The music filled his ears—a mournful saxophone melody, some acoustic guitar, a violin, a mild electric guitar. Nice opening, he thought appreciatively, with the ear of a professional music evaluator and aficionado. And then the vocals started and his opinion of the tune started to climb. Damn, she’s got a nice voice. And the lyrics—they were just so sad, so realistic. He had spun quite a few La Diferencia tunes in his career—KPID still played I Love to Dance once or twice each day, as a matter of fact—and he remembered them as cheesy pop staples, perhaps a cut above other such tunes just because of Valdez’s voice and the acoustic guitar work. Valdez certainly seemed to have upped her game on her solo effort.
He listened to the tune all the way through and genuinely enjoyed it. This tune is going to chart big time, he predicted to himself with confidence. It was a confidence that was well-earned. A career of listening to pop music and playing it for LA had turned him into a fairly good authority on the subject.
He popped the CD back out of the slot and then carefully replaced it in its case, handling it only by the edges, and then returned the case to the frequent play hopper where it belonged. That done, he took out the Jake Kingsley CD from the same hopper. He looked at the picture on the front for a moment, taking in Kingsley’s face. He had met the man several times back during Intemperance’s heyday and he was a fan. Though only a few Intemp songs had been regularly played on KPID over the years, those that were had been huge hits. He respected Kingsley on two different levels. Musically, he was beyond reproach, but his reputation as a prolific plunderer of pussy Frank held in particularly high regard. How could you not respect a man who had nailed Mindy Snow? And now the word on the street was that he was slamming Celia Valdez. He had been instructed to keep that rumor off the air, but that did not prevent him from pondering it in his own mind. I wonder if she moans in Spanish to him while he’s railing her? He liked to believe she did. And does she take it up the old poop chute? He chose to believe she did that as well.
When he finally tired of contemplating the sexual practices of Jake and Celia, he removed the CD from its case and popped it in. The Easy Way was the first cut on the album and he fired it up. It caught him off guard when he heard the synthesizer and the underlying beat, but once Kingsley’s voice started singing, he warmed up quickly. And then when the song went up-tempo and the guitar started to crunch a little more, his appreciation increased.
Not bad at all, he thought, nodding his head to the beat. Not exactly what I was expecting from a Kingsley tune, but it works. I think this one is going to chart as well.
He listened to this tune all the way through as well and then put the CD back where it belonged. He went back to his programming list and looked it over again. Struggle would be played for the first time at 7:05 and then again at 8:34. Easy would be played at 7:27 and then 8:48. He found himself looking forward to spinning both.
This same story was going on all across the United States and Canada. The corporate owned stations got the CDs first and played them first by virtue of the fact that they were, by definition, corporate and, thus, could receive instruction and direction at multiple stations by the authority of a single office, which made it easy for someone like Mick to do his job.
On July 6, 1992, every major market in the US heard both The Struggle and The Easy Way on at least one station, but usually on several. In every case, the local programming directors and the DJ or DJs spinning the tunes followed their presentation directions to the letter.
Nothing terribly dramatic happened on this first day. Nobody fell down in the streets in awe as they heard the tunes and nobody vowed to blow up a radio station either. About the only thing of note was that a dozen or so of the hard rock stations received phone calls from male listeners—they were all males—asking if that tune they’d just played was really Jake Kingsley, The Jake Kingsley? Of Intemperance fame? Most of these callers, when told that it really was The Jake Kingsley, expressed degrees of disappointment with the tune that ranged from “not what I was expecting” to “What a fuckin’ sellout!”
Two days later, the independent stations—which, at this point in the history of radio broadcasting, still made up more than half of all FCC licensed broadcasters—began to receive the CDs as well. The delay here was because each individual program director and/or station manager had to be contacted directly, one by one, by whatever independent music promoter was assigned to that particular region.
KRON was one such station. As the most popular hard rock station in the Los Angeles region, KRON was worthy of having two hundred thousand dollars a year indirectly paid into its account by Mick and his team, acting on behalf of National Records. This was not to mention the unreported cash payments, elaborate trips to ‘radio conferences’ in Hawaii or Las Vegas, and the three martini lunches that both the director and the manager were routinely treated to by Mick himself. As such, when Mick gave them their list of ‘suggestions’ regarding the Kingsley CD, they listened and implemented those suggestions.
By July 13th, one day before the release of the CDs for sale in music stores, Walmarts, department stores, and everywhere else CDs could be purchased, every market in the USA and Canada were regularly playing both The Struggle and The Easy Way, and most music consumers who cared enough to know the names of artists they enjoyed were aware that Jake Kingsley and Celia Valdez solo albums existed.
Jake and Laura were together when they first heard one of their efforts played on the radio. It was 7:05 AM on the morning of July 6. Jake had just come in from his morning run up in Griffith Park. His T-shirt was damp with sweat, his shoes and socks brown with trail dust. On his face, his mustache was nearly grown back now after being shaved for the album cover photo session.
“Hey, babe,” he greeted Laura, who was sitting before the master bath mirror wearing only a pair of black panties. She had just come out of the shower and was combing out her hair. She had another gig down at the National studio today and needed to be there at 9:00 AM. It was her fifth such session in the past two weeks, doing overdubs on a smooth jazz project by someone Jake had never heard of, but Laura had.
“Hey, sweetie,” she returned, flashing him her smile. She seemed very happy these days and was always in a good mood. “How was the run?”
“It was there,” he said, and then reached down and ran the back of his hand across one of her exposed breasts.
“Stop that!” she said, pushing the hand away. “You’re all grimy and sweaty!”
“You don’t seem to mind that at other times,” he challenged.
“I’m not getting ready to hit the studio at other times,” she shot back. “You can play with them all you want when I get home, but hands off right now.”
“Prude,” he told her.
“Am not,” she said stiffly. “I’ll have you know that I let some guy lick my butthole while I was in the hot tub last night.”
“Yeah?” he said, smiling at the memory. “Anyone I know?”
“Shut up,” she said, slapping at him again.
Jake gave her a quick kiss on the back of her exposed shoulder and then pulled off his shirt and dropped it into the laundry hamper. His shorts, underwear and socks soon followed. He then walked over and turned on the shower. While waiting for it to heat up, he flipped on the radio that was on the counter next to Laura. It was already tuned to KPID, the pop station, not because Jake or Laura listened to pop music—they really didn’t—but because they both knew their cuts were going to be played soon and they wanted to keep their ears out for them.