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35000 Watts Podast – S3E2 – Joe Lomonaco (289 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And welcome back to 35,000 Watts, the podcast. This is season three, and we are continuing our exploration of all things college radio. This episode is hosted by our good friend Lisa, and she’s got a special guest with there this time.
Okay, today we have a special guest. His name is Jonathan Lee, and Jonathan comes to us from WKNS. So nice to have you today, Jonathan.
Nice to be on the show. You and I met on Facebook a few years ago and one of our radio enthusiasts, Facebook groups. Um, I, I knew right away that you are a big fan of college radio, so I was glad that you reached out to be on our podcast today.
What can you tell us? Tell us about the time you were at WKNS and how that impacted your life. Well, as I probably, that would, in our pre-interview thing, like I, I took, hearing an old interview, so we had a thing called talk back before we were on, actual, on the air, and I had a, a real to real take, digitized a few years ago.
Um, and it sounds really bad, you know, if you record over those multiple times, you can like hear the under, the underside of the tape. There was a RadioShack tape is real cheap. One of my classmates interviewed me and I interviewed him, and I totally forgotten how I ended up there.
I had been looking in, or seeing ads and rolling stone and maybe some other music magazines for a place called Full Sale, recording studio in Florida, and it was a school, and there’s other ones too. And I thought, you know, I don’t have any musical village or anything, but I love music, so I was just thinking, well, maybe that could be a job for me. I don’t know exactly in what capacity.
I would work in that studio, but maybe they could find a place for me somehow and I could just learn about it. So I couldn’t find anything like that really in my area of North Carolina. Um, that would be like drivable.
Somehow I stumbled upon the curriculum for Lenore Community College in Kingston, which is probably 40 minutes to an hour maybe from where I was living at the time. They had a radio and TV broadcasting program, and one of the classes was like commercial production and ready and technique or something like that. I actually still have a copy of that somewhere.
And so it’s like, well, maybe that’s kind of close. And so maybe I can do that. And I am a radio enthusiast.
I mean, I was the kid with the transmitter radio under the covers when I was a little kid and and I didn’t, I know all my friends like would say they would listen to some station far off or whatever. I just like listen to whatever it was and it was probably just the local AM station or something. And that was the guy when I was listening to radio growing up as like a teenager and all that, that when the DJ would come on, I would turn it up and people like, why are you turning it up?
Like that’s when I switched the station or I don’t want to hear what they have to say. Well, I do want to hear what they have to say because maybe they’re about to say, Led Zeppelin’s coming out. Well, the new album or whoever it is.
And I want to hear what they have to say. So I was that guy, so, and also did, um, my dad had a formal cassette deck, and when I was a little kid, I had heard about how you could run a crumbled cellophane, just make it sound like fire or take wooden blocks and knock them together, make it sound like horses or something like that. So, plot or plopping.
So, I did those little skits and stuff like that on my formal cassette deck. So all that kind of radio, uh, stuff or theater in the mine thing was already there before I got into it. So, when I got to K 91, the format, the class ahead of us.
Well, that’s just WK, that’s what they call it, K91, which is no mod, just a K94 out of, I want to say Norfolk, but that’s not right. It was a tide in order, Virginia. I think it’s kind of on the border of North Carolina, Virginia, and it was a rock station.
So they did this in Obama, because that class was going to be top 40, but the 11th hour decided to make it a rock station. We were AOR format. And, uh, before you went on air, you did stuff in the production studio to kind of prepare you, like the top that thing I was talking about or, uh, how to do PSAs.
Okay, what years were you there at your college radio station? 1982 through 1984. 1982 to 1984. So what kind of music were you playing in college radio versus what kind of music was like non-college radio playing?
The format was AOR. But MTV launched in 1981. Our signals are not very strong.
So I think our main demographic was cutting out again. Our main demographic was, or who our listeners were, were mostly high school students. We played a lot, a lot of, uh, what’s her name?
uh, Coby Basil, Mickey, Mickey, I’m so fine. But I mean, that’s not AR and it was not getting played on AR stations, that’s more top 40 pop, but that’s where our listenership was. So it was very popular on MTV.
