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We All Shine On

John, Yoko, and Me

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Hardcover
$32.00 US
6.25"W x 9.26"H x 1.01"D   | 18 oz | 12 per carton
On sale Oct 22, 2024 | 304 Pages | 9780593475553
A personal and revealing look at the last ten years of John Lennon’s life and his partnership with Yoko Ono, written by the friend who knew them best

In 1972, Elliot Mintz installed a red light in his bedroom in Laurel Canyon. When it started flashing, it meant that either John Lennon or Yoko Ono—or sometimes both—were calling him. Which they did almost every day for nearly ten years, engaging Mintz in hours-long late-night phone conversations that all but consumed him for the better part of a decade.

In We All Shine On, Mintz—a former radio and television host in Los Angeles—recounts the story of how their unlikely friendship began and where it led him over the years, revealing the ups and downs of a wild, touching, heartbreaking, and sometimes shocking relationship. Mintz takes readers inside John and Yoko’s inner sanctums, including their expansive seventh-floor apartment in New York’s fabled Dakota building, where Mintz was something of a semipermanent fixture, ultimately becoming the Lennons' closest and most trusted confidant. Mintz was with John and Yoko through creative highs, relationship and private challenges, fascinating interactions with the other former Beatles, and the happiest moment of their lives together, the birth of their son, Sean. He was also by Yoko’s side during the aftermath of John’s assassination on the doorstep of the Dakota—not merely a witness to it all, but a key figure in the drama of John and Yoko’s extraordinary lives.
 
We All Shine On is a must-read for Beatles and Lennon fans, offering an up close and intimate view of one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, as well as one of the most fascinating marriages. But it’s also a relationship story that just about everyone can relate to, a tale about partnership, loyalty, and trust, and most of all, the lasting legacy of a true and deep friendship.
“It’s hard to define the relationship Elliot had with our family. But I ultimately think the best word to describe him is: friend. Perhaps our closest friend. The reason I wanted Elliot to write a book, first and foremost, is because he is a good storyteller. The fact that he was there in the lives of John and Yoko (and mine), is really just icing on the cake. I like hearing him talk, and I’m sure you will, too.” —Sean Ono Lennon

"Packed with insider details about Lennon and Ono’s unique creative alchemy, Lennon’s fabled, debaucherous “Lost Weekend” apart from Ono in Los Angeles between 1973-1975 and the horrifying aftermath of Lennon’s 1980 murder, We All Shine On is, at last, Mintz’s story too. In it, he ponders what his life might have been like had he never picked up that phone in the first place (he never married or had children), and why, he, of all people, became the sympathetic ear of choice for Lennon, Ono and a wealth of other celebrities of the time." —Spin News

“With We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me, author and publicist Elliot Mintz fashions a heartbreaking portrait of Lennon’s life and times beyond the recording studio.” —Salon

“Elliot Mintz’s We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me has the interests of Beatle People especially piqued. Arguably, no one was closer to John and Yoko Lennon during the 1970s or spent more time with them in person or on the phone than Mintz.” Houston Press

“Radio personality Mintz debuts with a vivid account of the decade he spent as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s confidante, fixer, and friend… It’s a captivating and intimate window into the complicated lives of one of rock’s most legendary couples.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A charmingly modest tale of a long brush with stardom, with all its pleasures and frustrations.” —Kirkus

"We All Shine On makes readers feel as if they’ve spent time with the book’s subjects…you’ll likely find the captivating story of this unusual friendship unduly hard to put down.” —BookPage

© Jimmy Steinfeldt
Elliot Mintz is a professional media consultant who has worked with the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bob Dylan, Paris Hilton, Diana Ross, and many more. Prior to being a consultant, Mintz worked as a radio DJ and television host and served as the entertainment correspondent for Eyewitness News on KABC. View titles by Elliot Mintz
One

Laurel Canyon, 1970

Once upon a time, there was a place called Laurel Canyon.

It's still around, of course. Turn north off Sunset onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, steer up the hill for about a mile, past the Canyon Country Store, and you'll wind up in a neighborhood that continues to go by that name.

But it's not Laurel Canyon. Not the Laurel Canyon I knew back in the 1970s.

Every couple of decades or so, certain geographical points become epicenters of creativity, inspiration, and invention. Paris in the 1920s. Chicago in the 1930s. New York in the 1950s. And in the 1970s, the spot on the planet that seemed to magnetically attract the world's best and brightest artists, especially in the music industry, was this deceptively quiet enclave nestled like a secret garden between the San Fernando Valley and what was then the wheezing heart of old Hollywood.

