Philadelphia Weekly: "John DeBella is not an Asshole Any More"
TaTaToothy
In article <3d26e8f0...@news.AnonGuy.edu>, Ano...@The.Basement.Cave
says...
>
>_____________________________________
>Scroll down to highlight for HS/JD war. -AG
>_____________________________________
>
>Philadelphia Weekly
>7/6/02
>
>JOHN DEBELLA IS NOT AN ASSHOLE ANYMORE.
>
>THE FORMER KEEPER OF WMMR'S MORNING ZOO IS BACK ON
>THE RADIO. IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE A GROWN MAN CRY.
>
>JONATHAN VALANIA (jval...@philadelphiaweekly.com)
>
>PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA GRYPHON
>
> John DeBella has been a hippie and a punk. A winner and a loser. A
>hero and a villain. And now he just wants to be a nice guy.
>
> As if to prove it, he is going to start welling up in T-minus-three
>seconds. "I can't remember a time when I have been this happy," says
>the former WMMR icon of his return to morning radio on WMGK.
>
> Those great big googly eyes start glistening. A furrow forms on his
>infinite forehead. He looks away, biting on his lip to stanch the
>quivering.
>
> "I didn't realize how much I missed it until I got behind the
>microphone," he says before changing the subject to avert an impending
>full-blown blubber. "I'm an emotional son of a bitch. I cry too
>easily."
>
> You can call him a lot of things, but one thing you can't call John
>DeBella is chicken. He has devoted his life to radio, which is--to
>paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson--a cruel and shallow money trench, a
>long and plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free, and good
>men die like dogs.
>
> For a time DeBella turned wackiness into a cash cow and tapped a big
>vein in that money trench. But the worm turned, as it always does in
>radio, and he died like a dog. Twice.
>
> It's only a slight exaggeration to call what happened to him a
>high-tech lynching, and while there are many sides to this story--and
>this is only one of them--this much is certain: Many he called friends
>left him twisting in the wind.
>
> And now he has come back for more. He has eaten more than his share
>of humble pie. He has grown fat on crow. And he has come here today,
>to the lobby of the Four Seasons, to say that he is grateful for the
>chance to dive back into the shark tank, knowing full well there is
>blood in the water. And he knows that nobody--save Pierre Robert, God
>bless his tie-dyed soul--will throw him a lifeline if he starts going
>down again.
>
> Then he breaks into that laugh--a nervous, rapid-fire raccoon
>chuckle--that punctuates every other sentence. There is a pleading, a
>neediness in that laugh, beseeching all who hear it to please come
>join him in this moment of complete and utter hilarity.
>
> His story is one part comedy--wacky and zany, or "zacky and wany," as
>he likes to call it. And two parts tragedy--which are less so. Much
>less.
>
> John DeBella was born 52 years ago in the Astoria section of Queens,
>the son of NYC Dept. of Sanitation worker--or G-man, as the old man
>used to call himself.
>
> When he was nine, his family moved to the Rosedale section of Queens,
>directly beneath a flight path at Idelwild Airport (now JFK
>International). The air traffic was constant--one plane every minute
>and 22 seconds--and deafening.
>
> "The planes were low enough that you could hit them with a rock," he
>recalls. "You would raise and lower the volume of your voice as the
>planes passed over." Thus was born what can only be described as the
>DeBellow.
>
> He started smoking when he was 11, and slowly but surely a touch of
>gravel was added to the DeBellow. He discovered rock 'n' roll the day
>he heard Lloyd Price's "Personality" on the Emerson Travel Lite
>transistor radio his grandfather bought him. He still has that radio.
>
> When he was in the seventh grade, he noticed that his hairline was
>beginning to recede. He grew a mustache as soon as he could.
>
> By 1967 he was playing drums in a psychedelic garage band called
>Human Rice. And as the Summer of Love flowered, he sampled all the
>psychotropic treats it had to offer. He is one of the few hippie alums
>who will cop to actually trying, unsuccessfully, to get high by
>smoking banana peels, an idea gleaned from Donovan's "Mellow Yellow."
