Tape cartridges are flying, the second hand on the big all-powerful clock is sweeping, his producers are whispering not two feet behind his back, a young woman from the restaurant down the street has just brought in flowers and taken a seat directly across from him, and the Greaseman, standing in a Rockville radio studio way too early in the morning, is staring straight ahead, his lips flapping barely an inch above the microphone, his mind locked on a fantasy deep in a California night.
Doug Tracht's Greaseman act debuted yesterday on WARW (94.7 FM), his return to Washington after four years in Los Angeles and Atlanta. He brought his fantasy world with him in a huge black trunk, filled to the brim with sound effects tapes for Grease's ad-libbed anthology of adolescent anguish.
Amid the controlled hysteria of a drive-time radio show, Grease is hard into his story now, a driving tale of how he dialed a wrong number, got into an ugly exchange with a total stranger and proceeded to win vengeance by tormenting that stranger with nightly phone taunts at 3 in the morning, until Grease finally had to halt. "The thing that killed it was Caller ID," Tracht whines. And then the tale, as so many Greaseman adventures do, goes into hyper-fantasy, culminating moments later with a seething growl: "I still have the necklace I made from their teeth."
Nothing like a little avenging Everyman in the morning, along with a dose of masturbatory humor, some recitations from Tracht's vast catalogue of libidinous synonyms, and, of course, traffic, news and weather. It's a formula that made Tracht the king of morning radio in Washington through much of the 1980s, and now he's back, weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m.
Upon his triumphant arrival at Dulles last week, the Greaseman told his listeners on WARW, "They had palm leaves spread out at the airport and I rode downtown all the way on an ass." Actually, Tracht, 46, zipped into town unnoticed and headed straight for the station in an office condo facing Rockville Pike, scurrying to transform a studio that had been home to a classic rock show into the stage for a three-hour daily theater of the air.
While longtime producer Bill Scanlan readies the sound effects and assistant producer Joel Thatcher makes certain the timing is precise for the other stations that pick up the syndicated show, Grease is off and yapping about why he says "prostrate" when he means "prostate" ("It used to be funny," he says in his faux-erudite Teutonic professor voice, "when I gave lectures at the Medical Congress in Vienna and I'd put that second R in there"), about the station's plans to create space for the studio audience ("I got to put a three-tiered observation deck in, and we need to make a deal with an onion dip company to get some dip in here"), and about 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn, the Air Force pilot facing court-martial because of her adulterous affair ("The Air Force frowns on any kind of marital gammahoochery," Grease explains).
Grease's die-hard fans keep the phone lines busy with requests for some of his regular bits. One caller, hoping to inspire Tracht to do his song about being Jewish (Refrain: "We're the boys who eat no ham"), pronounces himself a "goy," Yiddish slang for a gentile.
"Ah," Grease squeals, "are you a retail-paying, card-carrying, low-SAT-scoring goy? You are a goy's goy. Enlightening the goyim from Poolesville to Solomons Island, call me up and I'll give you a little bit of Tel Aviv, right here in Anacostia," and he launches into a suitably tasteless ditty that works in Jews, Ethiopians and hair that won't lie flat.
This is the material WARW hopes will bring to an end Howard Stern's domination of the young male listening audience in morning drive time.
He picks a message out of his pile of e-mail and calls a Virginia high school student who had invited Grease over to the house for dinner and Tater Tots. When Grease failed to respond to the invitation, the kid had become abusive, peppering his radio hero with nasty messages. Now Grease was "on the blower" at 5:30 in the morning, asking the kid's mom to wake him up and get him on the radio.
In the taped segment, Tracht subjects the groggy kid to a pre-dawn tongue-lashing: "I get 50 to 150 e-mails EFD -- every day," Grease says. "Don't castigate me on your e-mail anymore. It's obsessive-compulsive behavior."
The kid backs down, and so does Grease. "Your mom won't mind if I come lumbering through your door with a seersucker, wing tips, bottle of gin, will she?" The kid says no; he seems actually to believe that the Boss Radio Man will step up to his door one night soon, Gilbey's in hand.
And Grease next gets Mom on the horn, asking her permission to accept the dinner invite. She hems and haws and finally accedes, but Greaseman's mind has raced onto something else, and Van Halen is cutting loose, and it's time for the next segment.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company