It has been said that teachers have the strongest immune system in the world, because they are exposed to every childhood illness that walks the face of the earth. That may be true, but I postulate that the immune systems of radio DJs are nearly as strong. We get exposed to the adult and childhood viruses that are roaming through our cities. Or at least we used to.
First of all, look at the working environment. Combo radio presenters work in a small room usually with poor ventilation (to keep the background noise down), and lots of surfaces that we all touch. Those knobs and switches in most stations almost never got cleaned, especially if you were working in a station with a 24 hour broadcast day. Oh, I should explain that “combo” radio presenters are DJs who run their own mixing consoles, called boards, as well as talk on the air. That would be most of us who worked in music radio in its heyday.
Not only did we have the switches and knobs as common touch points, but we also handled the same records, carts and reel to reel tapes. In remotely controlled stations we used the same remote controls to operate the transmitter. In the case of airborne viruses, we were sharing the same air in those control rooms. It’s almost like being at 35,000 feet in an airplane cabin full of people who have colds.
At WCOS, our chief engineer, Milton, was a clean freak. He would come into the main control room during the time we were broadcasting from our remote studio at Doug Broome’s with a handful of paper towels and a bottle of Formula 409 which was invented in 1957 by Morris D. Rouff. Formula 409’s original application was as a commercial solvent and degreaser for industries that struggled with particularly difficult cleaning problems. Because the degreasing property of 409 removed the residue from hamburgers and french fries from the knobs, I’d say that qualified broadcasting stations as one of those industries that were in the struggle.
I knew where Milton kept his stash of 409 and more than once I’d grab the bottle and give everything a lick and a promise as I started my air shift. I would do that at least once a week out at Doug’s because I was the only one who was in that studio unless something broke down. Oh, yes, I’m guilty, there were times when there was a Big Joy hamburger, fries and a Pepsi sitting on the turntable deck just past turntable # 3. And to make my confession complete, later in the evening, there was usually a slice of strawberry pie covered with whipped cream. If I was not careful, the turntable switches and knobs would get sticky with some of that strawberry filling. So out would come that 409 and a napkin and all would be good again.
Microphones were a particular problem. Spraying 409 on them was a major no-no! Those RCA 77-DX ribbons could easily get covered with 409 if you sprayed it on the windscreens. The solution was to spray some 409 on a paper towel or a rag and wipe the steel screening of the microphone down to get at least the germs on the surface. My greatest fear about those germs was realized back in the 90s when Milton gave me a pair of those microphones which had quit working. I opened the microphones and sure enough, the insides, including the ribbons were covered with God only knows what. Today, those great old microphones are sitting in a place of honor in my home studio, clean inside and out and working perfectly.
Even with all the precautions Milton took to keep all of us healthy, sooner or later each fall or early winter, one of us would come down with an “upper respiratory infection;” a cold or the flu. When that happened, that cold would spread like wildfire through all of the staff. That was a problem. In normal work environments taking a sick day posed an inconvenience. In radio where it was necessary for every DJ to cover his or her shift or the station would have to go off the air. And that meant that most of the time we would have to work sick.
I have to tell you, that “Playing the top of the pops and the cream of the crop for all you cool cats and hot kitties” is a tad more difficult when you have “The Rock And Roll Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” is not one of the easiest of things to do. There was plenty of times where one of my co – DJs or I would rest our heads on our arms folded across the desk in front of the board while the record played. We were just resting our eyes, you see. I was fortunate in that I never fell asleep doing that, but one time, driving back to the station after doing my show from Doug’s while just a few blocks away I heard a record track through the end of the song and then heard the “bump, bump” as needle jumped in and out of the groove. I parked in the no parking zone in front of the Cornell Arms Lobby and ran up the stairs yelling to the guard to keep an eye on my car while I wake the DJ up. When I came back down a few minutes later, the guard was explaining to the patrol cop what was going on. Fortunately for me, the cop smiled, showed me his 7 transistor radio and told me that he enjoyed my show instead of giving me a ticket that I could not afford.
The effects of the “upper respiratory infections” had on me are two-fold one good and one bad.
The bad one is that having a cold makes you foggy and a little bit daffy. The old brain is only firing on 4 of the normal 8 cylinders. The mechanics of being a DJ; cueing up records and tapes, finding and loading cartridges are one thing. But being witty and funny and sometimes even pronouncing words in English can be a challenge. Eyes don’t seem to focus as clearly; making reading labels on 45s and carts more difficult and time consuming. The one saving grace about 45 RPM record labels was that each record company had their own distinct label so if you knew what record label a song was on, it was easier to find it in the rack of records on the top left of the Altec B-25 console. Yes – even I, with my watery eyes could tell a Buddah record from Motown record at a glance.
The good side effect of a cold is that it makes a DJs voice go low, at least as long as the voice holds out. These days with shorter shifts of 2 or 3 hours as opposed to the longer ones we had in the day of 5 – 6 hours; the voice usually holds out through the end of the show. But back in the day there were the shifts from hell when all we could do was to croak out the “Time, Temp, Boom-Boom” between records. Just in case you are wondering why we didn’t just segue songs together; those were different times, it was in our instructions never to do that!
These days, there are no more records and no more carts; only lines of text on a computer screen, so everything looks the same. That is why my music computer sits on the copy rack over the console right in front of my eyes. Right where I can see it, cold or not! Oh MY!
No comments:
Post a Comment