>He soon graduated to actual controlled substances--pot, acid and
>enough speed to rot his teeth. When he was 19 he lost his virginity to
>his "beautiful hippie girlfriend."
>
> Despite weak grades and unremarkable SATs, he bullshitted his way
>into Hofstra University by telling the dean, "I am going to become
>someone, and when I become someone, I am going to be someone who went
>to Hofstra."
>
> While studying theater, he started spinning on the college station,
>which had a broadcast radius that barely extended beyond the dorms. He
>worked out outrageous skits patterned after the psychedelic absurdity
>of Firesign Theater.
>
> Despite a brief stint working up bits for the National Lampoon Radio
>Hour--which included among its ranks what would soon become the bulk
>of the first-season cast of Saturday Night Live-- working in theater
>remained his dream. That all changed after a few penniless seasons of
>summerstock upstate.
>
> The day he decided to be a DJ was the day a friend told him he would
>be "an asshole" not to pursue something he was a natural at. WLIR in
>Long Island was at the vanguard of the free-form revolution in
>progressive radio.
>
> "We were like guerrilla radio," he says, "the station that would run
>into the city and kick the big guys in the shins and then run back out
>to Long Island."
>
> He started doing the graveyard shifts on weekends for the princely
>sum of $35 a week. "John was doing an '80s radio show in the '70s,"
>recalls Earl Bailey, a WLIR jock who later joined DeBella at WMMR. "It
>was the height of progressive radio, and most jocks would sort of hug
>the mic and whisper in your ear about peace, love and leather goods.
>John was a little more in-your-face."
>
> DeBella would soon get his first taste of the fun house-mirror logic
>that rules radio management. "The program director calls me into his
>office and tells me he's taking me off the air. I said, 'Why?' He said
>I had higher ratings than our morning guy. The only way I could be
>doing that was by not following format. So he was taking me off the
>air."
>
> That night DeBella got drunk and cried his eyes out at a Clash
>concert.
>
> In 1979 DeBella got an offer to do mornings at a station in
>Pittsburgh for $40,000. He was 29 and this would be his first time
>leaving home. He remembers that it was an especially beautiful New
>York evening as he made his way out of town--a large moon hung over
>the skyline, casting the skyscrapers in twilight silhouette. He had
>his radio tuned into WNEW and, swear to God, Billy Joel's "New York
>State of Mind" came on. By the time he hit the first tollbooth, the
>tears were streaming down his face.
>
> "I didn't live in Pittsburgh. I did time there," says DeBella. "My
>on-air rap was, 'Pittsburgh--where the sky is yellow and brown and the
>plants are as smart as the people. It's not the end of the universe.
>But you can see it from there.'"
>
> It was during this time he started twisting the ends of his mustache
>into handlebars. He spent eight months unsuccessfully trying to unseat
>the top morning guy, whose trademark stunt was putting on a Sousa
>march and getting sleepy-eyed Pittsburghers to march around the
>breakfast table.
>
> WLIR called and asked him to come back. Even though the Pittsburgh
>station had been planning to switch formats and cut DeBella loose, the
>station manager called WLIR and told them he had no intention of
>letting him go. They would have to buy him out of his contract. "They
>wanted to pay me $25,000, but he got me $48,000," says DeBella.
>
> During his second run at WLIR he started punching up his gonzo
>act--talking back to commercials, talking over records and putting
>listener phone calls on the air. His ratings started climbing. Music
>was changing, the listenership was clamoring for more punk and new
>wave.
>
> DeBella played the shit out of a song called "I Love Rock 'n' Roll,"
>by a local rocker named Joan Jett. It became a national hit, making
>him the golden boy of the New York music industry establishment.
>
> One night he bumped into John Belushi at an AC/DC concert. DeBella
>convinced the SNL star to come on his radio show the next morning.
>
> "He was like, 'Okay, just hang out with me tonight.' I said 'John, I
>gotta be on the air in the morning. I can't stay up with you all
>night.' Belushi said, 'Obviously, you have never heard of cocaine. I
>said, 'I have, but I don't work like that.'"
