TALES OF PECK

JEFFREY HEISER

I was on the radio with John Peck after Jeff Lee, Esquire, had left. I was the last of four guys who did the Giant Juke Box Show with him. Like a lot of kids, I became a big rock and roll fan, and as several ex-girlfriends could attest, music was all I wanted to talk about. When I was in college, I was living with Linda Brown at the time and she would listen to the Giant Jukebox on Saturday nights. So, after she became another ex-girlfriend, one day I'm hanging around the house and she calls me up, out of the blue, and says, “Hey, Dr. Oldie's looking for somebody to be disk jockey with him. Are you interested?” I'm like, “Are you KIDDING me?”

This is a dream come true! So I wind up go into his house, the old place on ??? Avenue, before there was America Street. I going through the kitchen and his words of wisdom were about the lawn, which he said he would mow it once in the springtime, and he felt he didn’t have to do it again. That's typical John. So you you walk in the kitchen, you go up the stairs, and there's this room, and the door has got five locks on it. Literally. So he opens up all the locks and goes inside and it's a small room and it's like the records all the way around, 360 degrees of records, except for a cutout spot where the stereo system was, with the turntable and reel-to-reel deck, where he did all the Dr. Oldie stuff. And I just thought that was just amazing. And I thought *I* had a lot of records at the time, but it was like, wow, this is what I want to do.

And he also had a Sony Trinitron, which at the time was a really big deal.I had a 12-inch portable black and white and he's got a color TV and a fancy one at that. So we did the show and I was on there for about five years. I would pick him up every Sunday night and drive up the show and then take him home afterwards and go home After that we finally got off the air. We never got paid for that by the way. I mean he figured out that he could get a lot of records in some nefarious places, all the doubles that he didn't have.

Another funny thing: he talked about doing record reviews in high school and I did the thing thing, but I didn't know that you could write to the record companies and ask them for free stuff. I wish somebody told me that! Also, during the time I knew the man, he was really good with his hands. Actually, if I look around the room, there were three record shelves that he built. They were each about out so high, with five rows of albums. And we built those maybe 40 years ago. We did all the work. I found the blueprints for them. Very detailed and he tells you three different places to buy all materials. Like you would go to one hardware store to buy the screws, another hardware store to buy the glue. And then you go to this other place to buy the lumber. But he had a rule, which said, if he helped you build one, you had to build one for him. No free ride.

I still have that shelving today, and I look around the room and it's all stuff that would remind me of Peck, which would be, there was a Byrds poster, a Cream poster, a stack of Raymond Chandler paperbacks. We had a lot of odd things in common, not just records. And then, of course, we started doing the record collectors shows.

On the last radio show we did, I remember there were a few interesting things. about the last show. He did a bunch of outer space songs and he's talking about them and he said that, because radio waves are infinite, centuries from now, there's going to be some little alien running around the spaceship and he's going to push an audio button, “And my voice is going to come out over the speaker! And that's immortality!”