So that informed our playlist, and I could show you some of those sometimes here want to see them. And then it was the journey and the Zeppelin and whatever else, that’s kind of standard AR stuff, but we also, but then the stuff that might be more associated with college radio would be more like YouTube, Ultravox, stuff like that. We were also playing, um, the MTV kind of things, the Spando ballet, the haircut, what, haircut 100, uh, Thompson twins, um, Walla Voodoo, um, But we weren’t playing Baohaus, or we weren’t playing deep.
Well, we were playing diva. Um, but we weren’t a cutting edge college rock station, like WXYC at UNC or uh, WXDU and Durham, which I don’t know if they even changed XDU yet or WK and C and uh, Raleigh, which their whole thing was always chainsaw rocks, what they call it. But yeah, it was fun though.
So it was a mixture of AOR and what was popular on MTV, kind of a top 40 thing. Lots of requests for photograph. By Def Leppard and Rock of Ages by Def Leppard.
So, and again, that’s a teenage crowd that’s wanting to hear, you know, hear that. So you were playing the rock hits of the day as well as some of the new wave faves coming up on the scene at that time. Correct.
And we had, and we did play dick cuts, like you know, our station did, so we had 45, We also played a lot of, we had albums, so we used the rotation clock as you did back then, or at least at our station. And so you had some freedom. It wasn’t like a sheet of paper that said, you have to play this, so, it was college radio too, so, but we would have, you know, the hot, the hit singles and then the, the recurrence and then the, the black dot meant like a deep apple track, and we might play one or 2 of those an hour or something, if I remember right.
I have a picture of the clock somewhere too. It told too much you could play. So, it was a lot of variety, and then we had, it was a commercial, so it was PSAs, and of course, most of us are all amateurs too.
So some were other, some of them were more seasoned radio people. I just wanted to gain more knowledge and people were professional, I guess, and maybe you have that on a resume that had a degree in broadcasting. The station was on the air from 6 AM until midnight, Monday through Saturday.
They were off the air completely on Sundays. We have 3 hours of classical programming from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. which was kind of a requirement, you and I talked about this a little bit, maybe a governmental requirement, or FCC requirement, which had to offer some sort of something for the community or something like that. And that was one of the only paid positions there.
I never did do that. There was other people that did, and they weren’t really so into the rock and roll, some of them, but I, and they may not have been that much in the classical either. And then the PB, which was also a student, that was a paid position.
And we had the news team, and they taught us how to write news. They taught us it was a creative writing class, so you learned how to write commercials, that sort of thing. And the classroom, the radio station was actually in the classroom.
There was a box in the corner with chicken wire on it. So you had a news team. You play different formats of music.
Did you have specialty shows? Right, right. So debate format was AR.
Um, and at night, it continued to be AR, but from 11th to midnight, there was a guy that had kind of an R&B sold dedication show. Magic Mike. I think is what they call himself, Mike Rouse, and then, but then on Saturdays, it was all specialty programming.
So one guy had a Christian rock show. I had a reggae show that was 2 hours called Roots Rock reggae, and then there was a, our 1st instructor was Bob Snowden, then he left, and then this other local radio guide, veteran of the area. Jim Kelso came in, and I’d already finished my 1st year under Bob, but we still had some classes with Miss Kelso or Jim Kelso, and he had a big band show, make the league ballroom.
So, that was also known outside the station. I think it maybe had aired on an NPR station or something, maybe an FM commercial station locally. But I think he already kind of had a little following.
But my regular show followed his, uh, maple blue ballroom on Saturday afternoon, and I really honestly can’t remember what all the other shows were, but there were shows on Saturdays from 6 AM until midnight, different formats, block format. And then during the week, they left you some freedom, like at night, I had my own rock and roll show that I called sounds of the south, and, um, and it was not just, it was some bands from the south, but it wasn’t necessarily just all scattered almond brothers and things like that. I expanded out and they had like mother’s finest from Atlanta.
They’re still around with like a funk rock band. That’s what they and the slogans were not just whistling in deck season, just to kind of give you the impression that it’s not just, you know, scanner and that sort of thing. Nothing against that because I played plenty of that too.
So that’s kind of that’s what it was like. And other people had shows similar to that that were at night that were specialty, but they were rock and roll. One guy that was a classmate, his was the rock and roll extravaganza, and others had other shows.
But we stayed in format for those. All right, so you were, um, you know, coming of age in the southern United States, and there’s one really big band that came out of college radio in your neck of the woods. What would you like to tell us about your experience with REM?
