The Pitch at 30: In 1980, Chuck Haddix probably sold you a record

Before Chuck Haddix was a weekend fixture as the host of KCUR 89.3’s long-running Fish Fry, he managed PennyLane Records in the twilight of music retail’s golden age. Working for PennyLane owner Hal Brody, the future broadcaster, historian and author was also a Pitch founder.

The Pitch: What did you do at PennyLane?

Haddix: I started managing the store when it was on Wornall, in 1978 or so. Then we moved to Broadway and expanded. It was a jazz and blues and folk store until we moved there and started stocking rock.

How did the paper start?

I had worked with Don [Mayberger] in college when we were both waiters. We became good friends, and he started working [for Brody] in the warehouse. I was living at 54th and Charlotte, and Don lived in Lawrence. He’d park his Ford Econoline in my backyard and sleep in it. We called it Van Morrison. We weren’t making any money. You worked in records for the glory. We started talking about doing a newsletter to promote the store and promote records we were featuring monthly. Don came up with the idea of the Penny Pitch. We were riffing on the PennyLane name. Don would round everybody up at deadline. More often than not, I was the last one to turn in my column. And he’d cut and paste it all together — stay up all night drinking Constant Comment and Thunder tea, highly caffeinated stuff, and put it all together.

Did anyone make money from the paper?

No, but we had a natural advertising base to keep it going. Warner Bros., Capitol, MCA, Columbia — they all had offices here, and if you look at the early issues, the labels were basically underwriting us as the main advertisers. And we had a big pool of talented people who wanted to contribute, so it took on a life of its own. The Westport Trucker had just folded, and the Star didn’t really cover rock. Don had studied journalism in Lawrence, and he knew what he was doing.

How much did you make at PennyLane in those days?

About $200 a week.

What was your background?

English, at UMKC. I wanted to be a poet. I’d done some writing at that point.

What were the models for the Penny Pitch?

We were way into National Lampoon and the underground presses — the Berkeley Barb and the L.A. Free Press and the Trucker. We were enrolled in the Hunter S. Thompson school of gonzo journalism — we were just doing it. It happened really spontaneously. We saw the success of the first issue, and we’re all ego-driven anyway. Having your own column in a paper is heady stuff. So we decided to produce a monthly newspaper. We were very naïve. No one got paid to do it. We did it as part of our job.

At what point did you really start thinking of yourselves as producing what we think of as an alt weekly in that mode?

We always had a political agenda because we were anti-establishment. We were a bunch of hippies, is what we were. Former hippies. And we were all blasted. We were liberals and radicals. We were stream-of-consciousness writers. We didn’t edit. I learned how to write at the Pitch. Don is a humorist. He had this wicked sense of humor, and he’d plant jokes in there. When he left, someone sent a letter to the editor and said, “All the jokes fell out of my Pitch.”

Dwight Frizzell was the second editor. He came from the Art Institute, and the paper when he took over became really arty and dense. I don’t think Hal enjoyed that. When Dwight was editor, there weren’t many ads in there. Hal was interested in advertising and making money off it. He was the only one who made money from the paper. His pseudonym in the early issues was “Hal Profit.” He did me a favor when he fired me because I would have got stuck in the record business, and of course that ship went down. You had to stand in line to be fired by Hal. [Laughs.] It didn’t really become professional until Donna Trussell took over.

Did the paper help the store?

It helped the whole scene. When Ry Cooder came to town, his label, Warner Bros., didn’t think we could sell out the Uptown. So we promoted the event in the Pitch and supported it with local radio, and it sold out. A friend of LeRoi’s owned Best Buy Motors, and so we were going to give away a car to a lucky winner. That night, the Uptown was packed to the rafters, and Ry Cooder couldn’t believe all these people had come to see him. LeRoi rolled up the aisle, drunk as the lord, to give away the car. The car had broken down on the way to the concert, so we had to get another one. We were old-style record guys. We could break records locally. And the Pitch became the vehicle to get the word out.

The nice thing about working there was, PennyLane was a social gathering spot. People would stop by and hang out. Everybody in town knows me now because of my association with Penny­Lane back in the day. I helped customers and oversaw the day-to-day operations. I would turn them on to music. Westport was a hip place in those days — a lot of great restaurants and music.

There’s a lot of parallels between today’s scene and what happened back then. It was grassroots, and — just like you are today — we were committed to cultivating local groups. Blue Rhythm Band was one of our favorites, so they got a lot of press. At that same time, you have the [Kansas City] Blues Society starting up and a lot of record stores, and the Uptown Theater starting up, the premier place for shows.

We weren’t conscious that we were creating something. We were just doing it. Westport was the center of nightlife. Midtown was the place then — Parody Hall and the Grand Emporium were starting. We were trying to be the cultural voice of all that, of the city. And guys like Dwight and LeRoi had so much personality. We were characters and we were all good friends. LeRoi was on the scene, man. And he loved women.

And the women liked him?

Women loooooooved LeRoi. He was a big star at the Pitch and at PennyLane.

Do you still read The Pitch?

I read it every week. I like Charles Ferruzza’s column. The only criticism I have is that there’s a whole lot of the music scene that isn’t covered there. You could say that about the Star, too. Rock and roll gets a lot of press, but there’s a lot of other music going on in town. The paper was crude, and it needed to evolve and really take on a life of its own. And it was natural for Hal to sell it eventually as the alternative press came up. But we set the irreverent tone for the Pitch.