When I moved to the neighborhood in the late 1960s, I had no idea what I was about to experience. I was a young broadcaster in my twenties, bouncing from job to job at various L.A. radio stations, collecting unemployment checks between gigs, and I needed a cheap place to live. At the time, Laurel Canyon was the city's bohemian district, poor cousin to Benedict and Coldwater Canyons, which were closer to ritzy Beverly Hills. The modest two-story house I ultimately settled into on Oak Court-then a dirt dead-end road-cost me all of $300 a month. It was tiny, maybe nine hundred square feet, with a kitchenette barely big enough to boil an egg, and it was perched so high up on the edge of a steep slope you had to climb a mountain of rickety steps to get to it. Fortunately, the landlord had installed a "hillevator"-a sort of open-air electric tram-that shuttled you from street level to the house's front door. Or at least, it did when it was working.

What drew me to the area-aside from its affordability-was its charming rustic ambiance. It was a short five-minute drive up the hill from the Sunset Strip, which even back then was a honking, teeming hive of urban activity. But once you got to the top of the road, you suddenly found yourself in a magical forest enveloped under a canopy of elderberry and eucalyptus trees. A mile below, it was traffic lights, fender benders, exhaust fumes, and police sirens. Up here, it was hummingbirds, butterflies, and bunnies, a pastoral sanctuary where the calming scent of jasmine (and oftentimes marijuana) perfumed the air.

Over those first few months, as I walked my new neighborhood with my then best friend-an Irish setter pup I named after one of my favorite childhood movie characters, Shane-I began to realize that there was much more to Laurel Canyon than a bucolic place to hang one's hat. For one thing, virtually everyone's door was always open, literally and figuratively. Despite the grisly Manson murders just a year earlier in nearby Benedict Canyon-a tragedy that spread fear and paranoia throughout Los Angeles-this was still a veritable paradise. Strangers not only smiled at me and said hello-or flashed a peace sign-as we passed each other on the narrow streets, but sometimes they'd stop for a bit of conversation and even invite me into their homes for a bite to eat. Granted, it was a different, more trusting time-the era of love beads, bell-bottoms, and free-range hairstyles-but even back in the late '60s and early '70s, this extra level of friendliness was astonishing.

For another thing, there was almost always music drifting from the open windows of just about every house and cottage. And not just any old music, but thrilling new sounds, angelic harmonies and funky folksy riffs. When I started meeting and befriending the locals-people like Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills, to name just a few of my immediate neighbors-it slowly began to dawn on me that I was not living in a normal residential zone. I had moved smack into the middle of a burgeoning musical renaissance.

A handful of the inhabitants were already celebrities. Micky Dolenz, who lived in a big house on Horse Shoe Canyon Road, and David Cassidy, who lived on Cole Crest Drive, both had hit TV shows in 1970-The Monkees and The Partridge Family. But many of the future musical superstars living in Laurel Canyon had not yet achieved the global fame that they would soon enjoy. Some, like Frank Zappa, another nearby neighbor, had already landed their first record deals. Others were still struggling to find their sound and make their rent. But, to me, all of them, famous or not, were merely the folks next door, my startlingly affable neighbors.

One thing almost everyone had in common in Laurel Canyon was that we were all transplants to the neighborhood: we had made a conscious choice to move here from a variety of far-flung origins. Zappa came from Baltimore. Mitchell was raised in Canada. Ronstadt hailed from Arizona. My own journey began in New York City. My dad, an immigrant from Poland, had worked his way up through the garment business and started his own company manufacturing plus-sized ladies' coats and suits. He made a decent enough living to afford a small but comfortable two-bedroom apartment-my younger sister and I shared one of them-in Washington Heights, which back in the 1950s was something of a starter neighborhood for Jewish families who were taking their first tentative steps into the middle class.

I was, to put it mildly, an unlikely candidate for a career in radio. For one thing, around the time I turned fifteen, I developed a severe stutter. Making my speech even more inelegant, I also had a strong New York accent. I was much smaller and slighter than most of my classmates, which, combined with my speech difficulties, put a bull's-eye on me for bullies, making me even more shy and awkward around strangers. The idea of speaking in front of others, even to small groups in classrooms, was terrifying. Indeed, as a teenager I had nightmares about it. Luckily, I was also developing what would become lifelong insomnia, so sleep was increasingly rare.

