BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Ty Williams (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

On second thought, maybe the tattoo wouldn't have been such a good idea.

''The single worst thing about working the overnight trick is always being asked: When do you sleep?'' complains Ty Williams, WEBN-FM overnight disc jockey and last original WEBN-FM employee.

''I felt like I ought to have it tattooed on my forehead,'' he says.

And his stock reply?

''When I ---- well please.''

Mr. Williams, 62, will be doing whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, when he retires Friday after 38 years in Cincinnati radio.

No more sleeping split shifts, 7-11 a.m. and 7-11 p.m., to be fresh for his midnight-5:30 p.m. show.

The man with the soothing deep voice and sly wit has been working the pre-dawn patrol for so long he can't recall when he started.

Over a lunch of corned beef, coffee and cigarettes, Mr. Williams remembers Frank ''Bo'' Wood Jr., former WEBN-FM general manager and son of the station founder, telling him the overnight shift would be temporary, just a few weeks, sometime back in the early to mid-1970s.

''Soon it hit me that I was spending four hours at work, and 20 hours with my family. Working overnight, there were no 'extras' involved, no remote broadcasts or production (recording commercials).

''I thought to myself: Man! You're making a living, bought a house, putting kids through college and you're only working four hours a night! You just sneak in and sneak out.

''It was a great gig,'' he says, ''so I stayed right where I was.''

Jazz man

The 1954 Withrow High School graduate was hired by Frank Wood Sr. in July 1967, two weeks before WEBN-FM began broadcasting from an old Price Hill house. The original format was half classical, half jazz.

By fall, the younger Mr. Wood was playing album-oriented rock on Saturday nights as disc jockey Michael Xanadu. The Jelly Pudding show led to a gradual format change over two years that eventually made WEBN-FM the city's No. 1 rock station.

Jazz was what attracted Mr. Williams to WEBN-FM. For seven years (1959-66) he had played Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane on tiny WNOP-AM.

He also was the first Tristate DJ to play Bob Dylan records in 1962. Longtime WNOP-AM morning DJ host Leo Underhill would call him ''Bobby DYE-lan.'' Jazz stalwarts called him much worse.

''People would call up and say, 'Why are you playing that blankety-blank hillbilly music in the middle of a jazz show?' I must admit it that Dylan did sound weird between a Coltrane and a Monk track,'' Mr. Williams says.

''Even back then I was convinced Bob Dylan was a poet and a prophet, not a musician. He just held a guitar,'' says Mr. Williams, who dined with the folk singer before his first Music Hall concert in 1962.

Mr. Williams, son of a Hyde Park attorney, fell in love with radio as a teen-ager, listening to Jean Shepherd tell stories late-nights on WLW-AM. (Mr. Shepherd later moved to New York and became a writer; one childhood tale became the popular holiday movie, A Christmas Story.)

Early on, Mr. Williams marched to the beat of a different musician, usually Coltrane or Davis. He championed Lenny Bruce. He joined the NAACP. After seeing The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in 1956, he ''decided that the corporate ladder was the stairway to hell.''

He wore jeans years before they were fashionable. WEBN-FM folks suggested he wear bell-bottoms, so he came to work in bib overalls.

With his bushy beard, and long hair, some mistake him for an aging hippy. He says he's not.

''I'm just an old, fat beatnik,'' he says. ''I get so tired of being called a 'hippy.' I go back farther than that.''

Only once in 30 years has he worn a necktie - to enter the posh Queen City Club and interview Jonathan Winters, his comic idol.

Music of the times

For a radio revolutionary, it was a natural progression to go from jazz of the 1960s civil rights movement to the rock music that fueled the Vietnam War protest.

Back then, rock had a passionate message, not a profit motive. Back then, DJs were paid to talk, not read the time and temperature and introduce tunes from a computerized play list, no matter how often Led Zeppelin's ''Stairway to Heaven'' appears on the schedule.

''If I have to play 'Stairway to Heaven' one more time, I'll puke all over the controls,'' he says.

Yes, a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a local rock 'n' roll legend. His tiny acid rock station, which once had a barber chair on the front porch (now in Mr. William's living room), has become the flagship for one of the nation's biggest radio chains, Jacor Communications.

And the droll Mr. Williams found himself following ''Bubba the Love Sponge,'' WEBN-FM's crude, sexist late-night call-in show.

It was time to move on. So WEBN-FM will salute the last original employee with an all-day, on-air party Friday. Then he'll retire to a life as a ''junker,'' buying and selling 33 rpm albums and other stuff at flea markets, or traveling some.

''I've got a daughter in St. Louis, a son in Denver and my other son in Tokyo. That would make a nice trip, wouldn't it?'' he says.

''It's a good time to be getting out. I was making an average buck. But 38 years is a long time in any one gig,'' he explains between draws on a Salem Ultra Lights.

''I figure a brain surgeon must get tired of slicing lobes after 30 years. And believe me, strictly formatted rock 'n' roll radio isn't brain surgery.''

John Kiesewetter is Enquirer TV/radio critic. His column appears Monday and Wednesday. Write him at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati, 45202; fax: 768-8330.