The Fifth
Beatle
JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE,
RINGO AND—MURRAY THE K!—THE fifth Beatle! Does anybody out there
really understand what it means that Murray the K is the Fifth Beatle? Does
anybody comprehend what something like that took? Does anybody comprehend what a victory it was to
become George the Beatle’s roommate in the hotel in Miami and do
things like tape record conversations with George during those
magic bloomings of the soul just before a man goes to sleep and
bring back to the kids the sound of a pure universe with nothing
but George, Murray the K and Fedders Miami air-conditioning in it?
No; practically nobody out there comprehends. Not even Murray the
K’s fellow disc jockey William B. Williams, of WNEW, who likes
singers like Frank Sinatra, all that corny nostalgia of the New
Jersey roadhouses, and says, “I like Murray, but if that’s what he
has to do to make a buck, he can have it.”
You can imagine how Murray the K feels!
He not only makes a buck, he makes about $150,000 a year, he is the
king of the Hysterical Disc Jockeys, and people still look at him and think he is some kind of amok
gnome. Do they know what’s happening? Here in the studio, close up,
inside the glass panels, amid the microphone grilles, cue sheets
and commercials in capital letters, Murray the K sits on the edge
of his seat, a solidly built man, thirty-eight years old, with the
normal adult worried look on his face, looking through the glass at
an engineer in a sport shirt. Granted, there are Murray the K’s
clothes. He has on a Stingy Brim straw hat, a shirt with wide
lavender stripes on it, a pair of black pants so tight they have to
have three-inch Chinese slits on the sides at the bottom so they
will fit over the gussets of his boots. Murray the K has 62 outfits
like this, elf boots, Russian hats, flip-nik jerseys, but isn’t
that part of it? Murray the K is sitting on the vinyl upholstery on
the edge of a chair, which makes it tip forward, and his legs are
pumping up and down, but all the time he has to be thinking. He has
to concentrate under all these layers of noise, such as the
Barbasol commercial.
“Men, listen as we rub a microphone
against an ordinary beard …”
What comes out of the speaker is a
sound like a garbage man dragging a can up the cellar stairs of the
Union Square Automat.
“ … and now listen to the Barbasol
sound …”
This sounds like an otter turned loose
in a bin full of immies. And through the whole thing, while all
these odd sounds come over the speaker, Murray the K has to sit
there in a glass box in the techni-blue of the fluorescent lights
and think ahead. He presses down the lever on the intercom box and
says to the engineer, “Give me Ringo and me—‘You’re what’s
happening.’” Then he wheels around to where Earl, from a British
record magazine, is sitting, right behind him in the studio, and
Earl gets his word in:
“Look, Murray, when can we sit down and
talk?”
“Wait a minute,” says Murray, “I got a
whole tumultuous opening here and I don’t know whether I’m coming
or going. I can’t do a show tonight—look at those
commercials!”
“You sound like you’ve got
troubles!”
Murray the K eyes the Englishman for a
second and then says, “Yeah, I’ve got troubles and I’m creating
troubles.”
“What do you mean?”
Old Barbasol is scraping and rumbling
away overhead.
“The Animals,” says
Murray.
“Murray!” says the Englishman. “The
Animals are very big!”
“Yeah, but they’re trying to do me in,”
says Murray.
What a sixth sense the man has! In the
very same moment the red light is going on, before he can even see
it, Murray is wheeling around, putting his face up to the
microphone, starting his legs pumping and throwing body English
into his delivery—and out comes the incredible cascade of
words:
“All right, baby, that’s Barbasol,
baby, and this is the boss sound, 1010 WINS in New York, and that’s
what’s happening, babe, John, Paul, George, Ringo and yours truly,
Murray the K, the Fifth Beatle, seven minutes before seven o’clock,
Beatle time, Beyezeatle Teyezime, and you ask Ringo what’s
happening, baby———”
All this starts out in a Southern
accent ground out from way back in the throat like a Bible Way
preacher and then turns into hippodrome circuit showbiz, and all
the while Murray the K is wrenching his body this way and that and
the words are barreling out on top of one another, piling up
hysteria until he points at the engineer and—pow—the tape of Ringo
and him is on, and the voice of Murray the K is heard
shouting;
“What’s happening, baby?”
And the curious black-water adenoid of
Ringo Starr the Beatle is heard shouting:
“You’re what’s happening,
baby!”
And Murray shouts, “You’re happening,
too, baby!”