Nevertheless, despite all those obstacles, the only thing in the world I wanted to be was a broadcaster.

I suppose it was precisely because of my adolescent isolation that I was drawn to radio and television. My only friends back then were on the airwaves. I spent countless hours as a kid listening to monologist Jean Shepherd spinning hypnotic spontaneous narratives on WOR Radio. When I was just a bit older, I became one-sided buddies with Jack Paar. I was watching NBC the night in 1960 when he famously walked off The Tonight Show; it traumatized me for days, as if I really had lost a best pal. Fortunately, my chum David Susskind remained on the air, hosting a local 11:00 p.m. television talk show called Open End. There was no stop time for the program: it kept going until the guests had run out of conversation. Perfect viewing for a budding young night owl.

One day, as I was getting ready to graduate high school, I told my father about my future career plans.

"Pop," I said, "I'm going into radio."

He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and smiled.

"That's a good business," he replied in his Yiddish-tinged accent, patting my knee. "That appliance store on 181st Street-always busy. People always need to get those things fixed."

"Pop," I corrected him, "I'm not going to repair them; I'm going to be inside them. I'm going to be one of the people you hear on the radio. I'm going to be a broadcaster."

He looked at me as if I'd just told him I was joining the astronaut program.

I applied to nine different colleges with broadcasting departments and was accepted by only one: Los Angeles City College. So, in the summer of '63, I packed a bag, got on an airplane for the first time in my life, and turned up on its Hollywood campus with a stutter and a New York accent. And $300 for tuition.

They quickly put me through my paces, taught me how to look into a camera and make eye contact, how to do sportscasts and weather reports, and how to spin records and conduct interviews. (I enjoyed that last one the most.) Also, how to speak without a stutter or an accent.

The homework in this last area was a series of brutal but surprisingly effective breathing and talking exercises. I would come back from classes-I was leasing a tiny room between Sunset and Hollywood-lie down on the floor, put an eighteen-pound typewriter on my solar plexus, stick out my tongue, and say "Ahhhh" for as long as I could inhale and exhale. It didn't take too long before both my accent and stutter were beaten into submission.

I'd only been in school about two or three months when I stumbled into the biggest break of my career, which, as it happened, occurred on one of the worst days in American history. We were attending classes on November 22, 1963, when the announcement came over the school speakers that President Kennedy had been shot; students were instructed to go home. Most did, but a small group of us broadcasting kids headed to our department's bungalow and huddled around a black-and-white TV to watch Walter Cronkite's reportage of the assassination. A few hours into the newscast, the first photos of Lee Harvey Oswald started flashing onto the screen.

"That's Lee!" I heard one of my classmates exclaim. "I was in the Marines with that guy!"

I don't know how, during that horrible, tragic day, I had the presence of mind to recognize the massive opportunity that had just fallen into my lap. But I took my classmate-his name was Roland Bynum-into another room, sat down with him, and turned on my tape recorder. Honestly, it wasn't the most in-depth interview of my career-I was still very much a news radio novice-but it was definitely the most auspiciously timed. When I finished, I took the tape back to my one-room apartment and placed a call to the biggest local radio news station in L.A.

"Hi, my name is Elliot and I go to L.A. City College, and I just did an interview with a man who served in the Marine Corps with Lee Harvey Oswald," I told whoever answered the phone. "Would you like the tape?"

Within what seemed like a hundredth of a second, a courier turned up on a motorcycle to retrieve the recording. A few hundredths of a second later, my interview was being broadcast across the city. My phone started ringing off the hook, with outlets around the world reaching out. By the time the sun set that day, my little exclusive was airing nationally on the CBS Evening News.

I spent the next couple of years at L.A. City College honing my craft, becoming especially adept at the art of celebrity booking. I landed an interview with Jayne Mansfield-who back then was being presented by the studios as the new Marilyn Monroe-by pestering her agent with relentless letters and even acquiring a map to the stars' homes and writing one to Mansfield herself. She must have read my letter, because one day, while I was at home, warming up a bowl of split pea soup on my hot plate, my phone rang. I was astonished to hear her voice on the other end. She not only agreed to the interview but invited me to a party at her house in Beverly Hills. Not long after that, I spotted Sal Mineo at a bar in Hollywood where I'd gone to cover a stage hypnotist. I landed an interview with the Rebel Without a Cause actor as well. In fact, Sal and I ended up becoming close friends.

