FM

by Richard Neer

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the very idea seems laughable. Today, in terms of financial position and cultural respect, disc jockeys are on the lower deck of a sinking ship. They are generally paid modest salaries in relation to other entertainers, and are deemed as replaceable as bald tires. At the first sight of ratings trouble, they are abandoned by their corporate superiors for the next flavor of the month. Instead of creating culture, they mimic it. One radio savant recently opined that in every other phase of entertainment, a presentation is greeted with, “That’s been done before, got anything original?” In radio, it’s “Where has this succeeded before?” Uniqueness is now career poison, as in real estate, where the word “quaint” once meant charming but is now a code word for “hopelessly outdated.”

  In the early seventies, though, I couldn’t think of a more exhilarating profession. Imagine having a job that paid you handsomely for toiling but four hours a day. You got to meet every rock star in creation, usually while dining for free at sumptuous restaurants. You had primo tickets to every major concert or sporting event, paid for by others. Celebrities in all walks of life were your fans: Politicians curried your favor and athletes were thrilled to be in your presence. You got to work side by side with radio veterans that you grew up idolizing. Every new music release was shipped to your home address, free of charge. And if your conscience allowed, you could have a personal cadre of record promotion men slavishly devoted to your every whim.

  In your daily four hours, you were the show. The music was entirely of your own selection. You never had to play anything you didn’t love. If your mood was quiet and contemplative, you could play long sets of Joni Mitchell or Gordon Lightfoot. If you were ready to party, the entire Rolling Stones collection was at your fingertips. If you didn’t like the limits of the world’s largest music library, you were free to bring in tunes from your personal cache. Or if you had something to get off your chest, you could vent for as long as you liked. An amusing story? Fire away. Take phone calls. Play Monty Python routines. It truly was a license to thrill.

  And the ratings didn’t matter because we barely knew what they were. When the quarterly Arbitron reports were issued, we occasionally got a memo suggesting we play more familiar music. The word “familiar” was never defined, leaving it to our wide-ranging and subjective opinions—from playing the Beatles once an hour to merely avoiding the fifth-best track on the Lothar and the Hand People album. Management philosophy seemed to be simple: Hire good people and leave them alone. We had two- or three-year contracts, at yearly increases of 20 percent. Life was good.

  And then there were the other fringe benefits. Whereas it would be presumptuous to suggest that any individual had the power to make or break an artist’s career, one disc jockey could champion a favored performer and dramatically increase his or her record sales. There were almost a dozen major record labels plus a host of minor ones, each represented by two or three promotion men with credit cards. Competition for a DJ’s ear could be fierce. Legally, the inducements were simple: a lavish dinner or lunch, a show, a few drinks. Company policy set a limit on the value of personal gifts, but each Christmas, there was fine wine in wooden crates, buttery leather jackets, luggage . . . whatever was hip that year. That was usually enough to get a record at least some attention.

  Illegal inducements were readily available—drugs, prostitutes, you name it. As music director, I had the power to add a record to the studio library, which would hugely increase its airplay. I suggested individual tracks for the jocks, and if my judgment was sound, I could help push singles up the charts. My first day in the library at WNEW-FM saw a steady stream of visitors from the labels setting up lunch dates. One younger guy hung in the background until the others had left, and then surreptitiously closed the heavy steel door to the music library. From under his trench coat, he extracted a bulky package wrapped in brown craft paper and clumsily tied with cotton twine. As he unveiled his prize, I recoiled physically at the sight of a lump of marijuana large enough to intoxicate several counties. Was this guy a cop, setting me up? As I chased him away, he sheepishly apologized for not knowing that I didn’t use the stuff and maybe I should keep it anyway, for friends, or perhaps to sell.

