When I was doing afternoon drive in 1950 at KLAC, Frank Sinatra often came for coffee and pie with me. We hit it off. He knew I was dedicated to his talent and played his Columbia Records LP’s.. “Saturday Night is The Loneliest Night in the Week,  I Didn’t sleep a Wink Last Night,  If You Were But a Dream..” If I wanted a song that had not been pressed into an LP, I would play the 78’s.

He ruptured his vocal cords around the time I knew him. Up til then, I had the impression that he could draw a single breath and sing an entire song.

 He didn’t really hit his stride again until the mid 50’s when Nelson Riddle summoned the guts to say, “Frank, You can’t sustain any more. How about trying some songs I arranged for you?.” That was the fore runner of those years when he caught fire again on the Capitol LP albums, singing finger snapping upbeat ballads that didn’t call for those sustained phrases.. ”I’ve Got You Under My Skin….. Come Fly With Me.”.

He hated interviews, so I never asked him for one., When he and I chummed, he was out of a job, and few wanted to be  near him. In Hollywood, joblessness, like leprosy, was feared to be communicable. None of this bothered me. I liked him.

The Chairman of the Board had no board. It all happened when he left his wife, Nancy, and his family, for Ava Gardner in 1947. Frank was being groomed for greatness when it all came tumbling down. Louis B Mayer, head of MGM, not only fired him, but  took his last check and gave it to Nancy. How do I know this?  Frank told me.

So, here I am with this juicy  information and honor bound to keep it to myself. Worse, at the same time Frank  was telling me how much he loved her, Ava was “seeing” one of the KLAC jocks in heavy rotation. I never told him about Ava while this was going on....

They married a couple of years later at the apartment of a friend, Mike Nidorf, Jo Stafford’s manager.

 Mike told me that right after the ceremony, Ava took violent offense at something Frank did or said and started throwing Mike’s priceless Ming vases at Frank. Years later, Frank sent Mike a generous sum in payment for the shambles.           

I held another national secret. I never publicly revealed that Elvis was a blonde. I had known it since 1955 when I saw him in the raw in a mutual dressing room. He begged me not to tell, and I didn’t. I kept his secret for years.           

Just as my relationship with Sinatra resulted in no interviews, I came up empty with Janis Joplin years later.  She and Big Brother and the Holding Company arrived in San Diego to perform a concert in late ‘69. I had just returned from Detroit  and was back at KCBQ, When I heard she was coming, I jumped at the chance to interview her. “Jumped” was a more appropriate way to put it than I realized.

My enthusiasm was somewhat stifled when I heard the terms of the interview. Her manager laid down a bunch of don’ts: don’t mention drugs and whiskey, don’t mention Port Arthur where she was born. It was no secret that she had been the only girl at Thomas Jefferson High not to be invited to the prom. I didn’t want to go there, anyway.

Janis was the  greatest “white blues mama” ever.  Jim Morrison called her, “the maiden with the raw iron soul.”

To me, she was the embodiment of road house music. I had a love and feel for it because I came from Galveston just a few miles-a whoop and a holler- up the road from Port Arthur. Janis had sung in road houses in the” Golden Triangle:” Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange, and across the border into Louisiana, where the legal drinking age was 18. There, her style evolved into the rough primal scream that had singled her out as a unique belter of the blues. 

Luckily, before Janis, I got to do a warm-up interview with Patti Page. This was the one I described earlier in this series of adventures: in which I auditioned for WNEW by sending them a Patti Page interview.

 It would have been easy to bring on Patti and talk about “Doggie in the Window” and other delicacies in her candied career. Instead, I presented her from a different angle, her Oklahoma roots and early career in country music. When I say “country,” I mean real country, like yodeling on the bridge of  “I Wanta be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.”. Her idol was Patsy Montana, an Olympics level yodeler. Patti was an Okie and proud of it. We went into that phase of her life during the interview, even singing “I Only Want a Buddy, Not a Sweetheart” together.

The programmers at WNEW were taken aback by my taped audition. They sent a telegram in which they questioned the wisdom of presenting Patti in that light..

I replied that it was my practice to find unique ways of presenting artists, and that Patti was at heart a good ol’ gal. That this was the real Patti, and that she could  legitimately be presented this way. There was a silence from New York, then, after a couple of weeks, a reply that I was right and they still wanted me.  

Back to Janis: I boned up on her life and music, and headed for the Sports Arena with my wife, Carol.  Janice would be waiting for me in her dressing room, and I would have ten minutes with her.