>
> Belushi never did make it to DeBella's show. Within a week the
>comedian was dead.
>
> One day DeBella got a call from Charlie Kendall, WMMR's program
>manager. He wanted to know if DeBella would be interested in coming on
>as the morning guy.
>
> "He told me the morning slot had a 6.5 share. I said, '6.5? I could
>get that down to a 3 in no time.' There was a pause, and then Charlie
>said, 'You really are the wiseass they say you are.'" DeBella, then
>32, signed on as morning guy at WMMR for $65,000.
>
> "I remember John showing up in a red beret, red scarf, red
>sunglasses, red coat and pants, and red shoes," says Pierre Robert. "I
>remember thinking, 'Uh-oh, something has certainly changed around
>here."
>
> When DeBella came aboard in 1982 WMMR was still trading on the fading
>glory of its rep in the '70s as a standard-bearer of free-form
>progressive programming. The station hadn't had a morning guy for six
>months.
>
> He called his show "The DeBella Travesty." It was an uphill battle,
>and management kept him on a short leash. The first DeBella DeBall,
>held a couple months after his arrival, drew 12 people.
>
> After six months DeBella wanted to go back to New York. "In his thick
>Mississippi accent, Kendall said to me, 'John, I want you to stay here
>and I've got a contract that says you do,'" he recalls.
>
> Eventually DeBella fell in love with Philadelphia. "There was huge
>blizzard in the winter of 1983, and without even thinking I trudged
>over to Jim's Steaks," says DeBella. "I'm walking back home with a
>cheesesteak under my arm, the wind is howling and it's snowing really
>hard, and at some point I stopped and said to myself, 'Asshole, you're
>a Philadelphian.'"
>
> DeBella slowly started putting his morning team together. He brought
>Mark Drucker down from WLIR, securing him a fat $50,000 salary and
>dubbing him Mark the Shark. He hired "Turbo" Cindy Graham for traffic.
>He struck up a friendship with Clay Heery, proprietor of the
>long-defunct Comedy Factory Outlet in Old City, who did a character
>called Captain Cranky on the air.
>
> Then DeBella found a character named Pat Godwin, a midwesterner
>living in the basement of a frat house at Penn--he wasn't even
>enrolled there--who could do uncanny impersonations of hit songs
>reworked with zany lyrics.
>
> Heery clued DeBella into the psychology of rowhouse Philadelphia and
>escorted a steady stream of rising young stand-up comedians through
>DeBella's morning-show wacky factory, including some kid named Jerry
>Seinfeld. Much hilarity ensued.
>
> In 1983 a new program director named George Harris, a
>suit-and-tie-and-gold-pocket-watch guy known for firing the morning
>guy as his first act at a new gig, replaced Kendall. Harris called
>DeBella into his office.
>
> "He said, 'Did you ever think about doing this?' And I said, 'Yeah,
>they made me get rid of it.' And then he said, 'Have you ever thought
>about doing this?' And I said, 'They made me get rid of it,'" says
>DeBella.
>
> "He said, 'How about the Scream of the Week' and I said, 'As a matter
>of fact I invented that at WLIR.' He said, 'Do me a favor. Go home and
>write down all the things they made you get rid of, and let's find a
>place to put them back and add some new stuff.'"
>
> Harris was known in the industry for pumping up listenership by
>methodically shrinking a station's playlist. In short order Harris
>brought up WMMR's cume--the number of people listening in any given
>quarter hour--from 300,000 to one million.
>
> "He had research that showed that people in the city knew who I was,
>and they knew who the 'MMR monkey was, but when asked if they could
>define the word 'travesty,' they couldn't," says DeBella. "He told me
>to think about calling the show the 'Morning Zoo.' It would be a great
>hook."
>
> The Morning Zoo concept--Hump Day, Thirsty Thursday, Hawaiian Shirt
>Gonzo Friday and all the attendant bells, whistles and nutty sound
>effects--was invented by a Florida DJ named Scott Shannon. By the time
>Shannon brought his Morning Zoo to New York a few years later the
>concept had been cloned all over the country.
