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Saturday, September 16, 2006

Pointless Nostalgia - Part V.A.01: What was being being played the week I started working full-time in radio. 

FM 106.3, WHTG
weekly chart for week of January 28, 1991

Program Director: Michael Butscher.
Music Director: Matt Pinfield.


POWER ROTATION
1. Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now" (SBK)
2. Sting, "All This Time" (A&M)
3. Chris Isaak, "Wicked Game" (REPRISE)
4. Living Colour, "Love Rears Its Ugly Head" (EPIC)
5. Mission U.K., "Hands Across The Ocean" (MERCURY)

HEAVY ROTATION
1. Pop Will Eat Itself, "X, Y, Zee" (BMG)
2. Daniel Ash, "This Love" (BMG)
3. Prefab Sprout, "Machine Gun Ibiza" (EPIC)
4. Sisters Of Mercy, "Detonation Blvd/More" (ELEKTRA)
5. Red Kross, "1976" (ATLANTIC)
6. Happy Mondays, "Kinky Afro" (ELEKTRA)
7. INXS, "Bitter Tears" (ATLANTIC)
8. Charlatans U.K., "White Shirt" (BMG)
9. Replacements, "When It Began" (REPRISE)
10. Echo & The Bunnymen, "Gone, Gone, Gone" (WB/SIRE)
11. Lush, "Sweetness & Light" (REPRISE/4AD)
12. Jane's Addiction, "Classic Girl" (WB)
13. Connells, "Get A Gun" (TVT)
14. Butthole Surfers, "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (ROUGH TRADE)
15. Peter Gabriel, "Shaking The Tree" (GEFFEN)
16. The High, "Box Set Go/Up & Down" (POLYGRAM)
17. Ride, "Taste" (REPRISE/SIRE)
18. Parachute Men, "Every Other Thursday" (FIRE)
19. Drivin' And Cryin', "Fly Me Courageous" (ISLAND)
20. Darling Buds, "End Of The Beginning" (COLUMBIA)
21. An Emotional Fish, "Grey Matter" (ATLANTIC)
22. Trash Can Sinatras, "Obscurity Knocks" (POLYGRAM)
23. Cause And Effect, "You Think You Know Her" (EXILE)
24. Goo Goo Dolls, "Just The Way You Are" (METAL BLADE)

MEDIUM ROTATION
1. Inspiral Carpets, "This Is How It Feels" (ELEKTRA)
2. various artists, "Red, Hot & Blue" (CHRYSALIS)
3. Pet Shop Boys, "How Do You Expect To Be..." (EMI)
4. Primal Scream, "Come Together" (WB/SIRE)
5. Fishbone, "In The Name Of Swing" (COLUMBIA)
6. Soup Dragons, "Lovegod" (MERCURY)
7. Sonic Youth, "Dirty Boots" (DGC)
8. Nine Inch Nails, "Get Down, Make Love" (TVT)
9. Enigma, "Sadeness" (CHARISMA)
10. Hex, "Shelter" (RYKODISC)
11. Susanna Hoffs, "My Side Of The Bed" (COLUMBIA)
12. Chagall Guevara, "Violent Blue" (MCA)
13. King's X, "We Are Finding Who We Are" (MEGAFORCE)
14. The Box, "Temptation" (CAPITOL)
15. Blue Rodeo, "'Til I Am Myself Again" (EASTWEST)
16. Harbour Kings, "Tattoo" (FIRE)
17. Posies, "Suddenly Mary" (DGC)
18. Soho, "Out Of My Mind" (ATCO)
19. Eno/Cale, "One Word" (WB/OPAL)
20. Rembrandts, "Burning Timber" (ATCO)
21. 29 Palms, "Fatal Joy" (IRS)
22. Todd Rundgren, "Public Servant" (WB)
23. Dream Academy, "12-8 Girl" (REPRISE)
24. Edie Brickell, "Black & Blue" (GEFFEN)

