am-2pm Florida time (where the program originates). Please go to:

Bill Ashford in The Rock Garden

San Francisco Liberation Radio

Keeping the tradition alive of Bay Area avante garde radio programming, San Francisco Liberation Radio can also be heard via Internet. Check them out:

San Francisco Liberation Radio

Dylan XM Radio Show

Bob Dylan will have a regular one-hour radio show on XM Satellite Radio, beginning in March 2006. For more info:

Dylan Digs XM [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] December 14, 2005

The Stones Dinner

Jim Pagliasotti recently wrote about Dan Fong at Dan's "The Creative Eye" website. In the process, he told some more about that infamous Stones/KFML dinner of May 1972:

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WHAT I COULD TELL YOU ABOUT DAN FONG

BY James Pagliasotti
Copyright 2005

There are a lot of stories I could tell you about Dan Fong. In fact, he would pay me good money not to tell you some of them.

But I will tell you this: if you care about the time when rock & roll came of age, those days of Jimi and Janis and the Who and the Stones, then I can assure you Dan was there, camera in hand and sharp eyes focused.

I know because I was there, too. Dan and I grew up together in Denver in the 50s, 60s and 70s. We were there when Top 40 radio gave way to free-form, when singles gave way to albums, when wholesome and carefully coiffed performers gave way to all those long haired freaks with guitars.

We were there when Chet Helms brought the Family Dog to town and settled in on West Mississippi; when Barry Fey began producing shows at the Denver Coliseum; when Stuart Green's Mammoth Gardens erupted in music uptown and Chuck Morris was booking Tulagi in Boulder. We heard it, we saw it, and we spent a lot of time with the people who made it happen. And, unlike many of the rest of us who were too stoned to function at the time, Dan got it all on film.

Most of his photos have never been seen before. Dan in those days was too busy to do anything but shoot them and store them away. Now he has this treasure trove to look through, and he's finally making them available to the rest of us.

As I pour over these galleries, the memories come back like a tsunami. They will for you too if you were there, or if you only imagined you were, or even if you just wanted to be. These photographs capture memories, but they can make them, too.

It was a time unlike any other and there were indeed a lot of scenes to capture, and stories to be told. Let me tell you just one of them.

When the Stones toured in the summer of 1972, Barry Fey was promoting some of their shows. He'd started out in the business a few years before by putting on a concert of the Byrds at a D.U. fraternity party and thereafter kept getting bigger, both in personal girth and the size of his shows. After the Denver Pop Festival in 1969, he became very big indeed. And, now, success hanging on him like slabs of fat on a roast, he wanted to have the Stones to dinner.

Dan Fong not only was a helluva photographer, he also was a serious chef. He'd grown up in a community of fine Chinese restaurants and this boy knew how to cook.

So Barry hired Dan to cook dinner for the Stones. He'd already done a number of backstage catering jobs at Fey's concerts, including both of the Stones' Denver shows, so it was a slam dunk. Mick wanted him so Barry wanted him and that's the way it was going to be. Barry then partnered up with all the freaks at KFML radio to give the evening some flavor, and before you knew it, it was becoming a rather auspicious event.

Keeping it a secret meant keeping it from the public. In the music business in Denver, everybody knew and everybody wanted to come, but not everybody could.

But then, that's what being a kingmaker is all about and Very Big Barry doled out the precious invitations as he saw fit. All we could do was to keep the location secret and somehow we did.

About the only way you could squeeze in a friend was to get them a job on the work crew that was going to help Dan Fong with the serving and cleaning. He'd already recruited his family and his friends at Bilotti's Pizza to help him prep and cook.

So, baby kingmakers that we were, we lined up the best looking girls that we knew to staff the party, figuring those were markers to be redeemed at a later time. I also got my friend Geitz Romo the job as bartender to the stars.

The party was held at Barry's home in Cherry Hills, which was one of those enormous Jewish modern ranch-style houses on an acre of land on Quincy just east of University. The back yard was scattered with dozens of waist-high, multi-colored paper mache mushrooms. Long low tables were set among them luau like and lanterns provided the light.

The piece de resistance was the Stones' newly minted lips and tongue logo in a sculpture some 5 feet tall, which was connected to a machine that was supposed to send clouds of bubbles out of the mouth. Unfortunately, the machine malfunctioned and all night long, this gelatinous goo kept pouring out of it, looking like nothing so much as puke.

So, the court gathered in advance of the stars. There was Barry, of course, and Cyndy, his wife at the time. Tall, blond, ice-blue-eyed Jerry Kennedy, the head of Denver's Vice Squad and Barry's security crew, was there in his captain's uniform, keeping tabs, one supposes.

There was Max Floyd of KMYR and Joe McGoey of KFML and assorted other business types that Barry wanted around. And there was Sandy Phelps and Thom Trunnell, Bill Ashford and Judy Roderick, Buffalo Chip and Reno Nevada and Brian the Super Warthog, David Shepardson and Ronnie Katz, Herb Neu and all the rest of the KFML gang, and Marcello Cabus, and me and the girls, and a host of other pseudo-celebrities.

