It took Detroit Simmons about ten seconds to throw his own bucket of icy cold water on Jimmy’s hot, hot fire.
"Jimmy Gill! There's no doubt at all now that you've lost your ever-lovin' mind! We got a tiger by the tail here in Nashville, we’re borrowing more bloody drug money from the Georges to jump into a snake pit down there in Atlanta, and now you’re about to tie up with a hillbilly singer and risk everything we’ve built, all for another station you’ve never even heard in a town that you’ve never even been to!"
Detroit was so mad he turned his back to Jimmy and stared out his shop window at the traffic zipping past outside on Music Row. Then he cursed loudly, picked up the chassis of some dingus he was working on and slammed it back down on the work bench so hard several tools danced off the edge and rattled noisily on the hard floor. Jimmy had put his ideas into logical sequence on the drive back into town from Cleo's. He had just begun laying out the facts in exactly the way he knew Detroit couldn’t resist, no matter how skeptical he might be, when the man had suddenly blown a gasket.
Jimmy stood there, shocked at Detroit’s anger. He was about to turn and leave, saving the rest of the scenario for a time when he might be more in a mood to listen. He was going to do the deal. He did not need Detroit Simmons for that. It was only a courtesy mentioning it to him in the first place. But then, Detroit spun around suddenly and blasted him with a cold stare Jimmy had rarely seen on his friend’s face.
An ugly thought slipped up on Detroit and he spoke before he meant to.
"Are you tapping that woman?"
"What?"
"You sleeping with her?"
“Frankly, it’s none of your damned business.”
Jimmy almost went farther, maybe even bounding across the office and hitting him. But he realized immediately that he loved him too much for that. Instead, he only bit his tongue and turned abruptly to stomp down the hallway to his office. He slammed his door behind him so hard it dislodged two framed gold records hanging on the wall and sent them crashing to the floor.
Detroit did not follow. He wanted to say more, something profound to try to keep Jimmy Gill from blundering into the unknown blinded by the beauty of this woman he had only just met. Why couldn't Jimmy ever think things through, line up the pros and cons on each side of a ledger and balance the decision on cold hard facts instead of raw, wild emotion? Detroit tried to lose himself in a schematic that unfolded over the entire work bench but the lines kept merging and the symbols blurred.
Jimmy sat, reared back in his big office chair, studying the patterns of the ceiling tile over his head. He had spent two hours with Cleo Michaels and, once past the initial stun of her beauty, he had been so lost in their talk of radio signals and music that lust had not cropped up again at all. And he had meant exactly what he had growled to Detroit. It was none of his business who he was doing what to or when or why.
If Jimmy wanted to buy half the radio stations in Texas, it was none of Detroit’s business regardless of what expedient, made-up legal title he might have in front of his silly name on the top of a piece of letterhead. He could wire radio equipment together all right and keep a transmitter humming on spit and tin foil, but he better keep his nose out of the rest of the business that he did not know jack about.
Jimmy knew it was Detroit’s weak knock at his door ten minutes later. He let him try three more times, though, before he grunted a reluctant, "Come on in." That fifteen seconds gave Jimmy Gill all the time he needed to reload his weapons.
"Look, Jimmy. I'm sorry," Detroit said, obviously pulling the apology from somewhere deep inside. "It's just that we both have worked so hard on building up these stations and I can't stand to see us risk it all for some..."
"Dee, you got to trust me! Hear me out for once without jumping to conclusions!" Jimmy was practically yelling at his only friend, but he wanted to slam him down viciously in a chair and force him to listen to what he had to say. Detroit fought to stay cool himself, standing there a full, quiet half minute, shifting from foot to foot, uncomfortable as he always was when the two of them had suffered through such disagreements before. He wanted to make sure whatever he said and however he said it would not send Jimmy storming away again before they could make things right between them. They always had before. Now, more than ever was riding on them coming to an agreement on things.
"Jimmy, I just want to make sure you’re not grabbing hold of some high voltage you can't let go of," Detroit finally said to the carpet, and then sank tiredly into the chair across from him before his feet betrayed him and he fled back to the sanctuary of his shop. "I know what it's like to fall for somebody. I haven't been the same since I met Rachel."
Jimmy continued to dissect the ceiling, but he had relaxed now. It was clear that Dee would be okay. He let him keep talking.
“Jim, you know how many shysters and con artists there are running around Music Row trying to siphon off all the money they can. All these wannabes and never-wases trying to cash in on somebody else's talent or ideas. How many crooks there are out there who would love to jump on board with us for the ride? I just want to make sure...”
"Where's the nearest satellite uplink?"
Detroit stopped cold in mid-sentence. He looked at Jimmy sideways once more with that familiar puzzled expression of his, as if he seriously suspected that Brother James had gone stone crazy. Lord knows, he should have been used to such questions by now.
"The Grand Ole Opry House out at Opryland is building an uplink for all the network television specials and the like. Why?"
"Do you know anybody over there?"
"I know everybody over there. I helped them wire up the new mixing suite in the auditorium. It’s the world’s biggest radio studio, you know."
Jimmy obviously did not care about the trivia. He rattled on.
"Is it true you can put audio piggy-back on the television signal when it goes up to the satellites?"
"Sure you can. They have plenty of subcarriers," Detroit said, impressed that Jimmy knew this much about a technical topic. "They mostly use it for backhaul and talkback and cue for the production crews on programs and stuff like that, but, yeah, they could be EQed to 25K I think. Plenty enough frequency response for FM radio."
Jimmy did not understand all that gibberish but he nodded as if he did. Detroit had given the right answer: "Sure you can," and Jimmy had aroused his interest. Dee was sniffing the bait.
"How about see what they would charge us to put a couple of stereo channels up, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."
"Okay. You going to make me guess what the hell you are talking about?" Dee nibbled.
"We're fixing to put up a progressive rock and roll radio station in Atlanta, Georgia, aren’t we? And we’ll be playing exactly the same music that we play here in Nashville already. With the same type jocks, the same contests, the same everything else. Only the commercials and call letters will be different between here and there, right?"
Detroit nodded, not following where Jimmy was going at all, but biting the barb of the hook anyway.
"What if we sent The River's programming down to Atlanta on satellite, and just played the local commercials from there? Any ideas how we could do that, Dee?"
Simmons was hooked solid. He twisted in his chair a few seconds, reeling himself in, lost in thought. He suddenly brightened.
"Sure! Audio tones. Just like my black box that got us canned at WROG that time. Different dedicated tape machines and special tones to fire off jingles, use automation carousels for the commercials with a simple ASCII routine to rack them up from a file we could import directly off the traffic system computer..."
Detroit Simmons was mentally spinning wonderful webs, pulling cable, wiring circuit boards, even as he sat there in the chair in Jimmy’s office. But then he remembered something.
"Wait. You said two stereo channels?"
"Picture this, Dee. A station that plays country music, with the biggest stars in the music business stopping by all the time to bring their latest records, do interviews, be a guest deejay, sort of like they do on WSM here. The only place in the world you could do that sort of stuff is right here in Nashville. But what if the radio station in question happens unfortunately to be located in Dallas, Texas, nine-hundred miles away?"
Dee slapped his knees with both hands and cackled. It was suddenly clear to him.
"Damn! We got to have an on-air studio somewhere and it might as well be here as out there in Texas!"
"Right. And I don’t see why we can’t eventually put a lot of the stuff we are going to do on the AM stations up on the satellite and cut some more of our programming costs, too. Just don’t tell the folks at Opryland what we’re up to. They’ll steal our idea in minute."
Jimmy began to spin his plan, to make the two AM stations true community bulletin boards, each like a giant 50,000-watt party line, with remote units popping in all the time with man-on-the-street interviews or direct reports from anything happening in town. And talk show hosts who could generate excitement and controversy and pull common folk into the debates on the turbulent times in which they found themselves as millions eavesdropped. And heavy involvement with sports in games-crazy Atlanta and Dallas, from play-by-play to sports talk shows. Music on AM would be dying a slow but sure death over the next few years as the better fidelity of FM claimed more and more of the available listeners, Jimmy believed. But no other medium could offer the immediacy and flexibility and broad coverage that made AM radio a natural for information and one-to-one communication. Much of the programming would have to originate locally to capture the feeling he wanted to achieve, but there was plenty of what Jimmy called “glue,” the stuff that held the formats together, that would be common to both markets that could be done by satellite from one or the other location.
But before he could preach him the rest of that sermon, Detroit decided that he had heard enough. He jumped to his feet and sprinted toward his shop to start making calls and drawing schematics for all the notions he had conjured up already. But three minutes later, he was back at Jimmy’s office door, hopping with excitement until he could get him off a telephone conversation.
“Yeah? What you got Dee?”
"Footprints!"
Now it was Jimmy Gill’s turn to look sideways at him, baffled.
“What?”
"Footprints, man! Satellites have big footprints. The area down on earth that the satellite's signal covers from space. Anybody with a satellite receiving dish at a station inside that footprint could pick up the stuff we put on the uplink. We could sell our programming to stations all over the country. Doesn’t matter if we have two or two-thousand stations that want to do it, it wouldn't cost us a penny more to put the music and stuff up there for them to tap into."
Jimmy’s mouth fell open as he jumped to his feet, dashed around the desk and danced arm in arm with Detroit. They waltzed out into the lobby, frightening two job applicants, a couple of salesmen, and three singers, waiting to push their songs. Jimmy was amazed that he had not thought of such a natural extension of his original idea. He was ecstatic that Detroit had.
A few of The River’s sales people stuck heads from their cubicles and looked on in shock as their president and the station manager did handstands and a wild square dance in the lobby. Sammie Criswell shielded the phone with her hand to keep a caller from hearing their maniacal screams and gales of wild laughter.
Suddenly, just that quickly, Jimmy Gill and Detroit Simmons were dangling from the side of a tower so tall it touched the ionosphere. And before anyone else knew it, the two of them could be yelling to the wind, waving at the horizon.