LIGHT ROTATION
1. Falling Joys, "You're In A Mess" (IRS)
2. Buffalo Tom, "Fortune Teller" (BMG)
3. Front 242, "Gripped By Fear" (EPIC)
4. Kitchens Of Distinction, "Drive That Fast" (A&M)
5. Hollow Men, "November Comes" (ARISTA)
6. Book Of Love, "Alice Everyday" (WB/SIRE)
7. Material Issue, "Valerrie Loves Me" (MERCURY)
8. Beautiful South, "My Book" (ELEKTRA)
9. The Children, "If I Gave U My Heart" (SKY)
10. Screaming Trees, "Bed Of Roses" (EPIC)
11. Exene, "Missing Nature" (RHINO)
12. Chickasaw Mud Puppies, "Do You Remember?" (MERCURY)
13. Havana 3 A.M., "Reach The Rock" (IRS)
14. Eleventh Dream Day, "Rose Of Jericho" (ATLANTIC)
15. Divinyls, "I Touch Myself" (VIRGIN)
16. Soul Asylum, "Something Out Of Nothing" (A&M)
17. Spooner, "Tomorrow Never Comes" (DALI)
18. Danielle Dax, "The Id Parade" (WB)
19. Bootsauce, "Let's Eat Out" (NEXT PLATEAU)
20. Cocteau Twins, "I Wear Your Ring" (CAPITOL)
21. Graham Parker, "Weeping Statues" (BMG)
22. Roger McGuinn, "You Bowed Down" (ARISTA)
23. Killing Joke, "Money Is Not Our God" (NOISE)
24. Stranglmartin, "Bury The Thunder" (DRAGON STREET)
25. Meat Beat Manifesto, "Psych Out" (ELEKTRA)
26. Nirvana, "Sliver" (SUB POP)
27. Alice In Chains, "Man In The Box" (COLUMBIA)
28. Paris, "The Devil Made Me Do It" (TOMMY BOY)
29. Brian Ritchie, "Religion Ruined My Life" (DALI)
30. A Tribe Called Quest, "Can I Kick It?" (JIVE/BMG)
31. Lonesome Rodeo, "Blind Streets" (CURB)
32. KMFDM, "Naive" (WAX TRAX)

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Posted by: Mike / 9/16/2006 10:10:00 AM
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Pointless Nostalgia - Part IV.B.01 

Former dwelling:me old home
18th Street near 8th Avenue, Chelsea. New York City. (photo via A9)

For a little more than a year in 1989 and 1990, I lived in a windowless room in this building's basement. The 8th Avenue subway line rumbled by my room at irregular intervals. Mice would wake me up in the middle of the night, rummaging through my wastebasket. No natural light reached the room, eventually necessitating me putting a small lamp on a timer so that I would at least have a vague idea of day vs. night.

One day, the hot water heater sprung a leak in a service area of the basement, behind a locked door and my room flooded. I slept there for one night with a soaked carpet and wet belongings and, by morning, I could barely breathe from the humidity. I called the superintendent and the owner to try to get them to do something, but they just told me that it was a matter for renter's insurance (which I didn't have--I could barely afford the rent). Eventually, they agreed to come and remove my sopping-wet carpet. Although I couldn't tell you anyone's name associated with any almost apartment since, I still have that super's named burned into my memory--Euclides Pagan, I'm looking in your direction! (actually, Mr. Pagan was not the problem--I remember him as being only helpful...hey, I wonder if this is him?)

Pine Tree DeliAcross the street from my apartment was the Pine Tree Deli (now apparently called the Pine Tree Market, according to the A9 photo), a 24-hour bodega which took possession of much of my few spare dollars. Often beer and late-night trips to the hot food at their salad bar, but that was only after I first moved in or just after payday thereafter.

I was unemployed for the first few months I moved here, living off the money I had saved working as a short-term employee of the U.S. Postal Service in the six months after I left college. I can think of few things more exciting at age 22 than spending several months with no responsibilities living in the greatest city on earth. I used to call it "the world's most dangerous amusement park," and it surely was both. Fortunately, I never ended up in harm's way (although it was mostly thanks to blind luck).

Eventually I had to knuckle down and get a job, though, and as an unqualified prospect for job after job proved to be a fruitless endeavor, so I followed the example of some of my friends and signed up with a temp agency. I had poor typing skills and even less experience with the then-popular office computer programs (although I wasn't too shabby with Lotus 1-2-3), so I ended up with what I was told by third parties was one of the goofball temp agencies--sort of the Rent-A-Wreck of H.R. world. At my interview, they let me retake the typing test several times so I could get my words-per-minute count up to their minimum.

But ah! They did get me the employment I was starting to need very much as I watched my bank account dwindle down to fewer and fewer digits. So I was pleased to show up for my first day on the job as a mailroom clerk at the home office of Guardian Life Insurance at 17th St. and Park Avenue, the northeast corner of Union Square (they've since moved down further downtown to 7 Hanover Square, and building is now a hotel). I had to sort interoffice mail, file paper insurance records in massive but dimly lit basement storage shelves, and four times each day, load up my mail cart and make the rounds of the offices assigned to me.

When I first began the job, my route took me outside of the building and to an extension office in a building on the next block. I thought I was going to feel like an ass, dragging my happy little mail cart with its happy little baskets of interoffice insurance mail down the street like some sort of guy friday for a pushcart arbitrageur.

But it was nothing like that--strolling up the sidewalk along the divided expanse of Park Avenue, leading up to Grand Central Station immediately followed by the looming presence of the Pan Am Building (which became the Met Life Building in 1991; photo via bridgeandtunnelclub.com), I could only think how lucky I was to be seeing as daily backdrop sights about which people all over the world only dreamed.

