Category: Radio Tales

The Men at the Mike

On By jbIn Radio Tales, Repeat Posts7 Comments

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(Pictured: Bob Uecker interviews Reggie Jackson in the locker room after the Yankees win the 1977 World Series. This post isn’t really about Uecker, though.) 

The Milwaukee Brewers’ playoff run brought renewed attention to Bob Uecker, who’s done Brewers radio for 50 years and is still in top form at age 87, and a damn legend whose like will never be seen again. (This recent MLB.com profile is absolute gold.) Over the years I have written about some of my favorite sportscasters. Here’s a reboot of some of that. 

My voice of the Badgers was Earl Gillespie, a Wisconsin sports legend who broadcast the Milwaukee Braves on radio from 1953 through 1963 before going into TV. By the 70s, he did Wisconsin Badgers football games on a statewide radio network, and his voice was as much a part of my youth as those of Larry Lujack, Fred Winston, and the rest of my Top 40 heroes. His color man was Ted Moore, who had a significant claim to fame of his own as the man at the radio mike during the Green Bay Packers’ glory years of the 1960s. Together, Gillespie and Moore provided the soundtrack for several years of autumn Saturdays. Gillespie would say “First down for Bucky Badger!,” and introduce commercial breaks by saying, “Now before the next kickoff, listen to this.”

Those early 70s Saturdays had their own rhythm. Games almost always kicked off at 1:00. Around halftime, East Coast final scores would come trickling in, from places like Harvard and Holy Cross. At halftime of home games, the broadcasters would always pause so the fans at home could hear the fans at the game sing Wisconsin’s traditional song, “Varsity.” And late in the season, the games would end as night began to fall.

And then, on Sunday games: 

It’s fashionable to criticize Joe Buck, currently the top baseball and football voice of Fox Sports, for his minimalist style, but Ray Scott, who called Packer games and four Super Bowls for CBS in the late 60s and early 1970s, was sports broadcasting’s original minimalist, always letting the game unfold and the broadcast breathe, never using two sentences when one would do, or six words when five were enough. [Uecker is a minimalist as well.—Ed.] But Scott’s great gift (and where Joe Buck often fails) was in effectively capturing the drama of the game with those well-chosen words. For a young boy just beginning to follow the NFL, he was the voice of God. He seemed larger than life and made the games seem that way, too. I can hear him now: “Starr brings the Packers to the line on third down and 14.” Even in memory, I sit up a little straighter and lean in closer to see what happens next. There are not many play-by-play guys working today who can do that.

As I travel around the country, I hear many high-level play-by-play broadcasters who don’t seem very good, but then I realize how spoiled we are up here in Wisconsin between Uecker and Brian Anderson, who does Brewers TV and national games for TNT and TBS, Wayne Larrivee on Packers football, and Matt Lepay on Badger football and basketball (and occasionally Brewers TV). Each of them deeply understands what seems so obvious, but which many sports broadcasters miss: their entire job is to either tell people what’s happening (on radio) or to elaborate on what they’re seeing (on television) as clearly and effectively as possible. They are not there to entertain. The star of the broadcast is the game and the team or teams they are covering. Oddly, that dedication to not being the star of the broadcast makes them a major attraction—entertaining, even—to those of us who enjoy their work.

My original piece on listening to Badger football began as follows, and it’s a good way to end this one. 

October 11, 1969: The Wisconsin Badgers, riding a 23-game winless streak, get a late touchdown pass from Neil Graff to Randy Marks and beat Iowa 23-16. It’s the first win for the Badgers since the 1966 season finale, a streak eased only by a tie with Iowa in 1967.

November 23, 1974: The Badgers meet Minnesota in their traditional season finale. Wisconsin tailback Bill Marek rushes for 304 yards and five touchdowns as the Badgers destroy the Gophers, 49-14. The Badgers end the ’74 season with seven wins and four losses, their first winning season since 1963.

I saw both of those games. They weren’t on TV, and I didn’t have a ticket—but they were on the radio, and that was enough.

