Around this time, I was dating my future wife long-distance, visiting her in North Carolina or meeting in Atlanta whenever we could. Hearing my morning show woes, the girlfriend told me of a morning show out of Charlotte she loved called the Bob & Sheri show. I got to hear a few episodes of it during a visit to NC and really took to it as well. Bob & Sheri are kind of the anti-morning zoo show in that they're more conversational and personality based than crass-humor or radio bit-based. At the time, they still played music, too, but largely they just chatted about the usual morning show topics from their perspective. I really dug the show and thought it was exactly the sort of format that would do well at my own station. Our demographic was 25 to 50 year old women and so was theirs. Seemed a good fit. Unfortunately, any Bob & Sheri sensibilities still had to be squeezed in between the umpteenth repeat of My Heart Will Go On, and once again had to be concise, so in practice it didn't work as well. Still, it gave me something to shoot for.
At the end of the next ratings period, we were both walking under a heavy heavy cloud, feeling that the sky would fall at any moment. We knew how it would happen, too. There would be a meeting called (in my experience, never EVER a good sign), probably with us individually, possibly with us both, and we would be told that numbers were down and we were fired. And, sure enough, one day a meeting was called, but for the entire staff. There we sat, all doom and gloom as we waited in the ad-sales room for someone to open the conference room doors. The doors were opened, we all shuffled in and looked around to see streamers and balloons and decorations and a giant sign that said "CONGRATULATIONS!"
Oh, hell, I thought. They're firing the lot of us. That sign really means "Congratulations, you suck worse than ANY radio station has ever sucked before; leave your keys on the conference table; you have five minutes to leave the building."
Turned out, though, that the decorations were there to celebrate the fact that our station's ratings had come back and we turned out to be #1 in the market for the first time in forever. Not only that, but our morning show had respectable numbers and was the #2 show in the area, after John Boy & Billy. Now, I'd like to be able to say these numbers were based largely on our talent as radio people, but that's not entirely the case. A major factor in this is that the station that was our number one competition in the area wound up moving their broadcast tower out of the area, putting their signal out of reach for a great many listeners. A lot of them turned to us as a replacement. Management had known this was a possibility (though I don't recall them letting me know about it), but it was not a guarantee as there were several other stations in the area with morning shows. I say all that to say this: we had our reprieve. Furthermore, with the numbers as good as they were, a lot of the people who'd been up our ass all year long finally climbed out. At long last we were finally left, if not alone then at least at a comfortable distance.
Meanwhile, back in my real life, things were getting pretty serious between me and the wife-to-be. I hated living 600 miles away from her and had actually not been too worried about being fired before, as that would at least give me the excuse to move to North Carolina. She'd already offered me her folks' Avion camper to stay in, should it come to that. And though we had not yet officially become engaged, we had been shopping around for rings and were very much in discussions. I figured give the station until July or August and then turn in at least a month's notice in time for them to find a new morning show person to replace me. In the meantime, I would try to save money for the move, which turned out to be easier because I got a pretty massive pay raise at work for no adequately apparent reason.
In late July, I picked my date to drop the news. Before I could do it, though, another staff meeting was called in the conference room. I didn't care, I felt invulnerable, but still the news was something of a shock. Our GM announced that our station had been sold to another local group of radio stations. This was a state-based media company that Cat had once worked for, one which was so notorious for being cheap that they actually made the DJs bring their own toilet paper to work. Our GM assured us that this was no longer the case and that the new company had agreed to take all employees with no layoff plans for the immediate future. The fact that the new company also had a reputation for never ever giving raises (something I'd enjoyed receiving on a more than annual basis since starting in professional radio) threw our recent massive pay raises into a new light. Turned out our old owners were trying to compensate for the cheapness of the new regime by giving us pay raises in advance, knowing the new company would have to honor them.
Of course, after learning the station had been sold off, my big departure news seemed kind of tame. It also came as a surprise to no one, as the staff had been wagering on how long it would take me to head for NC since the girlfriend and I had started dating.
I stepped down as morning show co-host in early August to allow Lee to take over again as Cat's morning show partner. (Which only made sense, as they were married in real life.) On my final day, I announced on the air that I had big news and then spilled the details of my departure. Cat, in turn, had some major news of her own to announce: she was pregnant. We then spent the next four hours trying to convince the listeners that it wasn't mine and had nothing to do with me leaving town.