>
> "I got a call from him once and he told me he was pissed at me, but
>he was going to tell me something that he would never admit to
>anyone," says DeBella. "He said, 'I created the Morning Zoo, but you
>perfected it.'"
>
> Large numbers of WMMR's one million listeners felt that way. One day
>the Morning Zoo was to do a remote broadcast from a now-defunct eatery
>in the basement of the Bourse.
>
> "We thought a few people might show up," says DeBella. "I got there
>at 4:45 and the line of people stretched for three blocks. The whole
>city got into it. You would walk into a bank on a Friday and all the
>tellers would be wearing Hawaiian shirts."
>
> The DeBella DeBalls got bigger and bigger--selling out months in
>advance--and when he came up with the idea for the "Louie, Louie"
>parades, patterned on the climactic scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off,
>thousands of drunken revelers turned out. DeBella's salary jumped to
>$200,000.
>
> Steadily, the newly minted Zookeeper was moving up in the ratings,
>with is sights set on No. 1 FM morning guy, Harvey in the Morning on
>WIOQ. It took three years, but one day in 1985 he knocked Harvey off
>his perch.
>
> "Back then, if you heard Harvey tell it, I did some terrible things
>to him," says DeBella. "I did two things: I called him 'Hardly in the
>Morning' and referred to his station as 'W-Low-IQ.' After the Stern
>thing happened, he was quoted as saying, 'Now he knows how it feels.'
>He was the guy to beat. It wasn't my fault that he was the guy to
>beat."
>
> Now all that stood in DeBella's way was KYW, the all-news colossus
>that owned the top slot. Within two years KYW was vanquished. WMMR's
>ad rates skyrocketed from $85 a minute to $1,500, and DeBella's salary
>ballooned to $1.2 million a year. It was John DeBella's morning;
>Philadelphia just woke up in it.
>
>
> In 1983 John DeBella met Annette Gammon, a party girl fixture on the
>local music scene. She was a regular listener and liked rock music. He
>liked her shag hairdo and ever-present shades. The two fell in love,
>and on Sept. 6, 1986, they married. Just before they left for their
>honeymoon, a new morning show debuted on WYSP originating from New
>York and hosted by some guy named Howard Stern. DeBella was
>nonplussed.
>
> DeBella and his wife moved into a colonial-style mansion in Bryn
>Mawr, but from the beginning domestic tranquility was in short supply.
>"She had a lot of problems I didn't know about. She was a borderline
>personality; she was an alcoholic," says DeBella. "I was an abused
>husband. She would chase me around the house with knives. I would go
>to bed early because I had to get up in the morning, and she would
>dump bottles of wine on me. I would wake up and she would be hovering
>over me with a baseball bat. I would leave regularly to sleep in
>hotels.
>
> "She wanted to be as much of a star as I was. And after years of
>therapy, the understanding I finally came to was that you can only
>keep the dream alive as long as you are willing to suffer. I searched
>for love for a really long time. One girl I was really in love
>with--the one I lost my virginity to--she was an Israeli, and I was
>far from being Jewish. Her father was so freaked out by our
>relationship he moved the whole family back to Israel. So I had a lot
>of that in my life. I wanted a relationship more than anything in the
>world, but it just never worked out for me.
>
> "I was warned," he says. "We went to see a therapist before we were
>married, and afterward the therapist calls me and says, 'Don't do it.'
>I was in love with her. I saw, or at least I thought I saw, the little
>fragile person inside."
>
>> Stern, meanwhile, was throwing down the gauntlet. When DeBella
>ignored the gesture, Stern picked it up and threw it harder--calling
>DeBella "Baldy" and devoting long stretches of his show to expressing
>his profound contempt for the Zookeeper. Morning radio in Philadelphia
>had become a full-contact sport.
>
> In 1990 Stern came to town and staged a mock funeral for DeBella in
>Rittenhouse Square below the windows of WMMR. Thousands came out to
>watch Stern burn DeBella in effigy.
>
> "One side of me wanted to fight in the biggest way," says DeBella.
>"But when you are No. 1, you never talk about the people below you.
