Opinion

Radio active

(Corbis)

(Corbis)

Up All Night

My Life and Times
in Rock Radio

by Carol Miller

Ecco

Bruce Springsteen is known as one of music’s most audience-friendly performers. But at the 1979 “No Nukes” concerts at Madison Square Garden, Springsteen showed that courtesy doesn’t extend to the entire audience.

As longtime New York rock radio disc jockey Carol Miller recalls in her new memoir, in the middle of a set before a sold-out MSG crowd, Springsteen spotted his ex-girlfriend, famed rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith, in the audience about 12 rows back.

In an incident omitted from the film of the concert, the pride of Jersey interrupted a song to tell the crowd, “Here’s my ex-girlfriend!” He then “walked down into the audience, grabbed Lynn’s arm, hoisted her onstage, then moved her to the back,” where a security guard “physically whisked Lynn offstage.” No “Promised Land” for you!

Miller, heard these days on New York’s WAXQ-FM and on SiriusXM satellite radio, was on WPLJ-FM and WNEW-FM for most of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, times that included some golden eras for New York rock radio.

Here, she gives the often hilarious view of a naive Jewish girl tossed into the maelstrom of excess, who nevertheless has continued to view it with a wide-eyed sense of “gee-whiz!” amazement.

Early on, Miller learned the perils of being a young and pretty professional woman in radio.

Starting her career in Philadelphia, her program director at WMMR in 1972 appointed her the station’s music director, then proclaimed, “Now we can have a closer relationship” as he “wiggled his hand up my left inner thigh.” His harassment soon escalated to include ordering her to take speed pills, which she would pretend to take while surreptitiously dumping them behind a water fountain.

On the plus side, Miller encountered many future music icons before they developed their superstar senses of detachment and entitlement.

When she first met Springsteen at one of his club gigs in 1973, he “giggled almost nervously” when she suggested she’d play his record on WNEW. Shortly after, she was watching David Bowie perform at Madison Square Garden when a paper airplane suddenly landed in her lap. “A few rows back sat Bruce and a couple of his E Street Band buddies,” she writes. “ ‘You’ll be playing here soon,’ I said to Bruce. ‘Yeah, right, I wish,’ said Springsteen, giggling, something he did a lot.”

Miller also experienced some unexpected celebrity dark sides. After interviewing Lily Tomlin, then famous for her appearances on “Laugh-In,” Tomlin “insisted that I take one of her rather large vitamin pills, which I was dumb enough to do.” Soon after, “the room felt like it was beginning to spin, and the walls and corner window were closing in” as “freewheeling disorientation set in.”

Other times, however, Miller was surprised by the softer side of wild rock ’n’ roll icons.

She recalls being introduced to a “tall, handsome young man with long dark curls” at a New York club, having been told only that he was also “in the music business.” During a shared cab ride downtown, Miller learned that her new acquaintance was Paul Stanley from KISS, then-unrecognizable, despite KISS’ status as the No. 1 band in America, due to the band members’ perpetually hidden faces.

“It took roughly 10 seconds for me to surmise that I was talking to a fellow Jew from Queens,” writes Miller, noting that Stanley (real name: Stanley Eisen) took her for a late night bite to Sarge’s Deli on Third Avenue, a “longtime bastion of ungeshtupt (overstuffed), mainly Eastern European Jewish cuisine.” When Stanley’s bandmate, Gene Simmons, joined them at around 4 a.m., the vibe was less rock star than borscht belt, as they dined on “chicken soup with noodles and matzoh balls and kreplach,” and discussed the preparation of gefilte fish for the High Holidays.

Miller and Stanley became an item, with Miller believing that her Jewish prince had finally come. She describes Stanley then as “a handsome, artistic, commendably frugal, hardworking, and exceedingly neat and tidy young Jewish man of his own independent means,” who would take her for chocolate egg creams and, at a concert by the band Rush, even have the audacity — given his own band’s garish stage stylings — to comment, “too much smoke.”

But Miller learned the hard way that nice Jewish boy or not, Stanley was still a rock star, as he “disappeared” on her as soon as the band prepared for their next tour.

