Finance and Rock ‘n’ Roll All in a Good Day’s Work for a Man Named Wisdom
Stocks, bonds and rock ‘n’ roll. That’s Gabriel Wisdom’s calling card these days.
You’re likely to see the 36-year-old Wisdom leading financial seminars, investing millions of dollars of his clients’ money as a Prudential-Bache stockbroker, or providing market analysis on television stations KFMB (Channel 8) and KGTV (Channel 10).
It’s a good mix, he says, with his more well-known 18-year career as a local radio personality and announcer for countless San Diego rock concerts.
He continues to do a spirited Saturday morning radio show on KGB-FM called “Flashback,” and is one of the station’s Newsbrothers for its weekday noontime news. He also does financial reports three times a day on KGB’s AM sister station, KPOP. Then, he tops it off with daily surf reports for KMET radio in Los Angeles, a ritual he has been doing for 10 years.
But priorities for San Diego’s most visible rock jock are changing. Two years ago, he married Shelle Strauss, producer of KFMB’s “Hudson and Bauer Show,” and now has a daughter, Phyllisa. Now, his list of things to do each day includes singing lullabies to Phyllisa and helping out on her nighttime feedings.
With much delight and gusto, he still plunges full force into his professional roles in finance and radio.
“There was a period in the 1970s when I got really burned out by the music end of it,” he said. “Just dealing with rock acts almost 24 hours a day was too much of one thing. Then, I got my career going in finance, and I found that to be a refreshing break from music. Now, being in both careers, I feel I’ve finally achieved a good balance and I can appreciate both worlds.”
For a man gleeful over “extending my adolescence well into my 30s,” Wisdom maintains a workaholic daily schedule.
Up at 5 a.m., he makes it to his La Jolla Prudential-Bache office at 6:30 “to catch the 9:30 a.m. opening of the New York Commodities Exchange.” In between investing his clients’ money, he does the first of three daily KPOP financial reports live by telephone from his office.
He has no prearranged script. He simply punches up stock information on San Diego-area companies on his desk-top computer and ad libs his commentary.
“I stay away from all the technical mumbo jumbo,” he said emphatically. “People don’t want that stuff. They want to know what made the market move, where it’s going, what the general trends are, and what local stocks are doing. And that’s what I give ‘em.”
Shortly after 11 a.m. he puts investment aside and dashes off to the studios of KGB to transform himself into a Newsbrother, along with Jeff Prescott.
The Newsbrothers is hardly standard fare for a radio newscast. Wisdom likes to call it a mini radio version of Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories.” It zeros in on the offbeat and bizarre.
“On Newsbrothers we interview local people who have no idea they are being funny,” Wisdom said. “They are dead serious.”
One of Wisdom’s favorite Newsbrothers interviews is with a South American gentleman who lives in the South Bay and runs a school for psychics and claims he can stare into a mirror and talk to the dead.
“He’ll call me up in his thick Argentinian accent and tell me all about his conversation with Mae West, stuff like that,” Wisdom said. “But I must admit, though, he did call me just before the recent earthquake we had and told me he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s day but there would be a major earthquake coming. I think he got lucky on that one.”
After Newsbrothers, Wisdom again puts on his financial hat and does the 12:20 p.m. business report on KPOP. As soon as that’s finished, he dashes back to La Jolla to work with clients the rest of the day, pausing briefly to do a final KPOP business wrap-up by phone at 4:20.
He also has to prepare for a show called “Flashback Sunday” that airs on KGB on Sunday nights. It features rock tunes of the 1960s and ‘70s, the era of music he loves most.
During “Flashback,” Wisdom is truly in his element. Each song pumps him up and draws more enthusiasm and energy from him until he becomes a whirling dervish, dancing about the studio, tapping his feet and banging out rhythm on controls, tapes, spare records--anything available. Occasionally he’ll let loose with a joyous yell that just can’t be subdued.
During a commercial break, he told a a visitor: “I love rock ‘n’ roll and I love it loud!”
It’s that disc jockey style and presence that pushed Wisdom to the top of the San Diego radio scene when he began his radio career in 1968.
His first stab at a career was opening up a surfboard repair shop after graduating from Point Loma High School in 1967. But progressive rock had just come on the scene, and Wisdom wanted to be part of it.
“I went to KPRI Radio, which at the time was the only station playing that kind of music,” Wisdom said, “and convinced them that I could be a good advertising salesman based on my vast experience as a kid doing two newspaper routes simultaneously.”
Wisdom got his chance at the mike when deejay Captain Sunshine fell asleep for almost three hours and the station’s program director called Wisdom and asked him to fill in at 4 a.m.
When he arrived at the station, his first words to listeners were: “Now that you’ve enjoyed listening to Marcel Marceau, here’s something from Country Joe and the Fish.”
After that, the Sunday morning show was his.
The 18-year-old novice carefully wove together a potpourri of music that often highlighted the songs of Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Love, Donovan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones with hip commentary and poetry from such sources as Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. At the urging of KPRI Program Director O.B. Jetty, he also changed his given name (Benjamin Wool) to the more glitzy Gabriel Wisdom, a name suggested by his father.
Wisdom later moved that show over to KGB and further incorporated interviews and commentary along with the music.
He also had made a deal with local rock promoter Jim Pagni to be the announcer at his local concerts, and from 1969 through the mid-70s he was able to tape plenty of rock star interviews backstage and show visiting groups around San Diego during their stays.
“I remember taking The Who around San Diego in a VW bus during their tour in 1969,” he said. “They were fascinated by all the sleazy shops on lower Broadway downtown that catered to sailors. And they spent a lot of time at the pinball machines in the arcades that used to be down there. This was before ‘Pinball Wizard’ and I think they might have gotten the idea for that song right here.”
Rock musicians were not the only ones on his show. In the early days, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams were attracted to his unique format and stopped by the studio to tape lead-ins for the station’s disc jockeys and do funny, impromptu skits for the program.
Wisdom’s program soon evolved into a contemporary radio magazine format that was eventually sponsored by Omni magazine, given a new name, “Brainstorm,” and syndicated nationally. Such guests as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminister Fuller, Jerry Mathers (of “Leave It to Beaver”) and Marvel Comic Books creator San Lee were on just as often as pop musicians.
But the most notorious regular guest was Timothy Leary.
“He’d just gotten out of federal prison here in 1976 and was looking for something to do,” Wisdom said. “I found him to be a very funny, witty guy. And his price was right (free), so I had him do movie reviews for the show. Tim soon expanded those into ‘social commentaries’ that were quite amusing. We’d tape interviews with him here in San Diego or up in Los Angeles and do about 20 features at a time every four or five months.”
“In no way do I endorse the ideologies and philosophies of Leary, much less understand them,” Wisdom quickly added. “But he was certainly an interesting element to the show.”
Wisdom emphasizes that even at the height of his radio career he always wanted to be a businessman, though a try at sponsoring a San Francisco rock act called Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks ended in disaster and left him broke at the age of 21.
“In the ‘60s, business was kind of a bad word so I didn’t tell my friends that I was more impressed with the major business people of the world than celebrities and stars,” Wisdom now admits. He also added that selling ads for his original KPRI Radio show “was just as stimulating to me as doing the show itself.”
But his business career was slow to develop. A few detours stalled him along the way.
He went off to Hawaii and lived in a tree house, he spent two years at Western State Law School “where I didn’t graduate and discovered I had no aptitude nor love for the study of law,” and he completed a doctorate in psychology and subsequently became a marriage counselor with the La Jolla Institute.
“One big problem with being a marriage counselor was only making about $2,000 from it in the two years I was involved,” he said.
There was also a brief period in the 1970s when he sold real estate.
In 1983, Wisdom got serious about his business career and went into training to become a stockbroker. For five months he was a stockbroker trainee at J. David Securities. He eventually got his preliminary broker’s license with Shearson-American Express.
Wisdom is just as proud of his record at Prudential-Bache as he is of his radio career, and he plans to keep going full speed in both worlds.
One special project he plans to put a lot of time into is rallying the business community to help support Father Joe Carroll and his St. Vincent de Paul organization in trying to solve the growing problem of San Diego’s homeless.
“I think local business is in a position to really help Father Carroll’s projects and provide more shelter. Unfortunately it’s a problem that appears to be getting worse here,” Wisdom said.
Meanwhile, San Diego’s dean of radio must dash off to give a surf report on the air, meet several clients at Prudential-Bache and then make it home in time to help feed his daughter.
