THE ELECTRIFYING MOJO - WGPR / WJLB / WHYT Detroit

When you're nearing the end of your rope, don't slide off . . . tie a knot . . . keep hanging . . . keep remembering . . . ain't nobody bad like you . . . For the next five hours there will be no need to change stations, insert eight track tapes, cassettes, video discs or other music or entertainment paraphernalia . . . sit back and relax . . . let Mojo handle it . . .

WGPR -- Where God's Presence Radiates -- sounded the most down-home of any Detroit station. Fittingly, its studios were in a building, on East Jefferson Avenue at Mt. Elliott, that had once housed an automobile dealership.

This building was also home to WGPR-TV, America's first black-owned television station. Its broadcast day circa late 1970s consisted primarily of old public domain movies played from video cassettes. Wrinkles and dropouts would pass by on the screen.

Come midnight, while "Reefer Madness" was on channel 62, the visitor to 107.5 on the FM dial would hear this:

Will all the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise . . . if you are in bed, you don't have to get up, as long as you get down . . . if you are in water, make waves . . . if you are driving - honk your horn, flash your lights . . . if you are at home, turn on your porch light for the next hour to show solidarity with the MFA . . . This meeting of the International Midnight Funk Association is hereby called to order, Electrifying Mojo presiding . . . may the funk be with you always . . .

I flashed my headlights. In traffic coming the other way, I'd see blink-blink . . . blink-blink . . .

No one called anything "awesome" in 1979. But this was; pure theater of the mind coming from a little room in the orphan radio station on the east side of town.
Mojo was deliberately secretive. He never allowed himself to be photographed. Few people knew his real name. Between radio jobs, he would hole up and listen to music, and radio, all day, for weeks. As he explained -- over music from Star Wars soundtracks -- he came to Earth from a distant galaxy in his Mothership, with one purpose in mind: to play music for the inhabitants of our planet.

He did, however, admit to, while a long record was on, standing at the plate glass window of the former auto showroom and watching traffic pass on East Jefferson, just to get a feel for the city whose rhythms and sounds and people he loved.

If I was headed home late -- with WGPR on, of course -- and the light at Mt. Elliott turned red, I'd roll up to it and look for a shadowy figure standing between the parted curtains. If there was none, I pretended he was there anyway.

Mojo took the Mothership to WJLB, by that time on FM, and then to WHYT; the former WJR-FM that had dropped beautiful music for a top 40 "Hot Hits" format in 1982. A Mojo set might include, between New Edition, Run DMC, and Prince; Falco, the B-52s, or Thomas Dolby. The gap between black stations and white stations had virtually disappeared.

Over four hundred friends gathered at Detroit's Tried Stone Baptist Church, on December 7, 1992, to say goodbye to Ernie Durham. The Coachman passed on Christmas Eve 2000. The Detroit Metro Times printed a tribute. Mojo is still in town, somewhere, possibly on 105.9 WDMK. The original Mothership, thanks to a donated collection of old airchecks, lands every Friday night at ten, Motor City time, on Detroit-based Internet broadcaster Emancipation Radio.

In the radio business, last month can seem nostalgic. Not that many calendar years have passed since Ernie D and the Coachman and Mojo ruled, but it can seems like forever. 1400 in Detroit is now a talk station. You have to search hard among the talk shows on WDET to find music. "Air personalities" -- they're not deejays anymore -- read what is written for them, and none of it rhymes. [[So much for personality.) And having blues on any station that calls itself Kiss or The Mix would be asking way too much of an already overburdened world.

Fortunately, there was tape. Airchecks allow the next generations to hear samples of what made this era of black radio history so great. Tape does come with a curse, however. Regardless of how many airchecks you have, or hear, you'll always wish there were more.

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