The opening of “The Fifth Beatle,” Tom Wolfe’s 1965 kandy-kolored profile of New York disc jockey Murray the K, who horned in on Beatlemania and made himself a pop icon of sorts for a while:
“John, Paul, George, Ringo and–Murray the K!–the fifth Beatle! Does anybody out there really understand what it means that Murray the K is the Fifth Beatle? Does anybody comprehend what something like that took? Does anybody comprehend what a victory it was to become George the Beatle’s roommate in the hotel in Miami and do things like tape record conversations with George during those magic bloomings of the soul just before a man goes to sleep and bring back to the kids the sound of a pure universe with nothing but George, Murray the K and Fedders Miami air-conditioning in it? No; practically nobody out there comprehends. Not even Murray the K’s fellow disc jockey William B. Williams, of WNEW, who likes singers like Frank Sinatra, all that corny nostalgia of the New Jersey roadhouses, and says, ‘I like Murray, but if that’s what he has to do to make a buck, he can have it.’
You can imagine how Murray the K feels! He not only makes a buck, he makes about $150,000 a year, he is the king of the Hysterical Disc Jockeys, and people still look at him and think he is some kind of amok gnome. Do they know what’s happening? Here in the studio, close up, inside the glass panels, amid the microphone grilles, cue sheets and commercials in capital letters, Murray the K sits on the edge of his seat, a solidly built man, thirty-eight years old, with the normal adult worried look on his face, looking through the glass at an engineer in a sport shirt. Granted, there are Murray the K’s clothes. He has on a stingy brim straw hat, a shirt with wide lavender stripes on it, a pair of black pants so tight that have to have three-inch Chinese slits on the sides at the bottom so they will fit over the gussets of his boots. Murray the K has 62 outfits like this, elf boots, Russian hats, flipnik jerseys, but isn’t that all part of it?”
••••••••••
In 1974, Murray the K, still a name but no longer a star, promotes sock hop concerts on a morning TV show in NYC:
More Tom Wolfe posts: