Dead Air
One of the jobs I really miss is working in radio. Not because of the actual job itself, but because of all the weirdo scumbags that worked there. I can honestly say that the experiences working there shaped a lot of my current day attitudes toward people in general.
I started working at our local AM station while I was in college. One of the reasons I wanted to go to college in the first place was to become a DJ. I spent a lot of my youth making mix tapes for myself, and recording stuff off the radio as a soundtrack to the radio shows I would record. I’d spend time in my room playing program director, and record music from 92 Pro FM on my boom box to this little shitty tape recorder I had. I’d get frustrated that I couldn’t actually cross fade One Night in Bangkok into Rock Me Amadeus, but whatever, I was leaving my parents alone, which I’m sure they were thrilled about.
So when I got this gig at the station, I really believed I was on my way to making it. At $5.00 an hour, I was at least making enough to quit working fast food, and I was in The Business. Of course this business of people had the collective brain capacity of a pile of dead monkeys, but whatever, I was working in radio as a board operator. My initial job was to board op all of the local sports games. Knowing how interested I was in sports, I figured, what the hell, I’m in the business, it’s the first step. My job was to listen for the commercial breaks, drop in local spots, and play the station ID at the top of the hour. I was supposed to take meter readings too, but nobody ever did that, because logging the wattage of the station is something that nobody cares about. I was there mostly at night, so people pretty much left me alone, especially my boss.
My boss at this place was one of the craziest, degenerate looking guys I’ve ever seen. He was a cross between Danny Devito and Kramer from Seinfeld, with these really thick coke bottle glasses. He used to tell me of the glory days of radio in the 70s with groupies, girls hiding under the mixing board distributing sexual favors, all kinds of creepy stuff. He’d point out stains on things and say, “You know what that’s from?” Now my job is to sit at this board, and I’ve seen what’s under that thing, and any girl who’s going to sit under there and service this guy is probably going to catch the plague, on top of whatever she’s gonna catch from him. He’d tell me stories how nowadays, the only way he could relive his glory days is to take his wife to swingers parties so that she could get plowed (his words) by a couple of guys at once.
And that was the thing, this place was run like a madhouse. Nobody ever knew what was on the air, clients were constantly complaining that their commercials never ran, and the place smelled like grim death. There was old food everywhere, and it smelled, and it was disorganized, it was a fucking mess. I’m pretty sure they did all their billing on an Abacus.
There were good thing about this job, besides that it was in the business. I got so good at blocking out the sports that I could actually read books, and know when to drop in the commercials without really paying attention. There was a Portuguese-speaking station in the next studio, and they were always bringing me Port wine and food, which was fantastic. Also, if I timed it right, in-between spot breaks, I could play in the production studio, and mess around with the reel-to-reels, the remote truck, and all kinds of cool shit.
The best thing? The records.
Downstairs in the basement, there was a room that was FILLED with records. Again, if I timed it right, I could go down there and pick through stuff, and find all kinds of wacky shit. There was one DJ on the station, who played records on the weekends “Oldies” show. He was another creep who used to bring in these Polaroid’s of naked “women” who would come into the studio. When he finally had enough and resigned, I asked my boss if I could do the oldies on the weekend, and he said I could.
I was now the host of two 6-hour radio shows on Saturday and Sunday nights. Man, did it get old quick. First of all, the biggest problem was that the sales people didn’t sell the show, so I had no commercials to run. At all. Add to the fact that most oldies tunes are about 2 minutes long, and there’s a LOT of time to fill on mic. At the end of 6 hours, my voice was shot, I was exhausted, and I never wanted to hear another fucking Doo-Wop again.
But you know what the worst part of the job was? The listeners. Every listener fell into one of two different categories: Old Bag or Fucking Lunatics.
Now I know I use the term lunatics a lot but some of my callers were Fucking Lunatics, and they had their own nicknames that they made up for themselves. There was the conspiracy theorist, The Old Humble Bum, who would chat me up for hours at a time about how there was something just beneath the surface. There was By The Way Gladys who was a serial song-dedicator. Patrick was just Patrick, but what made him a loon was that he spent all his money one night for a one way Taxi ride to the station to meet me. I told him he couldn’t come in, and he said he was going to walk back to the city. This was back when I gave a shit about people, so I put on a long record, some compilation, and drove him into the city while the station was completely un-manned. About halfway to Patrick’s house the record started skipping, and I figured I was gonna get fired. But again, no rational person was listening to this, let alone people who work at the station, so it flew under the radar.
