WKRP in Cincinnati’s legendary disc jockey Dr. Johnny Fever took the airwaves again – in the form of his actor alter ego Howard Hesseman – to tell Hollywood.com all about the cult favorite sitcom’s long-awaited DVD debut.
Hollywood.com: Just so you know, I’m doing this interview under my framed WKRP cast photo.
Howard Hesseman: Oh, what are my hands are doing in that photo?
HW: One is wrapped around Loni [Anderson] and the other is holding your head. You look very tired.
HH: Well, one arm around Loni tends to be exhausting after a while [Laughs].
HW: So, finally on DVD. Did you wonder if this was ever going to happen?
HH: Well, frankly I hadn’t. I just assumed that it had and that I didn’t know about it, that I wasn’t notified about it, but I’m pleased that it’s finally happening and that they’re going to make it accessible to more people.
HW: This show was really different when it first came out. It was really kind of a special show then and has remained that way in people’s hearts. Can you talk about your encounter with people who have carried a torch for the show for all these years?
HH: Well, I do meet a lot of radio people who say, ‘Because of you I got into radio.’ On the one hand, what I’d like to do for that is offer condolences [Laughs] because radio is such a hard way to make a living, but it is a great thing. I really dig radio because it stirs the imagination so thoroughly on the part of a listener. Everything isn’t pre-adjusted when it comes out, or at least in the past it wasn’t to the extent it is now. Certainly, I think, in rock-and-roll radio they were much more raucous and exciting times than what generally one hears now. But at the same time I think the show focused on people working at a radio station gave people, gave virtually anyone who has any memory of that specific DJ or that special song that played at that special moment, all of that out of your teen years – growing up in America, at any rate. Everyone has that iconic DJ in mind, and it seemed to me that it was interesting to sort of show the workspace and show something of what a radio station looks like in operation, and the other thing that I think worked for the show was that there were extremely disparate personalities who were openly outspoken in their conflicting opinions of what this kind of music was and what it represented, but in the end they all worked together to make the thing itself work. I think that there is some kind of lesson there, that cooperation gets us further than competition in this life.
HW: When you first started figuring out who Johnny was, that sort of great rock-and-roll bravado, but he’s got a bit of that neurotic underbelly too, how did you get there with that character?
HH: Well, a lot of it was on the page, thanks to Hugh Wilson, the creator of the show, but also I’d had some brief experience in radio in San Francisco. In ’67 as a favor to a friend I hosted a six-hour Saturday afternoon show for about eight months to help establish the first kind of guerilla outlaw 24/7 rock-and-roll FM operation there gradually moving as time buys expired on this station that was just an incredible mix of various ethnic programming. In doing that I started meeting other DJs in San Francisco. I started meeting DJs. – professional disc jockeys who began leaving largely AM stations to come work for KMPX because it was so exciting and when I read the pilot script for WKRP and went to meet Hugh for the first time I talked about that experience, and I said “I have a lot of ideas about this guy, because from a half dozen guys I know different aspects of Johnny Caravella’s personality that I can draw on from these other guys.’” As an actor you don’t know which guy I’m doing at any moment hopefully, but a number of them have said “Where are my residual checks?” [Laughs]
HW: Have you had a chance at all to look at the old episodes with fresh eyes and did you discover anything in them that you’d maybe forgotten or didn’t realize at the time?
HH: Well, first of all, Scott, these eyes aren’t fresh anymore. I may have seen portions of a few episodes several years back when Nick at Night was getting ready to run WKRP, but I really haven’t looked at it for like whatever it’s been, some 20 years. It is strange. I’ll tell you this: when I do see one of the episodes I never know what’s going to happen next, but as my character is speaking I know what I’m going to say. I know the lines, but I don’t know what happens after I speak. In other words I can’t remember where the episode goes, and if you ask me now to repeat my favorite line of that four years I don’t know that I could tell you one because I don’t remember any of them. Seeing the thing unfold, though, suddenly it comes back to me just a millisecond before I speak, whatever it is I’m going to say. Then there is the old actor’s notion where it’s like I speak and then it’s “blah, blah, blah” and then I speak, and so forth. But literally I can’t remember where the storylines are going.
