I can still remember…
…the exact moment when I decided that being a DJ was way too cool and that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somewhere circa 1970 late one evening I tuned in to one of my favorite stations, a local Top-40 AM radio station, 1310 WEEL, Fairfax VA that “Played The Hits, All the Hits and Nothing But the Hits”. I caught the very first air-shift of this (to this day unknown) DJ. He blew me away. This guy was having more fun than I have ever heard any one person have on the air. I listened in rapt attention till mom told me to turn off the radio and go to bed. My mind was made up, I was gonna do that.
Little did I know that 22 years later, the radio business would have kicked the shit out of my dreams by shuffling me from one shitty little hole in the wall station in one little hick town after another. After working for pinheads in bad suits who were at best qualified for selling Amway. I finally got disgusted with the lack of stability, money and respect and gave it all up for a career in The Fast Moving, Highly Paid Field of Computers (GOLLY!)
College Radio
American University was a pretty quiet place in the late 70’s. It was losing it’s “Camp AU” image but had not yet come into it’s own as a nationally respected University. During my sophomore year I finally got enough courage to seek out the student run radio station: Radio 61 WAMU (now WVAU). It was a dump, shoehorned into the basement of it’s big brother WAMU-FM. WAMU-FM was a fifty-thousand watt powerhouse and a major affiliate of PBS. Students were rarely allowed past the lobby.But the little carrier current, student-run, AM station… god was it fun! So much fun that I spent most of the remainder of my time, to the detriment of my studies in the cramped quarters of that beloved dump. College radio is, without a doubt the most wonderful and bestest way of becoming a DJ: Being allowed to be, really, really bad, until you get good enough for “Real Radio.”
Small Markets, Starting In The Biz
What followed my College Radio days was a series of Small Market (IE: small town) radio stations. These stations are the “Farm Leagues” of the radio biz. Where up and coming DJs learn and supposedly perfect their craft for very little money. These stations are usually in facilities featuring a severe lack of adequate space, lack of air-conditioning (think small sound-proofed room), and poor quality of equipment. Ahh the memories…
- A mobile home attached to a 14-foot square cinder block “building” in which the main studio and transmitter were located. All of this in a field outside the city limits of Martinsburg West Va.
- I remember a phone call from the manufacturer of the transmitter and all the audio equipment that ran a station in Berryville Va, “Mr. Chambers, does your boss normally not pay his bills?”
- Using snowmobiles to get to the studios of WAZY-AM/FM in Lafayette IN because the snow plows didn’t go that far out of town.
- A studio crammed into a 8 x 10 foot room on the ground floor of a century old building in Ocean City MD. If you were lucky the air conditioning unit in the window next to you wasn’t too noisy (think microphone).
- A studio so far out in the hills north of Wichita Falls TX that you had to watch for rattlesnakes, coyotes, prairie dogs, scorpions and spiders of the Brown Recluse variety. The toilet worked sometimes, but people used it regardless AHHHHHH!
Ocean City, Maryland
100KHI was the dominant Top-40 station in this resort town, or so the sales brochure said. Interestingly enough there was also a Dominant Rock station, a dominant Adult Contemporary Station and a Dominant Country station. Such is life in Small Town USA. Actually the town itself was a blast: 250-thousand tourists in the summer. In the Winter it was a sleepy little ghost town of 25-hundred. Needless to say the format of the station in the summer was simple: play two songs and then 6 commercials. Repeat all summer.
To give you an idea of the kind of mental giants that I worked for there: We started playing a Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” called “Eat it.” As with most Weird Al songs the title sounded vaguely dirty but the lyrics were pure G-rated fun. The owners, who never actually listened to their station pulled the song because it was “obscene.”
During my tenure at “Super Hit Radio KHI” I subscribed to a joke sheet written by Bobby Ocean. He wrote a cute little Christmas story in one issue of his joke sheet. I was so inspired that I produced and aired it at KHI and at most other stations I worked at since.
Now (for the first time ever on the internet) the story of Twinkie, The Littelest Moose. The Littelest Moose is presented as two glorious monophonic MP3 files. So gather the kids ’round that iMac in the spare bedroom, brew up some warm cocoa and put a log on the fire:
The Littlest Moose, Part One (4:32)
The Littlest Moose, Part Two (3:27)
Somehow I ended up in Texas, twice.
The first time was in “Deep East Texas” at a “Modern Country” station located in the booming metropolis of Lufkin. From experience I can tell you that “Modern Country” is an oxymoron of biblical proportions.
The second time I managed to last 3 1/2 years at a Top-40 station in scenic Wichita Falls. The joke went something like this,
“So Steve where are you working now?”
I reply “Wichita Falls, Texas.” There is a stony silence on the other end of the line.
So I pipe up, “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”
During my tenure at KKQV I survived the station changing hands twice, five station managers, five Program Directors (including me) and an uncounted number of Sales Mangers, SalesDroids and DJ’s. It was one of the strangest and most wonderful places I have ever worked. In fact QV103 Won Billboard Magazines Small Market Top-40 Station of The year in 1997. So we did a pretty good job for a small time station. If you are curious here is 3 minutes and 36 seconds of me on the air at The Hot FM QV103.