Even non-Jewish rockers turned Hebraic around her. As she ascended the New York radio ladder, she was thrilled to learn that Paul McCartney was a regular listener, and he requested to meet her when he brought his band Wings to Madison Square Garden.

As the two were introduced, the British McCartney busted out his best Yiddish (his wife, Linda, was a Jewish New Yorker), greeting her with, “sit down — let me get you a 7Up so you don’t have to schlep.”

Miller seemed to foster especially strong connections with Jewish rockers: Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth told Miller that she and her then-husband, MTV VJ Mark Goodman, were “like his friends from Hebrew school.”

While still trying to maintain her wide-eyed optimism, Miller learned to handle rock’s rough edges. When Cult singer Ian Astbury grabbed a cigarette out of Goodman’s mouth at an MTV event, Miller “grabbed the cigarette back, hit him with my purse, and grabbed his long hair. ‘Whaddya know, it’s not a wig!’ I said.”

As Miller developed a tougher spine, she began dating the wilder rockers as well, including a dalliance with Aerosmith frontman and recent “American Idol” judge Steven Tyler.

Still firmly in his drugged-out wild-man phase, Tyler’s favorite activities while staying at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South included “tormenting” the hotel’s elderly manager by “dancing through the lobby with his boom box, setting the room curtains on fire and, along with Joe [Perry], dumping over heavy, sand-filled ashtrays in the hallways.”

Despite also being treated to his sweet side, such as how he “loved getting letters from his grandmother,” Tyler’s antics — such as snorting heroin and cutting holes through hotel room walls — made the two an ill-fated pair.

Soon after noticing a clear sexual vibe one day between Tyler and Cyrinda Foxe, the wife of rocker David Johansen (who was in the room at the time), Miller got dumped when Tyler called to say that he and Foxe were becoming a couple. He sent Miller off with, “take a deep breath, and always remember I do love ya.”

In an odd bit of synchronicity, Miller was broadcasting from backstage at an Aerosmith show the night around 10 years later when Tyler, with “a panicky look in his eyes,” told her that Foxe had just served him with divorce papers that day, and said of his marriage, “I’ve failed. I’ve failed before God.”

While Miller had taken the good girl route when propositioned early in her career by the likes of Rod Stewart and Bowie, a bitter divorce from Goodman — which included her learning that he had been using their joint finances to pay for another woman’s apartment during their marriage — led to a one-night-stand with Whitesnake vocalist David Coverdale, whose seduction included telling her that she had “the body of a teenager.”

(Alas, as with her other conquests, Miller doesn’t review performances. “I’m not going into details,” she says of her night with Coverdale. “You already know what they are.”)

Miller’s proximity to stardom also left her privy to an unfortunate historical event. Miller, who lived in view of the Dakota building, shared a hairstylist named Bob with John Lennon, and Bob would tell her that Lennon often “commented on the lax security at the Dakota,” calling it “a joke.”

Noting that Lennon appeared “thin and zombie-like, as if he were on some kind of sedative” in his final days, and that he “did not look particularly happy,” Miller would often see Beatle-obsessed loiterers in front of the Dakota, including a “particularly peculiar” man who was “clutching a John Lennon album and rocking back and forth, side to side.”

Several days later, that man, Mark David Chapman, shot and killed Lennon. In the mob of sadness that soon enveloped the building, Miller exclaimed, to no one in particular, “I know who the guy is! He’s crazy! I saw him!” A reporter from Time magazine heard her and interviewed her, and after her comments appeared in print, one of New York’s top rock-radio DJ’s and lifelong Beatles fanatics almost found herself in the awkward position of having to testify on Chapman’s behalf to help support an insanity plea, a fate she luckily escaped when Chapman pled guilty.

While rock radio has since lost its prestige and influence, Miller, who also documents in the book her lengthy and ongoing battle with cancer, feels fortunate to be able to play the music she still loves for listeners who’ve remained loyal throughout the years.

“I’m still on the radio, with my friends, the listeners who have been with me for decades,” she writes. “I hope I’ve been a good companion to them, playing the music that has kept us going.”