Jello, Farts, Music, Beer, Mashed Potatoes, Close the Goddamned Door
the story of my absolute one true perfect love and how it broke up with me
A million years ago I was “famous,” aka I was that annoying voice in the little box in your car called “the radio.”
Lots of things happen to you when you work in radio. You get to run stupid contests for stupid prizes. You get to go to weird events where people do weird shit. You get to move at the drop of a hat with zero notice and less money to make that work out well for you. You get to develop crippling anxiety because you are always in danger of being fired and you probably will be fired at least once and it will never be for a reason you would get fired from a normal job for. But the thing that happened to me in radio that I never expected was I really, really, really fell in love.
It was unexpected really. Growing up as a Radio Brat aka a kid with a parent in radio, being on the radio wasn’t that mysterious to me. I slept on the floor of KROQ (back in the day when KROQ was still KROQ) as a child for crying out loud. Being a radio dj to me was as normal as “My dad is a truck driver,” it was just a thing parents did. When I started out at 16 myself, it was just my annoying after school job that I made a whopping 4.25 an hour at.
(In retrospect, as I work with 16 year olds at the grocery store, my brain has a hard time reconciling this, that I used to be on the radio on one of the biggest Top 40 stations and then the biggest rock station from Midnight till 6am at 16 and 17 years old. I’m sure the child labor board if there is such a thing would have shit their pants if they knew. When my English teacher my Senior year figured it out one weekend, he was a little weirded out because he and his girlfriend listened to me driving home from the bars.)
Falling in love with this was never in my field of vision though. It was normal. Like being backstage at whatever was normal. Free concert tickets was normal. Having 5,000 CDs in your living room was normal.
But one night my life changed. I was sitting doing my overnight shift and I got the call that DJs dream of, the one where another Program Director hears you and wants to give you another job and you get everything you wanted. For me it was getting off of overnights and becoming the Music Director.
Music Directors still exist but not like they did when I wanted to do it. Music Directors were the gate keepers, the taste makers, they were the ones that listened to everything new when it came in and they decided what the station played. They were the ones the record labels took out to fancy dinners and brought cool presents to. They were the people who said “This song is fucking cool and you like it now, trust me.” Sure, there was some boring math involved and that poor Music Director also had to convince their boss that they were right and then make the rest of the music on the radio station work, but damnit, they decided what was good.
I took the job offered and at 23 years old climbed in my car and went.
When I got to KURQ that year it was not exactly a mess but it wasn’t exactly winning either. The logo didn’t match the music, the music didn’t know what it was doing, going from Classic Rock to Nu Metal to Alternative… there was just a lot going on that made sense one piece at a time but not all together. It made sense in the bigger picture as at the time KURQ was basically KSLY’s (the biggest and most important top 40 station in San Luis Obispo County for YEARS but that is another story) shitty younger brother. You know the younger brother that leaves his stinky socks in the living room and farts at your friends. It was there, you had to feed the damn thing but you didn’t have to like it.
My first few months were just me learning just what a Music Director did and starting to realize what a Program Director did. I arrived just as the guy who I am forever grateful to for hiring me even though I was a pain in the ass to hire, was getting ready to exit. Naturally this was terrifying.
In the few months since I got there, we had started working towards a vision of a radio station that made sense and would win. We had the rough draft when he left and with the help of Promotions Director extraordinaire, Greg, we would have a new logo.
(blah blah blah, I talk on the radio.)
In my first PD’s absence I was the boss for a few months while we looked for a replacement. This meant on top of scheduling the music, I was deciding who was on the radio when, what we needed to promote, what we played and oh yeah going in to fix everything when it broke at WHY IS THIS EVEN A TIME OF DAY o’clock.
We hired someone else finally, but this rather annoying child of a radio station had it’s hooks in me and I wouldn’t let go of a lot of the responsibilities I picked up during the interim. The new PD was a cool guy, really. We didn’t really share the same sense of humor a lot of the time and butted heads about stuff because I was a stubborn asshole who often could be too cool for the room, but we did share one thing in common…
We really, really, really wanted to fucking win. And we were going to win no matter what.
