LZ STH

[Ksihkehe]

You've got to respect talent like that.  He's a born natural and genius on the bass.

The only bassist good enough that even I know he's good.

I've never been one to follow the names, so I couldn't have even told you his without looking it up.

I played the stand-up bass badly for a couple years. It's a pretty simple instrument, but he makes it come alive.

[Theatreboy]

I worked as an AM/FM engineer for about 10 years, anything to break into the music industry.

Anyway, when the overnight weekend jock called in, usually on a night with a great concert that i would end up missing, I would fill in on air. My 2 long songs for the bathroom, or a visit from my girlfriend, were Freebird, or The Loadout/Stay extended version.

[FCD]

I worked as an AM/FM engineer for about 10 years, anything to break into the music industry.

Anyway, when the overnight weekend jock called in, usually on a night with a great concert that i would end up missing, I would fill in on air. My 2 long songs for the bathroom, or a visit from my girlfriend, were Freebird, or The Loadout/Stay extended version.

HA!!  Yep, Freebird was the other one!! 

Too funny! 

The only reason we didn't use Freebird too much was it wasn't carted up and in the rotation library.  So, all the sub-audible timing queue tones weren't there which triggered the various warning lights in the studio (i.e. "5 seconds to vocals", "30 seconds to end of song", "10 seconds to end of song"  "release queued next", and the dreaded "DEAD AIR!", etc.).  To use Freebird we'd have to go fish it out of the vinyl library and hope you got a decent copy which wasn't going to skip or pop.

edit - Did you guys use the 1/4 second 1HP REVOX built-in turntables with the cast iron spindle weights about 2 feet below the platter? Those were some badass turntables! You could spin those badboys up with about a 1" lead...but we still spun them up ahead of time and just spun the vinyl on the anti-stat mats using your finger as a brake on the vinyl and de-stat mat. Didn't want to take any chances! (I had to replace one of those things once; damn things weighed about 60 lbs.)

[Theatreboy]

We had those when I started, but they were backup. Everything was cart, DAT, or CD. We started using Enco in 98? and then went to AudioVault.

Funny story, I interned at this cluster before being hired 5 years later after college and whatnot. The last day of my internship, I had about 30 carts to tone. Started my first day hired, and the DJ i was toning for came over to me and went up one side of me and the other. I have no idea what I did wrong, but not one tone was one those carts when I left that day of my internship. It left such a mark, that Gigi remembered me 5 years later!

[Nugget]

If I was solo DJing I would have gone for  "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" . Thae lbum version ws 17 minutes long!

[FCD]

If I was solo DJing I would have gone for  "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" . Thae lbum version ws 17 minutes long!

Yeah, that would have been a good one too.  I don't think we had that song though.  Man, that song is L.O.N.G. though, for sure!

Heck, that would have been long enough to take a shower too! LOL!

[19Bones79]

More stores about my radio days...or more stories about "the REST of the story"?

I have lots of both.

"Yes". 

[19Bones79]

This isn't really a DJ story.. but I was in charge of the music. 

A month before my first deployment on a demining contract I was working as a barman in a place called 'Cool Runnings'. 

The venue was divided into a front section where you had to memorize all the cocktails etc and dealt with the kitchen staff as well. They usually shouted at you while you were busy mixing fancy drinks because a waiter was taking too long to pick up his order. 

In the back was another bar and a small dance floor with a seating section even further back and the ambience was smokey and slightly dimmed in comparison to the rest of the venue. 

Here you didn't have to worry about cocktails or dramatic kitchen staff as your focus was primarily beers, coolers, hard liquor and shooters. Much easier to flow when your bar is packed from left to right extending into the dance floor. 

The front section would close at midnight but the back section would remain open at the discretion of the barman as long as he had music of his own and there was no sign of people leaving. It was usually still packed. 

This was the early 2000s.

Well,I would keep that bar pumping until 03:00 in the morning without fail. That's when I became a permanent fixture away from the cocktails and the kitchen, which was exactly what I wanted. 

The managers would come take me away from a packed bar early on in the shift and put a waiter behind my till telling them if there's a discrepancy on the totals after work then it was to be their fault, not mine.

My till was balanced, always. 

They would shove me into the kitchen with all the divas silently raging at my presence, and in front of me would be a beer with a straw bent inwards to facilitate a direct downing of the beer in one gulp, followed by a shot of Jaegermeister. 

Fun fact: unless there was some major discrepancy in my float I would never have hounded a waiter to make up some insignificant difference. 

Anyway long story short I made twice as much money, in cash, as I did per month the first time I walked up to a minefield in a hostile environment.

My songs were arranged to build up energetically, peak, and then mellow out for one song, something like the 'I will survive' cover by Cake.

I kid you not perhaps that was the most job satisfaction I ever had.

[FCD]

"Yes". 

   Well, okay then!

