Late Night Radio

I just read an article about a radio station using an AI-generated disc jockey. It got me thinking about how lucky I was to work in radio when it was still live, local, very analog and very fun.

From 1978 to 1983, I worked at various small town stations in Upstate New York and finally in Phoenix, Arizona. In those days, radio stations had live disc jockeys covering most every hour of the day. DJs usually worked four hour “airshifts”; 6:00am to 10:00am was morning drive, 10:00am to 2:00pm was mid-day, 2:00pm to 6:00pm was afternoon drive. Evening and overnight shifts were longer. At one station I worked for, afternoon drive was 3:00pm to 7:00pm and the evening shift was from 7:00pm until 1:00am when the station signed off the air. For 24 hour a day stations. overnights were typically from midnight until 6:00am.

I never did morning or afternoon drive, but I worked mid-days, evenings and overnights. While it was great working at the station during the day when the place was a buzz of activity, I must say that I enjoyed the evening and overnight airshifts most of all. The station had a different vibe after the sun went down, cooler, hipper, more relaxed…more romantic. I was a bit of a loner in those days and the solitude of being by myself in the broadcast studio in the wee hours suited me.

One common misconception about being a disc jockey was that you got to play whatever music you wanted to play. In most cases, that is not true. Radio stations had a Program Director or Music Director who “programmed” the station. The radio station’s “playlist” was carefully designed to match the demographics of the station’s listeners and to get them to listen often and for as long as possible. The more people who listened and the length of time they listened directly correlated to how much money the station could make from advertising. All of the stations I worked at had a “format” or “daypart” clock that told us what songs to play in each segment of the hour, when to stop for commercials, weather or news. If everyone followed the clock, the station sounded tight and consistent all of the time. Evening and overnight jocks got a little more leeway. We could play longer cuts of music and mix in more obscure cuts, depending on the format of the station. As a nighttime jock, you could get away with not following the clock or “breaking format” much easier than the people on the air during the day could. At one station I worked at part time in Arizona, I was breaking format like crazy one night around 2:00am and it just so happened that the Program Director was on his way home from a night out and heard me. He called and told me how great I sounded. I was lucky and he was probably drunk.

Radio stations had “request lines”, a telephone number that listeners could call in to make requests. The number rang through to a phone in the studio. A little blinking light told the disc jockey that someone was calling the request line. One would think that people calling a radio station in the middle of the night might be odd, but in all the time I worked evenings or overnights, I never had a “Play Misty for Me” moment. Most of my callers were very nice people working third shift at IBM, nurses at the local hospital, people working at 24-hour diners, security guards and the like. I think the oddest call I ever got was when I was working at an album rock station and some guy would call each night and when I answered, he would simply say in his best Jeff Spicoli voice… “FREEBIRD” and hang up, obviously asking for the Lynyrd Skynyrd hit.

Clint Eastwood in “Play Misty for Me, 1971. The Malpaso Company, Universal Pictures

Some of the stations I worked at carried live network news, usually at the top of each hour. In those days, you had the ABC Radio Networks—American Information, American Contemporary, American Entertainment and American FM, CBS Radio, NBC Radio and Mutual. If you worked at a station that carried network news live, you had to learn how to “back time”, making sure that your song ended with enough time for a station ID, jingle, promotional announcement or whatever and it all ended just perfectly before the news started. Doing it right took a little math and a lot of practice, but when you did it right, it was very satisfying.

Back timing was also used when disc jockeys “talked up” record intros. This was an art and the best jocks would talk over the intro of the record and “hit the post”, saying their last word just as the vocals of the song started. You can hear what I mean by checking out some classic radio airchecks on YouTube from WLS Chicago or WABC New York to hear top 40 DJs like John Landecker, Tom Kent and Dan Ingram hitting the post on the hits of the day.

40 years ago radio was an important part of everyone’s life. People depended on it for entertainment, news and information. Working in local radio was fun and rewarding, even in the middle of the night. Today, locally owned and operated stations are far and few between and if you hear a disc jockey on one of the corporate-owned stations, chances are he or she is “voice tracking” for multiple stations across many markets. Or it might not even be a real person at all.