Up to News Time

One of the many skills radio jocks used to have (a skill not needed much anymore) is the ability to back-time. In days of yore, stations often carried a national network newscast at the top of an hour—say 12 noon. Listeners would hear the last record of the hour end within a few seconds of 12:00. This did not happen by accident—the jock on the air had to make it happen. That’s back-timing.

Imagine that you are playing your last commercial break of the hour, and you know that it will end at 11:52:00. This means you have eight minutes to fill before the network news at 12:00:00. So you have to divide up the clock in your head to fill those last eight minutes. The easiest way would be to play two four-minute records, although those used to be rare—you might find yourself playing two records of about 2 1/2 minutes each and another that runs about three. If the format you’re running dictates that you must play a jingle, sweeper, or promotional spot between songs, you’ll have to account for those in your timing.

You’ll often have a little bit of wiggle room in your timing. If you’re going to run long, you can cut a few seconds by fading your songs a bit early. This will be less noticeable if you have chosen songs that end with a fade—fading early out of a song that has a cold ending is the radio equivalent of letting the seams show.

To back-time successfully, it’s critical that the timing listed on the record’s label be accurate. Sometimes it isn’t. (Phil Spector famously labeled “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers at 3:05 because he feared that if radio stations knew its real length, 3:40, they might have been less likely to play it.) And even when the label timing is closer to being right, it might not be exact. It might say 3:05, but that might not be 3:05 that a jock can use. It might be 3:05 from the start of the record to the last iota of sound before the groove is blank, but the amount of music at a decent level for broadcast might run only to 2:50 or so—and a back-timing jock needs to know that. Some stations would time records by hand to make sure the timing was exact.

The goal in back-timing is to get within a few seconds of the top of the hour, leaving you enough time to give your station identification or news introduction or whatever you have to do. It sounds best when the last record has a cold ending—and the very best is what’s known as a cold fade, a definite ending but one in which the final notes linger a bit. (Think “Something” by the Beatles, for example.) Then you can give your ID over the last notes, and they fade away to nothing just as the network broadcast begins. More often, however, you would simply fade the music yourself as you hit the network broadcast, and that’s fine, as long as the fade occurs at or near the point where the record would normally fade. (Again, to do otherwise is to let the seams show.)

Every veteran jock has used instrumentals to back-time. You’d do this when you couldn’t find the right combination of songs, or if you didn’t feel like doing math that day. You could fade out of the instrumental anytime you needed to. This is the origin of the DJ phrase, “Taking us up to news time, here’s Mason Williams.” Or Lenny Dee or Henry Mancini or the Hollyridge Strings or whatever was in the stack of instrumentals kept in the studio exclusively for back-timing purposes. I always think of Floyd Cramer’s 1960 hit “Last Date” as the ultimate “taking us up to news time” record. I must have heard it used that way a million times growing up, and it wasn’t until I got into radio myself that I even knew the title of it.

Mighty few stations have network broadcasts to hit anymore, however, so back-timing is a lost art (and it is indeed an art). But it’s an art every decent jock used to practice frequently, often once an hour and occasionally more. My greatest moment in back-timing came on the afternoon following the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. My station stopped carrying ABC Radio’s wall-to-wall war coverage and went back to music, but we carried ABC updates every 10 minutes. So for six solid hours that day, I back-timed to six network broadcasts every hour.

(DJ beats chest, yells like Tarzan.)

Recommended Reading: David Cantwell of Living in Stereo on Michael Jackson’s loneliness.

“Last Date”/Floyd Cramer (buy it here)
“Mr. Lucky”/Henry Mancini (buy it here)

History in the Making

During the first hour of my radio show last Thursday afternoon, I mentioned how every male who had grown up in the 70s lost a piece of himself when Farrah Fawcett died, even if he didn’t own the famous poster. A female caller then reminded me that girls liked the Farrah ‘do. I remarked on the air that as a guy, I wasn’t looking up that high.

