Norm Winter was 15 and living in Los Angeles when he started buying and selling used records. It was the start of a career that has included retail record sales, wholesaling and broadcasting. In 1983 he met and married the owner of Jelly’s, a local used record store; working together they built Jelly’s into a sprawling emporium of used books, records, tapes, CDs and related items (“She knew the business, I knew the music,” he said). Jelly’s became Idea’s Books and Music in 2016.
In 1991 Winter challenged the status quo in Hawaii’s radio industry with Radio Free Hawaii — a radio station where the playlist was determined by listeners’ votes rather than by a professional music director or mainland market consultants.
Winter, 77, became a published author when “The Radio Revolution: Historical Fiction Based on Radio Free Hawaii (The Radio Revolution in Honolulu 1991-1997)” was released in 2017. He celebrated the simultaneous release of two more books — “The Saga of the Mighty Valentine Cosmos Upon the Tower of Time” and “The Autobiograffiti of Grandville Rodriquez: The Outlaw that Saved the World” — earlier this month.
When do you have time to write two books?
I get up at 4 in the morning and write until I have to go to work pretty much every day.
Are these books also “historical fiction?”
“The Saga of the Mighty Valentine Cosmos Upon the Tower of Time” is a love story that ranges through all the universes so love has no boundaries, and love has no limits, and it’s eternal. I wrote it as a quantum-mechanics-type structure that uses the Many-Worlds theory in quantum physics. Grandville Rodriquez is a pissed-off Mexican scientist who had a beautiful Mexican revolutionary wife and together they concoct a way to destroy the power structure of the “gringo” (United States). This is written in deadpan humor.
How much of the “Radio Revolution” book actually happened?
The part about Radio Free Hawaii is real. People were buying all this music that the radio stations weren’t playing and it was flying out of the stores. The characters — because I didn’t want to get in trouble — all the characters are fictional. The theme of the book is (how) to bring down corporate radio and it shows how it can be done.
When did you become Sheriff Norm?
At Radio Free. I was “Sheriff Norm, Chief Monitor of the Airwaves, here to eradicate all air-hogs from ever scouring the airwaves ever again.” The first week we eradicated Vanilla Ice. The next week it was “Step by Step” by New Kids on the Block.
A couple of years ago you were doing an amazing show on 107.9 Kool Gold. It was great! What happened?
It was “The History of Rock ’N’ Roll for Extraterrestrials.” I was telling the history of rock ’n’ roll and how radio came to suck, and after the 13th show the radio station said I couldn’t talk about how radio sucks and they kicked me off the radio. You can hear the shows — and learn how the first book I wrote got me kicked out of high school — at stirringneurons.com
What’s next?
My next major project is getting “The Radio Revolution” in a big-time movie. I’ve written the radio script for it with Solana — that’s the girl from Radio Free, Pinkie Passion — and we intend to make it into the “American Graffiti” of the ’90s.
Reach John Berger at jberger@staradvertiser.com
