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I was at KADI in 1973 when the station was destroyed by fire. Miraculously, we were back on the air the next day! The transmitter room was not burned but only suffered heat and smoke damage. The engineers replaced some wiring that was damaged by the heat and put us back on the air. We were very generously offered the use of a production studio by KSLQ, which was a Top 40 station based in Clayton.
We had to start from square one! We had nothing… no music, no commercials, nothing! The jocks brought in an assortment of greatest hits ...
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I have been backstage at many events, many times! Like many things, the backstage experience has changed a lot over the years.
In the late 60’s, rock concerts were still a relatively new event and things could be pretty loose. Many times someone with a good rap could talk themselves backstage rather easily. Before I was in radio I became quite an artist at gaining entrance to concerts and backstage areas. (See Richipedia Sneaking Into Concerts).
The secret was to act alone. Too many people tried to sneak in en masse. (This rule does not apply to good looking ...
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Up until the mid 70’s there was little or no format in regards to the music. The program director simply decided that if he was going to play a new album, he put it in the studio. Early on, very little got rejected. Usually the record library was divided into two parts. Close to the turntables, very often in a peach crate or something like that, were the new albums. Then along the walls of the studio were the albums that were no longer current. You tended to play more of the newer albums because they were the most exciting.
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I have been doing radio since fall of 1968. The Beatles were still together. Jimi, Janis, and Jim were still alive. Led Zeppelin was months away from their first album. The Who were working on Tommy. I could go on with this much further, but you get the idea. I had the wonderful experience of playing most of the Classic Rock repertoire on the radio when it was all new!
We all had big mail slots at the radio station and almost every week we would come into work and there would be albums, sometimes as many as 10 or ...
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One of the early jocks (who shall remain nameless) was a great guy and a friend of mine. He was also very hyper and very spacy. I never worked with a guy who left the studio as much as he did. In those days your shift was a whole series of deadlines, three minute and thirty second deadlines or sixty-second deadlines. Nothing was automated and you had to be there to start and stop every record and every commercial precisely on time. This called for a high degree of concentration and left you surprisingly tired after your show. Bearing down ...
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Even now we get calls from crazy people. They seem to love radio, particularly schizophrenics. They hear voices in their heads and often they think that the voices come from us. I guess when you talk to crowds of people everyday, a certain amount of them are going to be eccentric. Back in the day otherwise sane folks could get a little crazy using certain substances. Paranoia was always good for a few phone calls.
"Hello!”
“The FBI is watching me!”
“Oh Yeah, why do you think?”
“Well I dropped some Purple blotter acid and ever since then, I am ...
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Radio in the 70’s was much more playful. This was especially true in the early years before FM rock radio became big business and we were pretty much left alone.
Over the years I have worked every time slot and one of my favorites was overnights. I very much liked the atmosphere and the total freedom you enjoyed at 3A in the morning. There were no ratings to worry about and the chief requirement of an all-night DJ was the ability to show up for his shift every night on time. You could do almost anything you wanted as long ...
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For the first 15 years of my radio life I played 331/3 rpm, Long Playing Record albums on the radio. There was an occasional 45rpm, but we avoided those where possible for audio quality reasons. For you youngsters out there, a 45 was the small record with usually one cut per side and a big hole in the middle. You would see these in Juke boxes. They are also referred to as “singles”.
You would get up, go to the record racks in the studio and select your LP. You sat back down behind the “board” and carefully extracted the ...
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As I write more and more of these, I am always reminding myself of the tremendous amount of change that I have seen in more than 40 years in the radio business. One of the biggest changes has occurred in the record industry.
I was fortunate to have been around during the really fat days of the recording industry. These days you hear how traditional CD sales are dwindling and that record labels are struggling to survive. It still amazes me that while record companies complain about things, we sometimes have a hard time simply getting the latest release from ...
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On August 9, 1968, Janis Joplin and Iron Butterfly played Kiel Auditorium. Also on the bill was Spirit, but they cancelled. Duane and Gregg Allman’s group Hourglass opened up and there was also a group called Ford’s Theatre.
Hourglass was one of those groups that gave you the feeling that there was something there, but it wasn’t happening quite yet. Now we know that it never happened with them until they became the Allman Brothers Band.
Iron Butterfly was known in St. Louis because that brand new cool FM underground rock station, was playing several tracks from their debut album, ...
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