“You know the thing I hate the worst about radio personalities?” talk-show host Jay Marvin asks as he walks up State Street to the WLS AM studios. “They’re all full of themselves. They’re not human. You ever notice that? They’re all manufactured—including me.”
Marvin was born Marvin Jay Cohen. His father, Stuart Cohen, was a fairly successful Hollywood talent agent who divorced his wife in 1959, when Marvin was six years old. He would see his father only once more, over the holidays that year. His mother’s second husband moved the family—Marvin had two stepsisters and later a half sister—into that bastion of conservatism, Orange County. Then as now, the county was the epitome of suburban comfort, full of ranch houses right out of the Brady Bunch. Breadwinners commuted in big cars, came home to martinis, and clucked their tongues at the civil rights and antiwar protesters on the nightly news. In the 80s the local airport was named after John Wayne. In the 90s the district was represented in Congress by an icon of the right, Bob Dornan.
Often he’d carry on the battles he’d had with his stepfather with the talk-show hosts. “Joe Pyne was extremely conservative,” he says. “I would call him on the phone, this kid from Orange County. I would get into it with him over the air. He’d hang up on me. I thought it was the greatest thing.”
The minute Marvin graduated in 1970 he left. “I hitchhiked,” he says, “because everybody wanted to be Jack Kerouac.” He had about $50 in his pocket. “In those days, man, that’s all you needed. People would share things. You could make it all the way across the United States.” For four months he traveled what was left of the original Route 66 to Chicago, then headed to Bangor, Maine. When he got there he turned around, came back through Chicago, and went on to Madison, Wisconsin.
After the inductees’ tests were graded, a sergeant stood in front of the room and called out names, and guys were led off to another room and a two-year hitch of active duty. When he’d finished calling out the names, ten people remained in the room, including Marvin. “A third of us who were left were drunk,” he says. “Some of them had serious abuse problems—falling down all over the place.” Each of them was directed to see a specialist in another room. “First I had to see a psychiatrist,” Marvin says. “Then I had to go see the FBI.” The FBI agent opened a box and showed Marvin all the items he’d mailed to the induction center. “I’d sent them bags of dirt, bricks, antiwar propaganda,” he says. The agent also reminded Marvin of some of his extracurricular activities as a teenager. “I’d been in demonstrations. I’d thrown rocks and bottles at the police. I was a strong supporter of the Black Panther Party. In those days I considered myself a communist.” He was disqualified for military service, declared 4-F.
So he concentrated on music stations, listening to the DJs, trying to understand what made a radio personality good. He also chose stations he saw as different. “I loved listening to the black stations up on the top end of the dial,” he says. “I also loved to listen to the hillbilly stations. I was drawn to it because at that time it was the white man’s blues. Country music was not like it is today—it was almost like an ethnic format. It was like being an outsider. I was getting into a culture that was alien from what I was raised in.”
