Media Game Changer

Chrysler will announce today that it's going to offer wireless internet in some 2009 models. Other car makers will surely follow suit, allowing you to listen to any radio station (or other audio source) from anywhere, anytime.

So, why do so many radio stations pay no attention to the horrible quality of their live online streams, with poorly synchronized audio and endlessly repeating PSAs? Mostly, it's because they haven't found enough revenue online, but that's typically short-sighted. They should have read my column a few months ago regarding this coming wave of changing in-car tech.

Once wireless internet is available to drivers, there will be no need for the other extra hardware that no one is buying (yes, I'm talking about you, HD Radio!), and will force a change in how XM and Sirius do business. The two satellite services, whether they merge or not, will have to transform themselves into pure content providers, probably relying more on advertising than subscription fees. It will be interesting to see if many of their spoken-word channels continue to offer pass-thru programming (from Fox News, CNN, NPR, and others, all of whom could chose to stream it themselves), or will develop new original programming to fill the online void.

Online On The Road

In 1999, on the eve of Y2K, I was talking with my longtime friend Bill Sobel -- one of the most connected media people I've ever known -- about the technological advancements we expected to see in the first decade of the new century.

Bill foresaw the advent of easier-to-use video cameras, made small enough that consumers could use them anywhere anytime. Now, just a few years later, they're here. Some cell phones have built-in video functionality. Last year, Bill introduced me to the remarkable Flip camera, designed specifically to capture content, transfer it to your computer, and share it with the world. That development has transformed the way events in our lives are collected, including caught-by-consumer news footage that is now a mainstay of virtually every TV newscast, not to mention much of what's uploaded to YouTube.

My prediction was that, as broadband's expansion continues, we'd see car dashboards that included internet access. It wouldn't just be used for visual information and GPS mapping, but would affect the audio you listened to, as well. With iPod-like technology built in, your car could download podcasts for you to listen to on your commute, or you could listen live to any audio source you wanted, whether it was an online-only stream or a terrestrial radio station, local or not.

Today, Mike Stern at Radio and Records reported this item:

Both Chrysler and BMW have announced plans for Internet access in their vehicles. Chrysler will be able to add the feature to existing cars at the dealer level and plans to make it a factory installed option by 2009. BMW's plans include a dash mounted display that will only work when the engine is off but full-time access for passengers in the backseat.

This advancement will be a boon for consumers, offering almost limitless choices. Audio services will proliferate, both free and via subscription. As in-car internet access expands, XM and Sirius will have to figure out a new business model -- they won't need their satellites anymore as they could provide all of their content online.

According to a new survey, 33% of American adults have listened to internet radio, and more than half have done so in the last month. Naturally, the younger you are, the more likely you are to embrace this distribution method. You've lived your life in an antenna-less world, where content on demand and myriad choices -- with little commercial interruption -- are the norm.

The downside will be for terrestrial radio stations, which for decades held a virtual monopoly in providing live in-car audio, competing only with pre-recorded formats from cassettes and 8-tracks to CDs and mp3 players. Now, they'll have to fight for consumers' ears even more, at a time when the industry is already struggling economically in an infotainment-laden media world.

Many consumers are already using this techonology on their PCs and laptops, not to mention cell phones with the ability to stream live audio. While on the air here in St. Louis, I had listeners in Portland and Columbus and Dallas enjoying my show online at their desks. Bill used to listen to me on his Motorola cell phone while commuting home on the Long Island Rail Road. If you like a local radio personality in one city, you'll be able to listen to him/her in your car, anywhere in the world. What will that do to the business of radio syndication, when you don't need multiple broadcast outlets and transmitters to reach listeners?

Apple, Amazon, and companies like them will also have another business opportunity to exploit. The two-way internet connection will allow consumers who like a song they hear to click a "buy" button and download it. Or order a book by an author they hear interviewed, delivered to their home or downloaded as an audiobook for listening on demand. Or bookmark the website of a business whose commercial grabs them for later review. And on and on.

