Phil Collins, Elton John, and Gloria Estefan dominated Adult Contemporary radio back in the 1980s and '90s, yet have disappeared from modern radio. Seemingly, the only time you ever hear them is at the grocery store or your local CVS. This blog remembers the music, the stories and the quirky characters from my days working in Adult Contemporary radio.
The door to the on-air studio opened late one evening at the soft rock radio station where I worked as a board operator and in walked Keith, the station's chief engineer. Keith was a character. He told great stories, had an infectious laugh, liked his whiskey, and was rumored to take naps in the transmitter room. Keith told me that at midnight he was taking the radio station off the air so they could performed scheduled transmitter maintenance. Before this happened, he said I needed to go on the air and give the station's call letters. Since I was simply a board operator, I had never gone on the air (a board operator does everything a DJ does -- except talk).
"Do you have headphones?" Keith asked.
"No, why?" I responded.
"You're gonna need them when you go on the air."
I quickly found a beaten-up set of headphones that looked like they lost a fight with a hungry German Shepherd.
"What do you want me to say?" I asked Keith.
"Just do the legal ID which is the call letters and Chicago and then say that we'll be off for a few hours," Keith nonchalantly responded.
I could almost feel my heart beating through the clunky headphones as I muttered through Keith's check-list of things to say. It was the first time I went on the air at Chicago's Windy 100, but it wouldn't be the last...
Every hour, a radio station airs something called the Legal ID which is just that: a legally mandated station identification. The Legal ID airs as close to the top-of-the-hour as possible and includes the station's call letters and licensed city of broadcast. In the case of the former WENS-FM in Indianapolis, I heard their Legal ID countless times during my many drives to and from Indiana University in Bloomington. It said: "97-point-1, W-E-N-S Shelbyville, Indianapolis. The flagship station of Emmis Communications." WENS-FM was licensed to Shelbyville, Indiana but broadcast out of Emmis' studios in Indianapolis.
For years, Production Directors spent lots of time crafting big, booming Legal ID's, but that changed when the ratings system morphed from diaries to Personal People Meters (PPM) in the late-2000s. Listeners no longer had to write down what stations they listed to since the PPM (a device that looks like a pager) now automatically records that information. This caused some stations to bury their Legal ID within a commercial break.
In 2006, I voiced a Legal ID for a radio station, and it proudly aired every hour until 2015 until the station switched formats and, ultimately, call letters. The day before the switch, I joked to my boss that my mom would be very upset if she didn't hear her son do the hourly Legal ID. He told me not to worry because I could voice the new Legal ID. The next morning at 10:00AM, the first of my five new Legal IDs started airing. It continues to air today much to the delight of Stephani, a part-time DJ at our sister-station. She liked them so much that I gave her what amounted to the worst cheapest birthday gift ever: an MP3 of said Legal IDs. Happy birthday, Stephani!