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hitting song posts
- Thread starter bobdavcav
- Start date
Yeah, it was a radio geek thing.
Probably hit its peak in 1973, when Machine Gun Kelly decided to talk up The Doobie Brothers' "Long Train Runnin'" (a 47-second intro) by just saying:
"K-H-J and Machiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine Gun!" (vocal begins)
A week after hearing that, I was listening to Marvelous Mark McKay at KFRC, who took the same record, the same 47 seconds, and intro-ed it this way:
"K-F-R (44 seconds of intro play). -C" (vocal begins)
So, even then we were at the point of self-parody.
I can still hear the evening jock in my mind at the Top 40 station I first worked at. This happened repeatedly most every night:
Callers (usually teenage or pre-teen girls trying to record "love songs" to make a "mix tape"): Can you PLEASE stop talking over the beginning and endings of all the songs? I'm trying to record them, and you're destroying that for me!
Annoyed DJ who'd worked hard on his banter and tried to time everything so all programming during his shift was kept "tight": You wanna hear the whole song or have a recording for posterity?? Yeah?? Then BUY yourself a copy! //click//
One more thing on this----people confuse talking until the split second before the vocal with hitting posts. And yeah, when you do that, you're hitting a post. But (in the day) a lot of records had two or more posts within the intro.
The art is in hitting all the posts. Do that once an hour (like Broadway Bill Lee at WCBS-FM) and you're a hero.
Just cutting it as close as you can before the vocal on all the songs isn't an art, but a skill that there is no demand for---especially from your audience (spoken as someone who made that rookie error for a good two years of his early career) .
The art is in hitting all the posts. Do that once an hour (like Broadway Bill Lee at WCBS-FM) and you're a hero.
Just cutting it as close as you can before the vocal on all the songs isn't an art, but a skill that there is no demand for---especially from your audience (spoken as someone who made that rookie error for a good two years of his early career) .
By the way, even the greats could be vulnerable in relying on their ability to hit the vocal.
On April Fools Day, 1997, KRTH PD Mike Phillips decided to play a prank on The Real Don Steele:
On April Fools Day, 1997, KRTH PD Mike Phillips decided to play a prank on The Real Don Steele:
As I recall the programming folks thinking in the day was to allow for more 'non-stop music', so jocks were encouraged to sweep music and other than stopping-down for breaks, just deliver liners, title/artist, banter, weather, time, and an occasional caller over longer intros. That's why guys like Don used to yell (project) so fast, to cram as much personality into :14 as possible without stomping the vocal.
Even to this day I'll be listening to some songs from back when I was on the air and will automatically know exactly when the vocal came in or where the various post(s) were. That, and I have somewhat of a photographic memory. To this day I can still name the cart number, into time, and song length of any cart that used to be in the rack. People used to test me all the time by calling out a song, expecting the intro time, total length, and type of ending. I would also deliver the cart number at the time, recognizing there's no way to verify that. But in my mind, I can still see the cart and what position in the cart rack it was. Talk about a useless gift!
Lite FM in NYC used to run TV commercials promoting the fact that they never talk over the music.
However, quite a few songs up through the '90s and 2000s were remixed for radio to remove the talking they had during the intro, to allow a DJ to do the talking. For example, Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" had a special version with her opening monologue removed:
However, quite a few songs up through the '90s and 2000s were remixed for radio to remove the talking they had during the intro, to allow a DJ to do the talking. For example, Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" had a special version with her opening monologue removed:
And "We Built This City" had a version without Les Garland talking in the middle of it:
Which, ironically, KFRC, the last station Garland programmed, used—-so it could insert Dave Sholin doing the exact same rap, but faster, so he could say “610 KFRC” in it twice.
Frankly, I found the DJs who did that to be annoying even as a teenager back in the late seventies. That was one of the things that drove me over to FM as soon as pop music started appearing on the FM dial in the Seattle/Tacoma market.
Completely agree w/ you !
Time tunnel: I did not like it even as a pre-teen back in the 60's no matter how popular or highly rated the DJ was. It's annoying as heck, especially when they started the song as they were ending the commercial ad they were reading. I especially didn't like it at Boss 93 KHJ, where jocks yelled over the instrumental intro and the outro also, in order to keep the energy going.
One of the advantages of early FM album stations, like KPPC with Jim Ladd, is that they did not yell over the beginning or ending of the song, but they did the reverse: they allowed about 10 seconds of dead air before they decided to open the mike and speak. (Classical music station announcers-- I don't think people playing Mozart liked to be called "DJ's"-- did that also).
With FM album stations, there was so much dead air in order to appear "cool and laid back", that I often wondered if the DJ had zoned out in some bong-induced haze and simply forgot to speak. But it was a lot better than Bill Lee types who yelled and yelled. I wonder if their vocal chords survived or if they were so damaged that all they could do in later life was to sound very raspy. JMO -- as I remember it. Daryl
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That reminds me of a time I was at the same lunch table as Randy Michaels at one of those Dan O’Day seminars. Somehow we got into a battle of “give the call letters and name the city and frequency” where. Others at the table would give the calls. This went on for about 20 minutes between the two of us. Totally useless information, of course.
Yeah, I probably could have kept up with you for at least ten minutes of that. Stuff gets burned into the brain.
I worked with guys who, if you gave them a hit song title, could tell you the name of the artist, the record label and the color the label was.
That struck me as taking it a bit far, but it could just be undiagnosed photographic memory.
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I will say this----our memories are often flawed.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've been gradually listening to my entire unscoped aircheck collection chronologically, to get a sense of the evolution of California radio.
