Back in the golden age of music radio, the most common source for the music we played on the air was vinyl records. Also, with very few exceptions like “Dan’s Dusty Disks” on WAPE, WBAM and WFLI the shows were all live. The majority of these shows were what we called “combo” shows, that is the live DJ operated the audio console and all the other studio equipment while “playing the top of the pops and the cream of the crop for all you cool cats and hot kitties.”
Personally I loved the physicality of doing “combo” shows. There is nothing more satisfying that “slip queuing” a record and “walking up the intro of the song and hitting the post.” Sadly that skill has lost its value in these days of MP3 files and automation systems.
Slip queuing was a technique used back in the days when broadcast turntables needed 10 seconds or so to come up to speed. So the DJ would place the needle of the tone arm on the record, start the turntable and listen to for the first notes on the record with a cue system that was not heard on the air. Once the first notes were heard, the record was backed up to a couple of seconds before the beginning of the song and held with the fingertips while the turntable continued to spin below it. Hence the name “slip queue”, the record “slipped” on the turntable as long as the DJ kept his or her fingers on the edge of the disk. When it was time for the song to start, the presenters lifted their fingers off the record and simultaneously turned up the “pot” or volume control for that turntable and just like magic the song was on the air.
In the late 60s and early 70s, the instant start turntables were introduced. These platters came up to speed very quickly; within a half second or so. This meant that the DJ no longer had to hold the records edge. One simply queued the record up on a turntable that was stopped, backed it up a second before the first notes and then start the turntable and “pot” the music up. What made it even better was the introduction of remote start buttons on the audio board tied to the “on” switch for the turntable audio. That made it much easier and it also allowed for the placement of the turntables out of reach of the presenter while he or she was talking into the microphone. This made life much easier for the on-air jock and reduced the necessity that they be quite as coordinated.
One of the side benefits to the placement of the studio turntables away from the DJ is the reduction of the accidental bumps delivered to the turntable. Until my muscle memory became familiar with the physical layout of a new control room, there was many a time I would swing the air chair around on its swivel to reach back to insert a cart into the cart machines and bump the desk the turntable was on and cause the record to skip on the air. With more space between the air chair and the turntable I could really get down to doing the DJ Air Chair Behind Boogie without fear of making the records skip.
Left: A good example of slip queuing a record. Note the soda bottle on the desk just waiting to spill. Alone in the radio booth at a drive in restaurant, eons ago, I learned another shortcoming to vinyl; records and water do not mix well. I accidentally spilt my ever present bottle of Pepsi on some of the “up and coming” records as I was grabbing one from the pile in the cardboard box that I used to carry them from the studio. Fortunately, I had already removed the news copy and the commercial carts before the spill. There was a water spigot on the side of the main building across the passage way from the booth. I grabbed the records, and quickly washed the spilt Pepsi off them. I tried to dry them quickly with some napkins but there was still a fine film of water at the bottom of the grooves in the records. Thinking that the needle would have no problem splashing its way through that almost invisible film of water, I chanced playing one of still not completely dry 45’s on the air live. To put it mildly, the results were not the best. When a needle hits water in a record it makes an unmistakable and quite unattractive sound.
Fortunately it was a quiet night and the car hops were sitting in their chairs watching all of this happen. Pretty soon they were having a party spinning the records around on their fingers until they were bone dry and could be played again. Yet another time those ladies saved my bacon.
The same is true for records that have been sitting around in the record library for a long time. We call them dusty disks for a reason. We learned very early on, to inspect each record and blow the dust off of the side we were going to play. If you don’t the static noise almost drowns the song out. More than once, I’d wash the record off and play it only after it was thoroughly dried. By the way, you had to be careful washing records. If you weren’t, you could permanently scratch the surface with loose dust and grit. Do you remember those disk cleaning kits? Well, I can tell you that a mild dish detergent, warm not hot water and a gentle washing motion worked quite well. The only advantage to the kits was that their cleaning solutions were alcohol based and they dried much quicker than soap and water.
I don’t know why, but a spinning turntable live on the air had the same power of attraction as a mobile home park to a tornado. Two incidents from my days at WCOS come to mind.
The first, I was on the air in the control room on the second floor of the Cornell Arms Apartments. My buddy, Scotty Quick, was in the production room next door finishing up some late commercial recording. There was a commercial on the log that I couldn’t find so I knocked on the glass window separating the two studios and pointed to the commercial on the log. He nodded “I’ve got it” and I pointed to the record on the turntable that had less than a minute left before I needed the cart the commercial was recorded on. He jumped up, and ran around the corner between us and tossed me the cart. Well, I butterfingered the cart instead of catching it cleanly and both of us looked on in horror as the cart bounced off my hands and formed a perfect ark from them to the record that was on the air. It sounded like WW II had broken out as I caught the cart on the rebound, slammed it into the cart machine and started it without saying anything. My hopes that the cacophony would go unnoticed were dashed as the studio telephone lines lit up with listeners asking what was all that! At the end of the next song, I had to come clean as to why I didn’t play first base in any of my neighborhood pickup baseball games growing up.
My second wayward turntable story involves a stray Beatle wig that somehow had a home on the top of short rack of equipment that sat next to that very same turntable featured in the first story. Quite often, Mike Rast, our news announcer would walk into the control room and kibitz with us with his arm resting on the top of that rack next to the Beatle wig. One day, we had spent the entire 5 minute news cast trying to make Mike laugh to no avail. No matter what we did, Mike maintained his professional demeanor and didn’t even crack a smile. After the news was over and the first song was on the air, he took his familiar place with his arm on the top of the cabinet to gloat that we were unable to “break him up.” As he turned with his eyes twinkling over his half glasses to leave, his sleeve accidentally knocked the Beatle wig off the rack and down onto, you guessed it, the turntable that was on the air at the time. If the cart incident sounded like WW II the Beatle wig incident sounded like Armageddon. Mike swore until his dying day that it was an accident but the rest of us weren’t so sure.
I still miss those days with the records spinning and the control room filled with the unmistakable smell of vinyl being grooved by the needles of those tone arms. I don’t care if it was 45 RPM or 33 1/3 RPM, that was real radio and I miss it still. Oh MY!
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