Radio Reflections

The author c.1987

Reflecting in 2010 on the state of what was I feel quite fortunate to have worked in the radio broadcast arena when I did.

Today radio has become irrelevant. I've covered this topic many times in the past on the Aircheck blog; so, I don't feel it necessary to go down that road once more today.

Often when one's supposed purpose in life is questioned a change of season or scenery is in order. In 1995 I had already spent 12 years of my life in broadcasting in virtual anonymity and felt that I had done all I could do in the field and escaped to 13 years in retail never seriously regretting my decision in light of financial reasons not due to any love loss.

Someone influential in my formative years warned that, "Once radio gets in your blood it is impossible to cure." He was right. But, what choice does one have once bitten by the "Radio Bug" when the whole industry has been turned on its collective ear?

The answer: redefine the skill set and adapt in a 21st century setting.

Again, I believe that my generation of broadcasters were the last of the breed anchored in the heritage of the medium while yearning for the new digital technologies so common today. The same technologies that have killed radio as we knew it. Rest in peace Radio.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden,The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.

Home Where I Belong

It's been crazy around here for a while. Blogging had to take the back burner and simmer a little. I've been transitioning back to my home church from the new work that had directed my energies a few weeks. I felt the mission would continue for at least a year; but, I could not get the rest of the family on board. It turns out that my wife and I both missed the old church but neither knew until I blurted out that the novelty had wore off. We agreed that we'd return home. And we did, not looking back. I worked to 100% of my abilities for the short time I was there building my skill set.

While we didn't regret our decision to return I did question why we left in the first place. As "luck" would have it on Sunday night the music pastor invited me to join the media team and introduced me to the person in charge; guess what? The new skills I learned at my most recent short time excursion I was able to intelligently  discuss with her. In fact, she observed that I could possibly teach their team the Pro Presenter software I had just experienced first hand. A mystery solved: the purpose for our diversion was learning a wholly new way of integrating sound, video and scheduling logistics for worship and bringing back those highly effective methods to our church. For the last decade I have craved some sort of synergy of my hobbies and talents. I realize how vague this all seems; but, I assure you, long suffering reader, it is coming together.

Stay tuned

©2010 Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved.

Brick Wall Broadcasting

Do you ever get discouraged on your job? Does it seem that despite your best efforts success eludes you? I found myself in such a situation at my second radio home. Just a few months prior to getting this job I had resigned from my first broadcast station leaving to pursue major market radio. I launched out not knowing for sure if I would land a DJ gig at all. Gospel 90 had offered me transfer to their 50,000 watt sister in Atlanta. Determined to make it on my own I, at age 20, turned down a sure thing and a 100 mile daily commute for something closer to home in suburbia. Had I made a bad move?

I was at this new home on 1520 AM only four months when the news came down that the charismatic church  that owned WSPZ was selling the facility. Budget crunched owners lost interest in the station shortly after their pastor (also station general manager) unexpectedly resigned. He championed our little station; with him gone the gloves were off. The deacons now had free reign to unload the little thousand watt daytimer that signed my paychecks. Key staff dropped like flies and I became program director having jumped two pay grades in short order. For all intent and purposes I was my own boss with a skeleton crew on a shoestring budget. We made the best of the circumstances with decent content and better than average talent   making a little money by adding high school sports coverage with both local and national sponsors.

The owners wanted $750,000 for the station and wound up settling for $70,000 three years later having kept us paid without fail. The whole crew, although discouraged, must have been surprised the station didn't go dark; to the owners' credit we were never laid off or asked to take pay cuts. Today's aircheck is my final morning show on April 20, 1990, for the church owned 1520 AM which ceased broadcast operations 4 O'clock that afternoon. Listen as I almost reveal the transition which was kept mum until it was legal later that day. 20 years have obscured details of officially passing the torch to the new owner. Such as it is, the recording remains.

©2010 Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved.

Decisions, Decisions, Part Two

  For a brief time in late 1986 my dad and I shared similar paths. We were both dissatisfied with how work prospects had dried up in the small coastal town we lived in for 13 years. In early summer of the year he asked if I had ever considered moving away to a bigger city and presumably a better life. He felt limited by the market and I agreed. Most disk jockeys of my era shared the opinion that moving "upmarket" was always a good idea. It meant better exposure and more money. The novelty of my first radio home had worn off. I was ready for a bridge burning change irrespective of an actual moving day. At the time I called it burnout. I was lying to myself; radio was my life. But what was I to do? I had a certain numerical figure in mind my current situation fell far from the mark of meeting, so a new career seemed necessary.

  Savannah, Georgia was known as a medium sized radio town ranked at about number 149 while Atlanta was a major market constantly in the top 10 of all US cities. By December of '86 my family had settled into our new home just outside the Atlanta metro, Douglasville. I had got a job immediately as an office temp doing telemarketing. At least I was using my voice, just in a different direction. The money was much better, almost my goal amount.

  My previous employer had set up an interview at a 50,000 watt sister station in Atlanta that I felt was a false opportunity. About an hour commute was unappealing even for the dollar figure, nearly twice my old rate. I would have been upside down with the fuel cost alone!

  I forever viewed this as a good decision although it meant a gap between radio homes. How long a gap was uncertain. The good news was that by the end of February I was in broadcasting again, This time at a 1,000 watt AM daytimer located mere minutes from home with comfortable pay.

  The station was in a facility recently remodeled and filled with the latest pro equipment. Despite its transmitted power, it was the best sounding facility of all my radio homes. Three months into my stay there the owner made the astounding announcement the the station would be sold! What had I got myself into?