After I graduated from City College, I set out to look for my first real job in radio. I found one at a publicly funded station called KPFK, which on the face of it didn't necessarily seem like a perfect fit for me. Back then, listener-supported radio appealed mostly to older people, so KPFK played a lot of harpsichord music. Sometimes it would broadcast lectures on bird-watching. But I had a plan for the station, which I pitched during my job interview.

"Look," I said, "I know I'm only a kid and I just got out of school, but I have an idea for a telephone talk show for teenagers. I want to interview people that teens are interested in, like rock stars. I could do it three nights a week, from ten p.m. to two a.m. We'd call it Looking in with Elliot Mintz."

The station manager gave me the same skeptical look my father had in our kitchen but for some reason said yes-and that's how, at twenty-one, I became the youngest radio talk show host in America.

I focused my interviews at KPFK on the musicians and artists that nobody else would book, which in those days was pretty much everyone in the counterculture. Remember, this was when the three broadcast networks-ABC, NBC, and CBS-had a stranglehold on the airwaves. Nobody was interviewing rock stars and beat poets, not on radio and certainly not on TV. Johnny Carson was never going to invite Frank Zappa or Allen Ginsberg as guests. For a while, I was the only game in town.

It was, I have to admit, a pretty cushy gig, especially for an insomniac. Since my show was a late-night program, I would get home from work at around 3:00 a.m., smoke a joint, read a book, relax, go to bed, and sleep till noon. Then I'd drift into the station in the afternoon and plan my night's programming. For this not-so-grueling labor, I was paid the handsome sum of $65 a week, just enough to afford my first car, a used 1964 Morris Minor, for which I paid $300. Best of all, my show rapidly began attracting an audience, which wasn't all that surprising given the youthquake rumbling across the country at the time. I was hardly becoming famous-fame was never my goal anyway-but I was getting noticed within the broadcasting community.

In fact, before long, I was approached by a bigger commercial radio station, KLAC, which offered me much better money-$300 a week-for essentially the same job, being the host of a talk show aimed at young listeners. And so it went for the next few years as I climbed L.A.'s radio station food chain, landing different jobs, sometimes stumbling and losing them, but always ultimately finding another, until I eventually ended up on KLOS, the station where, in the fall of 1971, I would conduct what would turn out to be the most consequential interview of my life.

About

A personal and revealing look at the last ten years of John Lennon’s life and his partnership with Yoko Ono, written by the friend who knew them best

In 1972, Elliot Mintz installed a red light in his bedroom in Laurel Canyon. When it started flashing, it meant that either John Lennon or Yoko Ono—or sometimes both—were calling him. Which they did almost every day for nearly ten years, engaging Mintz in hours-long late-night phone conversations that all but consumed him for the better part of a decade.

In We All Shine On, Mintz—a former radio and television host in Los Angeles—recounts the story of how their unlikely friendship began and where it led him over the years, revealing the ups and downs of a wild, touching, heartbreaking, and sometimes shocking relationship. Mintz takes readers inside John and Yoko’s inner sanctums, including their expansive seventh-floor apartment in New York’s fabled Dakota building, where Mintz was something of a semipermanent fixture, ultimately becoming the Lennons' closest and most trusted confidant. Mintz was with John and Yoko through creative highs, relationship and private challenges, fascinating interactions with the other former Beatles, and the happiest moment of their lives together, the birth of their son, Sean. He was also by Yoko’s side during the aftermath of John’s assassination on the doorstep of the Dakota—not merely a witness to it all, but a key figure in the drama of John and Yoko’s extraordinary lives.
 
We All Shine On is a must-read for Beatles and Lennon fans, offering an up close and intimate view of one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, as well as one of the most fascinating marriages. But it’s also a relationship story that just about everyone can relate to, a tale about partnership, loyalty, and trust, and most of all, the lasting legacy of a true and deep friendship.

