Editor’s note: On Friday, Sept. 9, Estate Services of Austin announced that “due to the vagaries of the legal system,” they were cancelling the scheduled tour of the John Aielli estate: “The Aielli estate, just like its remarkable creator, is a complicated, fantastic entity. Despite its complexities, we are loving being part of it.” While no rescheduled date is offered, the announcement concludes: “STAY TUNED.”
John Aielli was all quirks, but one quirk in particular that always delighted me was that he brought his own lamp into Cherrywood Coffeehouse. I don’t mean to imply he brought a lamp in once and left it where he liked to sit. He came there frequently and carried a lamp in with him like there was some kind of BYO-lamp situation. Who does that?
The most idiosyncratic, most legendary, and longest-serving radio deejay Austin ever had – that’s who. The Eklektikos host, known for his gentle prosody and meandering thought bubbles of live on-air monologues, had been a peculiar constant on the airwaves of KUT (and later KUTX) for 54 years before his retirement in 2020. He’d been the station’s most beloved and often highest-rated deejay, though some found his propensity for long periods of dead air, playing songs multiple times in a morning (sometimes consecutively), and stream-of-consciousness dialogue maddening. No one would debate, however, the oneness and essence of originality exuded by John Aielli, who died at age 76 at the end of July of complications from the stroke he suffered two years prior.
How many lamps are too many lamps for one small living room? I’m counting 14 and I could be off by five or 10 because there’s so many decorations, doodads, trinkets, trimmings, feathers, and framables covering every inch of the home. I’m standing in the doorway with my jaw halfway to the floor – which is so covered with Persian-style rugs that you might have to lift three or four of them to see what the color the carpet actually is. I’ve never been in a home that looks like this.
Neither has Carl McQueary, who’s spent a quarter century in the homes of the deceased, divorced, and downsized as founder of Estate Services of Austin – the city’s preeminent estate sale company. He’s been in plenty of houses brimming with interesting items, but he describes Aielli’s as the home “most ascribed to a person’s personality” that he’s ever been witness to.
McQueary, whose business frequently handles hoarder abatement for clients, quickly points out that there’s nothing remotely hoarder-like about the composition of Aielli’s house, despite it having more items per square foot than any house you’ve ever been in. Nothing is scattered.
“Everything is very organized and accessible,” he says. “And everything is intentional.”
The Eclectic Home
If you’ve listened to 98.9FM, or 90.5FM before that, over the last 50 years, you’ve been inside the mind of John Aielli – where the weather outside is of paramount importance, odd fascinations are deeply indulged, and a sweater’s hard-to-pinpoint shade of color is a topic worthy of lengthy contemplation. But if you haven’t been in his house, have you really been in Aielli’s mind?
In the most detailed, honest, funny, and beautiful postmortem accounting of Aielli’s life, longtime KUT(X) host and editor Jeff McCord wrote: “Here was the irony of John’s life. He was a gregarious extrovert who thrived on conversation with his many friends and co-workers, and with his listeners, yet beneath it all was a private undercurrent of loneliness.”
It’s my understanding that such privacy extended to Aielli’s home, which isn’t set up in a manner particularly conducive to having company over, but rather a personal temple to his interests and aesthetics.
A month and a half after John transitioned from life to whichever phenomena comes next, friends and fans are now invited inside. McQueary, having been contracted by Aielli’s family, will be overseeing tours of John Aielli’s home on Saturday, September 17. The walk-throughs will cost $10 and have limited capacity, dictated by the size of the house, so you might have to wait in line. (Follow Estate Services of Austin on social media for times and the address.)
The following Saturday, McQueary and his team will be orchestrating an on-site estate sale of Aielli’s possessions. McQueary says that some major items, perhaps including John’s H.P. Nelson concert upright grand piano and the 2003 Toyota Camry parked in the driveway, will be priced, but most of his effects will be pay-what-you-want.
“Then we’ll argue with you at checkout,” McQueary adds, though he says that most of the time, using that system, people offer to pay more than what an item would have been priced at.
All items purchased will have a sticker reading: “From the estate of John Aielli.” The sale’s expected to last two days, but maybe three … or four.
“There’s so much here that if you want to own something from John’s house, you will get it,” McQueary says. “There’s not 12 things, there’s 12,000 to 15,000.”
The Treasure Hunter
John Aielli was an insatiable shopper of thrift stores. I know because I am too, and I used to frequently see him at “the bins,” a Goodwill outlet on Burleson Road where you sift through unsorted goods that have been dumped into enormous, blue receptacles and pay by weight.
McQueary calls the bins “the butthole of Austin resale.” I beg to differ, but I do see where he’s coming from. After all, I once purchased a briefcase full of a random gentleman’s very private articles: divorce papers, unpaid child support documentation, and nude photos where he was being spanked by leather daddies.
