Creem Cheese Of The Month

Creem Cheese Of The Month

DICK PURTAN Have Some Crazy With Your Cornflakes

SUSAN WHITALL

God, it’s 11:00, and I’m late for this appointment with Dick Purtan. Rock ‘n’ roll just isn’t a diurnal business — even when I get there, an hour late, our photographer has to offer to slap me silly to get the adrenalin flowing. I marvel at Purtan’s energy as he receives us in one of the engineering booths, surrounded by controls and tapes (“Crowd Sounds,” “Hysterical Laughter,” “Baby Crying,” “Horse Neighing”). This guy’s been getting up to do a show at 7:00 for ten years (in this town, anyway). So how does he do it?

“Oh, I shoot up... besides that, I haye my Taster’s Choice — I got tired of Sanka. And Joey Ryan keeps me awake — he’s in the studio for the whole show, trading off jokes and stuff.”

The Morning Friendly recently printed an item in Action Line about WXYZ levying a $100 fine on Purtan whenever he was late. It had been in effect for about three years, but they weren’t enforcing it, so they cut it down to $50, then $25. Things changed when WXYZ program director, Joe Boccarella, caught on to Purtan’s game.

“Joe you see never tunes in until a quarter of seven — I’d figured that out. But one morning he did'and I was late, so he said ‘Purtan you SOB it’s $100 from now on!’ It’s on the honor system of course, they haven’t taken the money yet. Let them try, ha ha ha ha.”

Refreshing your memories a bit, Purtan started out in Detroit at WKNR at the end of “personality radio,” when jocks cultivated personas that would stick in kids’ minds (Rockin’ Robin Seymour, Lee “The' Horn” Alan, etc ). Purtan, with a zaniness reminiscent of the old English Goon Shows and a wit he admits is at least partly inspired by Steve Allen, fell into place easily. But with the advent of Drake programming at CKLW, personalities had to go. WKNR brought in a Man from the East who told the jocks to keeptheir patter down to ten seconds on the intro or outro of a record. Purtan threatened to quit, was appeased and given carte blanche for his morning show, but left three months later anyway for a hitch in Baltimore.

“I guess I was just too wild for Baltimore — they called me all kinds of names...atheist, communist. Remember when I did movies on the air, like An Affair to Remember starring Rita Bell and Bill Bonds? Weil l did it in Baltimore with the showbiz reporter and the anchorman. As it turned out, yeah, they really were having an affair. The guy threatened to sue me and all. And once I read a memo from the general manager over the air which said that nobody was to park in his parking space, with background music and all. I was fired very quickly.”

Purtan returned to Detroit radio, this time for good, taking the morning shift at WXYZ.

Some classic Purtan: The Sneezeand-Win Contest, the Yell-and-Win Contest, the Hang-up-and-Win Contest, and my favorite, the Ray Girardin Cough-Alike Contest, in which people were supposed to duplicate the former Detroit police commissioner’s distinctive hack.

“People called in and would try their coughs out. Then this one guy called and it was incredibly like Girardin’s, so I told him he’d won the spot. Of course, it was Ray.

“Newsweek took me to task for the contest I had after Betty Ford made those remarks about Susan having an affair. The contest was, you try to guess when Susan would have her affair, where, etc. And the winner would get dinner for two, Pine Knob tickets, the whole spiel we usually give. The winner of course was Susan Ford — she guessed Camp David and August 15. Newsweek said it was the most tasteless reaction to Betty’s remarks they’d seen.”

Ideas for a particular show are usually sketched out, but Purtan insists that nothing is ever actually scripted except for commercials.

“The trouble with scripts is. that you get dependent upon them: someone walking down the hall says ‘hi’ to you, you’re stuck for an answer.”

"I'm not much of a music fan...I'd just as soon play polkas all day."

Purtan’s popped up guest-hosting Bill Kennedy at the Movies, A.M. Detroit, and even appeared on Lou Gordon’s show.

“Lou? A helluva comic, a funny man. I went on his show only under the condition that he’d have Shirley Eder on too so I knew I wouldn’t get to talk. So he had Shirley Eder, Suzy Farbman of the News and myself on, and I was absolutely right — they argued for 13 of the 15 minutes we had on the air. Lou said to me, ‘We might as well not even be here.’ I said, ‘That’s OK with me, Lou.’”

Now Purtan has to turn down offers to host his own TV show because he can only do TV work on WXYZ-TV. “It’s OK”, he says blithely. “WXYZ treats me right. The only time the general manager got down on me was when we did this fake CKLW newscast. See, one day CK’s lead news story was this quote from David Cassidy, ‘I never indulge in sex on tour.’ That was their headline! So we did this David Cassidy voice and the drumrolls and all. But the g.m. said you couldn’t make fun of the competition like that, and to stop it. But we’d already done it twice...”

As a music magazine, we feel bound to ask Mr. Purtan, long a rock DJ, what his musical tastes are.

“I’m not much of a music fan. Nah, I’d just as soon play polkas all day. If

"I guess I was just too wild for Baltimore..."

they told me that we were going allprayer that’d be OK with me.”

Embarrassing moments?

“I was ringing the bell outside of Hudson’s last Christmas for the Salvation Army, so I told people on the air where to go to see me. I said, ‘It’s on Woodward Ave., blah blah blah, look for me, I’m the one with my clanger in my hand.’ As soon as the words left my mouth, Lou the engineer was on the floor laughing. I was totally mystified. Stuff like that happens reasonably often.”

Dick Purtan is the kind of man whose, voice seems to prepare your body physiologically, in a kind of Pavlovian response, to hurt itself laughing. Is nothing sacred? Purtan claims to inspire a lot of outraged calls from people telling him he’s gone too far this time. But it’s not a conscious effort: “Steve Allen could be so funny, and it was always clean funny, which is the most difficult to do.

“I once did an interview in which I said that I’d never do anything serious. Well, life is just not all laughs, so I don’t do all bits. Like when I protested Daylight Savings Time. We held a screening of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run — one of my favorite movies by the way — at the Oak Drive-In, to prove that you could screen an entire movie from 7:00 A.M. until the sun came out. We proved just that, and the crowds were terrific.”

OK, Rita Bell has responded to a decade of Purtan razzing in these pages. Any words for Our Lady of the Bells?

“Rita? A marvelous woman...good knees.” if