It’s Only Rock and Roll

“I was not a very good newsman, not then at least. My first major assignment was to interview author Kurt Vonnegut, who was speaking at Lehigh University. I asked him what I thought were intelligent questions, and he would start to give erudite answers, only to begin cursing like mad 30 seconds into his reply. It slowly dawned on me that Mr. Vonnegut did not desire to be interviewed.” Burt Kempner

Pinhead Angel

by Burt Kempner

GAINESVILLE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/15/2012—

“It’s Only Rock and Roll”

Twelve years after the Day the Music Died, I went to work as a news reporter at a Rock & Roll radio station in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was my first real job. We were WAEB, 7-9-oh-that’s radio, and we owned the town: AM radio was still king of the airwaves then, and the Top 40 format ruled the ratings.

We were a colorful crew. The disc jockeys who shared my shift included the son of the general manager. He was forced into the job by his father and froze in terror at the sight of a microphone. He frequently identified the station as “WAE-Blee.”

Then there was a nice Southern boy named Bobby Lee Travis, who had to go by the on-air name of BLT the Talking Sandwich. Bobby drank a lot; no one blamed him.

But our undisputed star was a short, charming Italian fellow who was known to every teeny-bopper in Allentown as Super Lou. Lou had hordes of female admirers and was known to entertain them in the studio while the music played. I would listen to him as I drove home each night. If he played a long song like “MacArthur Park,” I knew he was getting lucky. If he played “MacArthur Park” followed by “Hey Jude,” he was getting very lucky. And if he played “MacArthur Park,” followed by “Hey Jude,” followed by the 10-minute album version of “Light My Fire,” I would turn around and race back to the station.

I was not a very good newsman, not then at least. My first major assignment was to interview author Kurt Vonnegut, who was speaking at Lehigh University. I asked him what I thought were intelligent questions, and he would start to give erudite answers, only to begin cursing like mad 30 seconds into his reply. It slowly dawned on me that Mr. Vonnegut did not desire to be interviewed. I asked him if he wanted a drink instead and we both happily retired to a nearby tavern. My news director was not amused when he asked me to replay the interview, but he later admitted that he’d learned a few new things about the possibilities of human biology.

I crossed the line on a chilly October evening. Instead of taking my normal dinner break, I was having an up-close and personal encounter with Lorna. She, along with five other women who worked the night shift at Mack Truck, comprised my fan club. This is an embarrassing thing to admit, but I had a fan club. Thus passed my 15 minutes of fame.

Before going back to my car, I called in to the station to see if anything was going on. “Haven’t you heard?” the engineer spluttered. “There’s a huge fire on Seventh Street. A furniture warehouse. It’s been going on for an hour now. Where the hell have you been?”

This was not good news. I sped to the site of the blaze . . . and discovered only a smoking ruin. The fire was out. I managed to grab the fire chief for some desultory comments about possible causes, but I felt sick to my stomach. Every other reporter in town would present dramatic on-the-scene coverage, and all I had were ashes.

Back at WAEB, I marinated in self-pity. The engineer, a quiet, bookish type, tried to cheer me up, to no avail. Suddenly his face lit up with what I could only call a wicked glow. “Heyyyy,” he said. “What if we created our own fire and you pretended that you were reporting live? Then we cut in the interview with the fire chief afterward.”

“You want me to start a fire outside?” I asked?

“No need,” he said with a smile. He left the room and returned with a sheet of Saran-Wrap, which he started crinkling. “Instant fire.”

We were idiots to think we could get away with it, but the results were amazingly life-like. Our raging plastic wrap inferno fooled everyone. Except my news director.

Driving back to Philadelphia, unemployed, I absently switched on the station. Super Lou was playing “Close to You” by the Carpenters. It was only three minutes long. It was a tough night for everyone.

“Fear & Loathing In The Fossil Record”

(In which the author discovers there’s sometimes madness to the scientific method . . . )

When I went to Penn State in the 60s, one of the most popular classes was Geological Science 101. The professor was legendary for his brilliant, witty lectures. It was also, I, an indifferent science student at best, was to discover to my delight, an easy A. Emboldened by my success in the introductory course, I signed up for Geological Science 201, only to learn quickly that this was a very different kettle of prehistoric fish. They expected you to work, get your hands dirty and . . . find things.