I'm up around 1972 now, and the reality is that for most of the 60s and early 70s, jocks might hit a vocal two or three times an hour (Charlie Tuna seemed the most intent on doing it as often as he could---often because he liked to use whatever the first few words were as a punchline), but most of the time most of them (including The Real Don Steele) would aim for an early post before the vocal (drum hit, horns enter) and let it go from there to the vocal without being on top of it.
My memory says that I'll hear more attempts to talk up to the vocal from about '73 on as the pace of Top 40 got more and more frenetic until it reached its logical (?) conclusion at KTNQ. We'll see if I'm remembering that correctly or not. There's been so much in this almost four years of listening where I've learned that reality and memory were a bit out of whack.
The Drake format forbade talking over the end of a record unless you were going into a commercial break---otherwise it was forward momentum---you're focused on what's next, not what was. And while I've heard jocks roll a record while they were finishing a commercial, that, too, was not happening on KHJ or any Drake station. A live read at the end of a stop set was required to have a jingle between it and the beginning of music.
And the FM album jocks---I mean, they'd let the last sound come off the vinyl before they'd crack the mic, and it was loose, but I haven't heard five seconds of dead air, much less ten. The technique, though, was very much the same as Classical and for that matter, Beautiful Music, where a second and a half to two seconds of dead air between elements was actually part of the format).
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've been gradually listening to my entire unscoped aircheck collection chronologically, to get a sense of the evolution of California radio.
I'm up around 1972 now, and the reality is that for most of the 60s and early 70s, jocks might hit a vocal two or three times an hour (Charlie Tuna seemed the most intent on doing it as often as he could---often because he liked to use whatever the first few words were as a punchline), but most of the time most of them (including The Real Don Steele) would aim for an early post before the vocal (drum hit, horns enter) and let it go from there to the vocal without being on top of it.
My memory says that I'll hear more attempts to talk up to the vocal from about '73 on as the pace of Top 40 got more and more frenetic until it reached its logical (?) conclusion at KTNQ. We'll see if I'm remembering that correctly or not. There's been so much in this almost four years of listening where I've learned that reality and memory were a bit out of whack.
The Drake format forbade talking over the end of a record unless you were going into a commercial break---otherwise it was forward momentum---you're focused on what's next, not what was. And while I've heard jocks roll a record while they were finishing a commercial, that, too, was not happening on KHJ or any Drake station. A live read at the end of a stop set was required to have a jingle between it and the beginning of music.
And the FM album jocks---I mean, they'd let the last sound come off the vinyl before they'd crack the mic, and it was loose, but I haven't heard five seconds of dead air, much less ten. The technique, though, was very much the same as Classical and for that matter, Beautiful Music, where a second and a half to two seconds of dead air between elements was actually part of the format).
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Except, except, when the next record had a cold open, no instrumental intro. Then the jock would say something over the outro of the previous song, followed by a tight segue into the jingle and the cold open of the next song. (Not the perfect example, but Simon & Garfunkel's At The Zoo. Their vocal hits in that first second.)
It wasn't that loose. What it was was they could hear the ambiance of the last notes fading away in the studio monitors or their headphones, and they wouldn't crack their mics and start speaking until that last sound had evaporated. *Most* listeners weren't listening on good enough equipment to hear what they were hearing in the studio, or were listening in cars where the road noise wiped out most of that fade. But if you were listening in a quiet environment with quality audio equipment, then you probably understood why they held back.
Not usually. I'd have said that, too---but in what I've heard listening back, it was a no-talk jingle segue---previous record's fade hits 40% or so, the jingle plays, the next record with a cold open starts. If there's a tempo change, a fast to slow or slow to fast jingle aids the transition.
I know you have done a lot of research into KHJ, especially (but not limited to) the years 1965-1970. From your collection of unscoped airchecks, do you hear a lot of talking over the end of records while going into a commercial break where the copy was read live? That practice was permitted. I recall (though I may be mistaken), that it happened frequently.Because Drake stations billed themselves as "more music", they had to squeeze in as many records as they could, I think.
Maybe the difference was in the KHJ verses WOR-FM approaches. WOR-FM was what I had access to 24-7 in the NYC area. (Occasionally CKLW via tropospheric skip, or WRKO when I was in Boston on business, but 99% of the time it was OR-FM.) I recall it happening more often than you do.
By the way, a followup about talking over fadeouts. I was visiting at WOR-FM on Memorial Day 1967, just a few months before Gary Mack and the Drake team started showing up to grease the skids for the format that would replace the original "progressive rock and roll" one. That happened to be the day when the embargo ended and WOR was able to start playing the new Sgt. Pepper Beatles album, which famously ended with A Day In The Life, with its 35 second sustained piano chord ending. It was phenomenal to hear that play in the control room, before any processing, right out of the board, through their high-quality playback equipment in full stereo at full volume. You could hear every overtone, every nuance of that chord. Even with the studio mic on, nobody made a sound until the last moment of the fade was over. It was like being at Carnegie Hall in the final moment of a Beethoven symphony.
Yes, which I said in the post you responded to:
The Drake format forbade talking over the end of a record unless you were going into a commercial break---
And that was regardless of whether the first element in the break was live copy or not. Record fades to 40 percent modulation, back-announce begins and into the break.
The exception was records with cold endings, in which case the back-announce happened in the clear on the way to the break.
Yes ! I should have written:
"As you said, Michael, the Drake format forbade talking over the end of a record unless you were going into a commercial break."
My point was that I think this happened a lot, (talking over the end of records going into a commercial break) , and I got tired of it. So, I was glad to find FM album stations. JMO .
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