Anyway, here’s how the store works: When they roll out a new bin, everyone has to wait behind a line before an employee fires the proverbial starter pistol, and then the hordes feverishly dig for electronics, designer clothes, and collectibles. Sometimes it’s aggressive – you might catch an elbow from a grandma if you’re in her space. It’s a scene dominated by resellers, including the people who spend all day there filling shopping carts with shoes that they’ll clean and sell at the Mexican-oriented flea markets. But John was like me, casually browsing for interesting nonvaluables that might bring you joy. He’d often be holding a small statue or a nice turtleneck or a picture frame.
I always said hello and reintroduced myself because I was never sure if he knew who I was – even though I’d been a guest on his show three times. The third time, he mistakenly introduced me as “Nick Curtin” – a classic Aielli moment that would be considered a gaffe by any other deejay. I responded with a bit that “Nick Curtin” was my twin that’s kept secret from the Austin music scene so I can use him as a paid stand-in at shows that I’m obligated to attend, but don’t want to be at. I’m certain John’s daily existence was full of interactions with listeners who felt like they’d known him all their lives. In a sense, they had.
And now I’m certain where so much of the bric-a-brac, so many of the frames that make the walls and windows of his home feel more like layers than barriers, had been sourced from. Still, I’m astonished at the visual harmony of hundreds of secondhand items. It’s as if his environment was a canvas for a maximalist expression of his unfiltered self.
Elephants with their trunks up, imagery from world religions, shells, boas, inexpensive reproductions of classic paintings, statues, onyx, crystal, and depictions of monuments are all themes on repeat in the home Aielli resided in since the late Eighties.
Playing on themes had been one of his trademarks as a deejay. KUTX’s Taylor Wallace joked during Aielli’s Austin Music Industry Hall of Fame induction last year: “If you have ever, before 9am, been tasked with finding a dozen or so songs on the subjects of pie, wind, dirt, or purses, you may have been John Aielli’s producer.” He understood the power of connections and understood how things could go in ways other people didn’t.
“Notice how artfully arranged everything is?” asks McQueary from Aielli’s sewing room. “There’s humor in the arrangement. You see things placed in a way to make him laugh.”
Nearby there’s a copy of the famous photo Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, where 11 ironworkers are enjoying their break on a beam high above New York City. In front of the photo, there’s 11 Ken dolls sitting in similar poses … maybe they’re G.I. Joes – it’s hard to tell because they’re largely without clothes.
That’s another prevalent theme in John Aielli’s home: an appreciation for the male form – ranging from muscular pinups to various representations of Superman and Batman.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
There are stereos in every room of John Aielli’s home – all tuned to KUTX. The sides and backs of the speakers are used as additional surfaces for art and decoration. I want to hear John’s voice coming out of them, saying something like: “What would we have done without Mozart? And the same could be true for any of us. The world would be quite a different place. So here we all are, contributing our parts to this … amazing phenomenon.”
The “piano room,” though, exists as the musical epicenter of the Cherrywood neighborhood property. Somewhere in racks of 6,000 CDs and hundreds of LPs are something you’d heard Aielli play on Eklektikos – maybe the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir or Tibetan monks throat singing or whale songs or farm animals yodeling or an obscure Austin release or pretty much any significant work of classical music. Thus, the forthcoming estate sale might feel for some like a trip to the record store.
The focal point of this den is, of course, Aielli’s piano – the instrument that brought the Killeen-raised kid to Austin, where he studied music on scholarship.
For a moment, imagine that move had never transpired. Would Austin be what it is without John Aielli? Would John Aielli have been able to become an iconic radio presence – while notoriously not having a command of a mixing board – without the ears of a comparably eclectic music community?
The bench in front of the piano is covered in fabric that resembles the wardrobe from a play. In fact, all the chairs in the house are “dressed.” Meanwhile, the area of the house with Aielli’s actual wardrobe is set up unorthodoxly. Instead of dressers or closets, collared shirts are hung along the walls of the hallway and shirts and pants are neatly folded and stacked on a large table. Similarly unconventional are the bathroom and kitchens, each of which have counters that look like antique store display cases … with a sink in the middle of them. It’s as though inspiration has triumphed over functionality, and the results are surprisingly pleasing.
That’s not entirely dissimilar from John Aielli’s radio essence: doing many things wrong by industry standards, and yet it worked because he did it his own way.
As such, Aielli’s house – a private refuge for a public figure – currently exists as a monument to a true Austin original.
“I don’t think he gave any consideration at all into what other people think,” McQueary reflects about Aielli’s surroundings while sitting in the late deejay’s favorite living room chair. “It’s so personal and just absolutely brilliant.”
Check out more photos of Aielli’s home at austinchronicle.com/photos.
KUT and KUTX present Remembering John Aielli: A Memorial Thu., Sept. 8, 6pm, at the Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress. Free.
This article appears in The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.