That was not my last radio gig. I found a regular on-air slot in North Carolina, working for the very station that originated the Bob & Sheri show. That job also came with a fairly high degree of drama and many lessons learned about how commercial radio works. Overall, though, it was a positive experience, though if I never hear "Mambo #5" again in my life, I will not be too broken hearted. At least it wasn't Rod Stewart.
Showing posts with label Radio Days. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Radio Days. Show all posts
Monday, March 9, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Radio Days (Part 2)
I'd never had any major aspirations to do morning radio. Sure, I did some morning fill-in shifts for my friend Cleopatra, back in college radio, but the idea of getting up that early every day, even unwillingly, just didn't seem worth it. And because of this, I hadn't awakened early enough to listen to any morning radio for years. I'd never even heard my own station's former morning show for the entire time I'd been working there.
So at this point, I'd been doing two weeks of waking up at the 4 a.m. ballpark to come in and read station liners and weather reports. I barely had any idea of what sort of morning show I was going to do for our new CHUrban format and everyone kept assuring me that we'd get it worked out and that our high-paid consultant (yes, the same guy who'd been our consultant before who didn't like what I was doing in the first place) would have plenty of good suggestions for how to structure a good morning show. Of course, when our station dropped the new format after those two weeks and regressed beyond Hot AC into Soft Hits, the high-paid consultant was fired once again and I found myself as the co-host of a Soft Hits format morning program alongside Cat, the former morning show co-host, with barely a day to prepare anything. Fortunately, Cat was an old hat at small town morning radio and had been through quite a number of different co-hosts before. She and I felt we could at least roll with the old format of the show until we found our feet as a new duo.
Our show was called Williams & Winston in the morning, she being the Williams part, me being the Winston part. (When I first started working at the station, a year earlier, I knew I would need to change my on-air name since my college name of Juice Aaron just didn't sound reasonable enough for adult contemporary radio. The program director mentioned that a former general manager used to insist the on-air talent use a county name as part of their on-air name, to somehow help cement their down-home status in the minds of the listeners, hence why his on-air name was Lee Adams. Trouble is, many of Mississippi's county names are Native American, so unless I wanted to be called Oktibbeha or Yalobusha, I'd have to pick one more mundane. I chose Winston, as that was the name of my cat. It also worked well enough when I later did radio in North Carolina.)
I don't remember much about our early days on the job, other than they did not amount to great radio. Cat insisted on running the sound board, as all of her former male co-hosts had insisted on it for themselves and she wanted the power seat. This was fine with me, though I confess to feeling like a guy watching TV without a remote in his hand. As with any relationship, it took Cat and I awhile to mesh as morning show partners. Our personalities were pretty different, with hers being more upbeat and positive and mine being more of a complaining cynic, but it was a dynamic with the potential to go places. The trouble was, as much as it felt like we were left to our own devices to create our show, we weren't. Everyone from the program director to the general manager to the station's real owners elsewhere in the state had an idea of what we should be doing differently and all of those ideas were in direct opposition to one another.
First we were told we had to keep things short and concise and play more music. Then we were supposed to get more guests on the show, but then we could only do interviews in short concise bundles while playing more music. Then we were told we needed to do more community-based material, spotlighting a new town in our listening area each day and basically giving a book report about the history of that town and interviewing the mayor, if we could find him, but doing all this only in concise bundles while playing more music. We were even told at one point, and I'm not making this up, that we should study the statistics from the most recent Arbitron ratings period, pinpoint the precise moments when listeners from area communities had reported they began listening to the radio on specific days, and target material about those areas for those precise moments in our daily schedule. Unfortunately, there is NOTHING interesting about Verona, Mississippi, beyond the fact that they have the slowest Hardees in all the world, so we were screwed there too.
After a couple months of weekly pressure to keep our yaps as shut as possible, someone upstairs turned the valve the other direction and we were told we should instead talk a great deal more than we were. In fact, the PD threatened to come into the station in the dead of night and remove all of the CDs from the on-air room, leaving us with no alternative but to yammer on between commercial breaks. We were supposed to try and be like John Boy & Billy and do more bits. This was actually more like my mental image of morning radio, but was still a pretty big extreme to have to deal with on a dime. The PD didn't steal the CDs, but for the next few weeks we were hammered to bring more material in. Then, just as suddenly, the philosophy switched back in the other direction and we were told to reign it in even more extreme than before.