Praise

“It’s hard to define the relationship Elliot had with our family. But I ultimately think the best word to describe him is: friend. Perhaps our closest friend. The reason I wanted Elliot to write a book, first and foremost, is because he is a good storyteller. The fact that he was there in the lives of John and Yoko (and mine), is really just icing on the cake. I like hearing him talk, and I’m sure you will, too.” —Sean Ono Lennon

"Packed with insider details about Lennon and Ono’s unique creative alchemy, Lennon’s fabled, debaucherous “Lost Weekend” apart from Ono in Los Angeles between 1973-1975 and the horrifying aftermath of Lennon’s 1980 murder, We All Shine On is, at last, Mintz’s story too. In it, he ponders what his life might have been like had he never picked up that phone in the first place (he never married or had children), and why, he, of all people, became the sympathetic ear of choice for Lennon, Ono and a wealth of other celebrities of the time." —Spin News

“With We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me, author and publicist Elliot Mintz fashions a heartbreaking portrait of Lennon’s life and times beyond the recording studio.” —Salon

“Elliot Mintz’s We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me has the interests of Beatle People especially piqued. Arguably, no one was closer to John and Yoko Lennon during the 1970s or spent more time with them in person or on the phone than Mintz.” Houston Press

“Radio personality Mintz debuts with a vivid account of the decade he spent as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s confidante, fixer, and friend… It’s a captivating and intimate window into the complicated lives of one of rock’s most legendary couples.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A charmingly modest tale of a long brush with stardom, with all its pleasures and frustrations.” —Kirkus

"We All Shine On makes readers feel as if they’ve spent time with the book’s subjects…you’ll likely find the captivating story of this unusual friendship unduly hard to put down.” —BookPage

Author

© Jimmy Steinfeldt
Elliot Mintz is a professional media consultant who has worked with the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bob Dylan, Paris Hilton, Diana Ross, and many more. Prior to being a consultant, Mintz worked as a radio DJ and television host and served as the entertainment correspondent for Eyewitness News on KABC. View titles by Elliot Mintz

Excerpt

One

Laurel Canyon, 1970

Once upon a time, there was a place called Laurel Canyon.

It's still around, of course. Turn north off Sunset onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, steer up the hill for about a mile, past the Canyon Country Store, and you'll wind up in a neighborhood that continues to go by that name.

But it's not Laurel Canyon. Not the Laurel Canyon I knew back in the 1970s.

Every couple of decades or so, certain geographical points become epicenters of creativity, inspiration, and invention. Paris in the 1920s. Chicago in the 1930s. New York in the 1950s. And in the 1970s, the spot on the planet that seemed to magnetically attract the world's best and brightest artists, especially in the music industry, was this deceptively quiet enclave nestled like a secret garden between the San Fernando Valley and what was then the wheezing heart of old Hollywood.

When I moved to the neighborhood in the late 1960s, I had no idea what I was about to experience. I was a young broadcaster in my twenties, bouncing from job to job at various L.A. radio stations, collecting unemployment checks between gigs, and I needed a cheap place to live. At the time, Laurel Canyon was the city's bohemian district, poor cousin to Benedict and Coldwater Canyons, which were closer to ritzy Beverly Hills. The modest two-story house I ultimately settled into on Oak Court-then a dirt dead-end road-cost me all of $300 a month. It was tiny, maybe nine hundred square feet, with a kitchenette barely big enough to boil an egg, and it was perched so high up on the edge of a steep slope you had to climb a mountain of rickety steps to get to it. Fortunately, the landlord had installed a "hillevator"-a sort of open-air electric tram-that shuttled you from street level to the house's front door. Or at least, it did when it was working.

What drew me to the area-aside from its affordability-was its charming rustic ambiance. It was a short five-minute drive up the hill from the Sunset Strip, which even back then was a honking, teeming hive of urban activity. But once you got to the top of the road, you suddenly found yourself in a magical forest enveloped under a canopy of elderberry and eucalyptus trees. A mile below, it was traffic lights, fender benders, exhaust fumes, and police sirens. Up here, it was hummingbirds, butterflies, and bunnies, a pastoral sanctuary where the calming scent of jasmine (and oftentimes marijuana) perfumed the air.

Over those first few months, as I walked my new neighborhood with my then best friend-an Irish setter pup I named after one of my favorite childhood movie characters, Shane-I began to realize that there was much more to Laurel Canyon than a bucolic place to hang one's hat. For one thing, virtually everyone's door was always open, literally and figuratively. Despite the grisly Manson murders just a year earlier in nearby Benedict Canyon-a tragedy that spread fear and paranoia throughout Los Angeles-this was still a veritable paradise. Strangers not only smiled at me and said hello-or flashed a peace sign-as we passed each other on the narrow streets, but sometimes they'd stop for a bit of conversation and even invite me into their homes for a bite to eat. Granted, it was a different, more trusting time-the era of love beads, bell-bottoms, and free-range hairstyles-but even back in the late '60s and early '70s, this extra level of friendliness was astonishing.