Unless broadcasters grasp the importance of this platform, and embrace consumer-friendly digital distribution, they are destined to be left behind. This is the future of in-car audio, not HD radio, which is headed for the dead technology pile, right next to "quad."

Merging in Space

The Justice Department has approved the merger of the two satellite radio companies, Sirius and XM. Now the FCC must okay the deal, which is likely.

I don't know what this will mean for consumers -- I don't subscribe to either service -- but I do know that it means fewer jobs, a subject I'm particularly sensitive to these days. The beach is starting to get awfully crowded.

Is Modern Radio An Oxymoron?

Consultant Fred Jacobs says radio has a design problem:

The NAB's quest to stop the satellite radio merger has been well-documented, and perhaps will ultimately be successful. But the bigger threat to broadcast radio is on the inside -- turning around perceptions that the medium is out-of-step with consumer tastes and desires. It starts with that old clock radio on your nightstand and that dusty boom box in the garage. Dated-looking products won't cut it in this new gadget-filled millennium.

The whole thing's here. Fred's right -- compare any product made by Apple with the average radio available to the consumer.

I'll paraphrase something research guru Larry Rosin said last summer on a panel I emceed for a Bill Sobel Breakfast:

Go into Circuit City or Best Buy and ask them where the radios are, and
they'll look at you like you're insane. They might have clock radios, or
iPod accessories with AM-FM receivers built in, but you can't even buy a
stand-alone radio in most places anymore.

Radio Nowhere

You may notice that the KMOX call letters no longer appear in the right column of this blog. That's because I'm no longer on KMOX.

The CBS budget guillotine fell on my neck today. Along with a lot of other people across the country -- including three others here in St. Louis -- I was laid off by the company this afternoon.

To the question, "What will you do now?", the answer is "not much, for a couple of days." After that, I'll start figuring things out.

To those of you who have listened to my show through the years, thanks for your time, your attention, and your ears. I also appreciate the e-mails of support which started rolling in a few hours ago (you can't reach me at my CBS/KMOX e-address anymore, as they killed the account shortly after I left the building -- use the link on this page from now on, please).

Now, Here's Your Host...

Drew Carey will become host of "The Price Is Right." Howie Mandel does "Deal or No Deal." Bob Saget is in the midst of "1 vs. 100." Joe Rogan plays on contestants' "Fear Factor." Jeff Foxworthy asks "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?"

Clearly, if you want to host a game show these days, you first have to have a career as a standup comedian. But that's not how it always was. Used to be you had to work in radio first.

Bob Eubanks and Jim Lange were successful DJs before Chuck Barris chose them to front "The Newlywed Game" and "The Dating Game." Wink Martindale was a morning star in Memphis and at five different Los Angeles station before becoming synonymous with the words "game show host."

Art Fleming, host of the original "Jeopardy" in the 1960-70s, spent several years on the air in North Carolina and Ohio. After that incarnation of "Jeopardy" went off the air in 1979, Art returned to radio and spent a dozen years on KMOX.

Pat Sajak did afternoon drive in Nashville before becoming a TV weatherman and wheel-spinner. Tom Bergeron spent several years on the radio in New England. Even Bob Barker, who Carey will succeed, spoke into a radio microphone for years before Ralph Edwards chose him to host "Truth or Consequences."

But that era is over. Nowadays, the only way a radio guy gets a national TV hosting gig is to follow in the footsteps of Ryan Seacrest and outlast guys named Dunkelman.

Two other things. Since Barker got in trouble for a sex scandal involving the models on "TPIR," it'll be interesting to see how Drew Carey acts around them. After all, here's a guy who makes no secret of the fact that he's been a regular in more than one high-end strip club.

Oh, and the best game show host on TV these days is Pat Kiernan, the dry quizmaster on VH1's "World Series of Pop Culture." He not only runs the game well, but knows just how much to ad-lib and when. Perfect.

Radio Delay

My friend Mark Evanier in Los Angeles asked on his blog today why Dodgers games on the radio are now out of sync with the live event:

Is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?

A reader named Dave Sikula wrote to Mark and explained that the game (and all other live programming) is on delay because radio owners are afraid a prohibited word will be accidentally aired and they'll be fined by the FCC.

