I love radio! I've loved it since I was a kid. I began to love radio because as a kid I was quite the insomniac. I'd just lay awake forever bored to tears, until one day my mom gave me a tiny transistor radio, and my whole world opened up. I would listen to my little radio in bed in our home in New York City. I listened to radio stations from Boston, Nashville, Chicago, Syracuse and places in between. Back then there were quite a few AM radio stations with incredible power. Some with a half million watts. So as the night fell and many local radio stations reduced their power, stations from all over could be heard.
Disc jockeys as they used to be called kept me company. I listened to all genre of music, country, rock, soul, what ever they played. Consequently my tastes in music are all over the place. As I got older FM radio became more and more popular. But I remember when AM stations were the top stations.
My parents divorced when I was young and my dad moved to the L.A. area. When I visited him I took my little radio along, and once again it kept me company. I remember listening to KDAY AM in Los Angeles. I'm not sure if it was the number one station but it seemed everyone was listening to it.
As I got older radio continued to play an important part in my life. As pre-teen and teen in N.Y. I listened to Disco 92 WKTU- FM, which was the disco radio station everyone listened to. And although disco seems to have gotten almost joke status these days, it was great. I really wonder if what we were listening to on WKTU was what the rest of the country was listening to because it was great music. Not the corny disco like Saturday Night Fever, but music that was really the precursor to what's now known as house music. Stuff like the Gibson Brothers singing their song Cuba or Machine singing There But For The Grace Of God Go I. Not the stuff you would here on pop disco radio stations. There was a D.J. at WKTU called Poco, he was the man, everybody knew who Poco was.
Then of course as anyone who was anywhere near N.Y. in the 70's or 80's knows, there was WBLS - FM. They played R&B and some disco after WKTU came along. But again it was more Dance or house music then that pop disco that people think of. The Premier D.J. at WBLS was Frankie Crocker, or as he would call himself, "The Chief Rocker Frankie Crocker".
So-called boom boxes were in fashion then and you could hear either WBLS or WKTU on pretty much everybody's boom box. I would still listen to other radio stations when my friends weren't around. Stations like WNEW - FM and WPLJ - FM which played rock. I was into everybody from Genesis to Led Zeppelin to Peter Frampton to Patti Smith. When I was in Los Angeles as I got a little older I began to listen to KLOS - FM which was the local rock station and I still listened to R&B stations like Stevie Wonder's KJLH - FM.
I never lost my love for radio. In fact it seemed to get stronger in my 20's. I'm not sure why but I had the urge then to do more than listen. After I did my 'time' in college I found myself living in the South. One day I got in my car and on a whim went to the local number one radio station and asked to speak to the program director about a job. No haps. I was turned away for lack of experience. But I was meant to work in radio it seems. I went to an employment agency a few days later to find a regular job and I was asked if I'd be interested in a receptionist position. I of course said yes since I needed a job, and guess where the position was! The same radio station that I'd been to looking for a job. The regular receptionist was going on maternity leave! Once I was in the door that was all she wrote!
Within two months I was on the air at the number one radio station in the area. At first like all radio D.J. brand newbians I worked overnights and I loved it! Now I was the voice that people listened to as they lay awake at night or worked or drove or whatever. The best part was taking calls from listeners. Some just wanted to hear a particular song and some wanted to win a prize but some just wanted to say hi. I was in love.
Radio was not my first great passion, Ballet was. I adored ballet. I took class at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City. I was in love with 'the dance' as we would say. But my parents were defiantly not in love with the dance. "Can you make a living as a ballet dancer?" "That's not really a career, ballet". That's what I heard until they decided to withdrew all funding for my dance endeavors.
So I'd found my second great passion, radio. Over the next several years I worked at lots of radio stations. Country stations, gospel, jazz (back when there were actually commercial jazz radio stations), R&B, classic rock. It didn't matter to me and I had perfect training listening to so many different types of music growing up, I was familiar with just about everything.
Those were wonderful years. I met so many incredible people. I met people in radio, music artists, actors, writers, you name it. Everyone it seemed eventually visited radio stations. I was even at times fairly well known. I did personal appearances and actually got paid for it. As they say it was a heady time.
And then it all came to a terrible, screeching, crashing, horrible end.
The end was called The Telecommunications Act Of 1996. The then President of the United States Bill Clinton happily signed it into law on February 8, 1996. And that was the end of radio as I knew and loved it. The law basically dropped most of the limits on how many radio stations an entity could own in a particular market.
Corporate radio was born. Individual ownership quickly became a thing of the past as radio station owners were not willing to pass up thirty or forty million dollars for their radio stations. Consolidation was all the rage and before you knew it one or two radio giants like Clear Channel Communications owned half the stations in a radio market. It was like seeing your best friend ruin their life before your very eyes with no way to stop them. I was depressed.
So, that was it. I was not willing to deal with the boring corporate radio thing. The one format fits all plastic radio was not for me.
I don't listen to music radio at all now. It puts me into a coma. It's constant repetition, the same ten songs played over and over and on all the stations. Some radio announcers are not even at the station they are broadcast over. They do their shows remotely and it's piped in. But I still love radio, the same way I still love ballet. I listen to radio stations via the Internet from all over the world, Europe, Africa, Canada, The U.K.
I don't know if I'll ever work in radio again, but I still fall asleep listening to AM radio.