And Ringo shouts, “O.K., we’re both
happening, baby!”
And—what is happening?
What is happening is radio in the
modern age. It is a curious thing, psychologically. Radio is back
strong after its early losses to television, but in an altogether
different form. The radio is now something people listen to while
they are doing something else. They’re getting dressed in the
morning, driving to work, sorting mail, painting a building,
working in a manhole and listening to the radio. Then comes
nightfall, and all the adults in New York and New Jersey and Long
Island and Connecticut, like everywhere else, are stroked out,
catatonic, in front of the television set. The kids, however, are
more active. They are outside, all over the place, tooling around
in automobiles, lollygagging around with transistors plugged into
their skulls, listening to the radio. Listening is not exactly the
word. They use the radio as a background, the aural prop for
whatever kind of life they want to imagine they’re leading. They
don’t want any messages at all, they want an atmosphere. Half the
time, as soon as they get a message—namely, a commercial or a news
spot—they start turning the dial, looking for the atmosphere they
lost. So there are all those kids out there somewhere, roaming all
over the dial, looking for something that will hook not the minds,
but the psyche.
That was the problem for which Murray
the K, at Station WINS, was the solution. Given the problem, this
man was a genius. He was probably the original hysterical disc
jockey and in any case he was the first big hysterical disc jockey.
Murray the K doesn’t operate on Aristotelian logic. He operates on
symbolic logic. He builds up an atmosphere of breathless
jollification, comic hysteria, and turns it up to a pitch so high
it can hypnotize kids and keep them frozen to WINS through the
commercials and everything else. The name Murray the K itself is an
example of what he does. His real name is Murray Kaufman, but who
cares if they’re listening to somebody named Murray Kaufman? Murray
the K is different. It doesn’t mean anything, but it signifies
something, a kind of nutty hipsterism. Symbolic logic. He does the
same thing with sound effects. The sound effects come on
cartridges. He can ask the engineer for No. 39 and wham, when he
gives the signal, the biggest crash in the history of the world
comes over the air. There are freight trains, cavalry charges, the
screams of men plunging down an abyss, nutty macaw laughter from
the jungle, anything, and it all goes off like rockets in an
on-going lunacy, all spliced together only by the hysterical
apostrophes—“All right, baby!”—of Murray the K.
For a while, after discovering hysteria
and symbolic logic, Murray the K was murdering the competition. His
rating was 29, he says, against 9 for the next best disc jockey in
New York. Other stations were slow to copy the new technique
because—well, it was too damned nutty. It sounded kind of
demented or something. But they got over
that, and pretty soon two stations, WABC and WMCA, had set up teams
of disc jockeys who were working the rock and roll and hysteria
gimmick practically around the clock. WABC called its group the All
Americans and WMCA called theirs the Good Guys. Some of them, like
Bruce Morrow of WABC, “Cousin Brucie” he is called, could even keep
up with Murray the K in sheer pace. It got wild on the airways.
There was a great manic competition going on, shrieks, giggles,
falsettos, heaving buffoonery, laughing gargles, high school beat
talk, shouts, gasps, sighs, yuks, loony laughs, nonsense rhymes,
puns, crazy accents, anything that came spinning off the mind. And
by last February 7, Murray the K was losing. He was behind both the
All Americans and the Good Guys in the ratings.
“For one thing,” says Murray the K, “I
was boxed in. The station made some changes in the format and there
was a half-hour news bloc in front of me and a talk show behind
me.”
Sure, Murray the K may have been boxed
in, but a lot of times radio stations don’t show much appreciation
for the esoterica of disc jockey competition, just as nobody else
out there does. Murray the K had put in four years at WINS, which
was some kind of a record, but historically that doesn’t mean much.
There are about 25,000 or more disc jockeys in the country, and the
turnover is ferocious; they are all the time quitting or getting
fired, and about 95 per cent of them, employed or unemployed, have
their jaws open and their eyes set on the 16 big disc jockey jobs
in New York, the minimum expectation here being $20,000 a year for
a no-talent disc jockey who works regularly.
Actually, Murray the K has done a great
deal to diversify his work. About half his income comes from things
like pop music shows he puts on at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn, his
personal appearances at places like Freedomland, the Murray the K T
shirts he sells, the record albums he “hosts,” such as “Murray the
K’s Golden Gassers” and “Murray the K and Jackie the K’s Golden
Gassers.” Jackie is his wife. Jackie’s father, Hilary Hayes, runs
Murray the K’s office over at Station WINS, upstairs in a two-story
building on Central Park West right where it hits Columbus Circle.
