How I Got This Way

2009-11-22T17:37:08-06:00

How I Got This Way

When I was growing up I had a lot of friends who were passionate about something. Unlike them, I didn't obsess over motorcycles, horses, cars, MTV, a particular band, drugs, etc. Everyone seemed to have a passion but I felt like I was just drifting through life without much to care about.

When I was a freshman in high school, in tiny Belfry Montana, my Dad drove us to Cody, Wyoming to take windsurfing lessons. It was great and I discovered my first passion. Things took off from there… snowboarding, girls, football, sports in general, my first vehicles, jobs, etc. I figured I was going to college, but I didn't really know what I would study. My guidance counselor recommended majoring in engineering in Bozeman, at Montana State University. I opted to take the advice of the chorus teacher, though I never took chorus. Twice my senior year in the lunch line, he overheard me talking and said to me, “you should go into radio.”

I settled on the University of Montana because of their Journalism program, I think. I don't really remember. But, I did end up with a degree in Radio/TV from the University of Montana School of Journalism. I used it for a whole 18 months, too. Turns out radio is pretty boring. At least, at that era corporations and bosses took most of the liveliness away. It was not the madcap craziness you'd see on WRKP in Cincinatti or in the movies. It was sterile, a room with a computer that played drop-ins and commercials, a reel-to-reel for recording phone calls (which we weren't generally allowed to air, mostly because the calls weren't that interesting, which is the DJ's (“on-air personalities”) fault. Our morning show was great, the whole station was tight, but it seemed too controlled.

When the Internet hit I jumped to start working on web sites. Whoa, I need to back up.

I met a guy in the R/TV department. His name was Chad. He was a good DJ, and worked at that radio station that I ended up being a full-time Promotions Director my first year out of college. He actually recommended me when there was an opening playing commercials during the basketball team's games, played on an AM sister-station. The next year, my last at the U, I had to move out of this basement I was renting and Chad needed a roommate so we roomed.

Chad was a computer freak. He was running BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) with a couple of computers, a bank of modems (when 28800's hit, he was excited, to say the least. Chad let me use his precious computer when I needed to do school work and hardly blinked the day I completely hosed his entire BBS. Thinking back, it was pretty amazing. He was and remains one of the most influential men I've ever met, and one of the most important in my life.

Chad, having already helped me get my first radio job, helped me get into computers. He advised me on my first purchase, a 486 with 4 megs of RAM and a 212 MEGABYTE harddrive. It cost me almost $900 in 1993.

There was no “online” except for BBS and I found that I wasn't nearly interested enough to spent much time dialing in and out of BBSes to talk to people via precursors to email or forums. I did some school work on floppies and a few other things. Then I discovered “Recorder.” I can *record* with these things? Hmm.

I researched and found my first sound card. The computer I had didn't have one, and I ended up with a $150 card from Turtle Beach and Chad had to help me install it. You know, IRQ's and COM ports and such. It was such a pain back then.

I bought a microphone - a $400 Seinnheiser 420U I still own - I don't have any idea where I got all this money, and – AND, I ended up with SAW. The Software Audio Workshop. It would change my life.

I ended up editing many things in SAW during my senior year in college, totally acing all of the classes I took. My first real “project” was for Senior Seminar where I edited together a 4 minute piece about “Spring” using Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I was hooked. Producing audio pieces was it.

I didn't have to cut commercials at Z100 as a part-timer, but I edited a few things together anyway, to show the bosses. They were suitably impressed; all except Vern, the caretaker of all things technical.

Vern was a cool guy, and helped me with some technical things many times, but he would never believe or admit that a PC could put out audio with enough quality to sound good on the radio. So, I never told him where all of my commercial were coming from. No one ever said they sounded bad (neither technically or artistically). The station had a state-of-the-art DDR 10, a HUGE Mac with 30 minutes of recording space. If you used it, you had to delete your production within a day or two to allow other people to use it. No one used it. It was easier to record live to the Audisk computer commercial & drop-in system. You queued the CD background music, loaded your two or three carts if you had effects you needed, and just read your script. The top guys, in radio all their lives, could do it in a take or two. I'd need hours. So, I'd take my script home and cut it on my machine. It helped that I managed to find a $100 reel-to-reel to transfer, this being well before flash drives, portable anything or MP3.

After college I packed up for Las Vegas, where my brother lived. After a month there I got busted for smog – my car would not pass and I could not afford more than one $100 ticket – I moved to Arizona where my Dad and Grandparents lived. I got hired right away there, doing overnights at Lucky 108 FM, the Tri-State's Home of Rock and Roll, in Bullhead City, Arizona. I also did mornings on Killer Country, a startup station. It was good work but I didn't like the area – driving was insanely dangerous in the area and there was no community feel to it. When I got the call, just two months into my job there, to pack it back up, get a 40% pay raise, and be Promotions Directory and Afternoon Drive guy at Z100, I had to do it. My Dad had just gotten back from flying to Montana and driving a U-Haul back with the rest of my stuff but I packed it up again and drove it all back.

Now comes the hey-day. This is a year I'll never forget. Z100 was pulling in great ratings and about a 40 share for the Morning Show, we were putting together the craziest promotions – a hot tub full of milk and Lucky Charms and the two morning show hosts for St. Patrick's day parade is just one example – and I'm sitting in on these meetings with these great people, and they put me in charge of pulling off these stunts. I was also on-air during the second-strongest rating period during the day – 3-7p or “afternoon drive”. My friends were amazed. I was doing live remotes, working the grill at the tailgate parties, even got to be sideline reporter for the annual Cat-Griz football game (the big rivalry). I was on-air, coming full circle from when I started running commercials for these games. It was awesome.

But now we are back. It was awesome but a bit sterile. Chad was full-time for awhile, too, having worked evenings for a spell but jumped to working for a programming company writing BBS software. The Internet hit and the radio station owner bought up some Internet company and started offering web sites and dial-up service. I asked him what a web page was and the owner said, “I can't explain it, you have to see it.” I told him if he gave me free dial-up, I'd write the radio station's web pages and I did, and I kept it up until Chad's boss cherry-picked me a few months later, for a bump in salary and a very, very interesting line of work doing tech support, the company BBS and the company web site.

But, just before that, I was using SAW and my old 486 with 4 megs of RAM to edit promos for the morning show. This show was very popular and the hosts were awesome guys in every way. Mentors to this day. I've made decisions based on “what would Craig Johnson do here?” I'm a nicer guy because of Alan K*. These guys weren't great in the morning because of spite or being mean, they made fun of themselves. They had a stable of local fans that would call in and Craig could make any call interesting. It was here that we had a gold mine.

In radio you can set up your system to do “air checks” – at Z100 this meant that if you put a cassette into a specific machine, every time you turned on the microphone, it would automatically start recording. I did this every show and listened – it's a way to audition yourself to improve. I wouldn't know what sounded good and what didn't without it.

I found an old tape of Craig's one day and listened to it. It was hilarious to hear it all back-to-back, with no music or commercials. I told Craig to do them every morning and give them to me, I had an idea. He would forget most mornings, until I had enough to make my first promo. I edited together a minute's worth of in-zanity with a lively banjo-polka going on for music and the radio station “deep-voiced guy” who said, “The Z100 Morning Show, with Craig & Al!” at the end. I gave it to Craig and he loved it and never forgot to put in an aircheck tape again.

Every Sunday I'd spent 8-10 hours listening to 5 morning shows and copying the funny bits into snippets in SAW. I'd edit these together and then bring them in on reel-to-reel and copy them to the Audisk drop-in system and assign them throughout the day. Our boring station drop-ins became a one-minute laugh fest of the “Best of” Craig and Al. People loved them and would ask for repeats. They gave the whole station the feel only mornings used to have. I had more fun putting them together than doing anything else.

I also started my own production company about this time, “Big Wind Productions.” I loved windsurfing, and my logo was a microphone on a windsurfing board. I edited together a [demotape|demo tape] to mail out, made brochures and a cover sheet and sent a bunch out. I was actually on the phone with a production company in Oklahoma City on the morning Tim McVeigh murdered all those people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The woman told me, “the windows just shook and I can see a bunch of smoke about a mile away.” That was as far as I ever got with this production company because soon after, I left Z100 and moved on to Banana Programming, where Chad had gotten me work.

There is a 4 year hiatus here, where I did web sites, started several companies, sold one of them for really good money (and was part of the documentation “Startup.com” – I sold that company to the focus of that documentary). I met my wife, got married and had my son. My Dad moved to town to be around me and his grandson and to work with me at that company I sold.

During that time we were working together, I started this web site called “goofiness.com” (since sold as well). Just before my Dad had moved back to Montana from Arizona, he sent me a Prairie Home Companion Radio Show he recorded – the annual joke show. I'd heard these before, I specifically remember a few Sunday afternoon with my step-dad Chuck and being in the car laughing to the almost-borderline-for-family-radio-show jokes. But this one hit me at the right time. If you listen, it was the way they put the jokes together with several people and sound-effects. But, the biggest inspiration was “Jacob's Ladder” piece, with the joke about the bagels, gorillas and Smiths.

So with Goofiness.Com I set out to do the first podcasts. I recorded “produced” jokes, aiming to air them once-per-week. I already was doing a blog – before people called them blogs – and added a system for doing jokes, too. It was great. I LOVED doing it. I wrote a few songs, mostly parodies, and generally just had a blast.

It was fun, but there wasn't yet a way to make money in it. People were skeptical about MP3, the best system was to use a Real Audio Player to stream the MP3, but those were expensive. Many people couldn't download the songs and sound cards and speakers still weren't the center of a computer system. There was definitely no iTunes.

So, I gave it up. I still have most, if not all, of those old pieces, and I'll save them forever. I moved on to working for other people, making good money, moving all the way across the country and taking up windsurfing, probably the most time-consuming recreational pursuit in existence. I had time for family, work and windsurfing and little else.

Windsurfing Radio PRX/Transom The breakthrough: Stress Test God is Talking to Me Becoming a Christian The Devil's Radar Chuck and his book Goals, do it now, JFDI Here.

script

2009-11-26T17:40:53-06:00

THE DEVIL's RADAR

2009-11-21T08:30:18-06:00