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WORST Tennessee stations of all-time

firepoint525

firepoint525

The counter-punch to the "best Tennessee stations of all-time" thread. Who has (or had) the worst station(s) in Tennessee history.

My vote would have to go to WHDM of McKenzie, circa 1990-1991. I should know. I worked there then. We weren't allowed to carry network news, and this was at the height of the first Persian Gulf war!

They owed money to ASCAP at the time, so we weren't allowed to play anything published (or even co-published!) by ASCAP for fear that they would be listening to us and would fine us!

Ad to that that they STILL did not have a CD player yet at that time, and the very first volume of CDX was issued at about that time.

The station has long since been sold, and the now-former owner has been deceased for many years, so none of this should be taken as a judgement against whatever may be going on there now. I live too far away from them to listen to them now, and as far as I know, they don't broadcast online.
 
Any of the dollar a holler stations that are owned by FW Robbert: WNQM and WWCR shortwave in Nashville, WMQM and WLRM in Memphis. They also bought AM 730 in West Memphis, AR, but I think they're still sports talk for now, and I think they have a station in Knoxville as well.
 
From signal strength view the old 1550 Cir. 1970’s Soddy Daisy would be a contender. No night time signal, Chattanooga AM’s signals loud and strong daytime. No chance for signal improvement with Cookeville TN, and Huntsville AL on same frequency. IIRC this station was a sell and repo deal for a broker.
 
Two in Bristol come to mind....WOPI (1490) back in the late 70's/early 80's when Paul Culp owned it. The other, I have to be careful with, cause a poster on here, Sammy Reed, his dad used to work there. WBCV (1550), when it was owned by Jennings Dotson. Sammy's dad, Cecil Reed, did sign-on there and was actually decent. Jennings and his son, had no business even being around a radio station, but that's another story.

WOPI was the first station that Tennessee Ernie Ford ever worked for. Its now owned by Holston Valley Broadcasting Corp in Kingsport and simulcasts WKPT-AM on there except for weekends. WBCV had a chance to make a little bit of a comeback when former WCYB-TV 5 weatherman Rick Mitchell bought it and changed the calls to WIGN, but he's sold it to a baptist church in Bristol. Those 2 would be my choices.
 
WEMB in Erwin.

The horror stories of this station are legendary. Let's just say Jim Crawford and Chuck Ray aren't the brightest bulbs I've ever been around.

Once wanted me to do a talk show, but didn't give me a phone line.

I'll just leave it at that.
 
WHDM is owned by the lake WLZK Paris Tennessee. WHDM is also on 89.9fm in Mckinzie,TN
 
There is no doubt about this one. WDSG, Dyersburg. When I worked there it was owned by JoAnn Ward, who had NO idea about running a radio station. One shining example was when the transmitter flooded in the swamp behind the station, she went through 3 engineers before getting one to complete repairs. We were off the air for a week until she got a 10-watt emergency transmitter shipped in. When it went live, we covered a radius of 1 block! The brainiac decided we would play ALL of the spots we had missed over the past week immediately in order to bill the poor saps who actually advertised with us. I shut the power down and reasoned with her that the lawsuits would be more than the station was worth. When I finally escaped to Florida, I found out she had been taping my air shift and proceeded to air these taped programs for 3 YEARS after I left! I still shake my head when I think about how crappy that station was. It was sold after her death to WASL-WTRO and WTRO took the 1450 frequency.
 
How about an East TN station in the early 2000's that was running about 200 watts, modulated mostly with hum. The totally blind manager played all music off cassettes which he notched so he could identify them. He told ASCAP and BMI that they only played public domain Gospel, which would have been a challenge for him since I don't think he notched the cassettes to mark which songs were actually copyrighted and he certainly couldn't read the labels. There was no heat or air in the building. When a preacher would come in, he would open a window in the preacher studio and stick a room air conditioner on top of some old Pepsi crates to cool that room off. In the winter the preachers just wore heavy overcoats on the air.

He didn't know he had pre-sunrise authority, so he signed on and off at the "standard" times on the license, not allowing for Daylight Savings Time. He ran full power all night with no legal ID's and when busted told the commission the FCC had called him and told him it was OK to do so. Had the inspector actually stopped by the station he could have written them up for another 30,000 or so worth of fines. The only reason they checked on him was because one of the station's harmonics was blowing up WWV several miles away where a ham was monitoring.