That's true, but it's not the complete answer. There's also the technical matter of broadcasting in HD.

Although the technology hasn't really caught on with consumers, most AM & FM stations in the major markets now have an HD signal, and the digital processing inherent in transmitting that signal creates an extra delay of just over 8 seconds. So, even if there were no content-control delay, you still wouldn't be hearing Vin Scully's call of the Dodgers game in real time. And when you hear the top of the hour tone on my KMOX afternoon show just before the hourly CBS Radio newscast, the combination of the two delays puts that tone some 14 seconds after the true top of the hour.

However, there's one positive side effect of the HD signal for those of us doing the shows with airborne traffic reports. Before, when we were only using the content-control delay (the one with the "dump" button that we very rarely had to use), we couldn't go to Captain Rodger Brand and John Larrabee -- the guys who do our traffic reports from a helicopter and a plane -- without coming out of delay. They were monitoring the over-the-air signal, and if we kept them in delay, they'd hear their own voices coming back at them several seconds later and likely spiral out of the sky and into the Earth. To avoid that nasty scenario, I had to pause each time while we dumped out of delay, then introduced them, had them do the reports, and then we'd start building up the delay again during a commercial break so it was there when I went back to taking phone calls or whatever.

Now here's the benefit of the HD signal -- even on AM, it comes with a sideband signal that we use to send them a pre-delay audio feed directly from the studio, which we couldn't do before, and which they hear through an HD receiver. That way, we never have to dump out of delay and they still get to hear everything we're doing in the studio as it happens. Considering we do "traffic and weather together every ten minutes" in the last two hours of my show, that's a dozen times a day we no longer have to worry about going in and out of delay. On the other hand, it means that when they describe an accident they've just spotted on Highway 40, you won't know about it until 14 seconds later.

Note that there is an even longer delay when you listen to my show live via KMOX.com, because that digital processing of the streaming audio takes even more time.

Interestingly, many people with Dish Network or Direct TV were already out of the loop when it came to watching games on TV with the sound down so they could hear their favorite radio play-by-play guy describe the action. There's a delay inherent in the signals bouncing to and from the TV satellites that would add a couple of seconds, too. Radio broadcasts are almost all done via ISDN phone lines, which move the audio much more quickly. So, for instance, during a Rams game, you could hear Steven Jackson go off-tackle and gain four yards, and just as the whistle blew at the end of the play, you'd see the play start on TV.

One other quick story. When I did mornings at WYNY/New York in the mid-80s with Rick Harris (no relation), NBC had never had a morning show that took listener calls on the FM station, and they were scared to death someone would say something wrong. Thus, we were prohibited from taking those calls live until they installed a delay unit. Rather than ordering a new stereo unit from Eventide, their engineers borrowed two mono units from our AM sister station WNBC, wired them in (one for the left channel, one for the right), and told us to go ahead and try it.

The next morning, when we began the show at 5:30am, we punched in the delay system and went about our normal morning silliness. In less than a minute, every hotline number on the phone bank was ringing like crazy. We were still talking on the air, listening to ourselves in pre-delay and thus didn't know what was wrong, but it had to be something major, so we went to a commercial break quickly.

Off the air, Rick answered one hotline and I answered another, to find the chief engineer and the program director both yelling at us to dump out of delay immediately. It turned out that the two mono units weren't slaved together, and their delay wasn't in sync. None of the engineers had considered this possibility, and they hadn't tested it on the air until that moment.

The effect was to create an echo from the left channel to the right channel that was unlistenable. We turned the units off completely and had to do yet another show with no live phone calls. Two days later, a stereo unit arrived, the engineers put it in, and everything worked just fine -- except we had an airborne reporter then, too, which meant going in and out of delay all morning for his reports.

I was not all that surprised when NBC got out of the local radio business less than two years later.

Too Much Water

Here's that audio from KDND/Sacramento on the day that Jennifer Strange died after drinking too much water during the morning show's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" promotion.

After hearing this, Sheriff John McGinness has reopened the case, directing his homicide detectives to look into whether criminal charges should be brought.

