One of the most memorable moments of John Landecker’s radio career was his interview with John Travolta during the heyday of Travolta’s popularity. On John Travolta’s birthday, it seems like an appropriate day to feature this excerpt from Landecker’s book Records Truly Is My Middle Name.
JOHN TRAVOLTA
Saturday Night Fever hadn’t even come out yet, but thanks to Welcome Back Kotter, John Travolta was already on the verge of becoming a break out star. He had just released a record, and that’s what he came to WLS to promote. I was the lucky one to get the interview, and it went very well. We got along great.
During that interview we agreed to meet the following day and do an appearance together at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg Illinois. John’s limo picked me up at my apartment, and I accompanied him to a few different stops along the way. The first stop was WGN Radio so he could be interviewed by Roy Leonard. After that we went to a hotel party room somewhere and met with a Travolta fan club of some kind. Then we drove out to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg (suburban Chicago).
As usual, I brought a tape recorder and recorded everything as it was happening, beginning in the back seat of a security vehicle. It was reality radio, if you will, before they called it that.
Now, Woodfield was expecting maybe two or three thousand kids to be there, which would have been great, but when we arrived, there were 30,000 girls in the middle of Woodfield Mall screaming at the top of their lungs! (I have never been to a Beatles concert, but I imagine it sounded just like this.) This huge crowd was screaming in an enclosed area, and the sound was echoing and reverberating and shaking the walls. It was positively deafening. I’ve never heard anything like it before or since.
I had tape rolling throughout the whole thing, and it’s an amazing tape — you really get a feel for the mayhem. At one point you can hear a cop say, “My gun, my gun, my gun” because the force of the crowd literally forced his gun up and out of his holster. We finally got to where we were supposed to be, in the middle of this hysterical throng, and I got on the mic.
I told everyone they’d be on WLS between 8 and 9 that night, and then I said: “Give it up for Vinnie Barbarino!” Total Bedlam. Shrill unbelievable screaming. I can’t do it justice. I’m surprised the windows didn’t shatter. Travolta got up there, and did his Vinnie Barbarino routine, the catch phrases from the show.
“What?”
“Where?”
“When?”
The crowd went insane for every word he said. Completely berserk.
In the mayhem on the way out, Travolta and I got separated. I got knocked down and dragged out of there by two state cops. He got dragged out of there in a different direction. We were supposed to go to dinner that night, but that obviously never happened.
I played the tape on my show that night, and many other times over the years. I sent a copy of it to Travolta, and I believe it’s stored along with some pictures and a few other things I sent in the archives of the Scientology headquarters in California. He sent me a nice note thanking me.
But that was far from the last time I saw or spoke with him. He later came back to promote Saturday Night Fever and the movie he was filming at the time, Grease. (If you listen to the raw tape of that interview, you can hear my daughter Tracy walking into the studio as we were taping it, asking for me.)
A year or so after that, I was at home one night, and the phone rang. My wife answered it and handed it to me.
“John, it’s John Travolta.”
He was calling just to see how I was doing. This was during his heyday, the absolute peak of his celebrity. That’s the kind of guy he was.
