"A cool summer mornin' in early June is when 'the Legend' began..."

So goes the first line of the song that has chilled Michigan radio listeners for over 20 years. In reality, “The Legend” began on a chilly March morning in 1987. WTCM radio morning personality Jack O'Malley was seeking an idea for an April Fool's prank to play on his listeners. He sat down to brainstorm with WTCM production director Steve Cook, who said he might have something.

"It really wasn't a song, or a poem, or even a story then," reflected Cook, "just the core of an idea." An avid folklore collector since his youth, Cook was especially fascinated by hauntings and unusual animals. Choosing characteristics of Bigfoot, the Boggy Creek monster from Arkansas, the Jersey Devil, and several other "cryptids," Cook created a mythical half-man, half-dog, and wrote several verses about appearances of the creature. He placed the events in Northern Michigan towns, and gave the dogman a mysterious chronological nature. Each sighting occurs in the seventh year of the decade.

The WTCM Production Studio , where the original "Legend" was born in 1987. The keyboard in the lower right was used to produce the music.

"Everything in nature is cyclical," states Cook, "bird migrations, the seasons, locusts; I picked the seventh year simply because it happened to be 1987."

As the poem took shape, Cook began sampling different ways of recording it for use on the air. The most promising featured a simple drum rhythm extracted from a cheap analog Casio keyboard. The meter of the poem fit perfectly into 4/4 time. Using some of the other voices on the keyboard, Cook developed a melody and chord structure that sounds vaguely Native American. Cook chose to use the name of one of his radio-show characters, Bob Farley, as the artist for the song.

"The first attempts were really cheesy," laughs Cook. "The music was so thin and lifeless. We ran it through several cycles on an Eventide harmonizer to give it some depth and presence." Eventually, the very first version of "The Legend" was born.

And then it almost died.

What Was That Song?

Just a few days before April 1, 1987, Cook played his new creation for morning man Jack O'Malley. The reaction was less than enthusiastic. "I thought it was good," said O'Malley, "but it didn't really seem like much of an April Fool's prank. This song was more like something we'd play at Halloween."

With time running short to create anything else, O'Malley agreed to play the song a time or two on April Fool's day. The first airing of "The Legend" occurred at 7:40 that morning. O'Malley introduced the song, it played...and nothing happened. No phone calls, no listener reaction whatsoever. The song was aired again during the 9-10 AM hour, again eliciting no reaction at all. Cook and O'Malley were prepared to just let the failed prank die quietly.

WTCM's Jack O'Malley

Then the phone started ringing. "What was that weird song?" listeners asked. "Who did that song about the dog-man thing?" "When are you going to play it again?" Later that day, an elderly man called claiming to have been chilled to the bone when he heard the song, because he had actually seen a similar creature years before. That was the first of a series of sighting reports that would pour into the station over the next few weeks. Scores of otherwise normal, reasonable people told some very convincing stories of encounters with a creature very much like Cook's fabricated dogman. Within the month, "The Legend" became the most requested song on the air, and was added into the regular rotation of music.

Like most music, and in particular songs that fall into the novelty category, "The Legend" faded fast. By mid-June it was getting scarce airplay, then finally it was dropped from WTCM's music list.

Then in July came the attack.

Luther

"So the officer and I went out there to take a look at it...y'know he just tried to chew in around the doors...and we could see a dog print alongside the window there...and y'know, so it was obviously a dog."

Those are the words of a forest ranger (click here to listen to the actual recording) who, along with a Sheriff's deputy, went to investigate an animal attack on a remote cabin near Luther, Michigan, in July of 1987. They found deep cuts and teeth marks around the doors and windows of the building; screens were torn to shreds, but the only tracks they could find were those of a large dog. The ranger called WTCM, noting that he and the deputy had joked about how well this scene fit the seventh year prophecy made in the song "The Legend." The ranger's voice would later appear in the beginning of the 10th anniversary version of the song, "The Legend '97".

Mark Merentette, a reporter for the Cadillac Evening News, picked up the story the next day. His article was read and expanded upon by Jim Mancerelli of the Grand Rapids Press later in the week. Mancerelli later fed the story down the Associated Press newswire, and it was picked up by newspapers across the country, including USA Today. A few days later, Paul Harvey mentioned the strange coincidence in his national "News and Comments" broadcast.

Suddenly, "The Legend" roared into national prominence, and became a hit song again. Requests for copies poured in from all 50 states, and from as far away as Germany and Japan.

The original master tape - never considered at the time to be of any real value - had been destroyed. Steve Cook went into the studio again, this time with an upgraded keyboard, and recorded the song a second time. A few changes were made to the lyrics to update "The Legend" for summer. When it was finished, the second master recording was shipped to Ron Rose Studios in Southfield, Michigan for duplication to cassette tape.

The first 500 copies arrived a week later, and sold out in 12 days.

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