For another thing, there was almost always music drifting from the open windows of just about every house and cottage. And not just any old music, but thrilling new sounds, angelic harmonies and funky folksy riffs. When I started meeting and befriending the locals-people like Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills, to name just a few of my immediate neighbors-it slowly began to dawn on me that I was not living in a normal residential zone. I had moved smack into the middle of a burgeoning musical renaissance.

A handful of the inhabitants were already celebrities. Micky Dolenz, who lived in a big house on Horse Shoe Canyon Road, and David Cassidy, who lived on Cole Crest Drive, both had hit TV shows in 1970-The Monkees and The Partridge Family. But many of the future musical superstars living in Laurel Canyon had not yet achieved the global fame that they would soon enjoy. Some, like Frank Zappa, another nearby neighbor, had already landed their first record deals. Others were still struggling to find their sound and make their rent. But, to me, all of them, famous or not, were merely the folks next door, my startlingly affable neighbors.

One thing almost everyone had in common in Laurel Canyon was that we were all transplants to the neighborhood: we had made a conscious choice to move here from a variety of far-flung origins. Zappa came from Baltimore. Mitchell was raised in Canada. Ronstadt hailed from Arizona. My own journey began in New York City. My dad, an immigrant from Poland, had worked his way up through the garment business and started his own company manufacturing plus-sized ladies' coats and suits. He made a decent enough living to afford a small but comfortable two-bedroom apartment-my younger sister and I shared one of them-in Washington Heights, which back in the 1950s was something of a starter neighborhood for Jewish families who were taking their first tentative steps into the middle class.

I was, to put it mildly, an unlikely candidate for a career in radio. For one thing, around the time I turned fifteen, I developed a severe stutter. Making my speech even more inelegant, I also had a strong New York accent. I was much smaller and slighter than most of my classmates, which, combined with my speech difficulties, put a bull's-eye on me for bullies, making me even more shy and awkward around strangers. The idea of speaking in front of others, even to small groups in classrooms, was terrifying. Indeed, as a teenager I had nightmares about it. Luckily, I was also developing what would become lifelong insomnia, so sleep was increasingly rare.

Nevertheless, despite all those obstacles, the only thing in the world I wanted to be was a broadcaster.

I suppose it was precisely because of my adolescent isolation that I was drawn to radio and television. My only friends back then were on the airwaves. I spent countless hours as a kid listening to monologist Jean Shepherd spinning hypnotic spontaneous narratives on WOR Radio. When I was just a bit older, I became one-sided buddies with Jack Paar. I was watching NBC the night in 1960 when he famously walked off The Tonight Show; it traumatized me for days, as if I really had lost a best pal. Fortunately, my chum David Susskind remained on the air, hosting a local 11:00 p.m. television talk show called Open End. There was no stop time for the program: it kept going until the guests had run out of conversation. Perfect viewing for a budding young night owl.

One day, as I was getting ready to graduate high school, I told my father about my future career plans.

"Pop," I said, "I'm going into radio."

He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and smiled.

"That's a good business," he replied in his Yiddish-tinged accent, patting my knee. "That appliance store on 181st Street-always busy. People always need to get those things fixed."

"Pop," I corrected him, "I'm not going to repair them; I'm going to be inside them. I'm going to be one of the people you hear on the radio. I'm going to be a broadcaster."

He looked at me as if I'd just told him I was joining the astronaut program.

I applied to nine different colleges with broadcasting departments and was accepted by only one: Los Angeles City College. So, in the summer of '63, I packed a bag, got on an airplane for the first time in my life, and turned up on its Hollywood campus with a stutter and a New York accent. And $300 for tuition.

They quickly put me through my paces, taught me how to look into a camera and make eye contact, how to do sportscasts and weather reports, and how to spin records and conduct interviews. (I enjoyed that last one the most.) Also, how to speak without a stutter or an accent.

The homework in this last area was a series of brutal but surprisingly effective breathing and talking exercises. I would come back from classes-I was leasing a tiny room between Sunset and Hollywood-lie down on the floor, put an eighteen-pound typewriter on my solar plexus, stick out my tongue, and say "Ahhhh" for as long as I could inhale and exhale. It didn't take too long before both my accent and stutter were beaten into submission.