The old bags made up the other group, and they were fine, they were just old bags, but they were the ones who finally pushed me over the edge. I’m sure every nursing home in the area was tuned to this shitty AM station, because they made up for about 80% of my callers:
“Can you play Spanish Eyes and dedicate it to Edgar?”
“Hi honey, Rose fell and she’s in the hospital, can you play For the Good Times and dedicate it to her from Mary?”
“Do you have the Tony Bennett version of My Way?”
“When are you going to read the weather?”
On, and on, nonstop with this shit right up until I played the signoff at midnight.
After about 3 years of this, and still making $5.00 per hour, I started to really fuck with the old bags, in an effort to get fired. Getting fired from this place would be a dream, and not really a detriment to any career I wanted in radio, so I started to really mess around. I’d play records backwards. I’d spend the whole night announcing that it was an hour earlier. One time I found a record of John Wayne’s spoken word over patriotic music, called “Why Are You Marching, Son?” and I played the whole thing, both sides. I’d flip the switch and feed the Portuguese station into ours. Once I even announced over the air that their radios were broken, and that they were going to need new ones. I got calls in on the listener line for that one, asking me how to fix their radio.
I eventually wanted out.
I’ll never forget how perfect I thought this was gonna be. It was on a Saturday night, and the AP printer, the one that’s connected to the news feed, starts going crazy. Now that thing only goes balls up when something really important happens, and we’re required to announce it on the air. After avoiding it for about 20 minutes, I finally walked over to see what the fuss was about.
AP – Princess Diana in possible fatal accident in Paris.
“Wow”, I think, “That sucks”, and I head back into the studio to make the announcement. After I make the announcement, all the listener lines light up.
“What did you say? Did you say Princess Diana was in an accident?”
“Yes, I’ll be announcing more details as the night goes on”
That’s how it started. After about 2 hours of this, my blood was starting to boil.
“Did you say that Princess Diana died or that she’s dying?”
“Do you know it’s 1997, and you can probably turn on the TELEVISION?”
Not to mention the fact that even if they didn’t have a TV, they could change the radio station. I have never gotten so many phone calls in my life asking me what I just said. It was at the breaking point that I opened up the mic at 11:45 PM EST and announced:
“Princess Diana has died. Prince Charles was also killed in a Polo accident. Prince Harry and the other one have also died in a car accident. The Queen Mum had a heart attack and died when she heard the news, and the entire Royal Family is dead.”
I turned off the mic, and walked out of the station, knowing that I was going to get fired. There was simply no way that this wasn’t gonna get me in trouble.
I went home to bed, and waited the next morning for the phone call, which never came. I was pissed, only because this would have been a spectacular way to not work there anymore. You know how once you get the thought in your mind that you should call in sick, there’s no changing your mind? Well, there was no way I was going to go back to this place ever again, so I called them up to resign, and the female general manager answered the phone.
“Hi, this is Matt Morin, and I’m resigning, I won’t be coming in for my shift anymore.”
She had no idea who I was. Now, I should explain that she was the dopey trophy wife of a local politician, who knew shit about radio, let alone running a business. Ok, so maybe I was off her radar, so she asked me what my job was at the station.
“Um, I’ve been hosting the Oldies show for 3 years on the weekends”
“Well, I’m sorry Mark, but you must have called the wrong station, we don’t run oldies on the weekend, we run satellite.”
Mark? What the fuck? Really? Is it possible she had no idea of what ran on the weekends? She’s the general manager, this isn’t right. I was so insulted that I actually broke the phone hanging it up. She had no idea of the great radio gold I had crafted with the broken radios. Hadn’t she heard that I announced that the entire royal family was dead?
I sat by my radio at airtime to see just what exactly they were going to replace me with. Would you like to know how you could tell people who work or worked in radio? They turn up the volume when there’s dead air on a station. And at 6:00 that’s exactly what I did, listening to the dead air. There was no replacement, no announcement to my listeners, no music. Nothing. For two hours I sat there listening, waiting until finally someone put on a record. I’d never been so insulted in my entire life.
But I’ve gotten my revenge every year since.
That GM bimbo somehow ended up winning some local office in town. Every year when I go into the voting booth, I see her name. And every year I exact my revenge by writing “Anyone else on the planet” in the write-in candidate’s space. It’s the one bit of happiness I get from those shitty radio years.
Actually, come to think of it, I don’t miss working in radio.
Fuck radio.