So, I remember radio free Europe coming like, I don’t remember the, the hip tone version from 81 because they were not on my radar at that point. So we had a rock station at a Raleigh called WQDR, which was a Lee Abrams thing and he was the one that came up with the superstars format and all that. So that’s the 1st place I’ve ever gone yet.
It was Murmur. It was 83. But the 1st song I remember is laughing.
And it stays with me to this day. I know they played radio for Europe. See, that way I weren’t too, obviously, so they were playing good cuts.
So at our station, RPD at that time, I remember seeing the chart, the what we were playing in the head, and it was like the chart that was geared towards what you sent to the trade magazines, and it had our ads and what have been dropped and that sort of thing. And as one of the ads he had radio for your opponent, I said, why do you have that on there? We don’t even play.
So I don’t know what that was. I gathered maybe he was just trying to keep up with the Joneses. and make it appear that we were played, but I gather he was reading the trades and saw that other college stations were playing, and that sort of thing, and maybe he was just trying to keep up with Jones by saying that we were playing, even though we weren’t playing. And I don’t know why we wouldn’t have been playing it because, I mean, they were servicing college radio stations with that single, I would think, at that stage of their career, and that’s where, because I’m surprised, like I’ve wondered, so QDR was a, where, I guess you’d call Raleigh, uh, not a major market, but about a middle market, um, but not a small market either, not as big as Atlanta, but not as, or New York or something like that, but a media market, however you put that.
But they were playing a band that Don Dixon, who was the co-producer of Murmur and Reckoning with Mitch Easter. Don’s from out of state, but he had made his name here, prior to the murmer coming out with a band called arrogance. And so QDR did play arrogance.
And Mitch Easter is from around Winston Salem area. And I know they never played any less active if they did, it was kind of one off sort of thing, but they played a lot of arrogance. They were very supportive of them.
I don’t know that Don Dixon that really made his name as a producer or section guy outside of Erigance at that point. So I think that’s kind of what gave Arianna in at that station, and I think maybe one of the guys from that band might have been, from arrogance might have been a sales guy, Marty Stout, I think, may have worked at QDR. So that’s, and that’s what I’ve been told.
Like, so, and that, that, those days of REM, the whole thing is like it’s college radio thing and they’re groundbreakers in college radio and top of the charts all over the place. So, I don’t know how many commercial ALR stations nationwide, we’re playing REO at that point. The QR did, and they changed formats in um, 82 to 84, cease to exist, and split the country, but most of the people went to WRU in 84, which was another AR, and they continued also to play REM, and great supportive of them, and play the deep nuts and that sort of thing.
And I think that’s just kind of how that worked for us in this area, if you get what I’m saying. So it’s like, but no, we weren’t playing them, and I didn’t have any access to any college radio to speak up back then, I knew of it. Um, there was WZMB in Greenville, which we did trade when we were doing the reggae show.
I had a co-host after I or before I graduated, would come in, feel in for me sometimes, and it took over the show after I graduated. Um, we traded places with a reggae show with WZ and being Greenblood, East Carolina University. They were probably playing our year.
When we were over there doing that, then I saw a promo, cart, that had Michael Steinke, and Mike Mills on it, promoting the station, and I know they could have just called that in over the phone. But I think I found out later they did play Greenville, so it’s entirely conceivable that when they were in town, they dropped by the station, which was not uncommon for those bands to do back then and record that. So, but I had no idea who they were in 81.
I did not find out who Ari was until 82 when I heard, or excuse me, 83 when I saw him on, I heard him on QDR. But they played all around here too. Yeah, so being from that part of the country too, um, you know, being close to Nashville and, you know, REM and Athens and B 52s, college radio is known to be breaking like new weight bands and rock bands, but your station also broke some alternative country, right?
Not, I mean, we played some of that, but I don’t, so Cal Punk. The only one, the only 2 that I can really think of in that time period of 82 to 84 and there’s probably more than escaping my memory, but ranking file had all Hondo Escavado, and I had no idea who that guy was at that time. I don’t know who the band members were.
I just remember that album or two. And Jason and the Scorchers would definitely play Jason and the Scorchers. I know we played ranking file too, because I have the album actually, because when they split formats, I grabbed some of those, they put them for sale in the library.
And I’m sure there were probably some others. I just got thinking of them off the top of my head. What about Steve Earl?
