The Ail-Night Psychiatrist

At 4 a.m., a woman calls to announce: "I'm an alcoholic. I've just poured myself a drink." The man at the other end of the line tells her to throw it out--and she does. At 4:30, an 8-year-old sitting up with a flashlight calls to describe his dog giving birth. Next a woman rings up to say that she has slashed one wrist and intends to slash the other; the man tips off the police, who beat down the door and subdue her. A gang leader calls to announce a rumble with a rival group, and the man arranges to meet both gangs later in the morning to try to settle things peacefully. A former executioner with a bothered conscience calls to discuss capital punishment. All night long the calls pour in--from teen-agers and oldsters, semi-literates and Ph.D.s, unknowns and celebrities, the healthy and the disturbed.

The man at the other end of the phone is no psychiatrist, social worker or minister, but Michael Jackson, a mobile-faced disk jockey for San Francisco radio station KEWB. English-born Jackson hates rock 'n' roll music so much that he has stopped playing it and now talks all night to anyone who calls him, letting his listeners in on both ends of some pretty fascinating conversations. His midnight to 6 a.m. program is heard from San Francisco to the Canadian border and as far west as New Zealand, and it has made such a hit with listeners that KEWB hopes to hook up with a sister station in Los Angeles to give Jackson the entire West for an audience. Comedian Mort Sahl, who has rigged up a special antenna in his backyard in Los Angeles in order to receive Jackson, calls him "the all-night psychiatrist." Make Love Now. Jackson stays in business because his audience finds the program engrossing and totally unpredictable, but he also does his best to dispense free comfort and wisdom to both callers and listeners. His deep, mature, soothing and mellifluous upper-class English voice sounds like Harold Macmillan giving advice to Laertes. He is Fatherhood itself to women in trouble. He recently talked a 15-year-old pregnant child into waking up her parents and telling them the unfortunate news. "Whatever you do, ignore their first reaction," he advised her on the air. "Your father will be furious, but one day while he's shaving he'll tell his image in the mirror, 'You're going to be a grandfather.' That's the day to wait for." The girl did as she was told, and everything worked out as Jackson said it would.

Another girl once whispered over the phone that she feverishly wished to gratify the pleas of the fellow she hoped to marry, who happened to be with her at the moment. "In the dance of the seven veils, they never drop the seventh," Jackson told her, "but people hope they will and come back." A woman once called to say that her husband ignored her so totally that he would not even look at her over the breakfast table. "What do you feed him for breakfast," asked Jackson."Scrambled eggs," said the woman. "Throw them at him," advised Jackson--and she did. Said the husband later: ";It's the first bit of real action I've had out of this dame in three years." Blocked Nasal Passage. Though people's problems are one of the show's biggest fascinations (it is not all morbid curiosity; many people who have had the same problems phone in their advice), Jackson's program is by no means just amateur psychotherapy. People call up to talk about the aurora borealis, safaris, gambling, semantics, socialized medicine, cooking, baseball, electric toothbrushes.

Jackson has a retentive memory and broad range of knowledge, and boldly discusses every subject. Most of his listeners think they are talking to a silver-templed 66-year-old Solomon.

Jackson will be 66 on April 16th, 2000.

Now 28, he was born in London and came to the U.S. in 1958. He drifted into a disk jockey job in San Francisco, got fired because rock 'n' roll nauseated him.

KEWB hired him, told him to play rock 'n' roll and say what he thought of it. On his first show, he introduced a Frankie Avalon record by saying: "Frankie's left nasal passage is unfortunately blocked.

Programs like this will turn the nation into a breed of square-eyed troglodytes." When listeners called to complain, the station put their calls on the air and Jackson began gently debating with them. Soon conversation had crowded the music off the air completely.

Answers for All. On eight telephone lines, Jackson takes 70 to 80 calls nightly, and the busy signals average 17,000 nightly. The police listen to his program faith fully, though he encourages them to trace calls only in attempted suicide cases. Celebrities call frequently; so do experts with answers to the telephoned questions. Doctors, veterinarians, ministers and other regulars who call with advice are given an unpublicized number.

Jackson coolly handles the cranks and crackpots who occasionally call ("It's like playing Russian roulette on the air," he says), but he depends on mechanical help to solve another problem. By a tape device, his conversations are delayed four seconds. Beside him he has a panic but ton that he can trip to keep improper language off the air. Hell and damn are O.K., but he presses the button on anything beyond that. Every month, hundreds of four-letter words die like rats on the tape.

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