The radio station fired 10 employees yesterday, but I have questions about whether the whole contest had been approved by management and vetted by a lawyer. I ask because I've been doing radio my entire adult life and can't remember ever doing anything like this without having the legal end (and the company's butt) covered. And if that's the case -- if the morning show was told to go ahead and do the contest, even though it's apparent no one there knew the dangers of drinking so much water -- I wonder why the air staff was scapegoated.

As you listen to the audio, pay attention to the nonchalant way most of the on-air people act about any danger, and also notice how Jennifer herself seems oblivious. Does that mean that she assumed the risk, and they're off the hook? I doubt it, but either way, there's certain to be a lawsuit, and I'd bet that there will be a multi-million dollar settlement.

Another Radio Loser-To-Be

Now Dennis Miller has been given his own syndicated radio show.

It's only natural, since he's been so successful hosting a radio show at the local level -- oh, wait, he hasn't done that. He has no experience in creating three hours of radio five days a week. Here's his broadcasting track record: several successful years doing a few minutes of Weekend Update on "SNL," then a late-night TV talk/comedy show, then a failed cable news talk show, and a lot of stand-up comedy. Only in the latter instance was he solely responsible for creating content on a long-form basis, which is what radio hosts have to do every day.

There's no denying Miller is a smart guy, but when will these people learn that you don't hand a national platform to someone who has never done the job? Have they learned nothing from David Lee Roth?

As I said in an earlier column, radio is not a starter kit.

Recipe For Radio Disaster, continued

Several months ago, I wrote about the problems at Air America and noted that they all stemmed from one central problem -- the conceit that they could run a radio network without anyone who had been successful doing radio. In that column, I said:

If you were starting a new restaurant chain, and hoping to have outlets in every major city in America, you probably wouldn't hire a staff of people whose only experience was eating out on a regular basis. You'd want chefs and waiters who had not only worked in the food service business before, but were good at it. So why would anyone believe that model could work in radio?

In a NY Times piece today, Douglas Kreeger (former CEO of Air America, who may be part of a group that will take control of it again) admits their mistake:

I have come to understand very clearly that the radio component of this requires a radio professional.

Recipe For Radio Disaster

One of the big stories in the radio industry on Friday was that Air America has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. That doesn't mean they're going off the air, but it certainly isn't good.

I've known all along that Air America wasn't going to succeed, and it has nothing to do with it being liberal. The problem was that its first priority was its political agenda, instead of good broadcasting.

Most of the people they hired to do shows had very little (if any) radio experience. You don't start what you hope will be a national network by putting on hosts who have never had any success in the medium. You'd think was an easy mistake to avoid, but failures through the years from Mario Cuomo to David Lee Roth prove that Air America was not the only company making it.

Radio is not a starter kit.

I know a little something about this, because it's what I've been doing for a living my entire adult life. Most people don't consider us very far up the show business ladder (on a good day, we get slightly more respect than carnies and circus clowns), but that doesn't mean that anyone with a mouth is qualified to be on the air. Just because you can talk cleverly at cocktail parties, or in speeches, or in the guest chair on someone else's show for a few minutes, does not mean you'll be able to handle the pressure of coming up with several hours of entertainment and information every day, five days a week.

When Air America started, they hired all sorts of writers and producers and political insiders -- they thought they could fill the air time with wacky sketches. One of the people involved in that, and on the air, was Lizz Winstead. She's known for exactly one successful thing, "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central -- and it didn't become a major success until long after she'd left (following a run-in with then-host Craig Kilborn), and it morphed into its current buzz-creating version thanks to Jon Stewart. On Air America, Winstead bombed.

So did most of the other hosts, with the exception of Al Franken and Randi Rhodes. Franken won't be there much longer, having moved to Minnesota to start running for the Senate in 2008. That won't be a major loss, because even my most liberal friends find his Air America show exceedingly boring and have already given up on it.