I Did a Thing

On By jbIn Links and Notes, Radio Tales10 Comments
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Here is the thing:

For the last 15 years, I have been a weekend/fill-in DJ and jack-of-all-trades with the stations of Mid-West Family Broadcasting in Madison, Wisconsin, mostly on Magic 98 and Q106. In May of this year, the person who’d been doing the afternoon show on Magic 98 left the company. After filling in for several weeks, I was offered the opportunity to replace her on a permanent basis, and I took it. So every weekday from 3 til 7 US Central, you can find me here.

After all of the job losses during the radio industry’s COVID year and even before that, my ending up with a full-time radio job is something I never expected. And it feels like the right time for me to take it, even though I know several people of my exact age who have retired this year.

Slackers.

I have never had formal retirement as a life goal, and after nearly two decades participating in the gig economy, in which you generally work until you fall into the sweet embrace of death, the concept doesn’t register. From the age of 11, the only thing I ever really wanted to do—even when I was doing other things, like teaching or working in publishing, on somebody’s formal payroll or as a freelancer—was to be on the air someplace. So I plan to keep doing it until A) it ceases to be fun and/or rewarding; B) I’m no longer able to drag my ass into the studio; or C) management decides they don’t want me anymore. Whether that’s a year from now, five years from now, or longer, who knows. I’ll just keep showing up, until I don’t.

Since there’s some of the word count left, here’s some stuff you might have missed recently on my Twitter feed. Continue reading “I Did a Thing” →

Good Guys

On By jbIn Radio Tales9 Comments
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You probably never heard of Lou Gutenberger. He was was one of the original “Good Guys” on KSTT in Davenport, Iowa, and he died this past week at the age of 82. During its glory days in the 60s and 70s, KSTT was one of those larger-than-life local stations that just doesn’t exist anymore, and Gutenberger himself was one of the chief reasons why it loomed so large, at least to several Iowa radio people of my acquaintance. They tell of listening to him or meeting him as kids, and/or being inspired, encouraged, or mentored in their careers by him. Even if they hadn’t heard him or spoken to him in over 50 years (he left KSTT in 1968 after 13 years, and spent decades in Reno, Nevada, after that), they never forgot him, or what he did for them— even when he didn’t know he was doing it, just by walking into the studio every day.

Only a tiny fraction of people who end up in radio do it without being inspired to do it by somebody. My inspirations were the bigtime Chicago jocks I listened to from the time I was 10 years old, Larry Lujack and Fred Winston chief among them. I was well along in my career before I realized that I was also following in the footsteps of Stan Neuberger, the morning guy on our hometown station, who did as almost much to get me to school every day as my mother did. My conception of the service responsibility of a radio jock—to not just play music but to give the audience information they need and want—started with Stan and his colleagues at WEKZ.

Just as you don’t get into a field without inspirations, you don’t stay in it without people who, even if they don’t exactly mentor you, teach you by their example. As a young DJ, I learned a lot by watching my colleagues at KDTH, some of whom I have written about here. (I have realized in later years that, as a young idiot whose powers of observation were lacking, I didn’t learn as much as I could have from the KDTHers, and I regret that I didn’t pay closer attention.) In later years, I was fortunate to work for George Lipper and Gene Kauffman, two men whose main goals were to do good radio and do good in the community, and not merely to show a profit by any means necessary—goals more rare among owners and general managers than you’d like them to be. George taught me important principles involved with managing people. The single best thing Gene did for me wasn’t to hire me in 1990, but to fire me in 1994, because it forced me to make some necessary decisions about the future direction not just of my career, but of my life. I was past the age of 50 before I got the chance to work for John Sebastian, an industry legend who did more to make me a better jock in one year than anyone who’d come before him. I wish I’d worked for him when I was 30.

