DJ David Brenner Live (Part 2)

1979 Desert Inn flyer

I did listen to that entire David Brenner Live episode. In the first 10 seconds they plugged the local affiliate and I learned that this was broadcast on WXRK New York, NY. I doubt hardly anyone has heard this program since it first aired in 1985. Since there were only four episodes, I expect it was not re-broadcast at all. I did spend the time to ID all the music. Billy Preston's band did some covers which I didn't include.  They seemed to run out of material at the end and have to improvise their way to the end of the 90 minute segment. Interestingly he says that on September 4th the show is going weekly. Clearly that did not happen. 

Cyndi Lauper crashed the show, something that was known to happen in New York back in those days. Even I managed to run into Cyndi Lauper. Somehow she was everywhere all at once. Brenner graciously managed not to play any Cyndi Lauper while Cyndi Lauper was there. That would be a social faux pas, like wearing the bands T-shirt to their concert.

LISTEN ON ARCHIVE.ORG
https://archive.org/details/david-brenner-live-8-21-1985-side-b

If you are a jazz head you might know it was also Art Farmers birthday, thought it passed unobserved by Brenner. One of the highlights here was Billy Preston; he had some hits in 1984 and 1985 with Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston and Patti LaBelle. Though it was his cocaine years he was in good form on the show. After the 4 episodes of "David Brenner Live" Preston came back as musical director for the 1986/1987 season of "Nightlife,"   Brenner's next stab at a radio show. It was wildly more successful.

Below is my track listing for this episode if you just want to know what horrible 1980s rock bands he was spinning back then, in the glorious Fall of 1985. I am pleased to report that despite their huge popularity in that moment, he managed not to play Huey Lewis & The News.

1. -Intro
2. -Stand up routine
3. Sting - Fortress Around Your Heart
4. The Hollies - Carrie Anne (clip)
5. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Our House (clip)
6. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Woodstock (clip)
7. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Just a Song Before I Go
8. -Graham Nash interview pt 1
9. The Hollies - Bus Stop
10. -Graham Nash interview pt 2
11. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Teach Your Children
12. Taxxi - Still in Love (clip)
13. -Mary Gross interview
14. Ratt - Lay it Down (clip)
15. AC/DC - Sink The Pink (clip)
16. Paul Young - Every Time You Go Away (clip)
17. -Cyndi Lauper Call-in
18. -The Hooters - interview
19. The Hooters - And We Danced
20. -Cyndi Lauper interview
21. Harry Nilsson - You're Breakin' My Heart (censored)
22. The Hooters -All you Zombies (clip)
23. Graham Nash & The Hooters - Teach Your Children (live)

DJ David Brenner

David Brenner Live was a very short-lived program by a comedian who was very famous at the time. It's so brief that some of the articles about the debut, didn't run until it was almost over. The image above is from the August 31st, 1985 issue of Billboard magazine. The show first aired July 17th of that year. The earliest reference I found was in the July 6th issue of Billboard, it was a short plug.

"Also in New York, DIR Broadcasting has a music/comedy weekly dubbed "David Brenner Live" slated for a July 17th debut. David Lee Roth and Joe Piscopo are the honored guests for that episode, and the 90-minute program is promised to be mostly music. Features on the show, for which 150 stations have signed up so far, include, an oldies segment, top 10 count down, live performances and a listener phone-in bit."

The description sounds like the dogs breakfast, it's music, it's comedy, it's talk, it's live, it's a call-in... It sounds like they didn't have a plan. Alternate theory... maybe they wanted to give Brenner options. A smart programmer might understand it was the safe move to give a stand-up comic flexibility. Who knows. 

That description left me wondering what the show sounded like, but my impression was that there were very few episodes aired. How many show's were there?  I don't really know for sure.  There are 15 weeks and 3 days between the given start and end dates. If it was a weekly program, then that'd be an absolute maximum of 16 episodes. I wrote this draft post years ago, but I found a tape of one show just in March of 2024. At some point I'll have to digitize that aircheck.

August 31st, 1985, Billboard described a CBS segment on DIR Broadcasting's new comedy program "David Brenner Live." That first episode included an interview with David Brenner, DIR's Bob Myrowitz, and the guest was David Lee Roth. The article also identified July 17th as the debut. Myrowitz and DIR are better known for other syndicated programs: The King Biscuit Flower Hour, Schaefer Rock City, and Country Cuts.

David Brenner was a trail-blazer in the genre of observational comedy. He was a  regular on Tonight Show in the 1970s, a frequent guest of Howard Stern, Bill Maher, David Letterman, Larry King and even Ed Sullivan. He was a very influential comic and a beloved figure in his home town of Philadelphia. He's kind of like Rocky, except that he's real. I'd also like to state for the record that his books are good. My personal favorites are Soft Pretzels with Mustard and Nobody Ever Sees You Eat Tuna Fish. Those are autobiographical and have real depth. He didn't tone down the poverty, cocaine or revenge. More here.

