Taking requests for your favorite record!

One of the things I loved about being a radio DJ back in the golden age of rock and roll radio was taking requests. So much so that I still love it today.

There were two kinds of requests; the first was those that we took over the phone when we were in the main studio or on slips of paper when we were at remote locations such as Doug Broome’s Drive In. The other was those “Instant 60” requests where the person making the request was put on the air live.

When I first started full time at WCOS AM I was assigned the “All Night Satellite” which ran from 1 AM until 6 AM. During that time, WCOS was the only station on the air 24 hours a day so my audience consisted not only of the usual WCOS listeners but also people who normally listened to the other stations in the city. So the requests that came in to me covered a much wider choice of music, not only the Top 40, but also country, R&B and even what we called “Middle of the Road” music what later became known as “Elevator Music.” Unlike the huge music library I enjoyed at WUSC-AM, only the “Top 60 in Dixie” the “Up and Comers” and the small sampling of “Solid Gold” records were available for me to play. So if a listener wanted something else, they were out of luck. I would usually suggest a song that I could play that sounded similar to the one they requested if I could and most of the time they were OK with that. What that experience did for me was to greatly expand my knowledge of popular music of the 60s.

Taking those calls in the middle of the night really brought my audience and me closer together. There was usually a “story” behind each request and I felt that it was my duty to listen to each one. Sometimes that meant long conversations, interrupted every 2 ½ to 3 ½ minutes when I had to announce the next record. Many a time I’d hear the tearful story of a high school girl who’s world was crushed by a boy friend who had found someone else.

But to put to rest the notion that it was always the girl who was left broken hearted, I got my share of calls from boys asking the rhetorical question; “Why?” I admit that my teen aged years had their share of angst and heartache, but golly, it was practically tame compared to some of the stories that I was told. One of the things that the callers sought was confirmation that it will get better. As a “much older” person in my early 20’s I assured them that indeed it would be better.

Many a time I would get a call a few months later from a listener to tell me that I was right, there was a new boy (or girl) in the picture and everything was Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows, as Lesley Gore would put it.

The studio phone out at Doug Broome’s was a private number that was used to coordinate with Mike Rast back in the main studio in the Cornell Arms Building. We were told not to take any requests from anyone who was not present there in the parking lot. Most were brought to us by the roller skate shod car hops on scraps of paper or written on ketchup and mustard stained napkins. Some of those were almost illegible betraying either the writer’s excitement or the number of cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon that were consumed before making the request. I stacked them in a raggedy pile on the desk behind turntable number three to my right and every so often would pull the oldest request from the bottom of the pile, queue up the record and send the request out over the airwaves.

Back in those WCOS days, I was still a relative newcomer to Columbia who had spent most of his time here sheltered in the confines of the University of South Carolina campus, so I would sometimes get caught up in something that I didn’t know about. A good example of that was the night I unknowing read a “coded” invitation for a “rumble” between students of two rival high schools that were due to play their big game the upcoming Friday. The next morning I was called into a meeting with the station manager, the chief of police and the principals of the two schools. That was a mite uncomfortable, but they enlightened me of all the local code words and nicknames for the schools. I quickly learned to cast a wary eye on each and every request; especially those brought to my studio door by a good looking cheerleader wearing a tight high school sweater. Yes I’m a quick learner.

After playing the requests, they made their way into the office sized waste paper basket under turntable number one on my left. One of my regrets in life is that I didn’t save one of two of them in a scrapbook or something. While I’m at it, I wish I had taken a picture or two out at Doug’s; maybe with some of the kids who were always there or even of the cinder block building or the equipment inside.

I wrote earlier that there was also the “Instant 60 Requests.” They were the most fun of all and also the scariest. They could be run from only the main studio because they involved the listener calling the station and being put on the air live. During office hours we had to coordinate with Nellie Pleasant, our receptionist, so that she knew to not answer the shared telephone lines during the request. Sometimes, but not always, we put all the lines on hold to counteract those who dialed all but the last digit then held on until the jingle began to try to gain advantage over the others. It also leveled the playing field for those not in the Alpine telephone exchange. When the jingle started we cleared the line and generally took the caller coming in on line 3. We would talk to them until the jingle ended. Then we put them on the air, got their name and school, found out what they wanted to hear then played a “sweeper” that said “Here it comes” as we queued up the record and played it immediately. By the way in case you were expecting me to tell you exactly how we did that, I’m not gonna tell you, I was sworn to secrecy and I am not about to ruin the Top Secret Clearance that I had gotten from the Navy a few years before. By the way, I still remember that phone number for WCOS – “Alpine 2-2177. “

So why was the “Instant 60 Request” scary for the DJ? Three things; 1) it happens very fast with no margin for error, 2) the DJ needed to know precisely where on the Top 60 the requested song was in order to get it queued up on time, and 3) there was no delay back in the day so if someone uttered one of George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” it went out on the air for everybody to hear and you could do nothing about it.

In fact that did occasionally happen, one night I was on my way back to the studio after the Nightbeat Show when I heard one of our new DJs initiate an “Instant 60” request. Since I had the Top 60 records with me in the car I thought that took a lot of nerve since he had copies of only the top 30 on tape cartridge in the studio with him. It turned out to be a bad move for the DJ as when he asked the caller what he wanted to hear he was rewarded with the word that was on the top of Carlin’s list of words never to be uttered on the air. It was a good thing that there was no other traffic or a police car on Two Notch Road that morning and I swerved all over the road in reaction to what I had just heard. When I got back to the studio, no one mentioned what happened. Come to think of it, neither did the station management nor the FCC. So that was one that we got away with. In case you are getting a wild idea of having some fun with the local live radio personality that could never happen today because every station that takes live calls has a 10 second digital delay on it so we can “dump” any unwanted comments with a push of a big red button.

So the next time you hear me say to call in your requests on the studio line or send them in on Facebook, I mean it. Old school DJs and requests go hand in hand. Oh MY!