By Neal Rubin| Detroit Free Press Staff Writer
Editor's note: This story originally ran Oct. 10, 1993.
The microphone, a thick, black cylinder, hangs from the end of a white arm mounted on the studio console. Alan Almond does not see it; his eyes are half-closed, and it's beside him more than before him, nuzzling his left cheek as he murmurs hello.
The lights in the studio are dim. "This is my time," he says, his deep voice soft and slow. He's talking over the music, a melancholy instrumental from Kenny G, and he's saying what the law says he must at the top of the hour: "This is 100.3, WNIC-FM, Dearborn/Detroit."
He makes it sound like a compliment, whispered across the table at a sidewalk cafe. "I want to welcome you with open arms and a great big hug . . . to the first hour of Alan Almond's 'Pillowtalk.' "
It's one minute after 8 on a Tuesday night. The seduction has begun.
For the next four hours, Almond will play songs of love, talk about love and immerse himself and his listeners in love. Before the final great big hug at midnight, he will read one poem, counsel two teenagers, pass along half a dozen declarations of devotion and announce a pregnancy to a dumbstruck father. He will drink four cups of coffee (with Sweet 'n Low), open a half-foot high stack of mail (with photos) and confide on the air that he is fresh from a promising first date (with a lawyer).
The faithful will swoon. These are the people who send him birthday cards and brownies, who flirt with him and share their hurt with him, who thank him for being a rudder in their lives, and they have welcomed him with open arms.
Eight years after he bailed out -- eight ragged years after he jilted WNIC for a flashy Dame Fortune promising fast times and fame -- the former late-night phenomenon is back on "Pillowtalk," back every night in the plain brown building next to a Shell station on Michigan Avenue.
The format is the same. So is much of the music. Only the host has changed.
He is wiser. Quieter. Sadder, or at least more reflective. Better grounded. He's been bruised, by the business and by the fates.
He catches himself humming along with an instrumental bridge and shakes his head. "The humming is to die for," he tells his audience. "I'm getting checks for this? Amazing."
Mystery is the lure
Alan Almond was just another low voice until he called in sick one night in the mid-'70s. Home in bed, listening to his substitute play Steely Dan and Van Morrison, it struck him: "All these medium-tempo songs at 11:30? That's just not right."
He began devoting the last hour of his 7-to-midnight shift to down-tempo love songs. Callers responded. He started shifting to romantic music at 10, and the ratings responded. Finally, he gave the whole show over to "Pillowtalk," and the city responded.
Word at one point was that his ratings and salary were tops in the country for his time slot. His share of the female audience was overwhelming.
Part of his allure was mystery -- WNIC advertisem*nts never showed his face -- and Alan Almond impersonators took to making the rounds of singles bars.
Sitting in a Pizza Hut with a date one night, he heard someone in the next booth tell her friends about her weekend with Alan Almond. "I had never seen the girl in my life." Another stranger called to thank him for a wonderful trip to Chicago. "I remember telling my producer, 'Whoever it was must have done a good me, because she's sure happy.' "
Wary of misguidedly jealous boyfriends, he studied martial arts. He could certainly afford the lessons: On one of radio's least glamorous shifts, he was earning more than $100,000 a year.
But he wanted more.
The right demographics
"You know," he tells a 16-year-old from Livonia, "you can choose not to fight." This is his telephone voice, quicker but just as deep as the radio voice. "Your mom loves you, you know."
The young lady called to request a Whitney Houston song and wound up telling him about her family. Almond asks about her grades and her plans. "Go to college," he says.
Historically, Almond's demographic strength is women from 25 to 54. Though he was on the air for only half of the last ratings period, he nearly doubled WNIC's late-night share in that group. But he also hears from kids, like the 17-year-old twins from Oak Park who send their photos and a Taylor girl named Christine who tells her mother, "Alan's on! Alan's on!"
Almond claims that it's the teenagers who make him reluctant to discuss his age -- that he fears they'll stop relating to him if they know he's beyond his 20s. In truth, he's crossed 39, but he's looking younger these days; Almond stopped drinking three years ago, climbed aboard a bicycle and lost 40 pounds. Now all he has to do is stop smoking. He changes brands every time he buys a pack, hoping to find one so foul-tasting it'll make him quit.
Solidly built at 6-foot-2, he has brown eyes, thinning sandy brown hair and a blond-streaked mustache above an engaging smile. While local myth has him hiding his face because it's grotesque, he's actually handsome, in a rugged yet boyish way.
"This thing about not doing public appearances is probably the biggest coup he ever put together," says friend Thom McGinty, promotions director at WOMC-FM (104.3). It's good fortune as well as good business, McGinty says, because "he's really kind of a quiet person."
Almond was born in Detroit and graduated from Birmingham Groves High and Michigan State University, where he majored in literature. His father was an engineer and his mother worked for a florist. The middle of three boys, he has one brother with the postal service and another who teaches college linguistics.
Alan Almond is his real name. He started knocking on radio station doors when he was 16, but nobody hired him until he was months out of college and working as a security guard at a test track in Macomb County. Hired as a producer at the long-departed WDRQ-FM, he got his first taste of airtime when the overnight host didn't show up.
Once, in college, he auditioned for a low-level job doing top-of-the-hour IDs at a religious station in Howell. "I remember driving back to East Lansing thinking, 'Even God doesn't want me on the radio.' "
Seduced by the high life
"I want to be your soul provider," he purrs. It's an Almond trademark, repeating the key line of a song and making it his own. "That's Michael Bolton on 'Pillowtalk' . . ."
He slides another blue cartridge into a tape player and rolls his elevated chair away from the microphone.
The studio is almost homey, with hardwood floors and a rosy beige carpet on the walls to muffle sound. He says he felt comfortable in it from Day 1.
Still, he worried. Before his first shift last May -- today marks his five-month anniversary -- he told WNIC general manager Gary Fisher, "I'm just afraid no one is going to remember me.'
Almond still ruled the ratings in late 1985 when WMJC-FM lured him away.
Probably exaggerating, he told acquaintances that his new contract would bring him $1 million over three years. And it specified that a limousine would bring him to work and take him home every night.
"We never asked for the limo. They just threw it in to seal the deal," he says. "You've got to remember, this was the mid-'80s, the height of conspicuous consumption. What was I going to do, turn it down?"
In retrospect, he should have. Listeners attached themselves to him because he seemed real and down to earth. Between the chauffeur and the nightlife and the boat named after one of Errol Flynn's -- all highly publicized -- it was as though he'd set out to prove otherwise.
The audience that was supposed to follow him to WMJC didn't. WNIC kept the name "Pillowtalk" and replaced Almond with old hand Johnny Williams, a bass-voiced, $10-an-hour part-timer who'd been looking to get out of radio.
Essentially doing Almond's show with Almond's voice and Almond's delivery, Williams consistently beat him in the ratings. Outraged, Almond began attacking Williams on the air, which only drove more people away.
"Alan fell for the oldest trick in the radio business," says a local radio figure who knows and likes him. "He started thinking he was a bigger star than he was. All of us are the victims of our experience, and his experience was that he'd been carried into work on a sedan chair."
A syndication deal that had helped entice him to WMJC fell apart when a sister station in Los Angeles changed formats to classic rock. Then WMJC went classic rock, too, changing its call letters to WCSX, and the company bought out the last 18 months of Almond's contract.
He landed at WOMC-FM (104.3), only to get swept out during a budget crunch in September 1989. Then came a part-time gig on WMXD-FM and a weekend talk show on WXYT-AM (1270), which billed him as "North America's foremost authority on love and relationships."
In August '92, WJZZ-FM (105.9) brought him in to work 10 p.m.-2 a.m. He was happy, Almond says. He would come home after work to his downtown Birmingham apartment and paint: miniature watercolors at first, then larger oils. He began a novel, "a love story." But he'd been a star once, and now he was perched atop one of the lesser lily pads in a small pond.