  I had gained favor with the GM, "Vic", who gave me a 10% raise after only 30 days. It was this manager whose resignation, I assume, was catalyst for the sale. The business was owned by a local church, he was the pastor. The back story I can only speculate. I believe that the radio station was Pastor Vic's baby and his leaving gave those less enthusiastic of his cause leeway to unburden the load that we undoubtedly were. Key people eventually resigned and I became Program Director By November of 1987, finally earning my magic number, to the penny.

  Ironically, my monetary victory was shallow. I was unhappy. The money did not satisfy my artistic leanings. The station was boring. Except me, we had little or no listeners as we sailed on adrift, waiting to be sold. That process would take another three years. I have to give the owners credit for their integrity. Pulling the plug on the whole operation and going dark would have been the best course but they nobly kept us paid never missing a beat once. Unprecedented creativity was about to be unleashed from me as I was to find out with the successor at radio home 3. That is another story.

Stay tuned

Decisions, Decisions, Part One

A question I often pondered is why did I stay in radio so long? The answer is not so easy. The money was not good at all. I started out as a minimum wage button pusher at a 5,000 watt AM daytimer in Savannah, Georgia in 1983. By 1986 I had squeezed another 15 cents an hour out of management. Wow! What a windfall. In 20/20 hindsight, I believed the low wages was ownership’s way of taking advantage of us admittedly unambitious disk jockeys who lived and breathed radio. In other words we were underpaid because we loved the medium too much and were fools enough to take the monetary abuse. The first four years was a love hate relationship. Fact was that I could have been more proactive in sending out airchecks to bigger stations; but I felt at the time a longing to stay in gospel radio. Lack of confidence also played a role.

I was a shy teenager who had friends working at the Piggly Wiggly making upwards of a dollar more an hour. The “prestige” of my job somehow compensated for the gap. Personal appearances at skating parties paid way more than my station in summer of ‘84 but these gigs became non-existent on into 1985, a pivotal year for me.

Realizing that my pleading with a system that was either unwilling or unable to give a substantial raise caused a sense of futility hidden from plain view. Those closest to me knew of my dissatisfaction. For the sake of my craft I was willing to continue honing my DJ persona while I secretly, later openly, pursued a better paying job.

A promising airplane factory job was the first I turned down. A five week training course completed, I flat refused to see myself ever taking any amount of money to do shift work. My dad had pulled some strings with a college buddy’s wife well connected with the plant. The job would have been a sure thing. Somehow radio beckoned and I returned full time despite the better money and benefits. Needless to say greed never played a role. The tug of radio was an irresistible force. It was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, the greater good, my purpose; a calling. With that rationalization my wander lust subsided, for the moment.

By the end of 1986 I was fed up by the insult of a tiny raise not compensatory with my perceived improvement  that I legitimately worked very hard  obtaining, thank you very much; artistically indignant to coin a phrase. In reality my skill set was only better in delivering time, temperature and record introduction with inflections borrowed from the FM top 40 disk jockeys I attempted to emulate never imagining that personality radio was the wave of the future.

The days of my type of DJ were numbered while the shock jock was on the cusp of forever changing the way radio was done. Not that I wanted risqué talk a part of my repertoire rather the courage of these innovators to break the rules by speaking in their natural voices, expressing the listeners’ mind and bringing a brand of honesty that turned broadcasting on its ear was what I came to admire today.

In my defense, personality radio was not part of my training or nature. Being myself on-air horrified me so  advice to lighten up would have likely fallen on deaf ears. I would have scoffed at the idea seeing it unprofessional. In the final analysis, no one mentored me to excellence. Only the mechanics of running the board were taught, the rest was hit or miss self education.

Radio home number one was never a cohesive unit; a beast lacking focus. It was truly chaotic and not in a good, creative contrasting way. There were other DJ’s who did time, temp and intros “better” than me, for sure, but that method was going the way of the dinosaur. The radio industry evolved as my station spewed an extinct form I would eventually unlearn at my next two stations…

stay tuned

copyright 2009 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.

King of all Peanut Whistles

Talk about a peanut whistle. I worked a year at this particular 2,500 watt gem. We had local news, Southern Gospel music, a Swap Shop and daily obituaries. The news wasn't from a teletype or our own reporters. No, we read it directly from the newspaper. Verbatim. A few years before the dot com boom one of my fellow staff members commented on the state of our programming. The idea of a good ole country station was a relic of a bygone era. The world was now more accessible thanks to new technologies. I don't agree with him totally because stations such as this have their own unique charm. My friend Jim did get it right on one point though, we are a more enlightened society thanks to outlets such as CNN and other TV cable networks readily available then. It was 1992 and the World Wide Web and Fox News were a few years off. The context of his remarks was framed by people who he had observed overstating their "country" heritage by feigning ignorance, although being just as enlightened as city folks.

I was a bit of a snob then and saw this station a road block in my career.  The WBKI culture was an adjustment and was a step down from a purely business perspective. I later adopted their style and grew to appreciate their way of doing things. A few of the more countrified elements were weeded out and we became more "sophisticated." The home spun morning DJ resigned shortly after some heated debate with me. I viewed him as a local yokel. He was blissfully ignorant but the people loved him. The station fell into decline and eventually folded. My guess is that we didn't give the listeners what they wanted or maybe poor management was to blame. Who knows? Our GM saw the futility of the situation early on and probably mentally quit long before our demise. To borrow from the famous TV show WKRP in Cincinnati this guy was "town to town, up and down the dial". Success eluded David. We had worked together before. I witnessed his slow decline at my previous radio gig and now doubt my own wisdom in hitching to his star. However, I learned a lot from him and consider him a mentor. He allowed circumstances to limit him. I missed the control I had as a program director at my two previous jobs and felt the air chair was a handicap. For the first time in 6 years I was "just" a dee jay.

Stay tuned!