Those years in the early 2000’s were golden. We became our competition’s worst nightmare. We became our sister station KSLY’s worst nightmare.
I got my own Specialty Show.
(A Specialty Show is that thing where the person creating it gets to play stuff sort of out of format… aka it’s this block of programming that the person creating it gets to argue with the higher ups about what they play for a certain allotment of air time.)
In that time we also started a local music feature that would live on LONG after I was gone, SLO and Dysfunctional. It started off as a CD that featured local bands and morphed into a lot of live shows, playing local bands in regular rotation and a lot more. We even SOLD the damn thing at record stores and then moved on to selling it at Best Buy. We had t-shirts that we sold at a local skate shop.
(My name is inside five of these things.)
In the middle of all of this, I was finally promoted to Assistant Program Director.
(No I’m serious, I was handed the title at a station event dressed in this costume. Don’t ask, radio is weird.)
I gave up a long term relationship, like broke off an engagement for this job. I worked 12 - 14 hours a day sometimes. I worked weekends. I went broke. I started making more money than I could have thought was possible. My daypart aka when I was on the air was number one in our stations target demo like consistently. I basically got to do whatever I wanted as long as the station made money. It was a trip. This stupid radio station became mine, like my one perfect love.
(Radio and Records was this trade magazine back in my radio days, it was published once a week with radio news and music charts and then this page, the page that told you who was in charge. That’s me, right there in the middle row.)
One of the things we did was start a punk specialty show. It wasn’t my idea at all but when it was approved I jumped in to make it happen for the jocks that wanted to start it. The Punk Ass Bitches Show, that was later renamed The Punk Show by some stuffy suits we eventually had to deal with, ran for 10 years in some form or another. It was born one week in November. Considering when we started we were a Clear Channel radio station, the fact that this show even existed and STAYED on is still pretty insane.
(The longest running line up of the PABS.)
I was insanely in love with this station, the people who worked there, even my fancy office the size of a closet.
(My desk in the closet, one afternoon. Alcohol provided by our General Manager.)
The social culture at the station was part of what made it work on the air. We really all hung out off the air, we went out together, slept on each others couches, played cards together, picked each other up from the bar, picked each other up from jail, had parties, went to shows, played endless hours of Foosball in our jock lounge, stayed at the station drinking beers with the boss on Fridays, stopping only sometimes to go do some genius bit of radio our drunk asses came up with. It was a little family of people who just got each other. And our listeners could tell. We were the real deal.
(if you look beyond the fire that Tristan was trying to start in front of my office, you can see our Foosball table.)
And then It happened. It, always happens in radio. It is the best thing sometimes but usually It is the worst thing.
It was we got sold.
We were probably the exception to the Clear Channel Radio rule, as we were one of those stations that just got to do whatever we wanted because we kept winning and when you win you make money. So we were like this super weird rock station that may not have flown in another market but Clear Channel left us pretty much all the way the hell alone. My PD let anything fly if it made sense and even more so sometimes if it didn’t. Our General Manager was a freakin’ radio legend and babysitting us assholes was actually a part of his retirement plan and he basically let the lunatics run the asylum and came out to play with us from time to time, including throwing us some raging parties. We were happy hiding out in the Clear Channel Radio family… there were too many other stations for them to even bother with us. We weren’t a problem.
They still sold us. It wasn’t personal. They sold a shit ton of stations that year and in coming years before trying to rebrand their ass as I Heart Radio. They even took pretty good care of us through the sale, offering 9 months of salary as severance to anyone who got fired directly because of the sale within a certain time frame and CC HR helped a lot of us with our unemployment claims after we didn’t work for them anymore.
My GM quit. My PD was let go.
I was still there. I was Interim PD. I was making a lot of money.
