Sunday, December 15, 2019

The Solitary Voice on the Airwaves

When most people think of radio presenters or DJs, they have a vision of someone sitting in the air chair surrounded by people helping the show along. In reality, especially in music radio, being a DJ is a pretty solitary job.

Sure, at the bigger stations in the bigger cities, radio announcers used to across a console from an “engineer” who operated the board, turntables, cart machine, reel to reel recorders and all the other paraphernalia necessary to put a music show on the air. But for the most part, the DJs in our history were in “combo” jobs, that is, they ran their own equipment as well as providing the cheerful chatter that we listened to between records.

As a result; like others in the business for the most part my work experience as a DJ was a pretty solitary one. At the beginning and end of each air shift there was a moment of camaraderie with the jock that I was relieving and the one that was following me on the air. There was some technical discussion if there was a piece of equipment that was acting up or if the transmitter was behaving squirrelly. But to me, one of the most important things to determine was if the phones were active or quiet. Then the other DJ was out the door and I would be alone with the audience for the next five to six hours.

And that, my friends the crux of the situation was how active the phones were. While I never had a bad time while on the air, if the phones were active, then I knew I was going to have a great time.

During my salad days as a young pup DJ, I never came into the studio with a show all planned out. I was off in search of musical adventure. During my WUSC-AM days, I’d carry 5 to 10 albums in with me to start the show. As the show progressed the songs that I played seemed to point the way to other albums in the music library next door to the control room and I’d run in an grab one or two several times during the show. During my days at WCOS-AM, where we were rocking the top 40, the songs we were allowed to play consisted of the “Fun 40,” initially the “Top 60 in Dixie”, a stack of five to ten “up and comers” and a small box of “Solid Gold” records that have been off the active playlist for a couple of years.

On good days, the telephone would start ringing during the first song and I would begin pulling 45’s out of the wire frame record holder and build a small queue of records by placing the most recent request at the bottom of the stack. Computer programmers call this a FIFO stack (first in, first out.) Now this little stack was not rigidly a FIFO stack, there were some rules that affected the order a little bit. For example, we could not play two instrumentals or two female artists back to back. As misogynistic as that sounds the reasoning behind that was that the ratio of female to male artists was very low and the ratio of instrumental to vocal songs was even lower. Other than that, we were allowed to make our own choices from the 60 or so records that were in the studio with us.

Then there were the “train wrecks” that would occur if the queue was left in its natural order. A “train wreck” was two songs that sound horrible if they were played back to back, especially if they were segued. An example would be the very soft rock song “Love (Can Make You Happy)” by the Tampa Florida group Mercy and “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown who often performed with a flaming bowl of lit lighter fluid strapped to the top of his head. You get the picture? So occasionally the order of songs in the queue would be changed and/or a non requested song added to the stack just to make the flow work better.

During shows where the phones were not very active or the requests were coming in slow when I was out at Doug Broome’s Drive-In Restaurant I would have to select the songs in the queue myself. It was a bit difficult for me to keep my personal favorites from overwhelming the playlist. The biggest problem was that my personal favorites at any given moment tended to be weighted to the newer songs on the top 40 or the “up and comers.” By the time a song reached the top of the chart I was usually burned out on the record. So I had to make a concerted effort to mix in top ten records. Hopefully I would not mix in a song that would come up in a request in the next half hour. I absolutely hated to tell a listener that I had just played that song. Without fail they would say, “But I didn’t hear it!”

Now, if you are doing the math you realize that with an average length of 2 and a half to three minutes it was not uncommon to play 20 songs in an hour. That means that I could play the entire playlist (top 40 plus 10 “up and comers” and a smattering of solid gold oldies) and still I’d have a lot of show time to fill. So sooner or later, I would have to start repeating songs that I had played earlier in the shift. According to the top 40 programming experts of the day, that was fine, the audience that is listening near the end of a 5 hour shift was not the same as those who were tuned in at the beginning. Whenever I could, I would listen to the last hour of the show that preceded mine to make sure I didn’t play one of those songs in the first hour of mine.

During the semester at WUSC-FM, I am blessed to be rarely alone in the studio. There is usually a procession of folks dropping by to step into the production studio and record something. There is a big 4’x 8’ picture window between the studios to wave through and normally they will step into the control room to chat. Normally the program director comes in to pick up the operator logs from the previous week and the music director will come in to add fresh CDs into the heavy rotation mix on the shelf above the CD players and the light rotation mix on the shelf in the window behind the air chair. Occasionally a student or a student DJ from the station will drop by just to visit and chat. That is the best time of all.

Tomorrow is graduation day for the fall semester, and for the next month things will be quite different. The students will be away from campus and the halls outside the station will be quiet. On December 23rd and 30th things will be really quiet on campus as the winter break takes hold. Fortunately, the phone lines and the internet are really hot this year with a lot of requests coming in and someone ready to talk about their favorite oldie. Harrison Gasque, another old school Columbia DJ, should be joining me as co-host during this time period as well. So keep those requests coming in. Oh MY!

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