Considering the state of the radio industry today, I don’t know where the next generation of inspirations and mentors is going to come from. Radio jocks, and the craft of radio itself, have been devalued for a generation now, and the pandemic has only made it worse. It may be that the wheel has turned for good. Maybe there are no more inspirations to be found on terrestrial radio. Maybe the next generation of inspiration will be podcast hosts. It’s not for me to say.

I suppose it’s a cliché for an old geezer like me to yammer on about how good it used to be in the olden days and how everything sucks now. (Which could be this website’s mission statement some days, but I hope not every day.) There were probably old guys in Lou Gutenberger’s heyday doing the same thing: “Radio ain’t been worth a damn since the announcers stopped wearing tuxedos.” But I hope that radio, in some form as we have known it, will survive for a new generation. And I hope that the new generation finds inspirations and mentors somewhere. Because those of us who were lucky enough to have them treasure them, not just for what they meant to our careers, but for how they enriched our lives.

Overnights, Weekends, and Holidays

On By jbIn Podcasts, Radio Tales6 Comments
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(Pictured: DJs and podcast hosts are often told to picture their typical listener. So here you are.)

There have been a few thinkpieces recently about the rise of podcasting during the pandemic year. I am not sure how they were counted, but there’s supposedly 1.95 million different podcasts now. But raw numbers aside, podcasting, which started as a way for independent creators to reach new audiences, explore niche topics, and/or express unusual points of view, is becoming the same vast, corporatized space as the record industry, in which a fraction of one percent of the total number of creators commands the bulk of the audience, with content tailored to that mass audience.

A lot of high-profile podcasts were launched in the past year by idle celebrities who might otherwise have been spending time on film or TV shoots. Whether these people actually have a goal in mind beyond making some money—whether they actually have anything to say, or anything worth hearing—barely factors in. Some certainly will. The Barack Obama/Bruce Springsteen podcast has some intrigue, and two smart, interesting people in conversation are unlikely to be straight-up dull, but it’s by no means clear how much value their thing will actually have: whether they will make fresh, provocative observations, or just exchange platitudes about What Makes America Great. Lesser celebrities invite lesser expectations. Many are putting their names and voices on work that is largely being done by others—they’re not self-producing in their own basement studios.

I have no illusions about my own humble podcast. More people will log onto Paris Hilton’s new podcast by mistake than have ever intentionally listened to mine. And in fact, I intended to put mine on an open-ended hiatus early last fall. Then I ended up in the damn hospital, and the podcast was the best format to tell the story.

Stories are the key, and ultimately, the point. Sports and current-events podcasts are useful, but the ones that people are most passionate about tell stories, in one way or another.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying I have some more stories to tell, about the life of a radio person at three different times of the day, week, and year: overnights, weekends, and holidays. You can listen here, or at your usual podcast providers: Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, and Stitcher.

I hope you’ll find it a worthwhile use of 17 minutes and 40 seconds, and if you don’t, at least it’s only 17:40. Your comments are always appreciated, either in the comments here or by contacting me some other way. Also welcome are likes and positive ratings, if you are listening on a platform where you can do that.

If you are a radio person, or you were a radio person, I’m interested in hearing your own stories about overnights, weekends, and holidays, and I’m sure many among the readership will be too.

I’ve been hard at work creating Internet content for you this week. A new Sidepiece will be in your e-mail later today. Busy busy busy. Nothing I get paid for, but still.

Let ‘Em Play

On By jbIn Forgotten 45, Radio Tales7 Comments
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(Pictured: Meat Loaf, who is not the subject of this post, on stage in 1978.)

This New Year’s Eve, it will be 25 years since my first all-request show on the classic-rock station in Davenport, Iowa. It was a one-time thing that later became a regular gig on Saturday nights for much of 1996 and 1997. As I’ve written before, the program director trusted me to know what was appropriate to play and what was not, and if I skated over the line, he was willing to forgive me. I built a collection of literally hundreds of my own drops and sweepers too. It was highly produced, interactive, and fun for everybody, including (especially) me.