And one of the finer points of Hilary Hayes’ approach is that
Murray the K is not merely WINS’ outstanding disc jockey, he is a
showman and personality in his own right. Hayes is a white-haired
man who sits up there in the office at a desk underneath a poster
reading, “Kongratulations to Murray the K, You’re What’s Happening,
Baby.” On the other side of the desk are a bunch of girls,
volunteers, who answer Murray the K’s mail, 150 or so letters a
day. The girls being volunteers, there are always a lot of new
girls, and he has to keep going over the instructions for answering
the letters.
“Now remember,” he tells them, “end the
note with ‘Murray sends his love’ before ‘Sincerely,’ and remember
to say, ‘Listen to the boss show’—don’t name it, if they don’t know
which it is, too bad. Also, remember, we’re not happy because they
listen to WINS—we’re just happy they listen to Murray the K. If he
was on any other station, we’d be just as happy.”
The truth is, however, that for Murray
the K, like every other disc jockey, all of it would evaporate, the
T shirts, the albums, everything, if he ever found himself without
a top radio show. That was what he had to think over when the All
Americans and the Good Guys made their big surge. And then came
February 7, 1964, the day of the biggest coup in Murray the K’s
life.
That was the day the Beatles first
arrived in the United States, out at Kennedy Airport. The scene out
there was the expected madhouse, 4,000 kids ricocheting all over
the place, hurling themselves at plate glass to try to break
through into the customs area when the Beatles got off the plane
and came through, things like that. Every newspaper, television
station, network, all the wire services, all the radio stations,
everybody who could get somebody out there was covering it, and
they were all angling for something exclusive. At WINS they had
been trying to figure out which of their regular news reporters to
send out to Kennedy to do a live broadcast of the Beatles’ arrival,
and they couldn’t think of anybody suitable, and then Joel
Chaseman, the station’s manager, got the idea of why not send
Murray the K.
The trouble was, the press was only
going to get one shot at the Beatles, and that was when they were
led into a steaming little press room and put up on a platform with
literally about a hundred reporters, photographers and interviewers
packed into the room around them in overcoats, it being February.
To make it worse, all the photographers were yelling at once, and
it was bedlam generally, but this was Murray the K’s finest hour.
Murray the K must have looked odd even to the Beatles. Here he was
with a straw hat on in February, hunched up practically in a ball
at the foot of the platform, looking up at them with his best manic
look on and sticking a stick microphone up to about the level of
their knees. Murray the K was copping an interview. The
photographers were supposed to have first crack at the Beatles, but
Murray the K was copping an interview by shooting questions up to
them from somewhere in the general area of their feet, so they
could answer into the microphone at their knees. Some photographer
would be yelling something like, “Hey, how about you guys getting
in a little closer there!” but all the time Murray the K would be
singling out one Beatle like George Harrison and saying something
like, “Hey, George, baby, hey, hey, George, George, baby, yeah, hey
down here, how did this reception compare with the reception you
got in Stockholm, baby?” Murray knew their whole history. And
George, a literal-minded boy, would look down and see this odd
friendly face under a straw hat and say, “Well, we were worried at
first. Everywhere else we couldn’t hear the plane for the screams,
you know. But here we could hear the screams but we could also hear
the planes—you know?—it worried us. It didn’t seem big, you know,
sort-of-thing.”
All right! Cuba, de Gaulle, unilateral
disarmament, Lyndon B. Johnson, South Viet Nam, it wasn’t the sweep
of history, but in the league of disc jockeys covering the first
moments the Beatles set foot on the earth of America, it was a
historic scoop. The whole press conference went that way. Even
after the questions started from everybody, Murray the K kept
copping exclusive interviews. Some reporter would yell out a
question like, “What do you think of Beethoven?” John Lennon, the
Beatle, would answer most of these random questions, saying things
like, “Beethoven? He’s crazy, especially the poems,” and all the
while Murray the K would be sticking the stick microphone up and
asking, say, Ringo Starr, something like, “Ringo, what’s the first
thing you want to see in New York?” and Ringo would look down and
see this odd little character balled up at his feet and say, “Oh, I
dunno, some of the historic buildings, like the Peppermint Lounge.”
