Personal essays
Playing what people want to hear
Long time / First time
Before it became what it is today, I used to love listening to talk radio.
I’ve told you that the AM side of the first radio station I worked at used to run Larry King’s overnight show from the Mutual Broadcast system. I’d listen on my drive back to Boston from southern Rhode Island until I lost the signal.
I used to wake up each morning to NPR from the time I graduated college to when I got married. Familiar voices talked to me about what had happened the night before and placed the news in perspective.
In those days, talk radio didn’t shout at you.
If I wanted shouting in my talk I listened to sports radio. When I was a kid in Cleveland I listened to Pete Franklin on the local station and could also tune my radio to the clear channel Boston station where the heavily accented homers talked about their Sox, Celtics, and Bruins and later listened to national shows like Mike and Mike and Jim “Have a take - don’t Suck” Rome.
Some of the callers became familiar voices and others finally had an issue that motivated them to call in. The percentage of listeners who actually call is very tiny. The new voices would always begin, “Hi, long time listener, first time caller” and then proceed to make their comment or ask their question.
Raised on radio
I listened to two radios at night before bed - the sports stations on my AM radio and one of the music stations my FM radio.
Every once in a while the music stations would take a call and some listener would request a song.
The caller would say who they were, say the song they wanted to hear, and then end with the stations slogan or the host would prompt them.
It never occurred to me that these callers weren’t live.
It should have. As the caller made the request the song began to play and as they finished the vocals would come in for the song exactly on cue.
Of course they were recorded.
Sometimes I wonder about myself and why that wasn’t obvious.
The caller may have had to try to make their request more than once. The DJ might even have had to edit the recording to make it come out right.
By any other name
My friend Christie sent me an email saying she’d called in a request on her long drive back home from Cleveland and it made it onto the air.
I met her for breakfast last Friday while she was in town and we caught up and reminisced about people we knew from our time in radio.
I say Christie, but that’s not really her name.
I haven’t changed it to shield her identity - it’s just that I knew her as Christie.
Sure, I knew her real name is Marilyn, but she used Christie on the air so that’s what I’ve always called her.
Just as my old partner from the morning team at 108 will always be Matt to me even though now he’s a respected pastor named Elgan.
I suppose it’s only fair. His whole family still calls me Fudge. But that’s a story for another day.
I first me Christie years and years ago at 1230 in the morning at a Dennys.
By then I was working seven to midnight at 108 and she was working seven to midnight at Majic.
Yes, majic with a “j” because it was “WMJI, Cleveland’s Majic 1-0-5 point 7.”
Anyway, I’d been hired to be the new overnight guy at majic so the program director asked me to meet with Christie outside of the station to get some sample program logs and learn a bit how things ran there.
The program director didn’t want to tip off the current overnight guy because they didn’t want to let him know he was being let go. I was later told that they caught him sneaking in to the promotion director’s stash of prizes and taking what he wanted. He apparently took advantage of the drop ceilings to crawl over the locked door.
In turn, I didn’t want to let the program director know that, the overnight guy knew he was being fired and he knew I’d be replacing him because he’d called me to ask who he should call to ask about applying for the job I was leaving.
Who knows - he may have done the ceiling trick to sneak into the program director’s office to snoop around and find out.
Anyway, that’s why I first met Christie after our respective shifts had ended, just after breakfast.
Secrets
I loved my time at Majic and learned a lot. It was a real “less is more” station.
Before my first shift I sat in during Ron Foster’s shift and watched him work. He said something about it being a beautiful day to head down to the ballpark before he gave the weather forecast. That was it. And yet I’d been listening to him for a week or so and thought of him as a very personable and personal guy. It turned out, he’d said very little and I’d built up the rest in my own mind.
The music at Majic was picked by a computer. It made sure that the music rotated in such a way that the limited library sounded less limited. Because we played “your favorites of yesterday and today”, the current songs came up about once a shift or less. The older songs rotated every couple of days.
The rotation also ensured that the hours these older songs came up varied so that people who tended to listen the same time every day wouldn’t hear the older songs more than once every week or so.
Overnights played the same music from midnight to five as played midday from ten to three. Almost noone listened to the station at both of those times so this practice meant that the music rotated even more slowly and stretched the library even more. There were fewer commercials overnight so we’d add a fill song or two to make up the difference.
My body never got used to working overnights, but I loved what I was doing.
The station went through some changes and some people came and some people went and they replaced overnights with a board operator - someone who never spoke on the air but played the music and recorded jingles.
I ended up making the same amount of money working mornings on Saturday and Sunday and then coming back for the evening shift Sunday and one more on Monday nights.
That’s when I worked my first “All-request weekend”.
Lies
So the first lie I learned about the all-request weekend is that it wasn’t all-request.
In fact, it wasn’t even mostly request.
The “oldies” category covers a lot of ground and so you want to make sure that listeners are enjoying a nice trip to the buffet where they sample lots of dishes and aren’t just hanging out eating chicken wings (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
So a typical hour in the all-request weekend had three slots for requests. The rest were scheduled by the computer.
That brings us to the second lie.
We played listeners making requests on the air something like twice an hour.
A listener would call and want to be on the air requesting a particular song.
“Sorry,”” I’d say, “I won’t be able to get to that.”
They’d, of course, be disappointed.
“If you’d like,” I’d offer, “I will be playing
More often than not, they’d say sure and record their request as if it had been the song they wanted to hear all along.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking. I don’t think it matters a lot whether you work on air under your name or another name. But I think it says a lot about us that we generally don’t care if we’re recorded requesting the song we really want to hear or one that’s coming up anyway.
It’s a lesson I think about now and then.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 161. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe