Behind The Mic: A Personal Peek Into 1970s FM Classic Rock Radio--Pt. 3, WFMF/Baton Rouge, LA
Behind the scenes of my year as a radio DJ doing 7 to midnight at Baton Rouge's leading FM "progressive" rocker, while spending weeks on location for a CBS TV-movie!
While nepotism, admittedly, may have played a role in rising from the University of Houston’s KUHF to my first pro gig at Houston’s CBS affiliate, KLOL-FM 101, I landed my next job in a more personally satisfying way: The GM of Baton Rouge’s “progressive rock” WFMF-FM 102 was driving through Houston, heard me on 101, and called and offered me the high profile 7-to-midnight shift!
This all must have happened in either the spring or summer of 1976. I wasn’t there too long before the opportunity arose, that autumn, to spend my days playing Huey P. Long’s bodyguard in the CBS-TV movie, “The Life and Assassination of the Kingfish,” starring the late Edward Asner as the Louisiana governor from 1928-1932:
Only a 21-year-old could juggle a 10-hour day of an oft-grueling location shoot, grab a quick bite, and arrive (in full, ‘30s-era, gangster-like, 3-piece-suit) for a 5-hour prime nighttime radio shift! The jock whose afternoon drive shift went until 7pm, had a good time kidding me as I walked in for my mic duty: “Well, here comes Brad, the movie star!” he’d snark as he bade farewell to his audience.
Living Like a Millionaire: “Living is Good”
I found a 2-story, 2-bedroom townhouse on Lobdell Blvd. in the north central part of town, quite close to WFMF’s then-downtown Florida Boulevard location, a short distance from the Mississippi River. Apparently, the former WJBO-FM, progressive rock “Loose Radio” had recently switched to the “WFMF” call letters a year or two before my arrival.
I was making about $800 a month, which means my rent for the townhouse, in 1976 dollars, must’ve been in the $150-$200 range! I found a home for my 1,500 LPs and several hundred singles in my spare upstairs bedroom.
Related: My look back at the last week of August 1976, when Epic Records released Boston’s debut LP + 3 other albums by acts few have heard of, but most have heard.
I was alone at the station for my shift, inasmuch as the switchboard closed at 5, and the entire staff—traffic and sales folks, the PD, MD, and GM all vacated. I came to find it comforting to turn off all the extraneous lights in the building, including the control room. Doing my show with only the VU meter lights on to guide me seemed to add a calm, “typically” laid-back, FM vibe to my ‘tude! At least, that was the goal.
Of course, sans switchboard gal, I was left to answer the phones as I saw fit. I usually didn’t mind, as they were all listeners, anyway. It didn’t take long to ferret out the “typical” Baton Rouge teenage-through-young adult audience I was drawing. Mostly male, and thoroughly into hard and even harder rock.
I once dared to play Wendy Waldman’s “Living is Good” from her ‘76 “The Main Refrain” album, and got flooded with—not so much complaints—but clear, firm requests for anything else (which I took to mean, just harder…more guitar)!
The fact that Andrew Gold was all over this track (guitar, piano, vocals) probably helped to endear “Living is Good” to my ears, even though I was largely unaware of Gold’s talents to this point.
It would be a year until Gold (previously a member of Linda Ronstadt’s band) would hit with his solo Top 40 hit, “Lonely Boy,” and again with 1978’s “Thank You For Being a Friend,” another Top 40 smash (and eventually the famous “Golden Girls” theme song).
Gold’s melodies and harmonies became immediate favorites of mine for years (wanna dig up hidden Gold? Try Wax—sometimes referred to as Wax UK, his too-brief ‘80s collab with longtime songwriting legend and 10cc stalwart, Graham Gouldman). Start here:
Back to the phones, many of the anti-Wendy callers were bellowing for, among other things, Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Play ‘Free Bird,’ man!” Released just a couple years previous, I assumed the station had broken the song in the capital city with jocks who had preceded me.
Always one to want to “know my audience,” I acquiesced on many occasions..and, it helped that “One More From the Road,” Skynyrd’s live album (with a legendary 11-and-a-half-minute-long “Free Bird”) was released in September 1976…because of course it was! If only there had been a 3-day-long version! But, DJ bathroom breaks can only be so long!
Babs Streisand and the Little-Known “Evergreen” Contest
As with so many other things that happen within the walls of a radio station that the general public can’t, doesn’t, and certainly shouldn’t see are things like “production contests.” Can’t imagine there were or are that many, but one in 1976 caught my attention:
In the late autumn of that year, the movie and resultant soundtrack album to “A Star is Born” were released, the latter by CBS Records. The former’s film reviews, as I recall, might as well have called the movie, “A Star is Borin’.” Regardless, an ad showed up somewhere…if not record industry trade rags, Billboard or Cashbox…then, possibly Radio & Records, a radio trade pub.
The ad was publicizing some firm’s contest (prize now unknown) for coming up with a way to utilize Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” (she composed, while Paul Williams provided lyrics) into a creative new recorded experience. I had become very familiar with WFMF’s production studio, as all jocks had to produce local ads that played on air, complete with voice-over and background music; ad copy was provided by ad agencies or the companies themselves.
I can’t remember doing much more than reciting (in appropriately Don LaFontaine/James Earl Jones-like importance) Williams’ lyrics over Babs’ music from the original recording. Had I won, I would’ve been able to remember the first-place prize! “Evergreen” in Spanish, in case you’ve never heard it; I hadn’t:
My First Homer!
