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| Tuesday, September 04, 2007 |
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Nowhere Fast: The Lost Tapes ( I )
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Okay, recess is over! Back to more tales of disillusionment!
Over a year ago I was telling the tale of my many attempts at media superstardom that came to naught, called Nowhere Fast, when I stopped my story due to a interloper. As I was typing these They Thought They Had Me tales I realized I may as well fill this gap between Kinko's and Fitzsimmons with the remaining Nowhere Fast tales.
So now I had exited Kinko's. During the time there I had made my three Mike Rose Show appearances and also engaged in e-mail discussions about approaching XM and Sirius with a jam band channel with some actual "names" in the jam band world: Jeff Dunham of Z-93, David Gans of The Grateful Dead Hour and Robert Christgau of the Village Voice. This came to naught after a guy from Relix magazine had me call him so he could tell me Relix would like it if our coeterie butted out of the satellite radio races because they were pursuing that same idea. Fine.
The Mike Rose Show got cancelled about a month after my last appearance. Shortly after I started at Fitzsimmons Wireless, Jeff Dunham got booted off of Z-93 and has never been on the radio again, that I know of.
The lady who had invited me to write freelance for the AJC Cc'd me where she had recommended me to one of her cohorts. He told me her recommendation really meant something to him, but...I can't remember why nothing came of that one. I think he had just abdicated his leadership of the Cobb section, if I remember right. Whatever, it fell through.
X'd out by 99X
So now I was out of Kinko's and unemployed. While I had the downtime I decided I should try studying radio broadcasts like textbooks, listening with a notepad and pen and really analyzing what I heard. So one morning I taped each of the three big Atlanta rock morning shows as they came on the air until their first commercial, then moved to the next station, and continued this for about an hour. Then I edited them to a CD and analyzed lenghth of segments and subject matter.
On the ol' Radio-Info.com board someone had posted that they thought 99X's morning show blew. I seconded their belief with my "scientific" research, and cited exactly where I felt their opening segment went wrong. I thought nothing more of this until the next evening, when our sometime-poster Rob wrote on my old message board to ask what I thought about being on the radio that morning. Huh?
I had no idea what he was talking about, then thought on my Radio-Info post. Then a stranger showd up on my message board and said yes, 99X had downloaded my voice demo off of my old site and played it on the air. They read my Radio-Info post, then reverse-critiqued me! WHOAAAA!
Wow...on one hand I guess I had been mocked, but at the same time...just when I thought maybe I had been delusional all along, I once again was found worthy of filling 15 minutes of someone's air time. I wrote to get a copy of the tape, which their producer, Callandro/Radio Boy, had initially said he would send me, then said their manager told him not to. "Further posts and e-mails from you will be ignored," he finished. It turned out he was the one who had seen my post and apparently was tweaked I criticized the show. Later he probably would have helped me co-write it, because they fired him. About a year or more later we actually met up at a bar with a few other people. I also met Fred Toucher, a prominent member of the 99X crew and the target of some of my worst criticism, later.
Yes, I was beaten and bloodied but STILL not dead! I had more spare lives than Jason in the Friday the 13th series (or Michael...whatever that guy's name was)! |
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Posted by Art | 9:46 PM EST |
3 comments
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That sounds typical of radio these days, finding people they can mock and ridicule on the air, using the leverage that they would be excited just to be on the radio. Then, once they get their 20 minutes of yuks out of them, they throw them aside. It also sounds just like how Grandma Fram operates. You know, 99X is soooooo cool, after all.
I’ll tell you, when I was young, idealistic and stupid, and spent my downtime at college absorbing everything in the radio pages of Billboard magazine, I had absolutely no fucking clue how much the radio business would frustrate me. Fellow college broadcasters getting the breaks before finishing out their degrees, while once I finished mine, I couldn’t get arrested. Doing an internship at Star 94/WQXI and not getting a job…but Ryan Seacrest did (and he wasn’t even an intern, he was a friend of one of the DJs).
And then 99X’s offer in response to one of my (hundreds of expensive) tape and resume packages to drive the station van and assist the DJs at live remotes, station functions and such. The promotions guy on the other end of the phone laughed...LAUGHED!! when I asked about what it paid and said, "It doesn't pay anything. It's an internship." I said, “You’re kidding, right? That was a package looking for a job, not offering myself up as free pack mule labor.” And he said, “No, man, we need an intern,” to which I replied, "MY DAYS OF WORKING FOR FREE ARE OVER, ASSHOLE!!" and hung up on him.
And then, a couple of years later, a typical, bloated, fat-ass lying GM reneged on a deal that would have put me in overnights on an FM in Athens, after I had turned down other jobs in the process. And they guy that got the job was some old, smoked-out hippie who had actually been fired from WQXI many years before for taking a piss on the control board. This is what I got passed over for. Swell.
The 99X incident was around the end of `03 or beginning of `04. That's why I thought it would be awkward going to our Radio-Info meet-up with Callandro there, but it was all right.