READY TO ROCK 'N' ROLL

By ROBYN NORWOOD

Aug. 7, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s summer in Manhattan Beach, and Paul Hackett wants a blanket.

Not only one, either. He grabs the afghan off a chair, a blue UC Davis blanket from the sofa, and turns to ask his wife, Elizabeth, if they have any more. He’ll be needing all those pillows on the couch too.

The light pours into the downstairs room of the home of USC’s new football coach, but bit by bit, Hackett blocks it out, covering the windows as he casts one glance after another at his 1946 Wurlitzer Bubbler 1015 juke box, the prize of his small collection.

It is a glorious thing, the Wurlitzer, all curves and wood and chrome and color. And as the room darkens and the machine warms up, the colors emerge like the hues of an evening sky intensifying in twilight. Oranges, purples, blues and greens, the shades grow more and more vivid for a photographer’s lens as they revolve on the machine’s facade in the darkening room.

“Isn’t the purple great?” Hackett says, mesmerized for a moment. “The purple and the green, those are my favorites.”

Once, it took a nickel to hear a selection on the old juke box. A nickel! Remember when you could buy something with one of those? Now, press a button in the Hacketts’ rec room, and a selection from the coach’s prodigious collection of old and remade 78s brings back the 1950s and ‘60s--Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Tear Drops,” Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” and Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Across the room, Hackett’s Seeburg Select-O-Matic 100 juke box--”Like the one on ‘Happy Days’ ” he says--once gave you six plays for a quarter.

Now, you get Buddy Holly and the Crickets singing “That’ll Be the Day, the Duprees’ “You Belong to Me” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”--even the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”--free.

In the corner is a 1941 Coke machine, and alongside one wall, a Pac-Man machine, circa 1980.

And there, on the mantle, is a picture of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1979, when Hackett was a USC assistant coach and the Trojans beat Michigan to wrap up the 1978 national championship.

Then it hits you. Isn’t this all another straight line for a UCLA fan? One more Trojan, lost in the past? It has been 20 years since the Trojans’ last national championship on the football field, and over the last two seasons their record is only 12-11.

But Hackett may be the man who can bridge USC’s past and present. John Robinson tried, but ended up being fired amid mediocrity and a nasty clash between two Trojan icons, Robinson and Athletic Director Mike Garrett, the 1965 Heisman winner.

Hackett was at USC in the 1970s, but he was also with the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s and the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1990s, and is regarded as one of the leading practitioners of the West Coast offense, the vogue of the last decade or so.

When Hackett left his job as the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator and returned to USC’s Heritage Hall last January, he was hit by more than deja vu.

“Everything was exactly the same,” he says, pausing for effect. “That’s not right.”

What he’s saying is that USC had not changed with the times. While the mammoth programs of the Southeastern Conference have flashy new facilities and even the Pacific 10’s lesser lights have improved their programs--and Washington State and Arizona State made it to the Rose Bowl, for heaven’s sake--some aspects of the USC program that needed to change had not.

“College football is different now,” Hackett says. “We’re middle of the pack. We’re even now. Back then, we were at the very top. The quest is to get back to that.”

Some of the improvements that began under Robinson’s tenure--an expanded practice field, a new dining hall--have taken shape.

“We’ve got to get going,” Hackett says. “We’ve got to get our butt in gear.

“There’s a very strong feeling throughout the community and on the USC side of this city that this is going to be maybe a new time. What I don’t know is how people will respond if it doesn’t unfold exactly as we want. This is not going to be overnight. We’ve been .500 for a couple of years.”

At 51, Hackett is only 12 years younger than Robinson, but he seems from a different generation. He will never have Robinson’s gift for summoning the Trojan spirit and is unlikely to match Robinson’s 104 victories at USC.

What he brings to USC, however, is enormous energy and capacity for work, and a depth of passion for the strategic side of the game that is hard to match.

Bill Walsh has called him “very, very bright, if not brilliant,” and Joe Montana, who followed him from San Francisco to Kansas City, talks about Hackett’s absorption in details.

It’s the same quality you see in the depth of Hackett’s wide-ranging passion for music. Downstairs, Hackett has his collection of 78s--originals in protective sheaths, remakes on the juke box lest they be damaged by the machine.

Upstairs in a hall closet is the 100-disc CD player. Hackett presses a button and it’s Peter Cetera, then the Fleetwoods, Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” the Duprees, the Drifters, the Skyliners.

“This is the system where you hear quality. The stuff on the juke box, it’s no good,” Hackett says. “So you have to have the CDs too, for quality listening.”

The range is wide. Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan. Paul Anka--there’s a left turn--Roy Orbison, Elvis, Lovin’ Spoonful and every last Beatles CD and the soundtrack from the movie “Bronx Tale.”

“Let me tell you. Fabulous,” Hackett says. “I like doo-wop, New York harmony. That’s why I love the Everly Brothers, four-part harmony. . . . By the same token, I don’t have any problem with Dire Straits.

“My kids got me into Michael Jackson, Prince. I stopped at rap. I couldn’t do that.”

Rap might get him yet. The Hacketts’ sons, David, 26, and Nathaniel, a freshman tight end at Hackett’s alma mater, UC Davis, didn’t take him there.