So that would have been a little early, I think. Um, so when I got into country radio further, like after I graduated, and I already had a job in commercial radio, like within my 1st quarter or so. So by 85, 86, I met a country AM station in Goldsboro, which is probably 30 minutes from Kinston, uh, we were definitely playing Steve Earl, Guitar Town, era, that album, and also Dwight Yoakam, uh, the Wagoners, Nancy Griffith, I love it.
But Nancy Griffin, I was right on top of that in a sense, I mean, so the album was Lone Star state of mind, and I think she had 2 to 3 before that, but she ran into an issue too, where like, I didn’t really get it at the time, but the labels were trying to make her sound more country to get on the country stations, and it wasn’t really somewhat popular because she covered from a distance, which I guess was her big song back then. But she was not happy with trying to curtail her sound for, for the commercial radio playing on country radio. So she said just kind of screwed, walked away from it.
I was just going to do my own thing. But she was there for a couple years. I know we played that album and then to follow up little love affairs.
But Dwight Eggams, the one that called on, like all the other other folks I mentioned, they were kind of bubbling under like Steve Earl Southern Pacific was another one which had some of the ex, at least one Debbie brother guy in it, and I can’t remember who else, but it was not unknown people, and there was one company called, I think it was a normal strangers or something like that. I’m probably not thinking of saying it correctly, but Randy Wicks was in that band who wrote a song that was later covered by Lucinda on Car Wheels on the Gravel Road. So, all of a sudden, Long Justice, too.
I didn’t mean to leave them out. But they were getting more warm reception at rock radio, I thought. So there was a whole 2 rock for country and 2 country for rock radio.
Then if they were all, I think, I was in trouble down to Texas, a drug arrest or something. I dont know. I remember being told that he was being blacklisted by country radio and like at a certain point they wouldn’t play his music anymore and I haven’t really done the legwork on that to see how much truth there is to that, but he’s a very outsmoking guy and always has been, so I don’t know that that went ever so well with some of the more conservative country listeners and people that were programming those stations.
But when Guitar Town came out, it was a, it was popular, but then I remember like the new traditionalist, as they called them. I guess George Strait would be in there, Brady Travis, and then later Clint Black. I think he might have been later in my time, late 80s or early 90s.
That kind of sounded to me sort of thing that kind of won over, you know, and also the, I call him Marina Country, band, so the, like, Sawyer Brown, Restless Heart, Diamond Rio. Yeah, that kind of, that also kind of became a thing. Dang Garth Brooks, of course, but he was after my time too.
And I remember my dad really liking, like, Dark looks like, you know, the friends of low places and all that because it did have kind of a playback country sound to it, but in concert, he was like suspending himself from a rope or something to swinging around on stage. He grew up on Kiss and Billy Joel and Rush and stuff like that. So here’s this country guy kind of playing these country type songs, but his taste vegetations has fireworks and some arena country.
And he’s not the only one doing that, but he was one of the most high profile. And I’m run my dad one way, so I don’t, I’m not into like all that, but I like his music. But that’s a little after my time in country radio.
I’ve had a bad experience at that station. They kind of got out of radio for a little while and then we came back in the radio in 92 to 94 at WSFL in New Bern. How do you feel that your time in college radio contributed to your life?
Well, there’s that thing people say about division of your teens or young adulthood end up being the most important to you. So there’s, I think there’s more than a little bit of a kind of truth in that. And I don’t ever want it to create the wrong impression that I’m one of those people that only likes or that music from that era or something.
That’s not what I mean. I just mean. You know, you and I have gone back and forth on Facebook and I love that you’re always putting out new music.
I’ve never lost my passion for it. I think a lot of, and I don’t know why, I’ve read a bunch about it, and there’s that one thing I think are, and a lot of stuff, this does not go over well in that group, but this guy posted a thing, it’s about, so this, there’s that book like there, so many, a 1000 albums used to listen to for you, before you die or something. So it’s kind of based off of that concept, but it was all about new music.
And so if you read that article and I quote it often, this may, you know, the neuroplacidity where you’re using your brain to learn new things, whatever it may be, but one of those can be new music. And it prevents dementia, it’s been proven in scientific studies or whatever. There could be a book or whatever, just some sort of new activity.
