My great reward and motivation in blogging is that I hear from you in the comments. My new posts get more visits now than ever, but fewer comments now than just a year or two ago. I’ve noticed the same on other blogs I follow. I’ve even found myself commenting less often on the blogs I read. Maybe we’re all reading too many blogs and have less time for commenting. Or maybe we’re moving into a post-blog age. I don’t know. I reflected here in 2010 on the joy of the connection with you, drawing a parallel to my time in radio. I love telling my radio stories, so I’m running the post again, edited and updated.
In pro radio, jocks covet the morning spot because it has the biggest audience and therefore the most prestige and best pay. But at WMHD, my college’s radio station, we figured that our biggest audience tuned in weeknights after 6 p.m. when students settled in for a long night of homework. Sometimes I’d walk through the residence halls in the evening, counting dozens rooms from which I could hear our station. Or I’d visit the broadcast studio, where the phone rang off the hook with students calling to request their favorite music. These unscientific ratings methods supported our belief.
Knowing people were listening and engaged made the evening shows fun. Our best jocks lined up to take them. Afternoon shows were next most popular, but shows before noon were hard to fill. The morning show was nearly impossible to staff, as it meant being on the air at 7 a.m. I was station manager, the top dog, and I could have any show I wanted. But I chose the morning shift whenever my class schedule allowed.
WMHD was in the basement of a residence hall. I lived in a room about a hundred feet away. When my alarm went off at 6:45 a.m., I’d put on my glasses and head right for the station, barefoot and in my nightclothes, stopping only to answer nature’s call. I’d pick out the first four or five songs, fire up the transmitter, and play the sign-on message. The Electric Breakfast was on the air.
Our station’s hallmark was that each disk jockey got to play whatever he wanted. For the morning show, I chose mostly mellow acoustic music, the idea being that the show would gently ease listeners into the morning. It really stood out against the station’s normal alt-rock and heavy-metal programming.
I figure that most mornings I had at most a handful of listeners. I am sure that sometimes I played music for nobody at all. At 160 watts, WMHD could be heard within only about a two-mile radius, half of which was a cornfield and a horse farm.
I would have been thrilled for hundreds of people to hear my show, but I was plenty happy with the way things were. You see, I loved to match key, tempo, and mood, mixing songs so that each one seemed a natural extension of the one before. I did it all by feel, and was supremely satisfied each time I nailed it.
But more importantly, once in a while the phone would ring. It was usually a fellow who lived in nearby Seelyville who often listened to me as he got ready for work. He enjoyed the tapestries of music I wove and would call to tell me when he especially enjoyed a transition I made between songs. And once in a while someone would stop me on my way to class to say that he heard me that morning and liked it.
This occasional praise was all I needed to keep at it.
I am so glad I recorded a few Electric Breakfasts. Here is the first 45 minutes of the show from Wednesday, April 6, 1988. You can hear pops and scratches in the records I played – unlike most radio stations, we didn’t compress our audio to eliminate noise and make the music seem louder. You can also hear the sleepiness in my voice; it usually took me most of the first hour to shake it. But I was not so sleepy that I couldn’t manage a few good transitions between songs. Check it out.
My blogging experience has been very much like The Electric Breakfast. Down the Road is a mere blip in the blogosphere, barely a whisper among the Internet’s clamoring voices. If this post is typical, it will find 15 or 20 views in its first few days. Thanks to the Internet’s long tail, it might find another 50 readers in the next year. (My old-camera posts are the exception; some of those get over a thousand views a year.)
But I love the writing process and find it supremely satisfying when my sentences flow seamlessly into powerful paragraphs, which build an engaging story. And I love it when you leave comments, sharing your experiences or challenging my assertions or just saying that you enjoyed what I wrote. This is enough to keep me blogging indefinitely.
I never thanked that guy from Seelyville for listening. But I thank you for reading!
I did pro radio for a few years in the 90s. Here’s why radio wouldn’t be fun for me today.
