Prisoners of WOV

"Hiya cat, wipe ya feet on the mat, let's slap on the fat and dish out some scat. You're a prisoner of wov, W-O-V, 1280 on the dial, New York, and you're picking up the hard spiel and good deal of Fred Robbins, dispensing seven score and ten ticks of ecstatic static and spectacular vernacular from 6:30 to 9 every black on the 1280 Club. . . . We got stacks of lacquer crackers on the fire, so hang out your hearing flap while His Majesty salivates a neat reed."

To the average English-speaking listener, the announcement sounded like just one more of New York's many foreign-language broadcasts. But to jazz cultists, the strange words signaled the best jazz-music program on the air: a thorough course in jazz literature from Bunk Johnson to Dizzy Gillespie.

For the last six months listeners had "knocked" 2,500 to 3,000 "hunks of linen" a week to the 1280 Club's M.C., young (28), vacant-faced Fred Robbins. Last week Robbins was sent by the cheers of his "dicty" public into a top job--the M.C. spot on the Columbia Record Shop. With 359 stations, he would be the most widely broadcast disc jockey, but would have to educate his audience gradually into the mysteries of his "spectacular vernacular." With his take from the 1280 Club, he would now be grossing some $40,000 a year.

Talk for Hepcats. It was quite a "sack of jack," Robbins conceded, for the law graduate who seven years ago took an an-.. nouncing job with Baltimore's WITH at $17.50 a week. And every cent of it had been hard-earned. Like Walter Winchell and the late Damon Runyon, Robbins had almost singlehanded created his own "language," and built his audience by teaching it to them (see box). He started with a few scattered scat idioms picked up from jazzmen, rapidly invented new ones on principles of alliteration, assonance and (occasionally) metaphor.

Listeners who can bear with such brash trash are rewarded with a program as carefully arranged (generally by musicianly Mrs. Robbins) as a symphony orchestra's. During dinnertime, from 6:30 to 7, there is "gastric plastic"--soft, slow stuff; for the last hour the show gets hot with blues, boogie, chamber-music jazz, and jazz antiques. And at 9 p.m., when the last "fetching etching" has been sent, Robbins dreamily concludes: "This is your professor of thermodynamics taking a tacit for 24. We're clearing the joint of counterpoint, but we'll be back next black at 18:30. So have the body by the voice box, will ya? Keep ya chin up, good will toward men, and here's cookin' at ya."

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