So, and I don’t do it for any reason other than I just love music that much. I’m 62 and I just have not, and it doesn’t mean I’m listening to the whatever’s the latest hit thing or whatever that is. And I kind of, I’m somewhat out touch of with it, but, I mean, I kind of always been for a little bit, like, I just talked to what he’s just not, whatever he’s ever really into, and I’m not trying to proof on it or anything.
I’m aware of it and I could talk to you about it and stuff like that, but my stuff was always more off the big path a little, you know, I just, I’m still into it. I’ve always appreciated your defense of Taylor Swift. Uh, you know, there’s always the anti and the pro, and I’ve just always appreciated your take on why Taylor Swift is important today.
Yeah, well, you’re the one, and I guess it’s still, I don’t know if it’s, maybe she has to do it out since then, actually, does. But her new album, Time, you asked me to listen to it. No, I didn’t have to listen to it, but they want to, but it was kind of an assignment or something.
Um, and I did not make it through that album, but I tried. This is not I don’t hate it or anything. just doesn’t appeal to me mostly and I know she’s trying to do some kind of indie rockish things and maybe she did a song with somebody from the national or something like that. And you know, I really love boy genius and they’re all, they’re of that age, you know, and they grew up with her and they like her and they performed with her.
B. Bridgers has done a duet with Taylor, I think. I know she has. And then last year when she tore and she kicked the tour off in Nashville.
The 1st 3 dates were with Phoebe, the Phoebe brought out boy genius. They didn’t end up doing all 3 of those, well, actually, Phoebe had more shows than that with him. But those 1st 3 were in Nashville and on the 3rd night it rained.
So boy genius, our baby didn’t get to perform, but she didn’t come out and play with Taylor, but the people just love the hate on her for some reason. Well, I know one, a lot of it is, and it’s just, she’s a young, spiritually independent female that speaks up about how she feels about things, and they want the painter is this horrible human being, what she just donated all this money to hurricane victims in Western North Carolina. There was a tornado last year or something.
They were like, oh, she’s such a horrible person. She donated money to that. What did you do?
Complain about Taylor Smith. I don’t have to like her music and I don’t and I don’t hate it. It is just not my thing.
So, yeah, I have nothing against the woman. It’s more power to her. Okay, so what would you tell the students today?
What would you tell today’s college radio students and staff today about their experience in college radio? The game, as you well know, has changed dramatically. So my world is college radio play, he wants to teach you how to run automation.
I mean, sorry, that’s the fun thing about when I lived in a triangle area where we had the 3 college stations at USC, Raleigh, and Durham, I could call WXYC at Chapel Hill when I was leaving to come home from Raleigh, and I can get a lot of detail at 11 o’clock at night. Or later, because they’re up all night. They do it old school.
So what’s that preparing them for? It’s not preparing them to go to work. That the way radio is now where you, I mean, I went into I got some old radio frames a few years ago, we went to a cluster, a station, a building full of stations in Goldsburg, not far from where I grew up, and it’s all a bunch of stations in one building, but there’s no live DJs, and there you brought me through the control room, and there’s a empty chair with some headphones where the guy recorded the weather off the air that plays later.
So I don’t know what to tell them. I mean, unless they’re going to a WFMU is live. KEXP is live, but they’re not mainstream commercial radio stations, and then, and then the college, the program at LCC died out in the early 90s, and one of actually, one of my classmates taught it for a little while.
But I guess there’s just no interest died in it or something, but, so I don’t know, I’m not trying to put on that either, and I just think, commercial radio show holds a place for somebody, because they say somebody’s, did people listen to, people like to say radio is dead or whatever. It’s not the way we used to know it, but people are listening to it on their commutes, and it still garners ratings. Do they know the DJ’s not live?
Do they know like some computer software programs doing all the programming or most of it? The listener doesn’t really know that, but we know it because we’re radio people, but I don’t know about those college kids or they’re just doing it for fun while they’re in college or they want to major in broadcasting or in some way, but they’re, they’re not going to be able to get to do that thing. The live radio.
When they get out of there. And so don’t play regular, college radio day has a vinyl thong once a year where they, and it may not just be college radio, but I think it mostly is, and it’s not even in the US anymore, I don’t think. So for like an entire weekend, all these stations that are part of that network, play nothing but vinyl for a couple days.
So any now vinyls come back and it’s not that big, but it’s back way more than I ever thought it would be. So that’s kind of cool, but again, you’re not going to be doing that at some big station in Atlanta or something, or whatever, it may be Denver or unless it’s, so y’all got the Colorado sound station. Is that where you are or is that somewhere else?