David Brenner Live was officially cancelled by November. The New London Day newspaper ran a short article confirming the news on November 2nd. The reasons for the cancellation were disputed. DIR stated that Brenner had scheduling challenges between the program and his stand up comedy obligations. It sounded plausible. But in December Brenner himself stated that he was actually concentrating on a TV pilot. His radio contract was only for 4 shows, with an option to do more. He did the four and moved on. That's all the episodes that exist according to Brenner as a primary source. [SOURCE]

So what was that TV pilot? Brenner got his own TV talk show, Nightlife. It aired weeknights from September 8, 1986, to June 19, 1987. It was produced by Motown Productions in association with King World Productions, the show was filmed in New York City and featured a house band led by Billy Preston. (Yes, the fifth Beatle Billy Preston.)  Dan Ingram was the show's announcer. Nightlife earned an average Nielsen rating of  2.4; not amazing but not bad. Purportedly it was just lost in a sea of other night time talk shows. It still ran for 195 episodes. That's about 40 weeks.

According to that November 2nd issue of Billboard, Brenner's slot was filled with "Almost Live With Richard Belzer." (Mr Belzer has his own oddball radio career I'll cover another day.) Finally in 1987 DRI explained what they had been trying to do. It was Kim Freeman at Billboard again covering the comedy beat. 

"Even with the likes of hot comedians Robert Klein, Richard Belzer, and David Brenner and New York radio star Howard Stern, DIR's longform efforts in this field have "hit a wall" after clearing 30% to 40% of the country. Each of these shows were targeted mainly toward album rock radio, a format that [Peter] Kauff feels is missing the boat by not embracing more comedy."

Brenner took a second stab at radio in 1994 hosting a daytime talk-radio program. He took over the time slot of the Larry King Show on Westwood One. It ran 3:00 - 6:00 PM Eastern time. The first episode guests included David Letterman, Howard Stern and comedian Richard Lewis. Some critics bemoaned the change from news to entertainment but the show aired in 100 markets and ran from 1994 to 1996. David Brenner died in 2014 of pancreatic cancer.

The Great Black Out of 1965

When New York has black outs they can make history. Readers may remember the 2019 New York black out that left 73,000 New Yorkers in the dark if only for 5 hours. I can attest that it was hard to sleep that hot sweaty night in July of 1999 without power for the Air Conditioner for 18 hours... There was a similar black out back in 2003, affecting more of the North East, and back in 1977 they had one that stretched into the next day. But back in 1965 was the big daddy of them all: The North east black out affected 30 million people stretching from New Jersey deep into Ontario, Canada. The worst spots were without power for 13 hours. In New York City, six deaths were reported. More here.

History dives deep into the human story: people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, and falling into elevator shafts; the apartments without heat slowly getting colder, the sardine tin panic inside stalled commuter trains and the parallel disaster control story at Con Edison. The story played out live on television on back up generators. But on an aircheck of 77 WABC from November 9th, 1965we also can hear evidence of a a subplot playing out on the radio band.

That evening between 5:15 PM and 5:27, just before the city was "sucked into the maw of darkness" as the New York Times wrote, there was a brown out.  The frequency of electrical power in America is standardized on 60 Hz. That means the voltage changes from positive to negative, and from negative to positive voltage 60 times per second. This process is literally driven by the rotation speed of  the rotor of the generator which is 60 cycles per second. At some point after 5:00 PM that day that speed began to drift. To quote Eric Alper [SOURCE]

"The station’s music playback equipment used motors that got their speed timing from the frequency of the powerline, normally 60 Hz. Comparisons of segments of the hit songs played at the time of the broadcast, minutes before the blackout happened, in this aircheck, as compared to the same song recordings played at normal speed reveal that approximately six minutes before blackout the line frequency was 56 Hz, and just two minutes before the blackout that frequency dropped to 51 Hz. "

 For reference, the drop from 60 Hz to 56 Hz is a 6.7% frequency shift and 51 Hz is a 15% shift and the rotational speed of the LP is directly affected by the speed change in the motor. This changes the playback speed, and therefore the pitch of the music in that recording. In western music an octave has a frequency ratio of 2:1 and is divided in to 12 parts (semitones). Pitch changes works on a logarithmic scale, so that 15 percent change does not change the pitch 15%. In fact the first 2% had already lowered the pitch by a full half-tone. This is eerily similar to the way that Varispeed was used in recording studios in the same era. There is a fun calculator here.

WABC disc jockey Dan Ingram was hosting his afternoon drive time show and playing the song Jonathan King's "Everyone's Gone to the Moon." It sounds noticeably slow, as did the ads that followed it. Ingram even remarked that the King record "sounds particularly slow" and "was in the key of R." 

After the ad break for hotel bar butter and the station jingle he again notes that "it's slow" and during the ad for Adams Sour Orange gum you can hear the pitch continue to drift.  "It sounds like it's running in slow motion." Then the song "(Up a) Lazy River"by Si Zentner starts to play (very slowly) and Ingram notes that the lights in the studio are dimming. The power continues to dip as they segue into news and the power is lost  about the time newscaster Bill Rice starts into the second story about the gubernatorial election... If you're interested, David Nye wrote a good book on the subject, When the Lights Went Out : A History of Blackouts in America.