>You always talk up, never down. Secondly, my responsibility was
>entertaining my audience, not selling newspapers or creating
>television sound bites. I always believed there was a silent majority
>on my side."
>
> When Stern found out that DeBella's marriage was on the rocks, he
>came back and staged a "divorce party" on Independence Mall near where
>WMMR had moved. "Howard played very dirty with John," says Pierre
>Robert. "I remember a flatbed truck pulling up in front of the station
>loaded with drunk guys yelling, 'I fucked your wife! I fucked your
>wife!' Howard hammered and chiseled at John and then finally beat
>him."
>
> Even in victory Stern didn't let up. DeBella speculates that the feud
>got ugly and personal because it took Stern so long to unseat him.
>"Howard would go into a new market and within a year he would be No.
>1," says DeBella. "Howard came to Philadelphia. A year. Two years.
>Three years. It took him three and a half years to take me out. I have
>been told that [Stern Show parent company] Infinity told him he could
>not syndicate his show to non-Infinity stations until he was No. 1 in
>all the Infinity markets. If that's true, I cost him millions of
>dollars."
>
> Capitalizing on DeBella's crumbling marriage, Stern paid DeBella's
>wife $5,000 to appear on his show and badmouth her husband. She even
>went on a faux date with Captain Janks, a North Wales shipping clerk
>and a devout Stern fan who made it his personal mission to torment
>DeBella at public appearances and then phone into Stern the next day
>detailing the verbal harassment he had unleashed on the Zookeeper.
>
> And then in the wee hours of Oct. 17, 1992, after a night of drinking
>with her live-in boyfriend, Annette passed out behind the wheel of her
>car after pulling into the garage at the DeBella mansion in Bryn Mawr.
>With the garage door shut and the car engine running, Annette died of
>carbon monoxide poisoning. Police ruled it a suicide.
>
> "I think she thought she was getting the last laugh," DeBella says.
>"I think if Howard knew how sick Annette was, he would never have gone
>there. And being on the show played into it. She was trying to hurt me
>any way she could.
>
> "I buried my wife, a woman I loved very much despite all the
>bullshit. I buried the dream. And then moved on, with the help of a
>great therapist."
>
> A Philadelphia magazine story that appeared shortly after Annette's
>death contended that the DeBella marriage ended when Annette found an
>unsent love letter written by DeBella and addressed to Lisa Sabol,
>then the wife of NFL Films honcho Steve Sabol. The Sabols--who were in
>the midst of divorce proceedings around this time--and the DeBellas
>had socialized often.
>
> "Lisa was somebody who was helping me get my act together," DeBella
>says. "Stern was throwing divorce parties. I needed somewhere to go.
>Somehow that evolved in the media into an affair. Thank God she was
>around or I would have, as I like to say, sucked on the lead lolli. As
>far as a romantic relationship, not before 1994--and Annette died in
>1992."
>
> Today Lisa Sabol, now a Main Line real estate maven, and John DeBella
>are married.
>
> In the fall of 1992 WMMR came up with plan to put DeBella back on
>top--a bold new format they dubbed "sports rock" that would pair him
>with sports commentator Howard Eskin. "They called me in and said,
>'John, we want to show you something. We have done some research and
>the men who go to sporting events are aged 18 to 35. The men who
>listen to music are aged 18 to 35. They are the same men.' I said,
>'No, they may be the same age, but they are not the same people.' I
>have a lot of respect for Howard Eskin, but Eskin knows as much about
>rock music as I know about sports."
>
> Within a month DeBella fell from No. 2 to No. 15. By the spring of
>1993 sports rock was gone and DeBella was moved to afternoons with a
>steep pay cut. By September he'd had enough.
>
> "I had seen them dismantle the Zoo and destroy this thing I had
>built, the Annette thing, the Stern thing. I had made a lot of money
>and I figured out that I really didn't have to work anymore," he says.
>He signed off from his farewell show on Sept. 30 with the words,
>"Goodnight Philadelphia. Don't take any shit from anyone."
