A member
of this unusual group made this declaration on that Independence Day:
“Hello New
York and America, this is WNEW-FM ... Where the girls are ... Welcome to
history.”
The
background and selection of that early group—actresses, models, and assorted TV
personalities—represent a long, fascinating story in and of itself, which Dan McCue relates in this Substack post from this March.
But I want
to focus on the one who delivered the above greeting, survived the format
switch and mass replacement by male DJS a year later and, amid an employment
environment far different from today, created a template that other females in
the role pursued: Alison Steele.
To say
that Steele was the first woman to win Billboard’s FM Personality of the Year in
1976 and that she was an inductee in the Radio Hall of Fame and Rock and Rock
Hall of Fame doesn’t begin to describe the place she held in the imagination of
faithful listeners.
You had to
experience it, night after night, at your most restless and searching when you
were unwilling or unable to sleep.
At the
time of her hiring, Steele, a divorced single mom with a nine-year-old
daughter, trailed a set of broadcasting gigs behind her: office aide, production
assistant and associate producer at a New York radio station, morning exercise
program leader, and, in the parlance of the day, “weather girl.”
“I was
determined to be in show biz; I would do anything,” she told Su Yates of TV/Radio
Week in an August 1978 interview. The Brooklyn native had been taught well
by her mother, a singer and concert pianist: “She taught me a very simple rule:
If I wanted something, all I had to do was go and get it.”
The
entertainment world is filled with ambitious, hard-driving people who are sure
that with one break, they can vault to the top of their profession.
But Steele’s
willingness to try something different in that first year in her 2 pm-7 PM—theater
reviews, celebrity interviews, whatever might reasonably hold a listener’s
interest—may have impressed her bosses that she would be a quick study when
they instituted a free-form, progressive-rock format in October 1967.
Once given
her new perch from 10 PM to 2 AM six nights a week, she demonstrated the
intelligence to craft an utterly individual on-air personality, signaled in her
characteristic opening—a jazzy, flute-inflected melody followed by an intro she
herself wrote and made famous throughout the New York City area, that, with
some variations, went like this:
"The
flutter of wings, the sounds of the night, the shadow across the moon, as the
Nightbird lifts her wings and soars above the earth into another level of
comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come fly with me, Alison Steele,
the Nightbird..."
During my
adolescence more than 50 years ago, WNEW was the New York station you listened to
be cool, to hear concert simulcasts, musician interviews, and most tellingly,
cuts from up-and-coming artists. Truth be told, I was more familiar with Steele’s
male on-air colleagues because of the early hours I needed to maintain for
school.
But I
stayed up for the first hour or so to hear where her inclinations took her—spinning
records by Yes, Genesis, The Moody Blues, Santana, and the Grateful Dead, interviewing
Thin Lizzy, KISS, and Moody Blues bass guitarist John Lodge, and reading Poe,
Wordsworth, Ginsberg, and Shakespeare—all in that voice.
That voice—low,
honeyed, sultry, as if Lauren Bacall or Kathleen Turner were purring directly
to you. (Luckily, listeners only heard her purr and not her French
poodle, Genya, chewing on a bone in the studio near her.)
Her aural
allure was matched by a physical one, marked by flaming red hair and bohemian
attire: suede fringed vests, leather skirts, bell-bottom jeans, and flowing
velvet materials. No wonder she was rumored to have dated Frank Sinatra, Johnny
Carson, Sean Connery and a few rock stars.
It’s been 25 years since I read veteran DJ Richard Neer’s memoir of working at the station, FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio, but I can still vividly recall this passage:
“There was
once a summer concert in Central Park when [Steele] wore a thin leather halter
top, a leather bikini bottom, with high boots and a bare midriff. Boys were
literally falling out of trees to get a better look.”
Unlike her
high-living colleagues, Neer also notes, she was never “intoxicated by anything
more than a New York Rangers victory.”
During those
first years on the job, Steele disclaimed negativity (“I’ve always gone by the idea
that there’s something fine in life, but you have to make the effort to find what
it is,” she told K. Michael Blumberg in a 1974 New York Daily News profile).
She never
wrote a memoir, as another DJ, Meg Griffin, for instance, urged. But in later
years, after The Nightbird had flown from WNEW, she slipped hints about the sexism
and bruises along the way.
“She was
burned badly a few times,” recalled Griffin. “She lost several opportunities
because she was a woman, and I don’t think that’s something you forget. She’d
always tell me women had to work twice as many hours and be 10 times as good to
be noticed in radio.
She related additional frustrations to women’s studies scholar and author Becca Anderson, observing
that at a Madison Square Garden concert, “I was the last person be introduced.
So they [her fellow male WNEW deejays] were all on stage when they introduced
Alison Steele, ‘The Nightbird.’” They had to wait while the crowd cheered wildly
for her.
There were
also petty annoyances, as when station management wouldn’t buy her a step stool
so she could reach records on the top shelf, or not giving her the night off to
accept her Billboard award.
Management
and, perhaps, some of her fellow DJs may have felt annoyed over the attention
this radio pioneer received. But it’s doubtful that any of them ever inspired,
as she did, at least three fictional nighttime deejay characters on TV and
screen:
*Angie, a
female trucker who worked with the air name of “The Nightingale” on BJ and
the Bear;
*Rita
McCall, a controversial personality who draws the attention of a murderous
stalker in the Kojak episode "A Strange Kind of Love"; and
*Stevie
Wayne, a smalltown deejay with a beguiling voice that Adrienne Barbeau
patterned after Steele, in John Carpenter’s 1980 horror film The Fog.
By the end
of the 1970s, WNEW and the Nightbird came to a parting of the ways. According
to Neer’s account, the station asked him whether her extensive outside
activities (public appearances and producing radio and syndicated TV shows)
were distracting her from the work.
For her
part, Steele could see a rising demand that deejays move away from the
free-form format that emphasized personality-driven selections and towards homogenized
choices. So, after 13 years, she left the station that made her famous in
September 1979.
Her remaining
15 years were more nomadic—a stint announcing the soap opera One Life to
Live, commercials (again), serving as writer, producer, and correspondent
for CNN’s entertainment and lifestyle program, Limelight, and returning
to her “Nightbird” roots at 92.3 K-Rock in the late 1980s. Increasingly,
they were also darkened by health concerns.
Psychologist Dr. Patricia Farrell recalled becoming acquainted with Steele after meeting her on a late-night talk show, Last Call. Off the
air, Steele confided that she had cancer and “was convinced that her job
and the discrimination she had to battle in the industry had caused it.”
Her “vacations”
had become trips to Lenox Hill Hospital. Exhausted from the chemo, she should
have taken time off but couldn’t because she needed the health insurance.
The driven woman who’d become a radio legend and role model for later female deejays Carol Miller, Jody Peterson, and Rita Houston should have had a happier ending than death at age 58.
Rock died some time ago at WNEW, but it continues to live in
the memories of Steele’s listeners, who would agree with how colleague Vin
Scelsa characterized her in a tribute:
“In her
undying devotion to her audience, Alison was unique. She was one of the last
purveyors of the utopian, communal vision of radio.”
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