Merging my desire to know my audience with free rein of the phones, I had become friends, to varying degrees, with several of my…uh, fans. Many would call in on a nightly basis, and if they didn’t want to request “Free Bird,” they were happily surprised their “jock” didn’t mind chatting while a song was rotating on the turntable.
One affable young man I had come to know by many phone calls asked if he could come to the station and watch me “do my thing” one night. Remember, this was 1976, and despite the release of “Play Misty For Me” five years before, this was long before things like stalkers, random murders, or sneak attacks became lamentably fashionable.
I walked down the hall at his knock on the locked station door, and welcomed in a pleasant looking, dark-haired lad in a black trench coat. I know…sounds ominous by 21st century standards, but I offered him a chair in my darkened control room. He said his name was Homer, which would be the first one I’d ever met.
That, of course, would change in the late ‘80s at the debut of the yellow-skinned patriarch and his similarly-hued family of animated “Simpsons.”
It didn’t occur to me then, but as years passed and I recalled this benign and uneventful meeting of Homer while on-air, I realized that it was highly likely he was a minor! He certainly looked it. But, at 21, and in the Year of the Bicentennial, things like restraining orders and civil liability were as unheard of as “Battle of the Network Stars” being fought with firearms.
How I Altered a KISS Song (Come at Me, Gene!)
Perhaps inspired by Homer’s favorite band (or the dark hue of his attire), I began plotting to “play with” a particular sonic enhancement I had just discovered…one that can be easily produced with a radio station’s equipment arsenal…what I used to call a sort of “sonic swoosh” sound!
I could’ve employed my new little “trick” on a musical passage, but being the sonic purist I was (and still am), I didn’t want to trifle with someone’s creative output. But, with a sound effect, all bets (and thus, the litigious KISS management) were off!
Most radio stations in the ‘70s had at least two turntables to spin records (to cue up the next while one was playing), and many had four (two on either side of the jock). At some point, I noticed that when playing two copies of the same record simultaneously, I could hear (over control room speakers or a set of headphones) a kind of sonic “phasing” (as I used to call it, incorrectly) or “flanging” that listeners at home couldn’t possibly experience, being limited, generally, to one turntable and/or not being able to afford the luxury of owning two copies of any one album!
Technically, what I did was flanging, “an audio effect produced by mixing two identical signals together (in this case, two identical LPs), one signal delayed by a small and gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds.”
Enter Destroyer, the fourth KISS studio album on Casablanca Records, and its lead track, “Detroit Rock City.”
During the song’s final six seconds (album track only; Casablanca offered a shorter edit for the 45 rpm single release), there was a horrific car crash sound effect. It was for this moment that, while one “Destroyer” album was dutifully playing its “Detroit Rock City” over our air, another copy was playing simultaneously (and silently, at least as far as our audience knew), waiting for the needle’s inevitable rendezvous with the song’s 5:12 mark!
It was at just that moment I “opened the pot” (turned up the potentiometer, or volume control) on the second “Detroit Rock City” (now both records were playing live over the air) and let the natural flanging effect do its magic on my Baton Rouge listeners! I could hear all this on my headphones, of course, and would listen to both records as that precious 5:12 mark approached.
A crucial component of this exercise: I’d have to remember which of the two spinning turntables had the “live” over-air copy…if I couldn’t hear the flanging mere seconds away from “go time,” I’d use my finger to gently slow the off-air record, so that it could have the lag time necessary to affect the flanging.
If that was the record that was slow to begin with, I’d take my finger off the album edge, and quickly speed up the record by manipulating it from the lead-out groove adjacent to the label!
Now, that was the LP that had to be ever-so-slightly faster than the other for the flanging to work. And, when it did, it was borderline orgasmic to imagine my listeners at home going, “Hey! My album doesn’t have that weird sound!” (See the bottom of the article for a short video which explains, in simple terms, flanging, including a reel tape demonstration. What can work for reel-to-reel, of course, works for vinyl!)
Personal Appearances
Well, I guess there was really only one…that I recall, anyway. A popular department store in what was then Bon Marche Mall did an informal survey at one point, quizzing teens about their favorite local DJ. Apparently I was named most frequently (thanks, kids!), so I was invited by the store to make a personal appearance.
A half-page ad (with a large photo of yours truly) in the Baton Rouge Advocate tub-thumped my Saturday appearance in the store’s Junior Department about a week ahead. It wasn’t a live remote, but the store did set up a turntable from which I spun records whose sounds were piped over the store’s loudspeakers.
My job, with $100 store credit or $75 cash—I took the latter—as my remuneration, was to peddle the wares in the Junior Dept. ‘Twas the time I first learned what a Junior Department was! To the surprise of some, I’ve never gone back.
So cool! I was a DJ in college and after college a bit - for a university. I love your “flanging!” What a great thing that would have been to experience!
My DJ studio in the 90s was very nice equipment. And we only had 2 turntables. It was so cool, to me, that we could play the records backwards. Or at least turn them a bit.
Have you seen the show “The Getdown”? It was on Netflix at one point. I hope it’s still there. They should not have cancelled that series. It’s about the birth of hip hop, by DJs.
Loved reading your story here. It brought back fun memories from my own DJ days.