  I was appalled. Was this the way it worked? You get to your dream job and you find it’s as corrupt as the business world we sixties kids were rebelling against? Luckily, word got around quickly and I was never offered drugs again. But there were women who worked for record companies who were seemingly very available. Most of us flattered ourselves that it was our boyish charm or unique take on the world that made us attractive to these women. Indeed, I never uncovered any outright prostitution, and maybe in those heady times sex was just easier, before AIDS and our renewed faith in the sanctity of vows. Or maybe some Machiavellian promoter hoped that pillow talk would help get some spins.

  So, as Alison Steele used to say, “Come, fly with me.” We’ll go back to an era when radio mattered. When it was so revered that the appellation “DJ” seemed inadequate—we looked to be called “air personalities,” or as Jonathan Schwartz facetiously referred to himself—“jocque du disques.” The voices made love to you. When the normal world shut down, you hung on to every word for inspiration, revelation, even redemption. Or maybe you just needed a friend to help you through the night. You could hear poetry and politics and amazing new music that not only entertained but enlightened.

  And the music seemed created just for this type of radio. There were no time restrictions: If the Rolling Stones needed seven minutes to elicit “Sympathy for the Devil,” so be it. It was not necessary to prune Ray Manzarek’s organ solo from “Light My Fire” to make the Doors anthem suitable for airplay. Murray the K could debut “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum without fear that an angry program director would come crashing through the door to rip it from the turntable.

  It was all so honest, before the end of our collective innocence. Top Forty jocks screamed and yelled and sounded mightier than God on millions of transistor radios. But on FM radio it was all spun out for only you. On a golden web by a master weaver driven by fifty thousand magical watts of crystal clear power . . . before the days of trashy, hedonistic dumbspeak and disposable three-minute ditties . . . in the days where rock lived at many addresses in many cities.

  Who Are You?

  I stumbled into free-form radio simply because I didn’t know any better.

  My father had a lifelong interest in radio. As early as I can remember, he had tape machines and microphones in whatever home we occupied in Syracuse, New York; Lynchburg, Virginia; or northern New Jersey. He formed a radio drama group with several of his college friends called the “Four Bell Playhouse.” Initially, they used classic literature that they adapted for radio, but eventually began to write original scripts. Most of these never made it to the airwaves, but the quality of production and acting was quite good. The nights of watching them polish their scripts, invent sound effects, and alter their voices attempting to sound like a big-budget extravaganza must have rubbed off on me. I have boyhood memories of listening to A Christmas Carol, starring Ronald Colman as Scrooge, on a six-record set of clay 78s. Working with yellow legal pads and an old Smith-Corona typewriter, I copied it word for word and organized the family around my father’s Voice of Music tape recorder to create our own version of the Dickens classic. It was great fun, and the prospect of doing this for a living became very appealing.

  But as I grew up, radio drama began to vanish from the airwaves. On our long car trips from Virginia to Syracuse to visit relatives, we were no longer entertained by Gunsmoke or NBC’s Monitor. The rides became squabbles over which station we’d listen to. We kids were bored by the music our parents enjoyed. The elders thought WABC was noise, but its signal could be heard throughout the entire journey if we drove by night. In any case, when I graduated high school in 1966 and began attending Adelphi University on Long Island, my career interest was more oriented toward acting than radio.


  I’d never seen a real radio station until then, so when some of my freshman classes were held in an old Quonset hut that also housed the campus station, I was intrigued. There was a battered half-glass door with rattling blinds on one side and the faded gold-leaf inscription wali-am 620 facing the corridor. I assumed that radio stations were housed in stone palaces with spacious, elegant studios guarded by ferocious Hessians who would shoot anyone who dared to trespass. Even at a campus level, there must be hundreds of applicants for every position, willing to perform almost any menial task to be near the center of the action. Weeks passed before I summoned up the courage to knock on the door, curious to see what the grand stage was really like.