Does this mean that liberal radio hosts can't succeed? Not at all. There are a couple out there who are slowly developing an audience, including Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, neither of whom is on Air America. And then there are those wacky morning shows all across the country that aren't obsessed with political firefights, but who probably tilt a little more to the left than to the right, particularly on social issues. The difference is that they're more concerned with entertainment than propaganda.

If you were starting a new restaurant chain, and hoping to have outlets in every major city in America, you probably wouldn't hire a staff of people whose only experience was eating out on a regular basis. You'd want chefs and waiters who had not only worked in the food service business before, but were good at it. So why would anyone believe that model could work in radio?

Air America isn't alone in traveling this woeful path. There's a new group called Greenstone Media that's trying to develop radio that will appeal to a female demographic. It's backed by an all-star group of rich and famous women who, again, have no idea what makes good radio, but they'll pony up millions of dollars nonetheless.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of successful radio hosts on the air right now -- getting ratings, creating buzz in their towns, making the phones ring and hitting the target demo -- who would love to have the opportunity to take their shows national (please note that this is not my way of begging for a syndicated show, as I'm very happy doing what I do every afternoon on KMOX!), but there's no one offering them anything.

Instead, that deal was given to Whoopi Goldberg. I rest my case.

Morning Guy

What's it like at home with a morning radio guy who spews nothing but cliches? Not so much fun for Mrs. Morning Guy. Or, frankly, for his listeners. [thanks to Dave King for the link]

For more POTDs, see the Picture Of The Day page.

Blaming The Media

It's not even noon, and already I've heard, seen, and read over a dozen comments from people blaming The Media for the mistaken news reported last night in the West Virginia mining disaster.

Yes, there was some sloppy work done, which comes hand-in-hand with live television coverage and print deadlines. There can certainly be debate about what went wrong and who is at fault.

The problem is that every single one of these people blaming The Media are doing it on their radio shows, their TV newscasts, their newspaper websites, or their blogs. What they fail to acknowledge is that they are part of The Media, too.

Yesterday on my KMOX show, a listener commenting on one of the topics went off on a tangent about the Rodney King case, saying The Media didn't tell the truth about it. I wanted to ask him how he could possibly still be harping on the Rodney King case after all these years, but instead I asked him to give me examples of what The Media supposedly didn't report.

He proceeded to repeat many of the things about the case we already know. I asked him, if The Media hadn't reported them, how did he come to know those things, and he said he'd heard them from Michael Savage. I had to point out to him that Savage is a radio host and regardless of how much he wants to play-act that he's an outsider, his job makes him, by definition, part of The Media.

So am I. So is Rush (who started his show today claiming that this story proves that you can't trust The Media about anything, believe it or not). So are all the people at CNN and Fox News Channel and NPR and InstaPundit and DailyKos and The Suburban Journals and Fark -- and that woman who opened a Blogger account because she just has to share some fabulous news about her cats.

You see, there's no membership card to join The Media. It doesn't matter whether you have a radio show that's syndicated to hundreds of stations or heard by two members of your family on a small-town college station at two in the morning. You're still in The Media. Same goes for a local cable access TV show, a free weekly neighborhood newspaper, or even a blog.

If you publish, broadcast, or otherwise distribute content, stop referring to The Media in the third person.

Instead, have the guts to be specific in your complaints. Don't like what some news network did, or the headline in a certain newspaper, or the wording used by a particular blogger? Then vent and rant all you like, but mention them all by name, rather than blaming The Media in general.

This is the new paradigm, and you're part of it. Get used to it.

This Indecency Brought To You By The FCC

Perry Simon points out the irony of the FCC opening a new website section devoted to its regulation of obscenity, indecency, and profanity on the American airwaves.  Anyone with a browser can now access the actual documentation of the cases the FCC against radio companies and shows, with transcripts replete with exactly the sort of thing the commission has issued fines for.  Perry says (and I agree completely) this is a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do":

While the FCC will claim that this is merely instructional, to show everyone what they've done on indecency, there is no warning label, no disclaimer, no content rating to protect children.  And there's no safe harbor, either -- the kids can access this stuff at any time from any computer.  In fact, the FCC's indecent material is MORE pervasive than a local radio show, because unlike a radio show that can't be listened to in school and can't be listened to in mom's car without parental permission and guidance, this stuff can be looked up on any computer at any time, and no filtering program is going to block a government agency's educational website, is it?  You might believe that the two situations -- raunchy radio shows and a government website with raunch -- aren't the same. You're right. The FCC website is worse.

