K.M., after graduating third in a class of 80 at Career Academy of Broadcasting, I managed to get a one-hour on-air audition at KNJO. The program director chastised me because I played a Petula Clark album track (The Sun Shines Out Of Your Shoes). He told me---belatedly---to look at the back cover of each album and play only those songs which the manager had marked with a ✓.
I did some relief shifts at KNJO in the summer of 1978 when Bob Hughes was PD and I remember those stickers on the album jackets all too well. The "selections" were by Alan Fischler himself for the most part ... if a LP got into the control room before he could listen to it, you would cringe as you played anything because if Alan was listening and didn't like the song, you would get a call (while it was still playing) telling you to segue immediately, remove the album from the active library and leave it propped up against his office door for him to listen to in order to find out what
else he found objectionable. It was worse if you were on-air during business hours; Alan would come into the control room and rip the album off the turntable. Bob and I used to think he should have just bought an automation system and a canned format (except that he probably would have had us editing songs out of reels instead).
Could have been worse: When I was weekends/utility at Y97 in Santa Barbara I was asked to forego my usual Saturday afternoon shift to instead do live reports that morning for our sister news-talk station, KTMS, from a 15K run sponsored by the County Bar Association and which we had somehow gotten roped into being the "official radio station" for. So I dragged myself into the station way too damn early to get the remote gear, drove down to the beachfront where the run was taking place, and filed the reports. Now for the "worse" part ... they had the midday guy covering my afternoon shift and decided to give a potential new weekender an on-air audition during the midday shift.
To say he was awful would have been kind. He was a complete train wreck. Stepped on vocals, faded out of the weather bed before it could finish with the produced imaging, and then (the ultimate insult) he told the listeners "here's inks-ess!" Yes, he meant INXS.
He had only been on the air for a little under an hour when I got back to the studios to stow the remote gear, and the PD (Steve Smith) called looking for me. His question was: "You've been a PD, so let me get a second opinion ... is this guy as awful as I think he is?" With no one else available, he had me take the guy off the air and finish the shift, after having already been on duty since around 6:00am for the remote. We got the midday guy to come in an hour early, but I'm amazed I got through that one without falling asleep at the board.
Many years later, I found out that the mystery jock was Richard Wagoner, who now writes a weekly radio column for the
Daily News. We were on the phone chatting, and he was relating "this awful experience he had back in 1987 when auditioning for an on-air gig" ... as he made his way through the story I realized I'd already lived through it. He got a good laugh from finding out I'd been the one who replaced him. I think you were much less embarrassed at what happened at KNJO, Steve.