First Chapter: Head Bangin Radio
By Ted Prichard "Thrashpie"
Every hero has a beginning, and for Ted Prichard, his was on a tiny 10-watt college radio station in Southside, Virginia. Known to his fans as Thrashpie, Thrasher, Rock ‘N’ Roll Ted, Uncle Lee, or the Dream Merchant, Ted’s career led him from overnight weekend air shifts broadcasting to the “night people” of the deep South to standing on stage at the Los Angeles Coliseum in front of 80,000 screaming metalheads as one of the most beloved radio personalities in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Head Bangin’ Radio is an exciting memoir of the era of FM rock radio at Los Angeles’s flagship heavy metal station, KNAC-FM, through the days of Pirate Radio and beyond. For fans of heavy metal, those nostalgic for the great days of rock radio, or anyone who wants a good laugh at the absurdity of show business (and Thrasher himself!), Head Bangin’ Radio delivers. If you ever wondered what it was like to be on the radio, or just what the heck those people were really doing “in there” as you listened, Ted lets it all hang out, blemishes and all, with humor and love for a medium that is all but gone today.
HIGHWAY TO HELL—L.A.
Let me take you back to early January of 1986. At the time, I was the morning jock at an FM rock station in Tampa Bay, Florida and I had taken vacation time to fly out to L.A. One of my old radio buddies, Lou Simon, was on the West Coast as on-air talent and music director at a CBS-owned FM radio station, KKHR, in Los Angeles.
Lou showed me around town a bit and as a result I quickly learned that L.A. traffic was nuts beyond anything I had ever experienced. The horrific traffic essentially trapped people in their cars for hours on end. As a result of the time spent in vehicles, radio listenership was huge. Remember, I’m talking 1986 so there’s no satellite radio, no internet, and no cell phones to speak of. Unless you were rocking a cassette player or were an early owner of a car CD player, you became a radio junkie in L.A. There was no better place to be in radio than on the West Coast.
Legendary KMET was still on the air with Ace Young and Jeff Gonzer in the morning, Robert W. Morgan was doing mornings at KRLA-AM, Rick Dees on KIIS, Jay Thomas on Power 106, and the most creative and innovative station in the world at that point, KROQ, was changing radio formatting and presentation—forever.
I wanted to live in Southern California and work in L.A. radio more than anything. It was intimidating just to listen to all the talent on every AM and FM signal in L.A., and I had no idea how to make my dream a reality at that point. Then again, I had no real idea of how I had gotten as far as I had in my seven years of my “professional” radio career. All I can say is that very interesting, almost mystical, things go to work when you put total commitment in motion. Some years earlier I had decided to just get started somehow, take one step at a time and keep going no matter what happened or how things turned out. It had been an interesting journey in which I found myself in places and situations I could never have imagined. Like driving down the Sunset Strip with my pal Lou, and me mouth-breathing like a tourist trying to take in all of the sights and sounds.
As a kid, the world came to me through my transistor AM radio. It was a little green Emerson that I would hide under my pillow and listen to the Top-40 records played on KQV-AM in Pittsburgh where I grew up. To show you how young I was when I got hooked on radio, you have to understand that I had an older brother who turned me on to Fats Domino and groups like the Contours and Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon long before I heard the Beatles or the Stones. Those short little two and a half minute songs transported me to places away from freezing-ass Pennsylvania winters, arguing parents, and neighborhood kids who just did not get where I was coming from when it came to the rock and roll music I heard on the radio. I could stand in front of the mirror, lip sync with a Four Season’s song, and become a Philadelphia “Bad Boy” just like Frankie Valli. Whatever song came to me over the radio had some effect. I could be a great dancer, the best singer, or the most popular kid in school if only for those few minutes.
When the “British Invasion” and puberty hit me at the same time, my fate was sealed. I was going to be in or around rock and roll music and that was that. For me, it was supposed to be lights out and beddy-bye at about 8:30 PM so I had to hide that radio or feel the “hairbrush on the ass” wrath of my mom. In fact, my mom would fly down from heaven and kick my ass right now if she found out I had been listening to that radio after bedtime for all those years.
My first experience with actually being on the radio came in the early ‘70s at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia where I was a student. I won’t go into any detail about the horror that was my academic career but suffice to say that after an academic suspension (that is I flunked out), I returned to find that some of the science geeks had built a 10-watt FM radio station, WWHS-FM, in a small room above the cafeteria.
One of my fraternity brothers, Jimmy Logan from Luray, Virginia, and I were pretty tight due to our mutual worship of a Detroit disc jockey named Don Cornelius and in particular the TV show he hosted in the ‘70s called Soul Train. Watching Soul Train for us was like going to church. We’d smoke some of our home-grown weed, kick back in our fraternity house’s “tube room,” and soak up every second of the hour-long show. It didn’t matter that we were out in the sticks, we were making our connection with the big world every weekend by watching Cornelius on TV. All the great R&B acts performed, the dancing of the kids on the show was off the charts crazy, and Cornelius himself was the paragon of cool.