What I didn't find out until later was that these whiplash-inducing programming whims were not being made locally, but were being passed down from on high by the station's owners. Our station was owned by a gentleman further south who owned lots of other stations throughout the region, and who had a number of sons who managed them. Ours was the only one he owned in our particular neck of the state and one of the only ones not managed by one of his kids. That being the case, each of his sons took it upon themselves to tell us what we were doing wrong on a regular basis and, just like no one could locally agree on what to do with us, none of them could agree either. We were supposed to be barely noticeable among the music. We were supposed to have no music. We were supposed to be John Boy & Billy. We were supposed to argue with each other. We were supposed to shut up.
Meanwhile, the ratings for Schizophrenia 93.3 weren't doing too well. Imagine that. It couldn't be the fault of the shitty music we were pumping out or the asinine satellite jocks we played during the day, so it had to be the fault of one of some the only live programming we had, right? Having learned the hard lessons of commercial radio, I was becoming somewhat fearful for my job. There was only so long that management was going to tolerate low numbers, even taking into account the drop off and slow rebuild from the station's polar shift in format. The only thing Cat and I could do, though, was either continue to try and do what we were told or find our own way. I'd like to be able to say we just took a stand and actively ignored what we were told, but mostly it just sort of happened that way on its own in an unspoken manner. I think we both were feeling pretty dismal about our prospects, so we just sort of forged on as best we could and hoped for the best.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
So at this point, I'd been doing two weeks of waking up at the 4 a.m. ballpark to come in and read station liners and weather reports. I barely had any idea of what sort of morning show I was going to do for our new CHUrban format and everyone kept assuring me that we'd get it worked out and that our high-paid consultant (yes, the same guy who'd been our consultant before who didn't like what I was doing in the first place) would have plenty of good suggestions for how to structure a good morning show. Of course, when our station dropped the new format after those two weeks and regressed beyond Hot AC into Soft Hits, the high-paid consultant was fired once again and I found myself as the co-host of a Soft Hits format morning program alongside Cat, the former morning show co-host, with barely a day to prepare anything. Fortunately, Cat was an old hat at small town morning radio and had been through quite a number of different co-hosts before. She and I felt we could at least roll with the old format of the show until we found our feet as a new duo.
Our show was called Williams & Winston in the morning, she being the Williams part, me being the Winston part. (When I first started working at the station, a year earlier, I knew I would need to change my on-air name since my college name of Juice Aaron just didn't sound reasonable enough for adult contemporary radio. The program director mentioned that a former general manager used to insist the on-air talent use a county name as part of their on-air name, to somehow help cement their down-home status in the minds of the listeners, hence why his on-air name was Lee Adams. Trouble is, many of Mississippi's county names are Native American, so unless I wanted to be called Oktibbeha or Yalobusha, I'd have to pick one more mundane. I chose Winston, as that was the name of my cat. It also worked well enough when I later did radio in North Carolina.)
I don't remember much about our early days on the job, other than they did not amount to great radio. Cat insisted on running the sound board, as all of her former male co-hosts had insisted on it for themselves and she wanted the power seat. This was fine with me, though I confess to feeling like a guy watching TV without a remote in his hand. As with any relationship, it took Cat and I awhile to mesh as morning show partners. Our personalities were pretty different, with hers being more upbeat and positive and mine being more of a complaining cynic, but it was a dynamic with the potential to go places. The trouble was, as much as it felt like we were left to our own devices to create our show, we weren't. Everyone from the program director to the general manager to the station's real owners elsewhere in the state had an idea of what we should be doing differently and all of those ideas were in direct opposition to one another.
First we were told we had to keep things short and concise and play more music. Then we were supposed to get more guests on the show, but then we could only do interviews in short concise bundles while playing more music. Then we were told we needed to do more community-based material, spotlighting a new town in our listening area each day and basically giving a book report about the history of that town and interviewing the mayor, if we could find him, but doing all this only in concise bundles while playing more music. We were even told at one point, and I'm not making this up, that we should study the statistics from the most recent Arbitron ratings period, pinpoint the precise moments when listeners from area communities had reported they began listening to the radio on specific days, and target material about those areas for those precise moments in our daily schedule. Unfortunately, there is NOTHING interesting about Verona, Mississippi, beyond the fact that they have the slowest Hardees in all the world, so we were screwed there too.
After a couple months of weekly pressure to keep our yaps as shut as possible, someone upstairs turned the valve the other direction and we were told we should instead talk a great deal more than we were. In fact, the PD threatened to come into the station in the dead of night and remove all of the CDs from the on-air room, leaving us with no alternative but to yammer on between commercial breaks. We were supposed to try and be like John Boy & Billy and do more bits. This was actually more like my mental image of morning radio, but was still a pretty big extreme to have to deal with on a dime. The PD didn't steal the CDs, but for the next few weeks we were hammered to bring more material in. Then, just as suddenly, the philosophy switched back in the other direction and we were told to reign it in even more extreme than before.
