From the Sun vaults, September 7-13, 1979

Marin was hanging on the telephone 30 years ago this week.

In the waning days of summer '79, the county known as ground zero for such psychedelic rock acts as Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company had finally succumbed to the booty-shaking charms of Donna Summer, Chic and the Trammps. But while the groundswell of Bee Gee backlash was reverberating like a syncopated bass line throughout the country, Marin was boogieing on down the line to the four-on-the-floor Promised Land thanks to the emergence of a snare-drum savior from Mill Valley--Disco Man.

Disco Man, aka Mark "Spazz" Power, was almost too big for a single dance floor. Heck, he was too big for a single nickname. In her story "Doing It My Way," Sun reporter Linda Xiques traced the rise of Spazz from produce-market fruit sorter to Marin's wild-and-craziest dancing DJ; it was just like Saturday Night Fever, but with roller skates and a perm.

Spazz's MO--mondo operandi--at the beginning of his two-night-a-week gig at Sarky's in Sausalito would be to rev up the turntable, get out on the dance floor and "skate [his guts out" so that people will "stand around and gawk." After a few minutes of roller derby, he'd throw off the skates and break into a furious John Travolta routine. No one in the county, it seems, put more hustle into their Hustle than Spazz. "Build the momentum, and keep building it until you beat them to death with it," advised the 22-year-old DJ, who described himself to the Sun as "kind of a spazzy guy, who likes to leap around and go crazy a lot." Yeah, crazy like a VOX.

To the dismay of Van McCoy fans everywhere, the DJ's most dy-no-mite contribution to Western civilization wouldn't be cookin' disco--but Dial-A-Spazz, the suburban cowboy's pre-chat-line gift to late-night loners everywhere.

"Spazz's brainchild," wrote Xiques, "allows people to get on the phone, spill their guts, tell a joke, sing a song or make rude noises--on tape." Later, Spazz would listen to the day's recordings, edit the best entries onto another tape and plug it into an outlet line for the public's "dial-in listening pleasure."

And Marin could definitely dig it. Before long, Dial-A-Spazz had grown from a single answering machine in Spazz's apartment to multiple phone lines, tape recorders, control computers and editing machines linked together by what the Sun described as "an incredible spaghetti-like mass of wires." He eventually added a conference line so Spazzers could belch to each other in person.

Though the phone bills were piling up and the operation brought in no income, the DJ vowed to carry on with Dial-A-Spazz as long callers wanted to leave anomalous bodily noises on his machine. "I'm a public service, that's what I am," said Spazz.

Dial-A-Spazz remained in operation until 1998.

These days Mark "Spazz" Power--real name Mark Hester--has put his strobe into storage and lives a quieter life in Novato with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. He's still a professional DJ (visit www.goodtimedj.com) but has traded in his all-white halter jumpsuits for a modest tuxedo, specializing in weddings, Rat Pack tribute events and dancing on roller skates at the San Rafael and Novato farmers markets.

He's proud of the work he did with Dial-A-Spazz.

"I run into people all the time who were big callers of Dial-A-Spazz when they were teenagers," Power says. "Two or three people even got married through it."

Power has kept every tape that ever aired through the service, literally "hundreds and hundreds of cassettes of people telling jokes and singing songs."

Power believes Dial-A-Spazz could still be a hit today, though it would have to be reconfigured for 21st-century cell phone technology.

"I look at YouTube and it is just the video version of my service," he says. "People post their home movies of them dancing around being silly, making up their own words to songs...well that's just Dial-A-Spazz for the 2000s."

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