>
> One thing DeBella wants to clarify is that, contrary to popular
>belief, he never started a landscaping business. A gardening devotee,
>DeBella had spent a couple weeks on vacation in England learning about
>English gardens, and when his buddy told him about a client who needed
>help on his, DeBella offered his advice.
>
> "I said you can pay me a consulting fee, but I don't want to be out
>there digging holes," says DeBella. "I mentioned something about it
>before I went off the air, and somehow that became me on a lawnmower
>cutting grass."
>
> Within a year WYSP offered him nearly half a million dollars to do
>> afternoons. DeBella agreed, but first wanted to put the Stern rivalry
>to rest. So he went on the Stern show.
>
> "I was nervous and scared," says DeBella. "They jokingly waved me
>> down with a metal detector wand because I found out later he was really
>>afraid I was going to come in there and try and kill him. I get in there and
>he has these beautiful blue eyes, very comforting."
>
> Stern had arranged for many of the former Morning Zoo staff to come
>in and trash DeBella. Strangely enough, Stern stood up for DeBella
>every time. "Everybody was against me except Howard. I guess he
>thought if he could put this to bed it would make him look good."
>
> WYSP kept him muzzled. "'Shut up and play the music' was what they
>were looking for," says DeBella of his afternoon show. Relations
>between him and WYSP management chafed for years before he was let go
>on June 6 of last year. He says he felt numb for the next nine months.
>He speculates now that the station wanted to free up money to bring in
>the "Opie and Anthony Show," which, coincidentally, started the day
>after he was let go.
>
> It's getting late. The Four Seasons lunch crowd has been replaced by
>the dinner crowd. DeBella excuses himself to go to the men's room.
>When he comes back he says, "As I was walking back from the bathroom,
>I was thinking I must sound like such a pitiful soul. I don't know if
>I'm stupid or naive, or maybe I'm still just that hippie that thinks
>everyone is good."
>
> DeBella's now easing his way back into mornings on WMGK, which has
>increasingly come to resemble the WMMR of old with the likes of Ed
>Sciaky and Michael Tearson back behind the microphone and a steady
>diet of roach clip classics on the playlist.
>
> He's doing the radio equivalent of what restaurants call a "soft
>opening," treading lightly and carrying a big feather. Although he is
>in the market for a sidekick, he doesn't want to recreate the Morning
>Zoo. He's laying off the "zacky and wany," but he still plays Monty
>Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," a Zoo staple.
>
> And even though he is once again going up against Stern, he's pretty
>sure his old rival has bigger balls to break. He would like to get
>back to No. 1--"What am I gonna do, shoot for No. 8?"--but he has his
>work cut out for him. Mornings on WMGK now rank 11th out of 34
>stations.
>
> DeBella's gotten reams of welcome-back email from loyal longtime
>listeners, the prevailing sentiments of which can be summed up in the
>one that reads "Thank God."
>
> On his third day back on the air he did something that would not have
>even raised an eyebrow back in the wack-a-doo days of the mid-'80s,
>but in the airless, freeze-dried climate of 21st-century radio, where
>everything is micro-managed and market-tested down to the nanosecond,
>it was actually pretty radical. He played Bruce Springsteen's
>"Badlands," and it made him feel so good, he played it again.
>
> "It was the first time I grabbed the show and said, 'It's mine,'"
>says DeBella, who is getting emotional again just thinking about it.
>"I was supposed to go into a break. I grab the mic, and I'm saying how
>great this song sounds and how much I love it and how you should be
>driving with the windows down and the stereo up. Does it take a genius
>to play a record twice? No. But if I can make three minutes of your
>life easier to take, then I did my job. We're all in this together."
>And then he starts welling up again.
>
> Jonathan Valania (jval...@philadelphiaweekly.com) previously wrote a
>cover profile of WMMR's Pierre Robert.
>
>http://www.phillyweekly.com/cover/
Sherman Potter
news:3D2701F0...@optonline.net...
-----
Bobdammit if she doesn't look like Annette. Cap'n Janks must have a woody
already.
TaTaToothy
In article <agf2p...@enews2.newsguy.com>, "Sherman says...