And, behind a wall of grills and ovens, towering flames and truly huge mounds of food, was Dan Fong and his family, cooking their hearts out, while all of us awaited the Rolling Stones.

That night in those long ago times when things took place that today are actually hard to imagine, let alone to believe, Dan Fong cooked and served a 14 course sit down dinner for 100 people. And it was awesome! There was a little of this and a lot of that and oysters and duck and a roast pig the size of a small Mercedes cooked over an open pit. There were intoxicants of every sort, beer and wine, tequila and whiskey, and all sorts of other stuff, too; and there was that most ethereal of drugs: the bending of elbows with real celebrities, the once and future royalty of rock & roll.

You can bet Dan had his trusty camera handy. And somehow, in the midst of the flames and the grease and the chemistry of fine cuisine, he got some incredible shots, as he always did.

The Stones and their entourage arrived fashionably late, but well ahead of dinner. Mick was dressed in a baby blue jacket with feathers that trimmed the collar, the cuffs and the hem, which was cut off at the bottom of his ribs. It covered a sparkling silver shirt of some sort that also bared his midriff. His pants were dark blue tights and his shoes were satin slippers. His eyes were made up with sparkles and mascara. He seemed to be perfectly comfortable.

Keith was a bit out of it in those days and moved through the crowd somnambulistically, supported by two very tall Nordic women who drugged him and dragged him from place to place. Also very tall Mick Taylor was a friendly pile of blond curls, smiling and chatting and as nice as could be. Bill Wyman was sharp-faced, dark and intense, and good ol' Charlie Watts was just a regular guy.

I was sitting with him on a couch near the window, talking about jazz, and Mick was posing nearby, when Geitz the bartender yelled at me in a very loud voice: "Hey Smooth Dog! Tell that little faggot in the ballerina costume his drink is ready." Mick barely seemed to notice and smiled at me vaguely when I handed him the glass. Charlie laughed so hard that he fell on the floor.

It was one of those nights that kept unfolding like waves in the ocean, one image lapping in after another. We sat on the lawn at the long luscious tables of food and drink, with the lanterns bouncing light off faces that you knew and faces you only had imagined or seen at a distance or maybe on film. The mushrooms seemed to sway in the glow and the puke kept gurgling from the mouth of the Rolling Stones logo. Beautiful women served platters of indescribably delicious food and looked into your eyes for just a moment as though you were all they ever had dreamed of, and just as quickly they were gone in pursuit of any excuse to get close to Mick.

People that you worked for were passing out in the aisles and others that you barely paid attention to were waxing eloquent. Everybody it seemed got turned around completely and then had to reconfigure their bearings. And everybody went home happy.

Everybody, that is, except Dan. All of us first nighters and all of the staff, those beautiful girls and sharp tongued bartenders, everyone it seemed had wandered off into the night. And Dan Fong was left with a pile of pans and dishes and debris and detritus that defied the imagination of the average man among us. And having no other choice, he spent the night with all the crap and all of his equipment. And the next day, he and a couple of his cousins cleaned it all up, packed it away and took it home.

There among the equipment and the trash was his camera and his bag of lenses and film, and a couple of hundred shots he had taken that night that someday he would develop. The day that followed blended into the next and the next thereafter, and Dan Fong kept shooting pictures of the megastars and the lesser lights and some of the rest of us who peopled the portrait of rock & roll.

It was our story, and it was a helluva story, and all we needed was someone to record it. A good photographer is hard to find and so is Dan Fong. But, lucky you, you've found him.

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To view Dan's work, please go to:

The Creativeye - Photography

KFML Radio News

I finally formatted to mp3 the classic KFML Newscast of Jim Clancy and Ed Chatham reporting on the Dallas Police Bust, 1972.

You GOTTA listen to this. Click on the following link, then go to "Sound Clips." Look for the "new" icon. Click to listen or right click to save for listening later... This cast really takes you back to the spirit of KFML!

KFML-AM & FM, Denver, Colorado

Cream Reunion Concert - May 2005

Call me slow, but I just now saw the Cream Reunion Concert from May 2005. Billed as a "Great Performance" by PBS, it... is!

Cream history, info about the concert, clips and links at:

Great Performances . Cream Reunion Concert | PBS

Infamous KFML Dog Graphic

(KFML Graphic ran in Denver's "Straight Creek Journal," 1971)

The KFML webpages have been recently updated. A gem that has been added is the infamous KFML dog graphic that ran shortly after the station got underway in 1971.

For more KFML images, please go to:

KFML Photo Gallery

Greatful Dead Hour

Here's a fine interview of David Gans of "The Greatful Dead Hour" about the show:

Gray Areas Interview With David Gans