To see your government in action, go here, then click through the Notices of Apparent Liability and other pages (parental guidance suggested).

Jeff Jarvis on the FCC & Indecency

Jeff Jarvis, the BuzzMachine blogger, who created Entertainment Weekly and was TV critic for TV Guide and People magazine, appeared on my KMOX show today to talk about the FCC's crackdown on indecency.

The discussion included: his investigation into the shockingly small number of Americans who complained to the FCC about Fox's "Married By America" (which earned the network a $1.2 million fine, the largest in history); whether indecency is, in fact, out of control on TV and radio; and how Americans should handle their complaints and let the marketplace rule the airwaves, not the government.

Listen to the conversation here.

My First Radio Job

Twenty-five years ago today, I did my first show on a commercial radio station. To mark the occasion, here are my memories of the day I met the man who would give me my very first paying job in the business.

My interview at WRCN, on the east end of Long Island, is on Monday, April 3rd, 1978. I pull into the driveway off Flanders Road into the abandoned Riverhead Drive-In. A hundred yards up on the right there's a one-story cinder block building, which I've been told houses the studios of WRCN (the offices were a few blocks away in “downtown” Riverhead).

Outside in the small gravel parking lot, I see two guys throwing a softball back and forth. I learn later that one of them is Charlie, the chief engineer, and the other is Jeff Fisher, the Music Director and midday jock who happens to be on the air at the time. They greet me and tell me that Don Brink, the Program Director with whom I had made this appointment, is in his office, just inside the door and to the left. As I park and walk towards the door, Jeff runs back in to segue into the next record on the air. Then he's back out to the parking lot to resume that game of catch.

I had gotten Don's attention in the first place thanks to Kirk Ward, who worked with me at WUSB, the radio station of SUNY/Stony Brook, the university I had been attending for the last three years. "Captain" Kirk was working towards his Masters degree, had a traveling DJ business that provided music for parties and events, and also did the Saturday overnight shift at WRCN. He had helped me put together my audition tape, giving me hints about how the station worked formatically and other insight that I couldn't glean just from listening.

At the age of 19, I was completely enamored of the medium of radio, and had been for many years. Here was a chance to try to get paid for doing it after all these years of sitting behind microphones, turntables, and tape machines in college and high school.

Don, who is the morning man as well as the PD, sits me down in his small office and begins to talk to me about radio in general, and the Superstars album rock format in particular. Superstars had been invented just a couple of years before by Lee Abrams, whose firm Burkhart/Abrams & Associates consults this station and many others of every size across the country. It's a tightly formatted approach to Album Oriented Rock, designed to fill the void between the Top 40 stations and the Progressive Rock stations. WRCN calls itself The Album Station.

Don explains the basics and hands me a looseleaf notebook which goes into further detail. It still hasn't sunk into my head that he's offering me a job, as I sit there and glance through the notebook. All of a sudden he says, "I can't get you on by this weekend, so how about if your first night is Saturday the 15th?" I stammer out something like, "Sure, that sounds good. Whatever you say, Mr. Brink!" He smiles and tells me to follow him while he shows me around and introduces me to the rest of the crew.

As the view from the exterior suggested, this is a very small building. Opposite Don's office is the furnace room, also home of the UPI newswire that's constantly spitting out rolls of yellow paper with the latest news, sports, and weather stories.

Next he takes me into the hall, where the transmitter equipment is. Because most cars still do not have FM radios as standard equipment -- I had bought an FM converter which dangled out of the ashtray for years -- WRCN broadcasts its signal on both 1570 AM & 103.9 FM. The FM antenna and transmitter were several miles away on top of some hill. Its signal got there from here by phone lines, so all that was needed at this end was one rack of remote controls. However, the antenna for the AM station was right behind this building, and the transmitter itself was right in this hallway. It was a huge piece of equipment that gave off a massive amount of heat. Later I heard stories about the DJs using the warmth from its tubes to keep things like hamburgers warm, and it wasn't uncommon to see staff members stand around it on cold winter days.