When WNIC made him an offer, he jumped.
The Almond touch
"It's like Christmas every night," Almond says.
He's been going through the mail: Belated birthday cards, a self-published book of poetry, some shy endearments. Debra from Waterford, who thanks him for "making my life better when times were bad," asks him to play "Somewhere in Time" for "me and who I think is my soul mate."
"You bet I will, Debra," he tells the microphone, "and thank you very, very much for the card tonight."
Almond saves every piece of "Pillowtalk" mail. Boxes and duffel bags of correspondence are stacked head-high in his brother's basem*nt.
The devotion is "incredibly humbling," he says. If playing a request or relaying a message makes someone's night, it's a trade-off. "She made my night. And that's not just a show- business response. I really am touched."
WNIC program director Jim Harper, who oversaw the early days of "Pillowtalk," remains impressed by Almond's ''tremendous respect for his audience.
"You can't fake that stuff," Harper says. "He has an ability to really relate to people who choose to listen to him instead of watch TV or read a book."
Judy from Windsor accompanies her card and letter with a snapshot. She has long, wavy brown hair. "Your gentle words touch so many," she writes. "Your wisdom reaches so far."
Reached later, Judy, 38, says she began listening to Almond when her 19-year marriage was breaking up. His voice would fill her car as she drove the city in the darkness, ruminating about her life. She called him one lonely night and he stayed on the line for 15 minutes.
"He was gentle," she says. "He brought things down to a personal level. He shared some of his own experiences with me. I felt very touched."
She would like him to call her sometime. So would Rose from Detroit, who writes that she heard his voice a week ago "and almost flipped out."
"Now every night I put my two kids to bed and turn you on, so you can turn me on. (Smile.)"
The perfect mix
"Where does love begin, and how does it grow?
"Does it flourish in a green meadow? Does it fall like snow?"
He's reading a selection from the book of poetry that landed in his mailbox. "I like to try different things," he says -- verse, phone calls, philosophy. As winter approaches and his show begins after dark, "I just want to be pleasant, more relaxed. People are in for the evening when they turn on the radio. I play music that's a little more familiar."
To Almond, "Pillowtalk" is an art form. "Painting, compared to this, is very one-dimensional." He played guitar in college, in a raucous rock band, but "this is far more interactive."
He tinkers with the show constantly, searching for the perfect mix. The quest takes up seven nights a week; his days off, since May, barely reach double figures.
"This, to me, is somebody else's golf game," he says. It's a job, but also a passion. "As you get older, you've had the big house and the yacht and everything else, you find out that money doesn't make you happy."
Two convertible sports cars, a blue Mercedes and a red Ferrari, are the only remnants of his years in the fast lane. "I'm learning to look inward for happiness," he says. He's learning about himself, and, yes, about love.
The summer before last, "I finally found her. The perfect woman for me. The one I'd waited my whole life for." She had just one small, hidden flaw: All the time they were romancing, she was engaged to someone else.
"When I talk about loss on the show, I know what that means now," he says.
"When I talk about real love, I know what that means."
So heartbreak has improved the program. At least there's that. But he retreated for most of a year before deciding that he wanted to find that feeling again.
Now, after a lifetime of enthusiastic bachelorhood, "I'd really like to get married, I think." Not, he adds quickly, that there are any immediate prospects.
The date with the lawyer went nicely, but give it time. "I don't know," he says. "We're just getting to know each other."
There's a hint of a blush on the hidden face of "Pillowtalk."
"We'll see."
THE DIAL STYLE
Alan Almond's "Pillowtalk" airs from 8 p.m.-midnight, seven days a week on 100.3, WNIC-FM.
Almond lists the five most-requested songs:
1. "The Lady in Red," Chris DeBurgh
2. "Wonderful Tonight," Eric Clapton
3. "The Power of Love," Jennifer Rush
4. "Here and Now," Luther Vandross
5. "When I Fall in Love," Celine Dion and Clive Griffin
