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Dead Air Nightmares
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 This may be an urban legend, but its still a great story: A part-timer was running a syndicated religious-sermon broadcast one Sunday morning that came to the station on vinyl. Bored, hungry, he decided to head down to the convenience store, about a five minute drive from the station. He starts the record, heads out to the car and takes off, monitoring the station on his car radio like any good jock would do. It's a 25 minute sermon, and he decides to talk to the girl at the convenience store for a while before heading back. With maybe five minutes left, he hops in his car, starts her up, and the record is of course skipping, but thats not the real problem. The REAL problem is that it sticks at a particular part of the sermon where the preacher is saying in a VERY loud voice..."...you can go to HELL! (skip...)...you can go to HELL!..." Needless to say he broke all land speed records getting back to the station. Apparently the skip was only three minutes or so into the recording, meaning this preacher was repeatedly telling the stations listeners to go to hell for roughly 15-20 minutes. |
Ad libbing skills take time to develop. At my first real job in radio one night I had Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" on deck. Since I had just read an article about the ship, I felt confident and went into this long, detailed intro about the song's storyline. I was quite proud of my little speech! I gave the facts in a conversational manner without stumbling. About two minutes into the song, I noticed that there was no motion on the VU meters! I had left the song in cue. What a moron! | I was board-oping the overnight shift and, as usual, talking to phone groupies. After talking to one girl for over three hours, she suddenly says to me "so when are y'all gonna come back on air?" I said "What?" "Y'all been off the air all night, what's going on?" I hung up on her, panicked, and checked the board. We were a talk station during the day and the talk jocks left the board in PROGRAM instead of AIR. The transmitter had gone down and I hadn't checked meter readings since midnight. I called the engineer and pretended it had just gone off and he helped me bring it back up. | ||
| I am an engineer. Many moons ago I was in New Mexico. On a Saturday morning I got up a little late (about 8:20). I turned on my AM station--silence. I rang the studio--busy signal. I got dressed, rang the studio--busy. Thinking the worst I tore through town in my car. I arrived at the studios, and met the announcer. She told me she had just had a wonderful show, maybe the best of her career. I informed her that no one had heard it because of the dead air. She had failed to push the patch cord all the way in. She was absolutely devastated. The tears flowed, and she was sure she would be fired. I defended her to management. It really was the fault of bad technology. Within a week all the patch panels in the stations were removed. | I have recurring dreams. It's almost as bad as those
dreams where you miss a test in school. These are always about
my first day at a new station and always involve dead air. In
every dream I'm using a board that is not labeled and no one
is around to tell me which pot is for what! My song runs out,
I can't find another record in the studio, so I drop the needle
half way through the same song. Then I run around looking for
another record, all I can find is a box of dusty 45's full of
the same song! Of course, the record runs out, again. ============================= In another dream, the turntables are mounted flat onto the wall. The tone arm is just hanging there. The needle won't stay down on the record. |
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| Piloting a radio show is something akin to flying an airplane. All aircraft must be "learned" to some extent before you really feel comfortable in the cockpit. You have to ascertain where all the gauges are located and how they read. You've got to find the ignition switch for the microphone and calculate how hot to rev the VU meters. You've got to know how fast the turntables can accelerate from zero to 33 1/2 rpm, you must remember the location of the cart machines, and make note of which remote switches are for the tape decks and which ones are for the turntables. Once you finally get a feel for the cockpit, of course, you stop consciously thinking about how the ailerons work, and just fly the plane. Another aspect of being on the air that is analogous to flight is that if you crash, it's a very public event, but without the dignity of being killed. ...An excerpt from "Radio Waves" by Jim Ladd, St. Martins Press. Go to Jim's web site. | I worked at a rural radio station and the owner lived upstairs. He let his kitty run around, so I would bring my cat into work with me. I was engineering a high school basketball game which we were broadcasting live from a phone line. My cat was walking across the board, trying to sit on my lap. She stepped on the phone and cut off our connection! The owner came running in the studio asking what happened, and I said "I don't know! The line just went dead! Damn phone company!" | It sounds like an urban legend, but I HEARD it... The time
was mid 1960's... the radio station WDRC in Hartford.. A powerhouse
top 40.... the jock, the legendery Joey Reynolds. About 11:15
PM on what as probably a Saturday night ( cause I was still up
listening ) Wilson Pickett's " In the Midnight Hour "
starts skipping... over and over it kept going .... in the midnight.....
in the midnight.....in the midnight. I started listening , waiting
for Joey to stop it. No.. on and on it went.... well, I thought,
it's getting close to 12:00, maybe he's waiting for the midnight
hour. Nope, midnight came and went, still it went on.... in the
midnight..... in the midnight... I finally went to bed. Years later, I ended up working in the Hartford radio market, and asked about that night. There were two stories going around. One, that he had run across the street to get something to eat from White Castle, got locked out and couldn't get back in... The other was that he was just sitting there, letting it skip because he was pissed at management. I like the second story better. |
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| My nightmare, well, first some background.., I am very short. Back when we played records, I had trouble reaching the top rows of records... 'cause this is both a radio AND height nightmare. I was on the air and getting ready to play a spot break. I look at the revolving freestanding cart rack, to choose my carts, but it's covered with brown wrapping paper. In haste I tear the paper off, only to discover that none of the carts have any labels on them. But it wouldn't have mattered, because the cart machines were mounted near the ceiling and I couldn't reach them anyway. | (return to top) | In 1980, I was working in New Hampshire and was visiting a friend, Mike Emrey, at the competition, which strangely enough was in the same building. He was playing an album and asked me to toss him the sports page. I did, but he spaced out, missed it, and it landed on the album. It didn't knock the arm off, it didn't skip, it simply stopped-dead. He calmly reached over, turned the pot down, then picked off the newspaper and potted it back up so it wouldn't wow. He was a pretty cool guy. | ||
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