Finally somebody in the back, some reporter, yelled out, “Hey,
somebody tell Murray the K to cut out the crap!” So Paul McCartney,
the Beatle, stepped forward and looked down at Murray the K and
said, “Murray the K, cut out the crap!” Paradise! “Crazy, Paul,
baby,” Murray the K said into the microphone, “You’re what’s
happening, Paul, baby, and remember, you heard it first on 1010
WINS!” Cut out the crap! From Paul himself! This was the perfect
note, for by now it seemed like this was Murray the K’s press
conference and the rest of these hundred or so guys around here
were just some kind of a chorus. Murray the K’s fortunes started
skyrocketing from that very moment.
Somehow, the next night, it was Murray
the K who was taking the Beatles twisting at the Peppermint Lounge
and from then on he was the Beatles’ guide, Boswell, buffer,
playmate throughout their American tour, and he even went to
England with them. Maybe it was his magic hat, he doesn’t know, he
had never had any communication with the Beatles at all before the
moment he turned up stationed at their feet at Kennedy. “It was
involuntary,” says Murray, not necessarily choosing the precise
word. By the end of a week there were reporters who were getting
mad because to get anything out of the Beatles they had to go
through Murray the K, and who the hell was he anyway. In Miami,
Murray the K roomed with one of the Beatles, George Harrison, and
there and everywhere else Murray the K was making tape recordings a
mile a minute. He had all the Beatles, one by one, saying anything
he wanted into the tape recorder—plugs for WINS, plugs for Murray
the K, plugs for the “Swinging Soiree,” which is the name of his
nightly show from 6:30 to 10.
The impact of all this was great for
Murray the K. Every station, practically every disc jockey in town,
was trying to capitalize on the Beatles, who were probably the
biggest single popular music phenomenon ever. WABC, for example,
was calling itself WABeatleC, and so forth, but nobody could match
Murray the K. He was the Fifth Beatle!
Susan Tyrer, a seventeen-year-old girl,
is now sitting in Murray the K’s studio. She is up there for
something called the “Miss Swinging Soiree” contest, and there are
25 finalists, none of whom seems to have the faintest notion of
what happens if she wins. Susan tells how it was with her: “I
started listening to Murray the K when he started getting popular,
you know, with the Beatles and the English groups.” Murray the K
also plays a lot of the other English groups, such as the Dave
Clark Five and The Animals, groups like that. “Murray the K.—well,
you know,” says Susan, “like, he’s what’s happening!”
So Murray the K’s rating shot back up,
and now his program is almost entirely Murray the K and the
Beatles. He not only plays Beatle records all the time, the whole
show sort of moves in the medium of the Beatles.
One evening there is a story in the
newspapers that Ringo Starr, the Beatle, is going to get
married.
“I’m here to deny, baby,” Murray the K
says into the microphone, “I mean I’m here to deny that Ringo’s
marrying anyone. You know if he was you’d hear it first on the boss
show, 1010 WINS, New York. And now, baby, listen, baby, it’s the
Beyezeatlesingbooees!”
Murray the K even has tapes denying
Beatle marriages. He’ll say something like, “Paul, baby, we’re glad
you called us about that marriage bit, baby.” And Paul says, “Well,
Murray, I was glad to get it cleared up
sort-of-thing.”
He runs in Beatle dialogues all night
long. Sometimes they have a wacky jumpy quality about them,
something on the order of Murray the K saying, “Hey, Paul, baby,
what’s happening, baby?”
“I dunno, Murray, everything’s
happening sort-of-thing.”
“Paul, somebody asked me to ask you—I
mean, they asked me, some of your fans, they asked me to ask you,
so I’m going to go ahead and ask you, What is your favorite
color?”
“Well, uh, it’s kind of, you know,
black.”
“Black.”
“Yeah, you know, black. John is going
to jump off the ladder now.”
There is a sound of
applause.
“They applaud,” says Paul. “Sounds like
a cricket match.”
“You’re what’s happening, Paul,
baby!”
Symbolic logic, baby! Who cares what’s
happening? The Beatles are there, and Murray the K is in there with
them, tight.
One minute he feels like he is a
showman who is playing the role of “Murray the K” at this
particular stage in his career, which is a way of saying that
Murray the K is not the real him. Then the next minute he has a
very jealous regard for his Murray the K role and all the unique
skills that have gone into it. The symbol of his pride about this
is his hat. He keeps his straw hat on all the time when he is being
Murray the K and he is ready to fight over it. One time he was
MC’ing a show at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn and some singer, one
of the parade of them that come and go, got playful and grabbed
Murray the K’s hat off his head and threw it out into the audience.