Like The Jeffersons, though, eventually I was to be movin' on up--heading uptown for a job in another mailroom, albeit one more in line with my eventual intended radio career. Thanks to my former college roommate Chris Regan, I landed a job taking care of mail business at the New York office of A&M Records. Located in the magificent Fuller Building at 57th St. and Madison Avenue, the mailroom was located on a separate floor from the company's main offices and with one of the 42-story building's setbacks. So, after hours, my only other companion in the mailroom would occasionally end our workday by bringing up some beer and hop out the window onto the setback roof, saluting the fading day and midtown Manhattan's departing masses with our upturned bottles.

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Posted by: Mike / 11/30/2005 02:33:00 PM
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Sunday, March 27, 2005

Pointless Nostalgia - Part III.D.01 

In May of 1986, I was winding up my sophomore year of college. For the summer, I was planning on working at my college radio station, which paid students to work during the major school breaks. I had done the same thing for most of the previous summer (as a last-minute replacement) and was looking forward to doing it again. I mean, getting paid to be a radio DJ? Sign me up!

At the risk of too much of a good thing, I had also given a demo tape and resume to WQNY--known on the air as Q104-FM. In contrast to my very cool college station, Q104 was a very uncool Adult Contemporary station, targeting the easy rock masses of Central New York with a blend of Bread-style oldies and the mid-'80s soft favorites like Whitney Houston, Peter Cetera, and Gloria Estefan.

But it was more radio experience, and it was a paid gig. So I applied for a part-time job and was hired.

Located on the second story of a storefront on South Cayuga Street (over a kitchenware store), the WQNY facility at the time was fairly non-descript. A large main room decorated in Office Generica with desks strewn about for various salespeople and office staff. Besides the big room, there were two private offices plus the air studio, a production room, and a rest/storage room.

Dave Smith was the morning host and the PD. I believe Michael "E" handled afternoon drive, Mark Lobel was the night guy, and my fellow IC student Jeff Hetzel was holding down the overnight fort (I skipped middays, as my memory is not clear--was it Randy Charles? or was he a WTKO guy?). The GM was "Big Jim" Roberts, and Smith's morning news sidekick was Andy Levin.

I was hired to do a pair of weekend airshifts, which were nominally on two consecutive nights but were actually the same day. I did the Saturday overnight--midnight Saturday to 6 Sunday morning--as well as Sunday evenings from 8 to midnight.

Top these shifts the the two hour Breakfast with The Beatles show I hosted on my college station, WICB, and each Sunday I was working fully half the day over three shifts on two stations. It was a grueling, sleep-poor schedule, and I almost looked forward to Monday when I could rest ("TGIM," as I grimly thought more than once when returning, bleary-eyed, to my dorm room in the wee hours of Monday morning).

To add insult to injury, Ithaca's transit system didn't have Sunday bus service--an important point for me, since I neither had a car nor even yet a drivers' license. So the after getting off work at 6am, and both directions on Sunday night, were a 2.5 mile walk--sharply uphill heading home.

Yet with all this adversity, did I care? No, I enjoyed the hell out of it!

Granted, there were many a time I was desperate at 4:30am for any song--anything!--that was upbeat. Another Whitney Houston or Bread ballad and I'd be in danger of sleep.

At that time, CDs were only just percolating into usage. The station primarily used vinyl and tape cartridges for playing music, but there was a small rack of CDs available. Most were new releases, but the occasional "best of"--I specifically remember a Blood, Sweat & Tears collection--was in there, too.

What's most amusing in retrospect is that while Q104 had two CD players--needed to segue between two songs--one of them was a portable unit. CD players were still fairly expensive items in 1986, and perhaps the station management wasn't sure if this digital thing was a quadraphonic-style audio fad. They traded commercial spots for the CD players with a local audio store, and only ended up with a regular deck unit and the portable. And this was the #1 radio station in the market at the time!

Of course, they didn't always seem too with-it; they still had a liner we DJs had to read on ooccasion which promoted the station as "All day, all night, in stereo!"--laughably out of date by the mid '80s, as FM radio had overwhelmed the AM band in popularity for about a decade.

On Sunday evenings, instead of only playing music, I ran the board for two hour-long syndicated programs: Westwood One's Star Trak Profiles and NBC Radio's The Jazz Show with David Sanborn.

Star Trak Profiles was a musician interview show hosted by Phil Hendrie (!). The show was distributed on two vinyl records, and all I had to do was track each side and insert local commercials at the end of each. (I still have two of the show's episodes; one with Paul McCartney and another with Paul Simon)

The Jazz Show, a one-hour foray into what became known as "smooth jazz," came over the satellite earlier in the day. Someone else would record it on reel tape for me to play back that evening. The only rub was that the station didn't have a reel-to-reel player in the on-air studio, so I would have to transfer the outgoing signal to the production studio (set up that way so the prod. studio could be used as a backup to the main studio in case of technical emergency) and play it back from there. It was a pain in the ass, but it did get me into the prod studio, which I would otherwise have had no reason to explore otherwise--I ended up borrowing a couple of sound effects for personal projects from the station's vinyl SFX library.

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Posted by: Mike / 3/27/2005 07:06:00 PM
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