I was also making a lot of NOISE trying to keep my baby the way it was, because yo… it wasn’t broken.
The people who bought us though… they bought us for the wrong damn reasons. A bunch of lawyers thought they could play radio basically. They didn’t really get any of our stations in SLO. We were a problem. We had an attitude. Whenever they came up with some new stupid rule like you can’t get on Myspace or Facebook at work (every actual radio person knows these are both essential radio tools, no seriously they are, now days it’s a no brainer but this was early social media, Twitter didn’t exist yet) or you can’t drink beer on the air anymore, we figured out a way to get around it. We figured out a way to shut down almost every mandate that came down in some way…
They didn’t like it.
They came for our punk show. Change the name or it’s gone. They came for our station blogs on the website because the web host they provided us with couldn’t handle it and they didn’t like what we wrote about. They came for our station photos because they didn’t want us flipping the bird anymore or setting fire to the station lounge or hanging out with naked girls or drinking in our photos.
(the whole staff went out and drank 100 shots as a group one night. That’s me in the back with the Newcastle bottle.)
They came for the music. They came for our attitude. They came for our souls. They even came for our screen savers.
They came for me.
Nine months and about a week after being sold to this company by Clear Channel, I was called into an office and let go. This was JUST after the CC severance offer expired, so I still think it was personal. Especially looking at who they started picking off after I was gone. I cost too much. I caused too many problems. I pissed off the new GM just by being there. I wanted my rightful title of Program Director because I was the Program Director but they just wouldn’t drop the Assistant from my title even though there wasn’t a Program Director to assist. They were so pissed off that we had a music scheduling system that only myself and one other person could work properly that they downgraded us to a less complicated program instead of learning to work it.
They were pissed that the air staff was loyal to each other, with the exception of one…
Everything as we knew it was just poof gone.
It was during the big recession of 2008, so of course the words used were downsizing, the economy, streamlining, etc. I was offered the use of the studios to make a demo to get a new job and I told them exactly where they could stick that offer, cleaned up my now much larger office I had moved into and left.
About an hour or so later one of the other jocks and my best friend called me and told me to turn the station on, which was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to get drunk and cry, which is what I was doing when he called but… I did as I was asked.
My best friend was committing the ultimate radio sin.
He had gone into the studio and he blew out the playlist. He played a bunch of music from the Punk Ass Bitches Show and he… he talked about me.
I had a funeral on the radio basically. You don’t do this. Most listeners have no idea where a DJ goes when they leave the air. One day they are there and one day they’re just… gone. They’re dead until they pop up somewhere else later on (and I did… that’s still another story of it’s own.)
The listeners of New Rock 107.3 KURQ Grover Beach / San Luis Obispo, CA knew exactly what happened to me.
I cried some more.
I couldn’t turn the damn radio on for a long time afterwards. The first time I did I heard a song I had fought for months to keep off the station because it didn’t fit what we were doing and punched the face off of my car stereo.
The station survived a few more years. I wasn’t magic after all… but the numbers weren’t the same. The first ratings period after I left and the new guard took over the numbers went straight to hell and I’m not going to lie, I laughed for a few days straight about it.
Like I laughed when I found out the company that bought the station was so bad at the radio business they liquidated all of their stations. They literally do not exist anymore. Poof, gone.
I listened the night the station went off the air. You’d think they would have some respect for the history, for this thing that existed. Maybe they’d say good bye. Maybe they’d play a special song… it’s not unheard of in radio to say goodbye to a whole radio station or format or whatever.
At midnight, some unoriginal 2015 era alt rock song I can’t even remember faded out and then… Spanish. Just boom. A Spanish repeater tower fired up and 16 years of radio in San Luis Obispo was just gone.
I stayed in radio a few more years after that. I even went on to program another radio station that absolutely killed it every ratings period but it was never the same for me. New Rock was my baby. It was everything. It was messy, loud, defiant, snotty, all inclusive, stupid and a giant pain in the ass.
It was fucking perfect.