You know the station I’m talking about? It’s obviously in Colorado, but I don’t know if it’s in Denver, but they’re like an indie kind of station. Maybe it’s a little bit more of that kind of freedom there, but otherwise the only place you’re going to find that kind of that kind of freedom was a low power FM or college radio, community radio.
That’s if somebody asked me a couple days ago, I met some guy’s really into turntables and stuff as a DJ, but not a radio DJ. If I would go back into the radio, I would not, not commercial radio, I would, if I would do it again, it would have to be a community type radio situation where I had the freedom to not play. Like, there’s, there’s music.
I enjoy that I love that’s current, that’s not reaching the commercial airwaves that another time I feel like it would, it should. People complain about country, but are these country stations playing CRFA or Sturgill Simpson? Um, Nicky Lane and all these other people that play country music that sound actually sounds like country music.
And again, I’m trying to be condescending to watch commercial country. I get it. The Bro country thing.
I dont want to generalize too much. It was a probably, in all that, I think some Chris Stapleton, some people like that, occasionally breakthrough, but when we ever see these people that get labeled Americana, that are playing what I would more closely relate to his country, or will that, will that ever, ever have any kind of significant resurgence or break through it through a mainstream audience on that level? I just don’t know.
And even if it does, that’s not going to change how I’m not going to start listening to that all of a sudden for me. What did you learn from college radio? What did college radio teach you?
I would have to go back to Bob Stone, then also my fellow citizens too, then. I probably won’t be able to sign any samples really off the top of my head, like I would normally do, because I feel on the spot in some of these interviews sometimes, but just the advice he gave us, it was just day to day living kind of things that you applied to your work or your production work, and he used to say, keep it simple, stupid. That was one of his things.
And I know there’s many more, like, and how about you follow the clock and have your back time and stuff like that? And I just indirectly answering your question, but just the things you could get away with on college radio. We were young and we said some, I did, and I know I’m supposed to, we said some very immature things where people misbehaving on the air and stuff like that.
College radio was good for getting that out of your system, but we had good work for the other states. The rudiment somehow, you know, running a tight board, but that’s not even thinking. And I was talking to the guy, the turntable guy about segues.
I’m not sure, they even got what I was talking about. If you listen to a station now, there’s no thought put into segueing 2 songs into each other. A computer does it, and they don’t care, like this has a cold stock, or a cold start, or it doesn’t know anything.
Or it doesn’t know that you need a break between the cure and Metallica. That’s another thing too. So one of our our early homework assignments was to was to go home and listen to our stations for 30 minutes to write down all the songs we were.
And I was telling this guy about that. And again, that’s why I was like, I’m not sure if it’s going to swallow what I’m saying. He’s like 41 and I’m 62 so that’s a generational gap there.
But anyway, kind of the whole point of that assignment. I listen to WKDR, so I still listen to them. Some of my other fellow cits might have been, listen to a top 40 or R&B and sold, session.
But even then, an automation was around back then, obviously, but New Yard was live, and they made a big thing about being live at one point when that kind of became a thing, in general, like one of their competitors was automate. There’s a live human there picking the music and sequencing it in a way that makes sense to the listener, even though the listener doesn’t know what’s happening today, so we wrote it down. This song has a fashionate photo.
This one has a slow tipo. There’s a reason behind putting their songs into order that they did. They had the freedom.
They weren’t like totally playing, hey, I can play whatever I want, let that end, play certain songs, that sort of thing, but they could do it in a way to craft a listening experience for the listener, and the listener’s not even knowing any of this is going on. You know, the Pink Floyd song and in this, into this episode song because of the way they begin or end or whatever, the fade works really cool. They don’t know that.
Um, and there’s no beat, and they got those talking about big matches. I’m not talking about that at all. That’s a different kind of DJ.
It’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about the flow, the sequencing, the fast song and the slow song and then the fast song. We’re too fast songs, then a slow song, and how you could craft that for the listener, and it’s all part of the art radio that’s not there anymore, because computer does it off.
That’s our devices from college threat, you know, college radio. We did have to play commercials, but we played PSAs. Yeah, we had weather and we had a newscast.