What I didn’t know was that Farrah was about to be relegated to page 2. When I saw the first bulletin about Michael Jackson sometime after 4:00, it didn’t sink in right away—I had to read it to myself a couple of times to grasp the potential importance of it. On the air, I read the CNN dispatch about the cardiac arrest, and I repeated it even after TMZ.com reported that he had died. The program director and I weren’t going to go on with the story based only on the TMZ report. But when the Los Angeles Times confirmed it, that was enough for me.

(I was on the air the night Princess Diana died. Because that station was more of a jukebox than Magic 98 is, I held off on the story for a long while, until it became clear that her accident was no fender-bender. Shortly before the end of my show, I read the bulletin that she had died. I also read the first bulletin of the Challenger explosion on the air in 1986.)

I have come across some interesting observations on Michael Jackson’s legacy over the last few days of reading. Right here on this blog, commenter Chuck noted the ties between Jackson and Elvis (he married Lisa Marie, remember) and Jackson and the Beatles (he owned their song catalog), and says Jackson’s death means “the end of boomer megapop.” Author Michaelangelo Matos made a similar point at Salon, saying:

What we’ve lost, in a word, is monoculture. Michael Jackson is the final pop star of seeming consequence to everyone—not just people who don’t normally care about music, but people who don’t care about culture, period. Obviously, it’s been a quarter-century since that was unequivocally true. But he’s the last pop musician for whom it was even equivocally true.

Mark Morford of SFGate said something similar in fewer words: “[B]illions of humans disagree about the nature of God. But everyone knows what the moonwalk is.” At Popdose, Dave Steed said that because he’s not old enough to remember John Lennon’s death, Michael Jackson is his John Lennon.

A couple of my blogger friends have received anonymous reader comments saying that Jackson was a child molester and degenerate, that his transgressions render his other accomplishments worthless, that sympathy for him is inappropriate, and we should all just shut up. What those people are saying is that the totality of Michael Jackson’s life should be judged solely by the worst thing he ever did. Seems fair enough, I suppose, until you ask yourself if you’d like your life to be judged precisely the same way—and no one ever wants that. (There’s a bit of a philosophical problem in this—after all, Adolf Hitler was good to his mother—but I ain’t going there today.)

I was just getting out of the car the other night when somebody on the radio posed the following question: Now that Michael Jackson is gone, are there any living celebrities who would spark a similar worldwide media frenzy if they were to die? I can’t think of one, for the very reasons Chuck, Michaelangelo Matos, and Mark Morford state above. Jackson was the last figure of his kind. Music, movies, TV, the audiences are all fragmented now. Nobody bridges categories anymore like Elvis did, or Lennon did, or Jackson did. But I may be missing someone. If you can think of anyone, let me know.

Other Jacksoniana: Jerry Del Colliano’s customarily opinionated take on what radio stations did and didn’t do right on Thursday is right here. Jeff at AM, Then FM, explores Jackson’s influences and links to a couple of must-read pieces, including Lisa Marie Presley’s thoughts on Jackson’s death. And for a couple of really wonderful photos of Michael Jackson, check My Hmphs and Art Decade.

One Day in Your Life: June 28, 1980

June 28, 1980, is a Saturday. At Camp David, President Carter goes fishing, and later sees the movie Urban Cowboy with the First Lady. The federal debt ceiling is temporarily raised to $985 billion. Helen Gahagan Douglas, the second woman to serve in Congress, dies at age 79. (Douglas was defeated for the U.S. Senate in 1950 by Congressman Richard Nixon, who accused her of being a Communist, “pink right down to her underwear.” In return, she nicknamed him “Tricky Dick.”) Comic actor Herbie Faye, who played dozens of roles on TV and in the movies starting in the 1950s, dies at age 81. Future NBA player Rodney White is born. The San Diego Air and Space Museum opens. On TV tonight, the last episode of The Stockard Channing Show airs, starring the Grease actress and future First Lady on The West Wing. Also on CBS tonight, The Bad News Bears, based on the hit movie. An airplane disappears in the Bermuda Triangle, and Bigfoot is spotted in Snohomish County, Washington. “Crying” by Don McLean tops the British singles chart in Record Mirror magazine. In the States, “Funky Town” by Lipps, Inc., tops the Cash Box chart for the fourth straight week. The Dead Kennedys play the Whiskey in Los Angeles, Jackson Browne plays the Rosemont Horizon in suburban Chicago, Santana plays Knebworth in England, and the Eagles play Alpine Valley Music Theater near Milwaukee.