What I didn't find out until later was that these whiplash-inducing programming whims were not being made locally, but were being passed down from on high by the station's owners. Our station was owned by a gentleman further south who owned lots of other stations throughout the region, and who had a number of sons who managed them. Ours was the only one he owned in our particular neck of the state and one of the only ones not managed by one of his kids. That being the case, each of his sons took it upon themselves to tell us what we were doing wrong on a regular basis and, just like no one could locally agree on what to do with us, none of them could agree either. We were supposed to be barely noticeable among the music. We were supposed to have no music. We were supposed to be John Boy & Billy. We were supposed to argue with each other. We were supposed to shut up.
Meanwhile, the ratings for Schizophrenia 93.3 weren't doing too well. Imagine that. It couldn't be the fault of the shitty music we were pumping out or the asinine satellite jocks we played during the day, so it had to be the fault of one of some the only live programming we had, right? Having learned the hard lessons of commercial radio, I was becoming somewhat fearful for my job. There was only so long that management was going to tolerate low numbers, even taking into account the drop off and slow rebuild from the station's polar shift in format. The only thing Cat and I could do, though, was either continue to try and do what we were told or find our own way. I'd like to be able to say we just took a stand and actively ignored what we were told, but mostly it just sort of happened that way on its own in an unspoken manner. I think we both were feeling pretty dismal about our prospects, so we just sort of forged on as best we could and hoped for the best.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, February 23, 2009
Radio Days (Part 1)
The demise of the Adam Carolla show due to a station format switch got me thinking about my own former career in radio and how I wound up as a morning show DJ due to a similar switch.
I got into radio in college, where I used the same name I use here, Juice. S. Aaron, as my on-air name at WMSV 91.1, a 14,000 watt station broadcasting from Mississippi State University. I'd wanted to be a DJ for years, ever since a judge at a high school speech contest I was competing at told me I should be in radio, but MSU didn't have a radio broadcasting major, nor a campus radio station at the time I started college. When WMSV started up in `92, I knew I had to get in there, and I indeed became one of the DJs who went on the air on the first day of the station's life. Within a few months I had graduated to a daily two hour afternoon shift and, more months later a three hour shift. By then, MSU had a radio broadcasting major in place, but all the classes were taught during my air shift, so I opted for experience over book learning. For two and a half years I had the time of my life doing more or less what I wanted to on the air. And in addition to my daily airshift, I also got to create and co-host a weekly 15 minute show (cause the man wouldn't give us 30) about comics and general nerdity called Juice & Joe's Four Colour Theatre. We got to interview loads of comic professionals, spout off about how much we hated Rob Liefeld and have an absolute blast. Was it all great stuff? Probably only in retrospect, but damn if I didn't have fun.
I took my first real-world commercial radio job in Tupelo, MS, shortly after graduation. It was only weekends at first, requiring me to drive the hour from Starkville to Tupelo, sometimes twice a weekend. Soon enough, though, I was offered the chance to do a month of fill-in work for vacationing DJs. I took this as a good sign and packed up and moved from Starkville to Tupelo, taking up residency in a festering hellhole of an apartment, where I met my future wife.
On the day of my move to Tupelo, I experienced the first of several hard lessons of commercial radio. I had just dropped by the station to pick up my paycheck and the manager brought everyone into the on air studio to let us know that the co-host of the morning show, a guy named Steve, had just been fired and was no longer to be allowed in the building. I'd only met Steve a couple of times, but he seemed like a really nice guy. I couldn't imagine what he'd done to be banned from the building. Turned out, Steve's crime was that his involvement with the morning show had not produced the ratings that the station wanted. Evidently, when he'd signed on to co-host the show, it had been part of his contract that the ratings would grow or the station could terminate his employment. This was very very different from college radio, where I'd seen people fired before but mostly for doing things like falling asleep during their air shift. (Hi, Ryan!)
Life went on.
At about the time the vacation fill-ins ended, a temporary overnight shift opened up. This was a shift created to cover the month or so between the time the station discontinued using their expensive satellite overnight service and when they began using a new computer automation system. I didn't care. It might have been temporary work, but it was steady temporary work and it allowed me to remain in my crappy festering hellhole of an apartment for another month. And eat.