Several years after writing this I had a fit of “let’s clean out my closets” and found a box of old tapes. After transferring them to my Mac and tossing the old cassettes I spent some time cutting down an old air-check from my early days at KKQV. My curiosity piqued I started searching the internet for stuff related to KKQV.
Google was invented for looking up old crap on the internet. Strangely enough entering just KKQV as a search item brings up a lot of stuff having to do with genetics.
Anyway I ran across some info on my last program Director at KKQV, an idiot who went by the name “The Fox That Rocks.” Click here for the story…
Images from KKQV
New Jersey… twice (sorta)
See the big guy in the second QV103 picture? That is Ray St. James? Ray and I became good friends at QV103 and when he got canned at QV103 he moved back home to Philly and got a job in Asbury Park, NJ at WJLK AM/FM. He brought me (and my new wife) up to New Jersey. I did Afternoon Drive (3-7PM on the air) and was FM Operations Manager/Production Director. At this point I was becoming an old hand at this radio stuff and thought I had finally started to move up from little bitty teeny tiny stations to bigger ones.
Up until WJLK I had worked at Small Market radio stations, basically a small town station. Wichita Falls, TX was something like the 234th market. WJLK AM/FM was “The Dominant Station” in the Monmouth/Ocean Market which was the 40th largest market in the US. Unfortunately we were competing with NYC (#1 market) and Philly (#7 market). So “Dominant” meant “Dominant Local” which meant we had about 7-percent of the audience. Howard Stern On K-Rock had about 20%. I learned a new term here: Umbrella Market. I was still in the minor leagues, oh well.
So what happened at “The Shore Legend, K-94?” The Asbury Park Press sold it for an astonishing 12 million dollars (easily twice what it was worth) and bought WKXW in Trenton. Probably the best investment they ever made: They turned a bad Country station into a massive success and moneymaker: NewJersey 101.5. Who would have guessed that the company that had mismanaged WJLK so badly could put together a moneymaker like New Jersey101.5, go figure!
After the sale was finalized, the new owners of WJLK AM/FM realized that they had way too many people working there. It was a big money pit, needless to say I was out the door a few months later. I was out of work for almost 6 months, working weekends at a little station in Manahawkin NJ, WJRZ-FM. I was really starting to hate radio.
WSTC & WQQQ, Stamford, CT
One of the things about working in radio is that you make some friends who are incredible characters. I had met Jim Crossan at QV103 and we have stayed in touch to this day. He runs a successful radio comedy service with his wife out of his home in Columbia SC.
I had always loved production: putting together the commercials and promotional announcements that ran on every station. I was pretty good at it, and could do a remarkable number of distinct character voices. The latter was quite an asset as one person could do all the voices in a commercial that needed more than one voice or an unusual or character voice. Here is my production audition from WSTC/WQQQ.
All voices are mine, you be the judge.So I got a job as a full time Production Director at WSTC/WQQQ in Stamford CT. I was starting to get into this whole Production Director, No Regular Air-shift kind of job. I was sliding into a groove and getting into it in a big way, when a curious thing happened, I stopped being busy.
Let me explain. Every single commercial that went on the air at those two stations went thru my hands. Without commercials a radio station will die
a lingering, painful death.
Yes, I stopped being busy.
It was happening again, yet another station I worked for was being sold. OK, that’s enough. I had played this game out way too many times in the past and was tired of the whole scene. I wanted out. And I got out.
I owe a debt of gratitude for assisting me in this career change goes to Louanne, the woman I was dating at the time. We had kept our relationship going thru my lay-off at WJLK and thru 1 1/2 years of driving back and forth between Stamford CT and Neptune City NJ. So I left my radio career for a 9-dollar-an-hour job at MacWarehouse and moved in to her 1 bedroom apartment, with the understanding that I would take care of my bills and she would continue to pick up the tab on the rent and such.
And strangely enough…
Not only did I not miss radio as much as I feared I would, I actually enjoyed working on the phones in Technical Support at MacWarehouse and was pretty good at it.
The Strangeness Continues
A few years ago I was wandering thru Seaview Square Mall on a slow Saturday afternoon and noticed that WJLK had moved it’s studios to the mall. The studio had a window into the mall and I noticed that the DJ on duty was someone I had worked with at WJLK years before. We spent a few minutes catching up and she mentioned that they needed someone to do weekends, would I be interested? GULP! Sure, might be fun! Yeah for about 2 months.
Radio technology had changed a lot since I was last a DJ, all the commercials were on computer. All the songs were on CD (no vinyl and only a few tapes). Once I got the hang of the different buttons and knobs, I had an absolute blast, even if the music did suck. If you are curious here’s a 3 1/2 minute sample of my shows on Nintey-Four-Three The Point.
Not long after I started doing Sunday afternoons on the air at The Point the Program Director who hired me left for Minneapolis and the parent company put a first-time Program Director in his place. To make a long story short this pinhead gave me a raft of the shame shit I was getting from Program Directors when his only concern was getting quality nap time in kindergarten. I told him to take his job and shove it, boy did that feel good!
Now that I have gotten all that off my chest
turn the computer off and go outside,
take a deep breath and thank god you aren’t in radio
Originally posted before I added WordPress to this site. Published date is approximate.