I think we have one hourly that we did, but whatever DJ was on air did hourly, like you just read 5 minutes of news and weather. But at noon, at 6, there was a more extensive 15 to 20 minute newscast, which our call added, what I recommended to be a guest on your show, do, but he was like, we’re the trench coat and all that was a hardcore. It still is, news guy.
And he wrote all the news and I got it off the bar and rewrote it and we were taught how to do that. So, those sorts of things, and I applied that to my experience in Torsal radio when I worked at stations. were you required to do such stuff? So true story.
I just recently connected with a college radio station in my area. They’re in Boulder, which is about 20 minutes from where I live. They take community DJ, so you don’t have to be a student, so I signed up to do that, but yeah, when I went in for my training, they were showing me like, you know, you pot down the automation, and then you pot up the CD you’re playing, and I asked them about, you know, SEGs, and are you, are you doing any, you know, sweepers or stingers between fast and slow songs, and they were like, no?
And I was like, okay, lost art form. Yep, yeah. But then I mean, you can’t do it.
I mean, you know, if you wanted to. Oh, totally. Yeah, exactly.
She’s like, go for it. you want to produce your own, go for it. I was like, oh, might just do that. But with a regular show, I always wanted to try to syndicate that.
I never really got anywhere with it, but in more recent years, there was a fellow student that did a, we brought back 1091 on the, they went away as part of a NPR network down here now called public radio weeks, but it’s not a college station anymore. Like many college stations, it was acquired by NPR, but Hebrew did K91 online, so we could do our own new shows and I used broadband to bring back, like I said, I just did like a regular AR shift. Nothing newer than 1984, so it was all of the time, but it was like, when Long was going to do newer music, but and also my sounds of the South and the reggae show, and I’d use GarageBand to do it, but you can, it’s not quite the same, but you can, and you can do it more precise things with it, I guess.
And it’s obviously not live, but you can segue to songs and overlap them with each other and do the sequencing and stuff like that. And then you just kind of piece it all together. And I’ve never made them any longer than I were, I don’t think.
We’re listening to Billy because everybody’s got such a short attention fan, but I still it’s not the same as being, but one of our fellow students would not do the K91 on live calls online because he wanted to be live. Maybe they’re saying, yeah, there’s probably why he could do that, but I mean, not the way we were doing it. Right, yeah.
We still, all of, most of us still had the bug, and then one of the guys had spent most of his life in radio didn’t want to touch, be behind the microphone again for the rest of his life. We just burned on it. You still have dead air dreams?
I haven’t had one in a while, but now that you said, I probably have one tonight. I have. And so there’s when I was at WSF, SFF, which we got, we haven’t started getting disconnected when I was talking about that a while ago, but my last stint radio was at AOR station in Newburgh, and I did the overnight shifts most of the time there, and we’d go to a friend’s house, one of my classmates who came out in one of the sprints house.
He also got me, I kind of got me a good job there. I go sleeping in his house when I got off the air on Saturday mornings at 6 AM and I got up and sleepwalked to my car and got brought in my case logic thing full of CDs because in my dream, I dreamed I’d run out of music to play. But I, that’s, and I just, I don’t sleep walking the more, but I used to, yeah.
So, and they’re not really, they’re not dreams, they’re nightmares. A lot of them seem to be at that last country station I worked at, which is my 2nd last job on radio, which, It was always there for some reason, um, and I couldn’t find a song or even a PSA to play, but as I was watching the, the song run out live on the air. I’m trying to find something, the buffer, the gap, so I could find the next thing to play, and I could never do it in time or find it at all.
Yeah, or the ski player doesn’t work or the turntable won’t turn on. I have had those like long after I got out of radio. And I, I don’t remember last time I had that dream, but it probably hasn’t been that long, but.
Well, this has been great. I just really enjoyed getting to know you and your experience in that part of the world and, you know, thank you for being such a fan of our project. And, um, always supporting college radio, even before we were doing this project, you were talking about college radio in our, in our radio group.
Definitely a big thanks to all of our supporters and all the supporters of college radio out there. Thanks to Lisa and Jonathan for an excellent interview. We appreciate it.
And don’t forget, 35,000 watts, the story of college radio, a documentary film about, of course, college radio, is available now on multiple platforms, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Tubi, and now available on YouTube as well. So if you haven’t had a chance to see it, or maybe if you just want to watch it again. Go check it out.
It is available right now. Thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next time for another episode of 35,000 Watts. the podcast.