I'd only been in school about two or three months when I stumbled into the biggest break of my career, which, as it happened, occurred on one of the worst days in American history. We were attending classes on November 22, 1963, when the announcement came over the school speakers that President Kennedy had been shot; students were instructed to go home. Most did, but a small group of us broadcasting kids headed to our department's bungalow and huddled around a black-and-white TV to watch Walter Cronkite's reportage of the assassination. A few hours into the newscast, the first photos of Lee Harvey Oswald started flashing onto the screen.

"That's Lee!" I heard one of my classmates exclaim. "I was in the Marines with that guy!"

I don't know how, during that horrible, tragic day, I had the presence of mind to recognize the massive opportunity that had just fallen into my lap. But I took my classmate-his name was Roland Bynum-into another room, sat down with him, and turned on my tape recorder. Honestly, it wasn't the most in-depth interview of my career-I was still very much a news radio novice-but it was definitely the most auspiciously timed. When I finished, I took the tape back to my one-room apartment and placed a call to the biggest local radio news station in L.A.

"Hi, my name is Elliot and I go to L.A. City College, and I just did an interview with a man who served in the Marine Corps with Lee Harvey Oswald," I told whoever answered the phone. "Would you like the tape?"

Within what seemed like a hundredth of a second, a courier turned up on a motorcycle to retrieve the recording. A few hundredths of a second later, my interview was being broadcast across the city. My phone started ringing off the hook, with outlets around the world reaching out. By the time the sun set that day, my little exclusive was airing nationally on the CBS Evening News.

I spent the next couple of years at L.A. City College honing my craft, becoming especially adept at the art of celebrity booking. I landed an interview with Jayne Mansfield-who back then was being presented by the studios as the new Marilyn Monroe-by pestering her agent with relentless letters and even acquiring a map to the stars' homes and writing one to Mansfield herself. She must have read my letter, because one day, while I was at home, warming up a bowl of split pea soup on my hot plate, my phone rang. I was astonished to hear her voice on the other end. She not only agreed to the interview but invited me to a party at her house in Beverly Hills. Not long after that, I spotted Sal Mineo at a bar in Hollywood where I'd gone to cover a stage hypnotist. I landed an interview with the Rebel Without a Cause actor as well. In fact, Sal and I ended up becoming close friends.

After I graduated from City College, I set out to look for my first real job in radio. I found one at a publicly funded station called KPFK, which on the face of it didn't necessarily seem like a perfect fit for me. Back then, listener-supported radio appealed mostly to older people, so KPFK played a lot of harpsichord music. Sometimes it would broadcast lectures on bird-watching. But I had a plan for the station, which I pitched during my job interview.

"Look," I said, "I know I'm only a kid and I just got out of school, but I have an idea for a telephone talk show for teenagers. I want to interview people that teens are interested in, like rock stars. I could do it three nights a week, from ten p.m. to two a.m. We'd call it Looking in with Elliot Mintz."

The station manager gave me the same skeptical look my father had in our kitchen but for some reason said yes-and that's how, at twenty-one, I became the youngest radio talk show host in America.

I focused my interviews at KPFK on the musicians and artists that nobody else would book, which in those days was pretty much everyone in the counterculture. Remember, this was when the three broadcast networks-ABC, NBC, and CBS-had a stranglehold on the airwaves. Nobody was interviewing rock stars and beat poets, not on radio and certainly not on TV. Johnny Carson was never going to invite Frank Zappa or Allen Ginsberg as guests. For a while, I was the only game in town.

It was, I have to admit, a pretty cushy gig, especially for an insomniac. Since my show was a late-night program, I would get home from work at around 3:00 a.m., smoke a joint, read a book, relax, go to bed, and sleep till noon. Then I'd drift into the station in the afternoon and plan my night's programming. For this not-so-grueling labor, I was paid the handsome sum of $65 a week, just enough to afford my first car, a used 1964 Morris Minor, for which I paid $300. Best of all, my show rapidly began attracting an audience, which wasn't all that surprising given the youthquake rumbling across the country at the time. I was hardly becoming famous-fame was never my goal anyway-but I was getting noticed within the broadcasting community.

In fact, before long, I was approached by a bigger commercial radio station, KLAC, which offered me much better money-$300 a week-for essentially the same job, being the host of a talk show aimed at young listeners. And so it went for the next few years as I climbed L.A.'s radio station food chain, landing different jobs, sometimes stumbling and losing them, but always ultimately finding another, until I eventually ended up on KLOS, the station where, in the fall of 1971, I would conduct what would turn out to be the most consequential interview of my life.