We were on a field trip to the Nittany Mountains. It was an unseasonably hot spring day and the perspiration ran down in rivulets as we marched uphill. Our graduate assistant leader, a cheerful sadist whose name I won’t reveal, called a halt seconds before we intended to mutiny and toss him off a cliff. He allowed us a quick but merciful sip from our canteens and ordered us to spread out and search the hillside for fossils. He helpfully told us what kinds we could expect to find.

My grades in the class were not good. I eagerly cleared away dirt and pebbles hoping to find something earthshaking, a genuine game changer, but the early results were far from promising. A fern leaf. Boring. A tiny seashell. Uh-huh. And so it went until I unearthed a small miracle. At first I thought it was a trilobite but, on closer inspection, I detected important differences. This wasn’t a marine creature but some sort of insect. I took my fossil to the graduate assistant and handed it to him. “What do you think of this?”

The man turned deathly pale, but then his eyes narrowed. He considered me a devilish trickster and this could well be one of my infernal pranks. “Where did you find this?” he demanded. I showed him the patch of hillside I’d cleared away. His face once again became paper-white. “No,” he muttered under his breath. “It can’t be!”

He motioned me to follow him away from my classmates.

“You’re telling me the absolute truth?”

I nodded.

A look of indecision passed over my interrogator’s face, but his expression quickly became one of grim determination.

“What kind of grades are you getting in the class?”

“A low C.”

“How would you like a solid B, regardless of how you do in the final?”

“What do I have to do for it?”

“Give me the fossil.”

I shrugged and handed it to him. He wheeled about and with all his might threw it off the mountain. Whatever had caused him such anguish was now in a valley far, far below. “Let’s join the others. Oh, and here’s my spare canteen. Have a nice drink of water.”

That was how I became a co-conspirator to suppress the truth about the fossil record of the Nittany Mountains. I still feel occasional pangs of guilt, the fossil isn’t talking, and the graduate assistant is retired. I got a B in the course and he saved his career. Our secret has been safe for 46 years. And now, because I trust you, you know it, too.

“Death & Other Comedies”

My father was a kind and gentle man who did not deserve the last two years of his stay on Earth. Lymphoma robbed of his dignity, his mind and, on a frigid March evening, his life.

He had stopped going to synagogue many years previously, but not knowing where else to turn, we called his old congregation and asked if the current rabbi could officiate at his funeral.

The evening before the service, the rabbi paid a visit to my brother’s home. He was quite young and painfully earnest. He had never met our father, so he asked us to supply him with anecdotes he could incorporate into the eulogy. We spoke of his many acts of charity and love. He had been a quiet man, often lost in a reality no one else shared. As his disease progressed, he grew ever more silent and his vocabulary dwindled. He answered almost everything addressed to him with two stock phrases: “I wish I knew.” “If only I could tell you.” It was tragic, exasperating and, at times, hilariously funny. I know that sounds callous. The rabbi certainly thought so. But it’s true. Some of you who have endured a long ordeal with a loved one know that humor can often crop up in the unlikeliest of places.

The rabbi tried and failed to blink back his indignation and bid us good night. “Something tells me we’re going to get spanked tomorrow,” I said to my brother.

We got up early the next morning to clear away the snow that had covered the doorway path in the night. It was windy and mercilessly cold. A perfect day for a funeral.

The rabbi started off all right, praising our dad for his generosity and utter devotion to our late mother. And then he shot the two of us what I can only describe as a look of pure defiance.

“Irving Kempner was never a man to be content with easy answers,” he said.

“Oh my God,” my brother whispered to me. “He’s going there!”

“He pondered the mysteries of the Universe and his response was: ‘I wish I knew’ and ‘If only I could tell you.’”

“Yeah, mysteries like ‘What would you like for lunch?’ or ‘Where did you put your underwear?’” I said out of the side of my mouth.

The mourners standing behind us saw our shoulders quaking and assumed we were overcome with grief. We were certainly sad but we were also trying with all our might not to burst out laughing. The rabbi muttered a brief prayer, turned on his heel and walked off in a huff. He returned a few minutes later, sheepishly collecting his check.

I think my father, that wise and lovely man, would have found the whole episode vastly amusing.

I wish I knew.