Perspective From the Present: I was at the Eagles show that night with a bunch of friends. Last year, I found a bootleg of the show online. It’s not clear where it came from—some sources say it was from the soundboard while others say it’s an audience tape. Given how easy it is to hear certain individual audience members (like the guy who keeps yelling for “Walk Away” throughout the entire show), I’m betting on the latter.

Although we were thrilled with the show at the time, the tape reveals that Don Henley wasn’t in particularly good voice at the start. As the show goes on, he gets better, although he’s singing at the very top of his range and frequently struggles to reach it, more so than he ever did on the band’s studio recordings. Often, that’s the only way the live performances vary from their studio originals—as always, the Eagles stuck to the script in concert. Nobody seemed to mind, however, particularly during  the segment made up of “The Sad Cafe,” “Lyin’ Eyes,” “I Can’t Tell You Why,” and a medley of “Wasted Time” and “Desperado,” all played while a giant full moon was rising over the stage. We were surprised at the number of Joe Walsh tunes they played that night, although we shouldn’t have been; Walsh’s former bandmate Joe Vitale was onstage with them. Two of the band’ s four encores were Walsh tunes. (They never did play “Walk Away.”)

The Eagles show was our second trip to Alpine Valley—we’d seen the Doobie Brothers the summer before. This time, we knew that it would take hours to get out of the parking lot, so rather than tailgate beforehand, we fired up the grill and opened the coolers afterward. A college pal was on the air at an album-rock station in Milwaukee that night, and it was pretty cool to hear his voice blasting from dozens of car radios. The next night, I would be back on the radio myself in Freeport, Illinois, telling my listeners about the show. Altogether, that weekend is a pretty good rock ‘n’ roll memory from one of my favorite summers.

The sound quality on the tracks below is fair—I’ve heard better boots, and I’ve heard worse. The quality doesn’t matter all that much to me, though—unless you’re a Grateful Dead fan, what are the odds of finding a recording of a show you went to, nearly 30 years after it happened?

“Already Gone” (Alpine Valley 1980)/Eagles (features a changed-up guitar solo at the end)
“The Sad Cafe” (Alpine Valley 1980)/Eagles (my favorite performance that night)
“Life’s Been Good” (Alpine Valley 1980)/Eagles (includes a Joe Walsh for President campaign announcement)

Yesterday and Tomorrow

(Note added on Saturday morning: So much for the omniscience of our robot overlords. WordPress managed to FUBAR my posting schedule for the weekend yesterday, and I was offline all day so I didn’t catch it, so that’s why you saw a double post here for most of the day. What you see below was supposed to be at the top of the blog all day on Friday. Because we’re back to manual operation, the next new post you see here will be up tomorrow—Sunday—a special edition of “One Day in Your Life” featuring the most amazing bootleg in my collection. So anyway . . . .)

I spent most of Thursday evening writing a post about Michael Jackson for WNEW.com. I’m the resident historian over there (although a better way to describe my role might be that I’m the old geezer who’s always reminding the kids that things today aren’t the way they used to be), so I was focused on sketching the contours of Jackson’s career. My goal was to show readers who know only the tabloid version of him why his musical career mattered. I’m not the only writer doing that, because there’s a need for it. Now, however, I’m ready to reflect on a more personal level.