There were certain songs I could have played every week and more than once—“Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” “American Pie,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You”—but I didn’t. I wanted to please the people who didn’t call as much as the regular callers. And I wanted to take advantage of the fact that for every five listeners who wanted to hear fking Meat Loaf again, there would be one who would surprise me with something cool, something I couldn’t get on the air fast enough.

This post is about two of my favorite listener requests.

Continue reading “Let ‘Em Play” →

The Last Words

On By jbIn Radio Tales, Tributes1 Comment
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(Pictured: a young man holds a sign in tribute to John Lennon, 1980.)

Mark was a colleague of mine, another part-time DJ at KDTH, a country station in Dubuque, Iowa, back at the turn of the 80s. He worked a 10-to-midnight shift on Mondays, and a few years ago on Facebook, he wrote about his experience on the night of December 8, 1980:

As I usually did about 10 minutes before my airshift was to begin, I found my way to the newsroom to clear the AP wire and prepare for a little sportscast I did after the 10:00 news.

The moment I arrived in the newsroom, the mechanical AP wire went absolutely apeshit, with a tremendous, clanging racket of bells such as I’d never heard. In those days they didn’t ring the warning bells on the wire often and when they did it was always news of some import, usually a flash or breaking news. I checked the wire just as the flash headline was printing out, JOHN LENNON SHOT DEAD.

Immediately, I ripped the story from the wire and ran from the newsroom into the air studio, and gave it to the woman I was about to replace on the air …. She read it on the air, choking up while she read it, and played “Imagine” immediately after. We unilaterally decided to play all Lennon or Beatle songs for the rest of the night, and none of the usually cantankerous country fans even called to complain.

While I was pulling my airshift on the AM station, the program director of our automated FM station called to ask the news guy and myself to dub off as many Beatle/Lennon songs as we could find and feed them into the automation system …. coming within an eyelash of airing “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” on the radio, the very night its singer and songwriter was assassinated….

Somehow, I managed to get through my airshift. Immediately after signing both stations off the air, I went up on the roof of the station as I often did, rolled up a fat joint, smoked it, and allowed myself a good cry. This horrible, obscene thing was just too much to bear. 

I looked back at Radio and Records to see how the industry reacted to the murder in real time. It devoted much of the front page of its December 12 issue to a montage of pictures and a written tribute. Inside, under the heading “The Last Words,” it was reported that John and Yoko spent three hours late in the afternoon of December 8 being interviewed for the RKO Radio Network, and how afterward, the Lennons caught a ride with the RKO guys to the Record Plant studio. The article mentions waiting for Lennon to sign an autograph for a fan outside the Dakota. We know now, of course, that the fan was Mark David Chapman.

The magazine also detailed how program syndicators were scrambling to accommodate the Lennon story, in many cases updating year-end programs that had already been produced. It was reported that “Watermark has dropped a regularly scheduled hour of its American Top 40 for this weekend in favor of a specially-produced retrospective on Lennon.” That did not actually happen, although Casey’s producers made available an alternate program segment that stations could drop into the already-produced show to replace “(Just Like) Starting Over,” which was at #4 for the week. The AT40 production staff was also forced to update a feature earlier in the show about the top posthumous acts of the rock era.

In the December 19 issue, it was reported that a radio station in Baltimore had planned a memorial benefit with proceeds going to a gun-control group, but its lawyers advised that the Fairness Doctrine might require the station to give an organization such as the National Rifle Association equal time to respond. The event was canceled, and the station instead donated proceeds from an earlier event featuring Beatles movies to one of Lennon’s favorite charities.

On the Contemporary Hit Radio page, columnist John Leader wrote about radio’s response to the murder, how stations tossed their regular programming out the window on that night, how they opened the phones just to let people talk, how they helped arrange public memorials, and more. Leader concluded:

Radio can and should be so much more than the playlist, commercial log, and jock schedule. Radio is communication on a very personal and basic level. Radio is entertainment and companionship. Radio is always there with the flexibility to respond to the needs of its listeners. 

Last week radio did itself proud in the worst and the best of times.