Here's a quick fun one. ...

I'm sure everyone remembers the radio program "American Top 40 with Casey Kasem", right?  It was broadcast every Saturday morning across the nation.  I had listened to it since I was a kid.  One thing I always wondered was how they aired the program at the same time across every time zone.  I was pretty sure it was syndicated (i.e. pre-recorded and rebroadcast) but I never understood how that all worked.  In my mind I had pictured it was some kind of a delay and it was done over phone lines, but that would have been a helluva long distance phone bill every week.  Well, that's not how it worked.  And, when I started working at the first station I worked at I finally got to see it in action.  It was far different than I ever would have ever imagined.

So, one Thursday night I was working an evening shift (I was still a new guy).  It was coming up on about 8pm, and all of a sudden 3-4 other station personnel including a couple other jocks burst into the studio and were frantically asking..."Where is it?  Where is it?  Did they come yet?".  Of course I was sitting there going..."Huh???"  They said..."Federal Express, stupid, has Federal Express showed up yet?"  Before I could even answer, low and behold Fed Ex showed up in the parking lot.  While we were waiting for this guy to come inside (and I'm trying to get all these yahoos to be quiet so I can do the show), these guys are all fighting like school kids.  "I got here first!  It's mine!"...and..."Nuh-uhh I was already here, so it's MINE!"  I had no idea what they were talking about!

The Fed Ex guy comes in and he's got this large white box.  So being the one on duty, I signed for it.  These other station people are climbing over the top of each other with pens, all trying to be the first to write their name on this box in my hands.  I cut the tape on the box and opened it up, then threw the lid on the table in the studio (and these guys all dove on the box lid).  Inside the box was (4) freshly minted 12" LP vinyl records.  I pulled one of the records out of the sleeve and on the center label it said..."American Top 40 with Casey Kasem for the week of mm/dd/yyyy (I don't remember the exact date) - Volume 1"

Wow!  American Top 40 was actually a (4) record set of high-end commercial vinyl record stock!  I would have never guessed this.  I looked over the record and it looked like an ordinary record except the tracks were longer than on a normal music album.  What everyone was fighting over was "dibs" on who got to keep the set after it was aired.  The station just discarded them after they aired.

After everyone left I queued up Volume 1 on the secondary turntable and piped it into my headset (off-line).  To my amazement, I was actually listening to the American Top 40 radio program recorded in Hollywood on Thursday night, a day and a half before it would be broadcast for the first time across America!  For a new guy, that was pretty damn cool!

So you just know, me being the Curious George that I am, I just had to come in on Saturday morning (on my own time) to see how it all worked when it aired.  Basically, it worked just like listening to a record, except it was the whole radio program pressed on the vinyl.  What looked like individual song tracks on the vinyl was really a whole show segment with Kasem (usually 2-3 songs, with Kasem talking in between).  When each segment was over, you'd stop the record and go into local commercial break.  When you came back out of that commercial break, you'd spin up the next segment of AT40 with Kasem.  And you did this for all (4) of the albums, totaling the 3 hour run-time for the show.

One of the unique things, and something I've never seen anywhere else, was the vinyl was only recorded on one side.  The other side was just shiny smooth virgin vinyl.

In time I would wind up actually having to run the show myself on a few Saturday mornings (which was tragically boring actually!  Because you just sat there punching buttons for 3 hours.)  But that was how it all worked.

So once again...now you know...the REST of the story!

P.S. - Over my time there I think I wound up with about a dozen or so sets of AT40 for myself.  I still have them packed away somewhere 4+ decades later.

P.P.S - I have an even cooler similar story about another syndicated program which was called "Inner-View with Jim Ladd" where I wound up with a (4) album boxed set of a 4 hour long interview with Pink Floyd on the making of "The Wall".  It was really cool because Ladd would interview Waters, Gilmour and Barret in detail about the meaning and what went into each song on the double album, and then play that song.  What made this one even cooler was one of the night shift guys at the station was a fantastic artist, and because the boxed sets had to sit in the studio until they aired, every night he'd ink out these unbelievable art drawings about "The Wall".  The box (inside and out), and all the record jackets which were all just white, are covered in this guy's art.  It's pretty spectacular, and I was fortunate enough to get "dibs" on that set.  Probably one of my favorite mementos from my work in radio.

[19Bones79]

   Well, okay then!

Here's a quick fun one. ...



P.S. - Over my time there I think I wound up with about a dozen or so sets of AT40 for myself.  I still have them packed away somewhere 4+ decades later.

There were two shows I watched as a young one that just popped into my head, Cincinnati WKRP and T.H.R.O.B. whose theme was so catchy to my young ears I can still recall some of it. 

It sounds like with a good writer your experiences could've been good content for a show. You're very good at expressing the atmosphere of the situation. 


I bet those vinyls you have stored away are able to trigger some cherished memories.