  I tapped meekly on the glass, fearful that too loud a knock might be heard on the air and cause me to be expelled from school. It was early evening and I imagined the station to be buzzing with workers, preparing the night’s programming. No answer, so I tapped a little harder, still wary of disturbing someone’s art. I could vaguely make out dim fluorescent lighting through the blinds, so I knew someone must be there. But the on air beacon, a translucent plastic square with embossed red letters, was not lighted next to the entry. I was about to walk off dejectedly when the door swung open, revealing a slender young man with a crew cut and prominent Adam’s apple, dressed in a loose-fitting madras shirt. I was nearly bowled over by the smell of stale tobacco smoke and the odor of something electrical burning.

  “Hi, I’m John Schmidt. What can I do for you?” He smiled, revealing crooked teeth.

  “Uh, I go to school here and I was interested in touring, ah, well, taking a look at the station,” I stammered.

  “Not much to see. Come on in. I was just doing some soldering. Feel free to look around.”

  I was dumbfounded. Before me was an untidy little room measuring no more than twelve by fifteen feet. Leaky jalousie windows encrusted with grime comprised one wall; another was entirely made up of chipped gunmetal-gray floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets. A worn Formica-topped desk, littered with papers and folders, was against the wall nearest me. But what immediately drew my attention was the studio, behind a soundproof window. The entrance was a creaky-looking white plywood door, featuring another on air beacon above it. This too was extinguished, and the studio area beyond the glass was illuminated only by Schmidt’s work lights.

  “Excuse me, uh, sir,” I muttered. I wasn’t trying to be obsequious, but I’ve always had a regrettable tendency not to pay attention to people’s names when they are introduced to me. “Aren’t you on the air now?”

  “Call me John,” he said, again flashing a crooked smile. “Naw, the guy who should be on the air didn’t show up and the next one doesn’t come on until nine. I’m just doing some maintenance till he gets here.”

  “Oh, I see. Would it be possible for me to look at the studio?”

  “Suit yourself. I’ve got work to do.” He retreated behind the plywood door and I gingerly followed. I wanted to make some insightful comment about the equipment but most of it was strange to me. The air studio was tiny. It couldn’t have been more than ten by ten, smaller even than my bedroom at home. Celotex ceiling tile covered the entire space in a primitive attempt at soundproofing. The Gates audio console was bigger and more complex looking than anything my father had at home; it reminded me of an airplane cockpit, with knobs and buttons that I could never hope to fathom. Two turntables with heavy brushed-aluminum tonearms counterbalanced with stainless steel weights were on one side of the console, and two strange-looking devices that resembled eight-track tape players were opposite. Rack mounted behind the broadcast position stood two Ampex tape decks . . . at least those I recognized. But surrounding them were all sorts of curious gauges and VU meters, and a panel of perforations with black cords dangling from them. There were green and red blinking lights above a clipboard with some sort of algebra written on it. Next to the studio was a small glass-encased booth, with an old RCA ribbon microphone hanging from a boom. My dad had several of these. Everything was dusty and reeked of age, as if it had been salvaged from German bunkers after the Second World War.

  “You interested in working here?” Schmidt said from beneath the console, where he was soldering some circuits together.

  “Well, uh, sure, but I don’t really know much about radio.” I kicked myself. Some way to get a job. But I hadn’t come in looking for a job, had I?

  “There’re applications in that rack just outside the control-room door. Why don’t you fill one out? They’re always looking for people.” He went back to his soldering, still chattering away.

  I retraced my steps through the dim corridor and spotted a Lucite rack with some papers mounted to the wall. Name, address, major, and campus mailbox number were about the extent of the information required on the application. So I filled one out and placed it on the desk before going back into the room to thank Schmidt. The big clock on the wall read seven-thirty.

  Five hours later I was out of there. Not only did the nine o’clock host fail to show, but the ten-thirty man didn’t materialize either. Sign-off was at midnight—but the station had yet to sign on.