Murray the K blew up. He made the fellow stop everything, right in
the middle of the show, and go out in the audience, out among a lot
of screaming kids, and retrieve the hat. There was something about
the look in his eyes, and the fellow didn’t have to think twice
about whether he was going to obey or not. He just went after the
hat.
The same goes for the music he plays,
which is generally called rock and roll, a term that Murray the K
considers out of date. He argues that it is the popular music now, not just a teen-age deviation,
just as swing was the popular music of the 1930’s. He really blows
up when someone like William B. Williams starts panning rock and
roll as infra dig, such as the way Williams used to introduce the
Beatles’ first hit record, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” as “I Want
to Hold My Nose” and just play 12 seconds of it. The same people,
says Murray the K, will then start going on and on about Glenn
Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and all that bunch as if they were
classics, all those mushy woodwinds, mushy ballads, all that stupid
roadhouse glamor of the “Big Band” and some aging smoothie leading
the band with a moon face and his hair combed straight back. The
Glenn Miller business really gets him. Pop music today has a
vitality and an intricacy that Glenn Miller couldn’t have come up
with in a hundred years.
“When I hear people start going about
Glenn Miller,” says Murray the K, “well, that’s too
much.”
Ironically, rock and roll, or whatever
you want to call what the hysterical disc jockeys play, is very
much in vogue now among intellectuals in New York and Paris and
London. They revere it like primitive art. They play the Shirelles,
the Jelly Beans, the Beach Boys, Shirley Ellis, Dionne Warwick,
Johnny Rivers, musicians like that, on the record player at
parties. Jazz, especially jazz as played by people like Miles Davis
and Thelonious Monk, is considered a hopelessly bourgeois taste,
the kind you might expect from a Williams College boy with a
lie-down crewcut on a big weekend in New York.
Yet the vogue has never included the
disc jockeys themselves, although you hear some of them, Murray the
K and Cousin Brucie, particularly, mentioned as sort of pop art
phenomena. So the disc jockeys themselves remain about the only
people who appreciate the art. Does anybody truly realize what it
amounted to when Murray the K took over the Beatles?
“When the Beatles came here,” he says,
“I believed that this was the test. This was the biggest thing in
the history of popular music. Presley was never this big, neither
was Sinatra. The fact that I was able to be associated with the
Beatles the way I was, living with them, having George as my
roommate—well, it caused such jealousy as I have never seen in my
life.”
Murray the K stands up and paces around
in his gusseted boots. When he says something with conviction, his
southern accent breaks through. He was born in
Virginia.
“But I’m not riding on the Beatles’
coat tails,” he says. “Actually, I think the Beatles are going to
last a lot longer than everybody believes. I think they are natural
wits and comedians, they’re the coolest, they’re too much, they’re
the greatest. But I’m not riding the Beatles’ coat tails, and if
they go, I’m going to be ready for the next person who comes
along.
“I’ve done everything you have to do in
this business, I’ve made every move you have to make, I’ve put cash
on the line, and I came out a winner, and now I want everything
that goes with it, all the goodies and all the respect, because I
earned it.”
Murray the K winds up his show a couple
of minutes before 10 o’clock, and as soon as he leaves his glass
cubicle, in walks a young man wearing a crease-top hat, of the
genre known as the Madison Avenue crash helmet, and carrying an
attaché case. He looks like an account executive on the 5:25. He
sits at a table studying a script. His name is Pete Myers. Suddenly
he leans into the microphone and says, “It’s 10 P.M. and now, from
Sponge Rubber Hall—it’s Mad Daddy.”
Down on the street, on Central Park
West, three girls are waiting to get Murray the K’s autograph as he
comes out the door. One of them is squeezed into a pair of short
shorts that come up to about her ilial crest. Coming down over her
left breast she has a row of buttons. The top one says, “We Love
the Beatles.” The next one says, “We Love Ringo,” the next one, “We
Love Paul,” the next, “We Love John,” the next, “We Love George,”
and the next—well, the next one, the bottom one, is kind of rough
in execution. It is made of paper wrapped around an old button with
the letters penciled on, saying, “We Love Murray the K.” But so
what? The letters are big, and her little mary poppins tremble
honestly.