You’ll find lots of comparisons between Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson today, and here’s another. When Elvis died in 1977, it had been 15 years or so since he’d been the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He’d continued to record and perform, but his lifestyle had become extremely self-indulgent and his behavior downright odd. His appearance had changed greatly from what it had been. When he died, there was a whole generation of people who knew him only as a tabloid joke—”a fat guy who croaked on his toilet,” as one description had it at the time. When Michael died yesterday, it had been at least a dozen years since he’d been the King of Pop. He, too, remained part of the pop world, but his lifestyle, behavior, and appearance were what made headlines. And to the generation that’s come of age since the mid 1990s, he, too, is a tabloid joke.

That’s not to say older people never think of him that way. I was on the air yesterday when stories of Jackson’s death began to circulate, and I got a couple of phone calls that astounded me with their meanness: “One less freak in the world,” one person said, a note of glee in the voice. The callers spoke as though Jackson had finally gotten the death penalty he had deserved all along. What I said to them was that I’d rather focus on his music. The rest of it happened, yeah, and it’s irresistible to people who take pleasure in the suffering of others, or to people who enjoy seeing the mighty bought low (and to cable news channels, which are exemplars of both the latter and the former). But it’s not what made Michael Jackson famous, and it’s not why we should remember him.

Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya

(This is the 900th published post in the history of this blog. If you have read them all, you deserve some kind of award. Or to put it another way: Why?)

We have noted here before that for the first eight or nine months of 1979, disco ruled the Top 40 airwaves, but some of the most popular rock albums of the last 30 years came out during the very same period. The album charts from 30 years ago this week include such titles as Breakfast in America by Supertramp, Cheap Trick at Budokan, Molly Hatchet’s debut album, and Minute by Minute by the Doobie Brothers. Also on the album chart that week: Van Halen II, Bad Company’s Desolation Angels, Monolith by Kansas, Evolution by Journey,  and Ted Nugent’s State of Shock—not classics, but significant in their time, and not dance records, either. If your chart knowledge is particularly encyclopedic, you might remember Just a Game by Triumph, Patti Smith’s Wave, Real Life Ain’t This Way by Jay Ferguson, Blackfoot’s Strikes, or self-titled albums by Herman Brood and His Wild Romance, Tycoon, and New England. All of them were on the radio and in stores during June of ’79.

New England’s debut album was released late in 1978, and we played it on my college radio station that spring. I remember hearing the band on D93, the FM Top 40 station in Dubuque. Part of my job at KDTH that spring and summer was to feed the automation system that ran its FM sister, D93—a whole room full of tape machines. The station’s music director liked to play music by new bands in hopes of breaking hits; there’s no doubt in my mind that he was on New England pretty early.

New England probably should have been huge. They were discovered in the Boston area by Bill Aucoin, who had discovered KISS and would manage them until 1982. Paul Stanley of KISS co-produced their debut album, and they opened for KISS on a concert tour. (The band also toured with with Styx and AC/DC.) The hype for the New England album was pretty intense, partly because of Aucoin’s reputation and Stanley’s participation, but also because the record was tailor-made for rock radio, particularly the lead single, “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya.”

The essay on the New England album at Allmusic.com criticizes the album’s production, suggesting that some terrific songs get swamped by too much bombast. It’s hard to say what the album might have sounded like with a lighter touch behind the board, but there’s no point in speculating—co-producer Mike Stone, who would go on to overproduce Asia, wasn’t that kind of guy. I think there’s a plausible argument that the bombastic production actually works in favor of some of the songs, giving them a bigger-than-life quality.

After their debut album, New England would release two more albums that went nowhere (including one produced by Todd Rundgren), and the group would dissolve in 1983. Two members, keyboard player Jimmy Waldo and bassist Gary Shea, ended up in the group Alcatrazz alongside future metal gods Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai. Two other members, guitarist/lead singer and principal songwriter John Fannon and drummer Hirsh Gardner, became record producers. They apparently played a reunion concert a few years back, and their albums are available on their website, although the site doesn’t appear to have been updated for a while.

