When you gotta go, you gotta go!

Let me set up the scenario for you. Back in the day, on air shifts for radio presenters were long; five to six hour shifts were the norm.

Most DJs worked “combo shows” which meant that they ran their own audio consoles and often operated their transmitters either locally or via remote control. Except during business hours, they were the only one in the radio station. Automation was still in radio’s future so each “jock” was in perpetual motion selecting and queuing up records, loading the carts for the next commercial or jingle, checking the news and weather teletypes and answering the phone. We had to be there at the microphone at the beginning and end of every record.

The last two elements to the scenario is that the average song length was somewhere between 2 ½ to 3 ½ minutes and that DJ’s had to keep hydrated or they would go hoarse with dry throat. Also with these longer shifts, we often had to eat while on the air.

That brings up the problem, how to output all that input. Making a trip to the rest room and getting back before the end of the record was nearly impossible in the less than 180 seconds of the average record.

Sure there were some songs that were longer; Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”, The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”, and Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” were lifesavers. But for the most part, there were no long songs active on the average Top 40 Playlist for a given week. And this is where DJ creativity came into play.

A typical three cart system The most common method was to record an announce break between two songs in the production room onto a cart and have it in the rack for emergency use. This method was limited by the requirement that the DJ had to say something between every record. This meant that each DJ had to make their own “break cart” with their voice. Also because of that, these “break carts” had a limited shelf life. Once used, a new one had to be recorded. That was a lot of work.

If you were lucky to work for a radio station where the engineer understood the trials and tribulations of you had another tool available. The engineer would rig up a switch that would allow you to “program” three carts to start one after the other starting with a “tertiary queue tone placed at the end of the song. The “announce cart” would be placed in the middle cart and then the second song would start in the third card on the “end queue” of the announce cart. Now you could have a more comfortable 6 to 7 minutes to take care of business.

But all was not lost if you were not so lucky. The third option was to make a short song longer. Let’s take a real world example of how this was done. Valleri by the Monkees was 2 minutes and 16 seconds long when it was released on February 17, 1968 on the Colgems Label (#1019.) Not a particularly good length to manage a rest room run. But at the end of the song is a guitar riff by Peter Tork that is very similar to the one at the beginning. The phrasing of this riff works very well to be the hinge of the edit. So we could replace the riff at the end of the song with the same one from the beginning. And “Boom!” now we have a song that is five minutes long. Plenty of time for the pause that refreshes. Peter, Mickey, Michael (and Davy up in heaven) I apologize, but your song was so good and the need was so great.

There was another problem with the first two methods. Live remote shows. Much of my time at WCOS was spent in a small cinder block studio at the end of the first row of teletrays in plain sight of the folks listening on their car radios. If they heard my voice and could see that I was not in the booth, there would be questions to answer. So for me, reliance on the stretched song was all I had for those emergencies. It was more complicated at Doug Broome’s because the nearest rest room was 200 feet away in the main building of the restaurant. Adding to that was the fact that I had to lock the studio door when leaving and unlock it returning. My record time there was a little under 3 minutes and I was out of breath when I opened the microphone to announce.

The final tool I had for mid show bio breaks was Mike Rast, our intrepid newsman at WCOS. Each hour at 5 minutes until the hour, he did our “News at 55” Newscast. At the end of the news, he would give the station ID and play the “Top of the hour” jingle and I would start the first record of the hour. This was the only time that we did not announce a song. The first song, an up-beat rocker that set the pace for the rest of the hour was called a “kicker.” I could get an 8 minute break if I asked Mike to play the “kicker” from the studio rather than me out at Dougs.

Unless you are a DJ of a certain age, you will never live through the necessity of these radio “hacks.” These days all you have to do is to “connect” two songs together on the automation and go on about your business. Full disclosure, with my aging bladder and a late cup of coffee, I sometimes do that during my oldies shows at WUSC-FM. Oh MY!