  I was trapped like a fly in a spiderweb. Little did I realize that John Schmidt spent many lonely nights at the studio. He proceeded to tell me all about WALI in more detail than I cared to know. He talked about the general manager and how he worked at a real station somewhere on the Island. The program director was a student who was elected by the staff weeks before but hadn’t a clue. The chief announcer—what was that? I found out all sorts of gossipy things about people I hadn’t met, and perhaps never would meet. Schmidt shared confidences with me about the inner workings of the station.

  I was fascinated for a while, but I was getting tired and had studying to do. He asked if I would mind running out to fetch him some coffee before the campus cafeteria closed, and I obliged. I figured that when I returned I’d keep my coat on and then gracefully bid him good night. No way. He chewed my ear off for hours, until he ran out of steam shortly after midnight. I later found out that I wasn’t alone in hearing these rambling monologues. An engineer’s life can be a solitary existence, especially when you’re the only one a station employs. You’re on call day and night if any of the jury-rigged equipment fails. He welcomed someone to talk to—anyone. Most veteran staffers had perfected their escape routes, or resorted to rudeness to make their move. But I didn’t want to offend him for fear of blowing my chances.

  I was hooked. I wanted to try this radio thing, and it seemed that I might be able to squeeze in the door if I made a good impression on chief engineer Schmidt.

  Before I left, I ascertained the correct person to speak with about a try-out and Schmidt told me to come by the next night. I already was looking for excuses to avoid a repetition of the endless chatter, but I told him I’d try to make it. It took me another week to follow through. I figured that maybe Monday nights were slow around WALI, and that next time I might catch someone in authority who could teach me the basics of announcing.

  This time the place was fairly active. All the hosts had shown up, and the station manager was actually there. He was a student and his position was unpaid as opposed to the general manager, who worked full-time at a commercial FM station and, like the chief engineer, was given a small stipend for supervising WALI. The station manager was an overweight, rumpled man, but had great pipes and was doing the hourly newscasts that evening.

  “So, you filled out an application?” he asked as I introduced myself.

  “Yes, sir, I stopped by last week and left it right here on this table.”

  He rummaged around for it, amid half-filled cups of cold coffee and greasy paper from fast-food burgers. He only searched the first few layers of debris, so it well could have been buried beneath the clutter. “Don’t see it. Why don’t you fill out another one?”

  I agreed, although I was pessimistic that the new one would receive any more attention than the first. I had no credits to recommend me, so I was stric
tly at their mercy.

  “Drama major, eh?” he said perusing my latest application. “Know anything about sports?”

  I only happened to live for sports, but by the way he sneered as he uttered the word “sports,” I sensed a certain contempt, so I bridled my enthusiasm. “Sure.”

  “Well, our sports guy is a no-show tonight. He’s not much good anyway. Think you can prepare three minutes of sports by nine? UPI wire is down the hall. It’s just basically rip and read.”

  “Sure.” My voice cracked a little and I hoped the adolescent squeak wouldn’t disqualify me. I had a decent baritone, devoid of regionalisms, but I certainly couldn’t match the polished tones of the man across the desk. And what did “rip and read” mean exactly? To ask would only demonstrate my ignorance, so I hoped to learn on the fly.

  “Great. Follow me,” he said, leading me outside the offices down a wide hallway toward a small closet, mere steps away from where I took earth science. “Here’s our newsroom.”

  He pointed to the claustrophobic little room, probably a converted janitorial closet. It was barely wide enough to squeeze past the clattering UPI machine, which was banging out the day’s top stories. “Here’s the switch for UPI. Remember to turn it off when you hit your mic key. And don’t forget to flip it back on again as soon as you’re finished so that we don’t miss anything. What do you want us to call you on the air?”

  This was a big decision. I hadn’t considered any flashy radio names. I wasn’t prepared to be thrust onto the air, but I didn’t want to risk losing my big shot. “Uh, I don’t know. Richard Neer’s my name. I guess that’ll be good.”

  “Dick Neer, great. When I say, Here’s Dick Neer with sports, you start talking. See ya.”