Runnin’ a tight board!

If you are not an old school radio person, you probably have no idea what this week’s blog title is about. It has nothing to do with foot races and certainly nothing about anything that grows. Unless you count that feel good mood that strikes you when you listen to a radio show that is done in the old Top 40 style that ruled the airwaves from the mid ‘50s through the mid ‘70s. “Runnin’ a tight board” meant that there were no moments of silence between songs, jingles, commercials and all the other things that happen during a radio show.

We called those moments of silence “dead air” and we tried to avoid that at all costs. Runnin’ tight boards was not just something that happened in Top 40 radio but was a general practice in all radio formats including, R&B, Country and even “Middle of the Road” programming.

Running tight boards did not come easy; it took a skilled radio presenter as they called them in the UK, DJ was the term here in the states. A lot of physical work went into keeping the stream of sound active. There was cueing records, and reel to reel tapes. Commercials had to be located on the program log, carts retrieved from their places in the in the cart racks and loaded into the bank of cart machines for playback.

Left: a typical first generation cart machine similar to the ones I used. “Wait a minute;” you say. “Just what is a cart?” Well if you are of a certain age I can say it was the precursor to 8 track tapes, except it had only one program track (two if stereo) and a cue track to stop the tape at a spot just before the beginning of the next commercial or jingle. If you are too young to know what an 8 track is; an 8 track tape is a continuous loop of tape that was wound on a single spool in a plastic case. The tape was pulled from the center and passed through openings at the end of the cartridge, where when placed into a cart machine or 8 track player the tape heads could pick up the sound before the tape wound back to the outside edge of the tape on the spool. To the MP3 crowd, that seems like a lot to get the same thing that you get on the click of a mouse these days, but trust me, to the DJ who remembers playing all jingles and commercials on reel to reel tape players they were really something special.

On top of all this physical activity by the Radio Jock, he or she had to introduce records, talk about the weather, take requests and dedications over the phone or on napkins taken at the back door of the announce booth at the local drive in restaurants if you were lucky enough to be where the action was at a remote gig. By the time one got the next break between records set up, the record on the air was beginning to fade out at the end and it was time to do the break and then start all over again.

The breaks were really different depending on if you had a full schedule of commercials or a light commercial load. The maximum non programming time in an hour was limited to 18 minutes by the FCC back in those days. News, weather and sports counted as programming time so that took about 10 minutes out of each hour so that left about 50 minutes for music and commercials. The most common commercial “spot announcement” was 30 seconds long, many were as short as 15 seconds. If you do the math, that meant that during the peak “sold out” time of the day, something had to go between each record. One more thing, the DJ had to start everything by hand. That meant lots of opportunity for screw ups, and most screw ups meant “dead air”.

My most common cause of “dead air” was misplacement of carts into the cart machine. Most cart machines could play more than one size cart, so when the DJ loaded the cart into the machine, he or she had to make sure that it aligned with the right side of the slot on the machine. Additionally the cart had to be placed fully into the machine up against the heads and the capstan that moved the tape in the cart. In one of my stations, the stack of cart machines was located to the left and behind the air chair. Loading carts required either leaning back or turning the chair. The leaning back method was used especially when time was running out and speed was needed. Unfortunately haste makes waste and occasionally the cart would not be seated correctly. If I was lucky, the results were that the cart would not start when the button on the console was pushed. One unfortunate night; I suffered a catastrophic cart failure when the pinch roller that swings up to the capstan to move the tape shattered the plastic case rendering it unusable. During the next song, I located an empty cart case in the production studio and replaced the empty spool with the one I removed from the broken case. I got the commercial on the air without having to do a “make good,” a free announcement to cover the one I missed.

Where the “tight board” rubber meets the road is at the beginning and end of the songs. The Top 40 programmers back in the day required that there be something, the DJ’s voice or a station programming element usually a jingle between every pair of songs. Plus we were required to “walk up a record and hit the post.” That meant talk over the music at the beginning of a song and stop at the exact moment that the singer or singers begin. The kids who were trying to record their favorite song hated this and although I was never told this, I suspect that is the reason this practice came into being, to force them to buy the record rather than bootleg it off the air. The same was true of the musical endings of the records.

To me, there is little that is more satisfying than hearing an old school DJ spinning the tunes and doing a show complete with all this. Alas in this day of block programming and stop breaks these skills have given way to the automation friendly practice of pre and post selling the songs in a music block, and running “loose boards” complete with snippets of “dead air.”

Lest you think I am an old radio curmudgeon who misses the old days, (I stipulate that is the case,) I will relate to you that at least once a semester at WUSC-FM on the campus, a student will walk into the control room in the middle of my show there just to “see how this cool radio is done.” My die hard audience and I are grateful that the powers that be give me a place on the dial where I can keep that ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s radio experience alive. Oh MY!