Toward the middle of that overnights run, though, I was offered the chance to take over afternoon drive, which I readily accepted. What I didn't know until later was that this promotion was due to the station's hired consultant, who had been listening to me, decided that my voice suited afternoon drive better than overnights and suggested they make some schedule changes. This was my next hard lesson of commercial radio, which is that any schedule change made is going to suck for somebody. My move to afternoons dislodged the afternoon guy to nights, which dislodged the nights guy to overnights, which was a position that would dissolve in under two weeks. I felt awful, particularly when the station's manager began pairing me with this guy for some wildly awkward appearances. Ultimately, though, it wasn't my decision.
Life went on.
Afternoon drive was a timeslot that suited my personal schedule quite nicely. In fact, it felt like old times, as that was what I'd been doing back in college. I didn't have to be at work until noon, didn't go on the air until 3p and was free and clear after 7p. I even wound up getting a hefty bonus for increasing the ratings in my timeslot, (part of which I used to pay for the meal the very first time I asked my future wife to go out to dinner with me). But working in commercial radio felt like working for the Borg. Creativity was encouraged only within the very narrow confines of what the station's high-paid consultant was willing to accept. Mostly, he didn't seem to like what I was doing nor did he like the way I did it. Fortunately, a couple months into my time there, the highly paid consultant was fired and then I had to live by the rules of our program director. While less strict, his rules were not so much freeing in a creative sense as they were geared toward trying to get me to be a better DJ from a technical standpoint. Frankly, this is what I needed.
Life went on.
After a year on afternoons, I had another hard lesson of commercial radio. I got called in early one morning for a meeting with the station's manager and program director. I was told that station's Hot Adult Contemporary music format (think lots of up-tempo Rod Stewart) was being changed to a Contemporary Hits Radio/Urban format (think lots of Chumbawumba), in order to compete with similar stations in the area that were getting the kind of numbers they wanted. Subsequently, the mid-day guy had been fired for not having a "CHUrban"-sounding voice, and I (a guy who also doesn't have that kind of voice, but was at least youthful) had somehow been promoted to doing the new morning show from 5 to 9a. The good news was that it came with a pay raise, but not one commensurate to the amount of soul/sanity erosion that would occur from having to wake up at 4a. every day.
I never got to see what sort of CHUrban morning DJ I would have been--though I'd wager, not a great one, as that just doesn't suit my personality. The plan of action for the new station was for me to spend the first two weeks just saying the new station imaging and doing the weather, then we'd transition into a real morning show. However, during those two weeks, all of our ad-sales people were trying desperately to get all our advertisers to keep buying ads with us despite the fact that the station had undergone a violent demographic shift toward people who don't have any money. It didn't work. The advertisers dropped us as fast as we'd dropped Van Morrison, prompting the station's owners to decide the whole thing had been a mistake. Rather than returning to Hot AC, they instead decided to dial it down even further into a Soft Hits format (think lots of slow-tempo Rod Stewart). And since they'd lost so much money, they decided to come back the cheap route, with the station largely automated except for the morning show and mid-days. I would continue hosting the morning show, along with the former female morning show co-host, and mid-days would be resumed by the rehired former mid-day guy. Come Monday, we would be starting a new morning show.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
I got into radio in college, where I used the same name I use here, Juice. S. Aaron, as my on-air name at WMSV 91.1, a 14,000 watt station broadcasting from Mississippi State University. I'd wanted to be a DJ for years, ever since a judge at a high school speech contest I was competing at told me I should be in radio, but MSU didn't have a radio broadcasting major, nor a campus radio station at the time I started college. When WMSV started up in `92, I knew I had to get in there, and I indeed became one of the DJs who went on the air on the first day of the station's life. Within a few months I had graduated to a daily two hour afternoon shift and, more months later a three hour shift. By then, MSU had a radio broadcasting major in place, but all the classes were taught during my air shift, so I opted for experience over book learning. For two and a half years I had the time of my life doing more or less what I wanted to on the air. And in addition to my daily airshift, I also got to create and co-host a weekly 15 minute show (cause the man wouldn't give us 30) about comics and general nerdity called Juice & Joe's Four Colour Theatre. We got to interview loads of comic professionals, spout off about how much we hated Rob Liefeld and have an absolute blast. Was it all great stuff? Probably only in retrospect, but damn if I didn't have fun.
I took my first real-world commercial radio job in Tupelo, MS, shortly after graduation. It was only weekends at first, requiring me to drive the hour from Starkville to Tupelo, sometimes twice a weekend. Soon enough, though, I was offered the chance to do a month of fill-in work for vacationing DJs. I took this as a good sign and packed up and moved from Starkville to Tupelo, taking up residency in a festering hellhole of an apartment, where I met my future wife.