With most of her life out of bounds, I was going to talk about music.  

I still had not  figured out a hook in the Joplin interview, but had learned to depend on my instincts to come up with something. One thing: I knew her music.

A voice kept whispering to me, “Watch out. She could be wilder than Malcolm X,”.. She swore like the boys. What if she was drunk? She swigged Southern Comfort the way others do water these days, right out of the bottle..

Too late.  I was walking through the stage door, carrying my tape machine with  Carol at my side. She said later that I had a look of supreme confidence which she knew was a sham.

I stepped into the dark halls of the backstage area and there stood Janis with a radiant smile. She had a volleyball in her embrace and was surrounded by the Holding Company. guys and their crew..

“Hi Janis,” I said, “I’m Hare from KCBQ radio. I came to visit with you, okay?”

She giggled and said “Sure man…. Hey! Ya wanna play volleyball?” Before I could answer, she hurled a gut buster to me and shouted, “You serve.” I saw no net but, under the rules of this game, who cared?

 The guys split up with Janis, Carol, and me standing together, and the others  completing  a circle. Now, I got it. The object was to bat the ball in the air, and keep it from falling to the deck.

            Simple game…unless you were playing with Janis Joplin in the bunch.. Bomp! Bomp! Bomp! All eyes were fixed on the ball as it was bounced up and down , bomped often  by several sets of hands at a time. No one wanted to let the ball drop to the deck, least of all Janis, who made a body punishing save by diving for the ball when it came down a little out of her reach. She crashed, laughing joyously, to the deck and scooped the ball back into play in a last minute save. She played like an NBA player, with elbows jabbing at anyone who went for the ball anywhere near her.

Carol was athletic. She forgot all of the meticulous preparations she had made for this evening and was in the thick of it.  She kicked off her high heels for better traction Her make-up was running, and she was sweating buckets like the rest of us.

            Janis hollered at me over her shoulder, “Come on, Hare, make a dive for Pearl.”

At that very moment, the ball came down, falling away from me and I crashed, but got a hand on it and sent it back up into play.. No time to just sit there. I scrambled back to my feet, just in time to make another dive for Pearl. She didn’t like the name Janis. She was Pearl to herself.

Enough! I reached for my tape machine.

The call came for Janis/Pearl to go onstage.

If you have seen a Joplin concert and wondered why she looked so disheveled when she came on stage,. it may be because she had just left a rousing game of netless volleyball  

In earlier days she might have been stoned or drunk, but not this evening.

I grabbed my tape machine and hollered after her,” Can I get the interview after the concert?” She laughed a big laugh. “Hell man! You jest got it,. Jest go to work tomorra and tell’em whatcha saw?”

Then…it came to me.  Janice playing without a net,. What a metaphor!   

She was clean the night I was with her, but soon afterward, at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles, on October 4^th 1970, she scored an unusually pure batch of heroin and  soared into another place. The name of her last album was “Pearl.”

No still portrait ever captured her. In those professional head shots, there was always a hint of wistfulness in her eyes, pleading for understanding. That girl was little Janis from Port Arthur, but Pearl on stage was the real Janis, her hair tousled and tumbling over her contorted face, her clothes wringing wet with sweat, and her voice straining to the breaking point, and her not caring.

 I still remember Janis on stage taking command, defining the terms by which she would be heard, and 200 Hell’s Angels bikers sitting in front, in submission to her powerful presence.  

            I didn’t realize it at the time, I had stumbled into that illusive third dimension of  radio. 

The real Frank Sinatra was when he was on stage, moving emotional mountains in his audience, not the guy connected with Sam Giancana the mob boss, or the Frank sucking up to JFK, in a cheap petition for recognition.

What he didn’t realize was that, in his way, he was as big as both of them. Damn! I should have said this to him and then interviewed him, nothing personal but getting him going about his music and then getting out of the way.  

That is what I should have done, then…but what did I know at the time? I was a kid fresh out of Galveston. 

I had unwittingly done this with Patti Page. She was never more real than when she was happily transported back to her youth in Okalahoma singing country.

Her portrait hangs next to mine in “Faces,” a posh downtown San Diego restaurant. I can’t imagine anyone better to hang with.  

October 8^th, I will be in Akron for induction into the Radio/Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame of Ohio. My daughter, Melanie will be the presenter. My wife, Carol, will be there avoiding the spotlight, but helping me bring out the best in myself. Her technique: get me to talking or writing about my love for radio, then stepping aside.