On “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya,” the big-n-busy production gives the record a power it wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s no question: If the singer loses ya, the consequences are going to be indescribable. Its combination of big guitar riffs, spacy synthesizers, and a singalong chorus should have made it a big hit, but it stalled at Number 40 on the Hot 100 during the week of June 16, 1979. “Hello Hello Hello” was apparently the second single from the album, although it didn’t chart. New England knew how to rock and roll, but that knowledge didn’t translate into anything like lasting fame, and they faded into history as just another one-hit wonder.

“Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya”/New England
“Hello Hello Hello”/New England (buy ‘em here)

I Was a Teenage Radiotelephone Operator, Again

My post on Monday about radio-station sign-ons and sign-offs, and about once having a third-class radiotelephone operator’s license, generated lots of comments. Until the readers mentioned it, I’d completely forgotten that most people who took the FCC’s test for a third-class license took a three-part test. The parts were called “elements.” If you passed elements 1 and 2, you could operate the dispatcher’s radio at a taxi service, but if you were going to be on a broadcast station, you also had to pass element 9, the broadcast endorsement. It was the hardest part, as John G. said—lots of technical stuff, like how to calculate the station’s power, the rules for the Emergency Broadcast System, what to do if the lights on the antenna tower went out, that kind of thing. Lots of people passed elements 1 and 2 but flunked 9, which meant that you had to take the whole thing again.

I got my “third phone,” as it was known, during my first semester at college. I took a four-week prep class offered through the university, and by the first of November 1978, I was ready to take the test. But it wouldn’t be offered at the Federal Building in Madison until December, and I didn’t want to wait. So I scrounged around to find another location, and ended up going to Rock Island, Illinois, to take it. The memory is pretty vivid, still—my father had just bought a new truck and he wanted to take it on a road trip, so one fine November Saturday we took the 2-1/2 hour ride through northwestern Illinois to Rock Island, where I took the test. It had been years since I had spent much time alone with my dad. I can still remember the small-town diner lunch we shared that day, as well as the smile I got from the guy who told me I’d passed.

The official FCC certificate came in the mail a couple of weeks later. In those days, operators were required to post their licenses in the studio where they worked, so like my college colleagues, I framed mine, and I hung it proudly in the studio of our campus station until I got a part-time job in Dubuque. I moved it to the KDTH studio then, and posted a copy at the college station. That was a status symbol of a sort, as only a few of us had what we called “commercial” radio jobs. And speaking of status symbols, a status gulf quickly developed between those of us who had been required to take a test to be on the radio and those who had not. By the time The Mrs. got to school in 1979, the testing requirement had been abolished. You could, as we derisively put it, “send in your box tops” and get a third phone. (Sometime in the 80s, even that requirement was abolished.)

At our campus station, we still required prospective operators to pass a test after the FCC test was dropped. One guy who failed the test claimed that it was racist, which was an interesting take on reality; if there was anything unfair about the test, it was probably the question that asked how to check the tower lights. Our tower wasn’t tall enough, so it didn’t have lights. It wasn’t long before we dropped our testing requirement, too. And as my college years went by, jocks who had taken the FCC’s third-class test became scarcer and scarcer. While I can’t rule out the ancient prejudice of the old against the young—you kids get off my lawn—it seemed to me that the jocks coming up behind me did not consider being on the air as great a privilege as my “generation” had. It’s no wonder, really. Something you have earned is more valuable than something you are given.

I am pretty sure my original third-class certificate is around here somewhere—I would never have discarded such an important document. And I still have the little pocket-sized card I received after my original license expired and I sent in my own box tops for a renewal. It’s hanging on the side of the fridge right now.

Recommended Reading: At Living in Stereo, Charles Hughes notes the passing of Barry Beckett, a musician whose work you’ve heard, and whose story you should know.