Opposite the equipment is the window to the on-air studio. The door, just to the right of the window, also leads to the bathroom. Don sends me into the studio alone -- the room isn't big enough for the three of us to fit in -- and asks Jeff to show me what I need to know. I'm surprised to see that the control board is much smaller and older than the one we use at the college station.

On each side are turntables with 16" platters and two-speed gears for both 33 & 45rpm. Above the board is an ITC triple-spot cart machine, and a microphone which moves forward and back very easily to wherever the DJ is most comfortable. One wall behind the DJ's chair is filled with albums, which are filed in alphabetical order. I learn that the most recent albums, which are played most frequently in this format, are kept together on the bottom shelf within easy reach. Another wall contains a rack full of tape cartridges, on which are recorded the various commercials and promotional announcements. There's also a reel-to-reel machine, which can be used to record such things as incoming phone calls or to play previously recorded shows such as the music specials which air on Sunday nights.

I watch Jeff do a couple of segues and then do a break on the air. He's smooth and easygoing as he talks about the music, reads a liner card with information about an upcoming station event, and starts a commercial on cart. Although I've been on the air and behind microphones for several years already, I'm nervous being in there. I swallow hard realizing that I'll be sitting in that seat in less than two weeks.

Don returns and pulls me out of the air studio. Next door, he shows me the production studio. Again, I'm shocked. I guess I've been spoiled working at the two college stations, WCWP and WUSB, where the equipment is fairly up-to-date and plentiful. WRCN's production studio is a mess. The board only has four channels, as opposed to the ten or twelve I'm used to. The reel-to-reel machine only works in mono. There's only one cart machine in the room, and it's the only one in the building that records. And there's paper and dust everywhere.

But what's shocking is not the condition of the room, it's what I hear coming out of the speakers. It's a commercial for a local nightclub, The Boardy Barn. The copy is fairly standard and the music is rocking, but the voice on the spot is a booming bass that just plain rattles the bones and sells this sucker like it's really the big time. When it's over, Don turns to the guy sitting in the chair and says, "Nice job, Tim. Hey, meet our newest part-timer, Paul Harris. Paul, this is Tim Tango."

I shake his hand and smile to myself thinking, yeah, I'm sure Tim Tango is his real name. I compliment him on the commercial and say he must have worked on it for hours. He and Don both laugh as Tim tells me no, he just walked in about five minutes ago. Now I'm truly amazed. Later, I'll learn not only how to do it myself, but also that Tim Tango IS his real name!

We leave Tim to quickly finish the tour, which includes Jeff's office -- complete with a desk cluttered with records and posters and other music promotional material -- and Charlie's engineering area, which is really just a workbench and storage closet. At the moment, it's also serving as Charlie's lunch table.

That's it. Don walks me back to the front door, all of twenty feet, and out to my car. He tells me to come in about an hour early on the 15th to watch Tim do the last hour of his show -- all the fulltime DJs work six-day weeks -- and then I'll be on from 7pm to Midnight. I agree (“Whatever you say, Mr. Brink!”) and thank him for the opportunity.

All the way back to Stony Brook, about a 45-minute ride, and for the next week and a half, I spend every spare moment listening closely to WRCN. I'm trying to pick out the different elements of the format. At the same time, I can hardly contain my excitement. In just 12 days, on April 15, 1978, I'll make my debut on commercial radio!!

Twenty five years later, I’m still getting paid to talk on the radio.

I blame a quarter-century of wearing cranked-up headphones for the lack of hair on my head and the diminished hearing in one ear. I’ve worked with people with names even more colorful than Tim Tango. I’ve changed cities, call letters, and formats. I’ve seen the equipment around me change until there are no more turntables and tape machines, because everything’s digital. But I’m still here.

Thank you, Don Brink, for giving me that first chance. And thanks to everyone since who heard my voice on the radio and didn’t change the station.