The Wages of Spin

A sometime window washer with a personality greatly appealing to himself ("I am such a sweet little guy"), Tom Clay first went to work as a record spinner at Detroit's WJBK two years ago. What happened to him thereafter until he was fired last week makes a typical case history of the deejay riding the payola trail.

For the first eleven months no "pusher" approached him. "The record-company guys," he told a TIME correspondent in Detroit last week, "went to the bigger men here. I didn't care because I knew when I was Number One they would come to me. First a guy would ask me to coffee, but I was sardonic and I would say, 'Wait until I get to the dinner stage. huh?' When I was finally asked out to dinner, I knew I was Number One. Payola comes to the top disk jockeys, so isn't this the greatest compliment?"

Silver for Christmas. Clay's view of payola ethics is intricate: "I have never demanded money from a record-company. When a deejay does that, he's dirty rotten. But it is all right for a man to put down $200 and leave a record for a deejay. If the deejay honestly thinks it is good, then he is justified in taking the $200 because, after all, that money is an investment for the record company. If the deejay turns down the record, the $200 is well spent. It saves the company money--they won't go ahead and make 10,000 records."

Not all companies were satisfied with Clay's code. When they paid him, they wanted to hear their records played. But Clay did not always oblige. Chicago's Chess and Checker record companies, Clay claims, got so mad at him one year that they did not even send him a Christmas card. "That really bugged me," he recalls. "So the man says, 'Didn't you get the silver plate for Christmas?' I said no. When he gets back to Chicago, he phones me and says, 'Tommy, baby'--when they say 'baby,' look out, because they're dirty --'I'm sending you the silverware.' "

Meanwhile, regular checks (marked "promotion") came in from other companies, and Clay listed them for the income tax men. "Can I send you something every month?" payolateers would ask. "That isn't necessary," was Clay's stock reply, "but go ahead if you want to." The wages of spin almost doubled his yearly salary of $8,000.

Nivins the Nightshade. The payola game brought Disk Jockey Clay in contact with a string of Damon Runyon-like characters, including Nat ("The Rat") Tarnapol, artist-and-repertory man for Roulette records, and Promoter Harry Balk, indicted earlier this year as a fixer of newspaper puzzle contests (TIME, March 9). But the most lizardous type Tom Clay ever encountered was Harry Nivins, a bald, cherubic nightshade who proved to be Tom's downfall.

Nivins was the manager of a rock 'n' roll singer named Melrose Baggy. Would Tom Clay take $200 and play a Baggy song on the air? No, said Clay. Later, they went for a ride in Clay's new Lincoln, and Nivins propositioned him again, offering $100. "I tell him, like, it was $200 last time," says Clay. "I also tell him this is one record which isn't going to happen. I find out later he has a tape recorder in his clothing."

Some of Clay's enemy colleagues on WJBK, it turned out, had passed the hat to pay for the rental of a midget tape recorder so Nivins could sandbag Clay. Confronted with Nivins' charge, says Clay, Station Manager Harry Lipson shrugged it off with a minor reprimand. But Nivins the Nightshade kept after his man, wired the Miami headquarters of the Storer Broadcasting Co., helped touch off the inquisition that cost Clay his job. He was disillusioned: "None of the pushers have come around since I got fired. These guys pretend that they were friends. I wait at home for the phone to ring, and it doesn't. I even check to make sure it isn't off the hook. I will never mingle socially with any guys in records. I want friendship."

Like a man can be on the take, but nobody should forget friendship. It's a principle, like.

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