On the day of my move to Tupelo, I experienced the first of several hard lessons of commercial radio. I had just dropped by the station to pick up my paycheck and the manager brought everyone into the on air studio to let us know that the co-host of the morning show, a guy named Steve, had just been fired and was no longer to be allowed in the building. I'd only met Steve a couple of times, but he seemed like a really nice guy. I couldn't imagine what he'd done to be banned from the building. Turned out, Steve's crime was that his involvement with the morning show had not produced the ratings that the station wanted. Evidently, when he'd signed on to co-host the show, it had been part of his contract that the ratings would grow or the station could terminate his employment. This was very very different from college radio, where I'd seen people fired before but mostly for doing things like falling asleep during their air shift. (Hi, Ryan!)
Life went on.
At about the time the vacation fill-ins ended, a temporary overnight shift opened up. This was a shift created to cover the month or so between the time the station discontinued using their expensive satellite overnight service and when they began using a new computer automation system. I didn't care. It might have been temporary work, but it was steady temporary work and it allowed me to remain in my crappy festering hellhole of an apartment for another month. And eat.
Toward the middle of that overnights run, though, I was offered the chance to take over afternoon drive, which I readily accepted. What I didn't know until later was that this promotion was due to the station's hired consultant, who had been listening to me, decided that my voice suited afternoon drive better than overnights and suggested they make some schedule changes. This was my next hard lesson of commercial radio, which is that any schedule change made is going to suck for somebody. My move to afternoons dislodged the afternoon guy to nights, which dislodged the nights guy to overnights, which was a position that would dissolve in under two weeks. I felt awful, particularly when the station's manager began pairing me with this guy for some wildly awkward appearances. Ultimately, though, it wasn't my decision.
Life went on.
Afternoon drive was a timeslot that suited my personal schedule quite nicely. In fact, it felt like old times, as that was what I'd been doing back in college. I didn't have to be at work until noon, didn't go on the air until 3p and was free and clear after 7p. I even wound up getting a hefty bonus for increasing the ratings in my timeslot, (part of which I used to pay for the meal the very first time I asked my future wife to go out to dinner with me). But working in commercial radio felt like working for the Borg. Creativity was encouraged only within the very narrow confines of what the station's high-paid consultant was willing to accept. Mostly, he didn't seem to like what I was doing nor did he like the way I did it. Fortunately, a couple months into my time there, the highly paid consultant was fired and then I had to live by the rules of our program director. While less strict, his rules were not so much freeing in a creative sense as they were geared toward trying to get me to be a better DJ from a technical standpoint. Frankly, this is what I needed.
Life went on.
After a year on afternoons, I had another hard lesson of commercial radio. I got called in early one morning for a meeting with the station's manager and program director. I was told that station's Hot Adult Contemporary music format (think lots of up-tempo Rod Stewart) was being changed to a Contemporary Hits Radio/Urban format (think lots of Chumbawumba), in order to compete with similar stations in the area that were getting the kind of numbers they wanted. Subsequently, the mid-day guy had been fired for not having a "CHUrban"-sounding voice, and I (a guy who also doesn't have that kind of voice, but was at least youthful) had somehow been promoted to doing the new morning show from 5 to 9a. The good news was that it came with a pay raise, but not one commensurate to the amount of soul/sanity erosion that would occur from having to wake up at 4a. every day.
I never got to see what sort of CHUrban morning DJ I would have been--though I'd wager, not a great one, as that just doesn't suit my personality. The plan of action for the new station was for me to spend the first two weeks just saying the new station imaging and doing the weather, then we'd transition into a real morning show. However, during those two weeks, all of our ad-sales people were trying desperately to get all our advertisers to keep buying ads with us despite the fact that the station had undergone a violent demographic shift toward people who don't have any money. It didn't work. The advertisers dropped us as fast as we'd dropped Van Morrison, prompting the station's owners to decide the whole thing had been a mistake. Rather than returning to Hot AC, they instead decided to dial it down even further into a Soft Hits format (think lots of slow-tempo Rod Stewart). And since they'd lost so much money, they decided to come back the cheap route, with the station largely automated except for the morning show and mid-days. I would continue hosting the morning show, along with the former female morning show co-host, and mid-days would be resumed by the rehired former mid-day guy. Come Monday, we would be starting a new morning show.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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