Performer: Zebra
Songwriter: Randy Jackson
Original Release: No Tellin’ Lies
Year: 1984
Definitive Version: none
After my sophomore-year
experience of calling Wabash basketball and then the Caveman bouts, which were
a series of amateur boxing matches for charity, I was emeshed in the WNDY
experience.
I was named sports director,
so I was in charge of all sports programming—football and basketball games, of
course, but also any pregame shows. The first week of the 1984 football season,
I interviewed Steve Hoffman, who was the starting quarterback, at the radio
station studio.
Let me back up a bit. WNDY
had four rooms: the booth, the transmitter room beside it, the “office,” which
consisted of one desk, one chair, a few filing cabinets and a phone, and then the
recording studio beside that. The recording studio is where the music was put
on carts (tapes like 8-tracks), the commercials were recorded and where I would
record my personal audio tapes. (Come on, this was professional gear. I wasn’t
going to use my cheapy stereo at home.)
As is my wont, I learned how
to run everything—just in case I ever needed to—so putting together a cassette
of my interview with Hoffman was easy. Before the game, the guy who ran the
soundboard and played the commercials could pop in the tape, press play and let
it roll.
I turned over the pregame
player interviews to my color guy, which turned out to not be the best idea,
because he was fairly lazy. Coach Carlson’s interview was given to Steve, who
did a solid job as a freshman and the color man in waiting.
I also got more involved
with the station beyond sports. In addition to doing the regular Wednesday
early-shift show, as mentioned, I filled in regularly during the week and
particularly during the Saturday night request show. I had a steady girlfriend
at home, so I didn’t need to hit up campus parties like the other guys, so I
was available.
The cool thing about doing
the request show was that it was the only show that was free form, aside from
the necessary commercials and public-service announcements, of course. If
people called in requests, I’d play those songs. If they didn’t, I played
whatever I wanted, including records I brought from home, like The Who, Led
Zeppelin and my favorite new band, Genesis, which weren’t part of the station’s
format.
My freshman year, when I
barely knew Wabash had a radio station let alone had anything to do with it,
WNDY was free form. In other words, each DJ played whatever he wanted. My
sophomore year, it was decided to go top 40. This was done because WNDY wasn’t
just a student-run station; it was a commercial enterprise, and it was assumed
that a single format that was top 40 would be profitable in Crawfordsville, Ind. Records started to
disappear, and carts became more in vogue, because they were easier to play, they were pre-cued and you could control the music.
The next year, my junior
year, a new PD took it a step further. He got it into his mind to program the
entire day. He created a computer program that more or less picked the songs in
order, along with all other drop-ins.
Songs were divided in three
groups by color-coded carts. Red was for the hottest hits, yellow were lesser
hits—coming or fading—and green was stuff that fit the format to break up the
monotony a bit. We’d play X number of red tunes per hour, far fewer yellow and
maybe one or two greenies. The only leeway Js had was to pick the actual song
and make sure not to repeat anything to often.
When this song made its
debut on MTV, I dug it the most, and I told Joe, the WNDY PD, that we should
put it in the rotation. He thought it was a little too harsh for the format,
but I insisted. Come on, man: MTV of all things has it in heavy rotation, so he
relented and carted it up yellow. It was the only musical contribution I made
to WNDY.
What’s interesting about all
of this in retrospect is that this whole experience gave me an unwitting
glimpse of the (bleak) future of radio.
Today, music radio is
dominated by computerized stations that play the same 1,200 songs ad infinitum.
It’s cheap: You don’t have to pay for personalities to talk up records or even
to talk at all. It’s nonthreatening to people who still listen to music radio
and just want to hear the same stuff over and over, so it registers with the
People Meters that have destroyed radio in Chicago if not everywhere else.
We didn’t go that far at
WNDY, but we used the same road map.
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