HW: Well, a lot of people at that time have trouble remembering the late ’70s, I’m sure.
HH: [Laughs] A lot of people who lived through the late ’70s, the only reason that they survived is because they can’t remember most of it.
HW: As an acting ensemble you guys had such a great groove going on. What is that tight-knit of a family among the cast as it seemed onscreen? I’m sure that everyone in the cast was disparate as the characters were too.
HH: Yeah, but pretty much it was an ensemble out of the gate. We were all relieved and fascinated at how quickly we seemed to gel as a unit, if you like. We didn’t do a lot of hanging out off-stage. There was usually a gathering every Friday night after the taping, but I have to confess that I think I attended one out of 90 of them or so. I didn’t tend to hang that much with everyone else, but we’ve all remained friends and we see one another. The last time that we were all together was for Gordon Jump‘s funeral, the memorial service and funeral. But we get together and have lunch a couple of times a year and there are also some production people – directors, stage managers and stuff – that come in on those groups. It’s nice to do that and we still feel connected and still feel that family part of it.
HW: When the show went off the air it was a somewhat premature decision by CBS and the ratings went up once the announcement went out. And they tried to get you guys back. Is that right?
HH: [Laughs] I think that we were always a little startled, but quickly discovered that if the show broke into the top 20 we were within two weeks of being moved, if not to a new time slot on the same night than just a completely different night. I think that we were moved 11 times in four years. There seemed like as if there was someone who just didn’t want our show to succeed who was in a position to keep moving us around like that on the schedule. I have no idea what the real reasons were, but we were moved around the schedule mercilessly. Most of us had anticipated probably getting another half year. In other words, having four and a half seasons in the can. At that time a hundred episodes seemed to be the magic number for syndication and I think that we stopped at 92 or something like that. We were all a little surprised that they were shutting us down, but then when you look at all those schedule changes, not really.
HW: Did you keep any Johnny Fever souvenirs, the coffee mug with all his on-air names, or the rock-and-roll t-shirts?
HH: No. Well, most of the t-shirts were mine anyway. I had a number of friends in San Francisco who were rock-and-roll poster artists from the ’60s and I had them do some t-shirts for me to use on the show. I still have most of those, but I don’t think that I have anything else.
HW: One thing that a lot of the fans are concerned about is that a lot of the hit music from the era that was used on the show couldn’t be secured for the DVD. Do you think that’ll take away from the experience at all?
HH: Well, to some extent I’m sure that it will, but at the same time I’m given to understand that Hugh Wilson, the creator of the show, was present and was very careful in his insistence that the music that was being substituted was an appropriate substitute and that the change wouldn’t really affect the scene negatively, but that’s a hard call for me to make. I haven’t seen any of the shows and so I don’t really know. I do know that there were some gags that were so intrinsically predicated on the specific piece of music and I know that when the show was first in syndication, I guess, in the mid to late ’80’s I saw pieces of it excised that kind of hurt me. But again that’s beyond my control and I can’t do anything about it, and I think that the show still stands even if the music isn’t as on the nose as it had been. I’d like to think that anyway.
HW: As an actor do you relate to Johnny a little bit in that you’re constantly crossing off your last name, moving onto a new name and totally changing identities with each new job?
HH: In a way. I think that’s one of the reasons I got into the business. Not that it was not knowing who I was, but that here was an opportunity to be someone different on a regular basis and perhaps explore aspects of myself to see if I could find just enough pieces or symbols to pass for sentient human being in today’s world [Laughs].
HW: Well, thanks for everything – and hearing your voice coming out of a speaker seems appropriate.
HH: It doesn’t, doesn’t it? [Laughs]