But R. Jay Soward, the Trojan receiver who said last year he wanted to be a master of disaster like Busta Rhymes, just might.

The Beatles were one of Hackett’s strongest influences, and a 1964 Life magazine cover of the Fab Four is framed on his wall, the mailing label to the Hackett household still on it.

In college, he was the kid who ran the sound and lights for various acts that came through. He worked the Ike and Tina Turner show, for one. Being in Northern California in the mid- to late ‘60s and early ‘70s, it seemed to him that everything in music was happening right there.

“In San Francisco, you had the Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore West,” he says. “I’d go on the weekend to San Francisco and see Jefferson Airplane.”

In 1966, he was at what proved to be the Beatles’ last live performance, on Aug. 29 at Candlestick Park.

“They came in by helicopter and out by armored car,” Hackett says. “I was standing right there by the first-base dugout, and they were playing at second base.

“It was just fabulous. You had no idea, at the time, they’re never ever going to go on tour again. It was like when somebody asked me if I thought I was watching Joe Montana’s last game. You don’t think about that stuff at the time.”

In 1967, he was at the Monterey Pop Festival, the landmark rock ‘n’ roll festival where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin performed.

“He was an old hippie,” joked UCLA Coach Bob Toledo, who played against Hackett when Toledo was at San Francisco State and Hackett was at Davis.

Music fell by the wayside for a while.

“I got a job in 1972,” Hackett said, “as a grad assistant at Berkeley, had a baby on the way and no money.”

But as his career progressed, music returned. At USC, he used to sit on the bus near running back Ricky Bell, whose brother was the leader of Archie Bell and the Drells, the group whose song “Tighten Up” sold a million records in 1968.

“‘He always had a box, and always had the latest stuff,” Hackett says.

In the NFL, there was always music too.

“Players keep you in touch,” he says.

It was when the Hacketts moved to Pittsburgh for his first stint as a college head coach that Hackett bought his jukeboxes. The Panthers went 13-20-1 during Hackett’s three seasons. He left with the lesson that he couldn’t do everything--Hackett had tried to be head coach, offensive coordinator and quarterback coach--and with his Wurlitzer.

“I’ve found a whole world of juke boxes,” he says. “Weekly magazines, monthlies, people who sell parts.”

A juke box like Hackett’s might be worth $12,000, said Lou Pionati, the juke-box restoration expert with Unique Music Machines in New Castle, Pa., who helped Hackett with his. A rarer model might go for $35,000, he said.

Hackett’s machine came from a bar in Cleveland, badly in need of repair.

“A guy had thrown it down a stairway,” Hackett says.

It took Pionati nine months to restore it, but through Hackett he also has sold juke boxes to the Chiefs’ team surgeon and a Buffalo Bills’ assistant coach.

“I tried to get him to keep as much original as we could,” Hackett says, opening the front to expose the machine’s innards, and what amounts to an odometer, rolling over to 27,764 plays.

“It’s good therapy pretty much any time. After a game, when you get home from the parties--if you have something to celebrate,” Hackett says.

He listens to music almost every night during the summer, and every off-season, he rotates the 78s in the juke boxes.

“I don’t have time for it during the season.”

Elizabeth jokes that the wide alley on one side of the house helps make good neighbors--and not because visitors have noticed UCLA license plate frames on the cars parked outside.

“He plays his music so loud,” she says.

Together, they still go to concerts, especially since Elizabeth, who met Paul at UC Davis, has grown interested in country music.

But there hasn’t been time since the family moved to organize all the CDs and 78s Hackett has stored around the house.

“I’m trying to win some football games,” says Hackett, who will coach his first for USC on Aug. 30 against Purdue in the Pigskin Classic at the Coliseum. “Next spring, I’ll get it organized.”

Long before that--sometime this season--the juke-box dealer is going to ship another machine to Los Angeles.

This one will go to the football offices at Heritage Hall, a loaner, maybe something “super outrageous,” Pionati said.

Hackett will have to find the records.

He’s looking for a few hits of the late 1990s and the seasons to come.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Paul Hackett Profile

BACKGROUND: Age 51. . . . His Kansas City offense ranked 14th last season as the Chiefs finished with an NFL-best 13-3 regular-season record. . . . An assistant for national champion USC in 1978. . . . Assistant for Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers in 1984. . . . In 1989, took over as head coach for Pittsburgh’s 31-28 Hancock Bowl victory over Texas A&M; and was head coach the next three seasons.

COACHING YEAR BY YEAR

* 1969: Freshman team assistant at UC Davis

* 1970-71: Freshman team head coach at UC Davis

* 1972: Graduate assistant at California

* 1973: Receivers assistant at California

* 1974-75: Quarterbacks assistant at California

* 1976-77: Quarterbacks/receivers assistant at USC

* 1978-80: Quarterbacks/passing game assistant at USC

* 1981-82: Quarterbacks assistant for Cleveland Browns

* 1983-85: Quarterbacks/receivers assistant for S.F. 49ers

* 1986-88: Passing offensive coordinator for Dallas Cowboys.

* 1989: Offensive coordinator for Pittsburgh.