It’s hard to believe that it’s already March around here. It’s time for the radio sales guys to wake themselves from their post holiday slumber and start rousting the stations advertiser base for new commercials. The record promoters are beginning to sniff around with new songs for the spring. Well, that’s the way it used to be.
January and February were easy months for radio DJs back in the day. The program logs were sparsely populated with commercials since the sponsors blew their advertising budgets on the Christmas season and many of their customers were bound up in their homes under piles of blankets, venturing out for groceries and work only. It was not unusual to see a program log sporting commercials only from the ship-owners who sponsored the programs. Good examples of these sponsors from my past were the Taylor Street Pharmacy, and Doug Broome’s Drive In Restaurants.
Station owners were always a little nervous during January and February because the income from sponsors barely kept the stations in the black, and in fact sometimes the stations ran in the red during the first part of the year.
March was when it all began to change. The pace of sales went up. The new Spring song releases came in and we all geared up with the first promotional activity for the year; usually station contests to get the audience re-engaged. I must say, that at WCOS, Woody our program director was genius in that he installed the “Instant Request” as a year round feature. At first it was the “Instant 60 Request” and later when we shrunk the “Top 60 in Dixie” to “The Fun 40” it became the “Fun 40 Request.”
Either way it worked the same; We would play a “sweeper” that announced that it was time to make an instant request, we would choose a caller from the bank of blinking lights on the phone, put them on the air live, talk to them a bit and then ask them what song from the playlist they would like to hear. When then said the song, we would drop in cold a stinger that said “Here it comes!” and immediately play the record. We used the same stinger for both the Instant 60 and the Fun 40 requests. It was a classic.
Over the years, I’ve been asked many times just how we did that. Don’t get your hopes up… I’m not going to spill the beans. I think some mystery and magic from the old days should be maintained. But I will share this. Doing “Instant Requests” was the most nerve wracking thing I ever did on the air. It required a good knowledge of where a song was on the top 40. But most of all, because it was live and there was no delay you were at the mercy of the caller to behave and not curse on the radio. I was lucky, that never happened to me, but I’ve heard some of my fellow DJs get bombed by a caller.
So because of the “Instant Request” we had a head start on the other stations getting the audience re-engaged for the contest season.
Once we got the contests running again, and we could see the phone lines filling up every time we came out of a record we knew the well was primed.
BTW, we also know that many of you out there dialed our phone number Alpine-2-2177 on your rotary phones, all but the last 7 which you would hold with your finger until you heard either a contest or the “Instant Request” come on the air. We also knew that for some reason – the listeners who were also in the Alpine exchange had an advantage over those in the Sunset exchange, those on the UofSC 777 exchange or the other exchanges in town. So we would occasionally put all the incoming lines on hold and release them a few seconds after the request/contest began to level the playing field a little.
The other audience engaging thing that we did was the station promoted concerts. These eventually became the “Woody with the Goodies Hoparoonies!” as Woody took over the responsibility and the risks of promoting them personally. During the summer months, it seems as if we had one of these every month in venues all around the city such as the Township Auditorium, the Shriner’s Club and one or more of the buildings out at the State Fair Grounds. I loved these “Hoparoonies” because I got to meet so many of the rock and roll artists of the day either backstage or in the studios.
Once I began doing the “Nightbeat Show” in the evening out at Doug Broome’s I missed most of the shows because I was on the air during the performances. But I got to see much of the audiences as they would come by after the concert for a burger, fries and shake. Oh!… also they would drop off a request for a song by the artist who was in town that evening.
One more thing about March aside from the “Ides of March” is the fact that Daylight Saving Time begins in March. We “spring forward” next Sunday. The grogginess that I feel from the time change was offset by being able to stay on the daytime transmitter an hour later in the evening. I loved the reach that the higher daytime power gave the station. The only thing more magical than that was late in the evening when “skip” conditions formed up and I would occasionally hear from listeners from all over the eastern half of the country. I’ll never forget that night when Mike Rast called me out at Doug Broome’s to pass on a request from a listener in Peterborough, Ontario just across the lake from Rochester, New York. I don’t remember what it was they wanted to hear but you had better believe that I played their song and gave Peterborough a shout out!
Speaking of skip; last week KLYC, the station in Oregon where I do a show on Saturdays, received a message from a guy listening to the station in northern Sweden. How cool is that!?! Oh MY!
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