When Jimmy and I found out that WWHS-FM would let students perform on the air, it was all over. We signed up to do a “Soul Show” right away. Naturally, we had to create some kind of buzz so we came up with on-air characters. Jimmy called himself “Dr. Starr” and I was the “Dream Merchant.” I’m pretty sure I stole that nickname from R & B singer Jerry Butler whom I had seen in Richmond at some point. So “Dr. Starr and the Dream Merchant” became a team and nailed down a time slot on WWHS-FM. For show prep we would rip and read articles out of Right On! magazine and other similar fanzines that covered R&B music and black celebrities.
Luckily for us there was a 7-Eleven store in the “black section” of Farmville. VA, the closest town to school. Remember, we were in the south in the ‘70s so we stuck out like hookers at a debutante ball in that neighborhood, but we could buy all the current magazines there. Let me be VERY clear: We were NOT unwelcome there. In fact, after a few weeks, folks got pretty used to seeing us around.
I remember Jimmy got a clothing store in Farmville to sponsor us which was very cool as we were one of the first shows to bring in any kind of such underwriting. We were a couple of promoting fools, to be honest about it. We printed flyers and stuck them up all over campus, and also talked the school newspaper into doing an article about the show. Jimmy and I had a blast. My grades went to hell again but I was focused on that radio station so I didn’t care. I did some other freeform type rock stuff in other time slots and filled in on the air a good bit as I remember. I stayed connected to WWHS-FM until I left school. Thing was, I couldn’t really connect with how to turn that serious interest in radio into a real job. When I graduated I pretty much resigned myself to finding some kind of a “grown up” career.
As you can well imagine, a “grown up” career didn’t suit me too well. I was in training at the Virginia Paper Company in Charlotte, NC, with the idea of becoming a salesman. Part of the training was to work in the warehouse for a while in order to learn the basics. Well, I had more fun working in the warehouse with all the black guys than I ever did in the office with all the white folks. As I have always been somewhat of a mimic, I put my talents to work imitating the voice of the manager who had a preppy, country club kind of Southern accent. The guys in the warehouse got a kick out of it so I had a built in audience.
I was moved into the office after a time and set to work taking orders on the phone. I hated it. I actually asked the manager if I could move back out to the warehouse. That cracker looked at me as if to say, “What in the hey-ell is wrong with you boy?” Soon after, I gave notice and registered at UNC-Charlotte in the Theater Arts department that same week. At the time, there was no audition or other requirements for that department, so I found myself in school again, this time as an art student. It was the fall of 1978.
In Charlotte there was a radio station with a great morning show: WAYS-AM/WROQ-FM. The morning man’s name was Robert Murphy, “Murphy in the Morning.” Murph performed comedy sketches and used a really talented character voice guy named Larry Sprinkle. The two of them came up with a bit that became known nationally called PTL—“Pass the Loot.” It was a satire on the PTL Club (People That Love or Praise the Lord—take your pick), which was the brainchild of Jim and Tammy Bakker, who from their religious sect’s compound just over the border in South Carolina, fleeced the hell out of people dumb enough to mail in their hard earned money. Their thievery went on until Brother Jim got caught schtupping Jessica Hahn some years later. You might remember Jessica Hahn in Sam Kinison’s “Wild Thing” video.
Tammy became the butt of many a stand up comedian’s joke repertoire because of her makeup “skills,” and Jim was simply seen as just another redneck evangelist douchebag. Anyway, my point is that Murph and Larry were very bright, hip people and I saw them as the only really talented radio people around town, and I wanted to be part of it. As usual, I had no idea how to make that happen. However, fate stepped in at the right time. On the first day of class at UNCC, I met a guy named Mike Donovan who was a part-time disc jockey on the station BIG WAYS. It was to be a fortuitous meeting. As it turned out, Mike and I were the only two heterosexual men in the whole theater department, including the instructors. But everybody was cool and it was quite a humorous Christmas party when Mike and I opened our “Surprise Santa” gifts: matching sets of Soap on a Rope. We’re great friends to this day.
UNCC was a major step in life for me. I had suffered from horrible shyness from an early age. In fact, it got so bad at one point, I couldn’t go into a fast-food joint and order a hamburger. But theater people are wonderful and everyone I met there accepted me and all of my weirdness without judgment. I accepted them as well. As a result of their kindness, I started to come out of my shell. As you can guess, my attitude about people of different lifestyles broadened as well. All of my classes required some kind of performing on a daily basis. I was fortunate to perform in the department’s major productions as well as numerous smaller shows and student productions during that year. Slowly, surely, I became quite comfortable with the whole business.
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