Fortunately some fool bought the station and it's doing much better now.
 
exdjted said:
There is no doubt about this one. WDSG, Dyersburg. When I worked there it was owned by JoAnn Ward, who had NO idea about running a radio station. One shining example was when the transmitter flooded in the swamp behind the station, she went through 3 engineers before getting one to complete repairs. We were off the air for a week until she got a 10-watt emergency transmitter shipped in. When it went live, we covered a radius of 1 block! The brainiac decided we would play ALL of the spots we had missed over the past week immediately in order to bill the poor saps who actually advertised with us. I shut the power down and reasoned with her that the lawsuits would be more than the station was worth. When I finally escaped to Florida, I found out she had been taping my air shift and proceeded to air these taped programs for 3 YEARS after I left! I still shake my head when I think about how crappy that station was. It was sold after her death to WASL-WTRO and WTRO took the 1450 frequency.
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This must have been in the '80s. I knew of a guy who had worked there back then, and said that they never even instructed him on how to cue up a record! :eek:

During the early '90s, while that station was off the air, my mother would listen to me on WHDM whenever she drove to Dyersburg to visit her sister. Had WDSG still been on the air at the time, that would have been impossible.
 
The message about WDSG reminded me of WIZO in Franklin in the mid '90s, when Alice Jackson owned it. She came from a journalism background, and I could tell that she didn't know anything about radio. The station was so broke that she kept the heat turned off (except in the very back of the building where everything was), and she checked the mail every day, specifically looking for checks. The automation was a single channel of a stereo feed, so the listener often heard instrumental versions of Beatles songs, for example. I might be able to say more about it, except that my own employment there lasted barely a week. (In '96, she sold it to hispanic interests who changed the call letters to WHEW, and the format (obviously) to Spanish-language programming.) I'm sure that the management of WAKM loved becoming the only remaining English-language AM station in town.

Also bad was WPFD in nearby Fairview, TN. They had an announcer (at the time that they were playing old country) who kept referring to them on the air as "WPF&D." Not sure what the "and" was in there for. ??? They were actually at one time listed for sale in one of those real estate magazines that you can pick up on newstands in front of gas stations, at bus stops, etc. They later went hispanic as well. I was told that they simulcast WHEW, but I was never able to verify that. They are now off the air. (I believe that Alice Jackson actually considered buying WPFD while she was still at WIZO!)

When I was at WIZO, we called WQSV in Ashland City to exchange election returns with them on election night, since both stations were (at that time) in the same state house district. Little did I know at the time that a couple of years later, I would (briefly) work there as well. My experience there was similar to that of WIZO, since both stations never filed I-9 paperwork on me, thus making it like I never actually worked at either place. In many respects, WQSV reminded me of the old WHDM!
 
I'm guessing that all of the stations mentioned so far have been AM stations, so it's time to add an FM station into the mix. WCMT-FM of Martin, TN. Up until about 1992, they were still automated with reel-to-reel tapes, and may have used those tapes for even longer than that! That may have made sense back in the '60s and '70s, when listenership on AM radio far surpassed that of its FM counterparts. But to continue to program the AM live while automating the FM (which is what WCMT was still doing as recently as the early '90s) didn't make any sense at all. Martin is a college town, so it isn't like Tinkle couldn't have found jocks to work the station for cheap! ::) To make matters worse, they were still playing '50s and '60s oldies on that station (again, remember, it's a college town!) on the weekends until as late as at least 1992! We would get requests from as far away as southern Illinois (for the FM station, of course), but since the FM was automated, we couldn't play them! ::) Meanwhile, we were live on our AM station pumping out a whopping 54 watts at night! ::)
 
firepoint525 said:
I'm guessing that all of the stations mentioned so far have been AM stations, so it's time to add an FM station into the mix. WCMT-FM of Martin, TN. Up until about 1992, they were still automated with reel-to-reel tapes, and may have used those tapes for even longer than that! That may have made sense back in the '60s and '70s, when listenership on AM radio far surpassed that of its FM counterparts. But to continue to program the AM live while automating the FM (which is what WCMT was still doing as recently as the early '90s) didn't make any sense at all. Martin is a college town, so it isn't like Tinkle couldn't have found jocks to work the station for cheap! ::) To make matters worse, they were still playing '50s and '60s oldies on that station (again, remember, it's a college town!) on the weekends until as late as at least 1992! We would get requests from as far away as southern Illinois (for the FM station, of course), but since the FM was automated, we couldn't play them! ::) Meanwhile, we were live on our AM station pumping out a whopping 54 watts at night! ::)
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My first commercial gig (after a brief, but pivotal appearance on WUTM-FM, the 10-watt wonder) was at WCMT, B.T. (before Tinkle). It was 1973 and Tinkle was at U.T.M., working on what was then WALR-FM, on the Highway between Union City and South Fulton.

J.T. Sudbury of Blythville, Ark. owned it but rarely came to town. Duke Drumm was the G.M. The A.M. was old-style block programming with Country in mornings with engineer Herb Cathey and in the middays with Gary Tuck, who switched to pop music in the afternoons. A variety of UTM kids rotated throughout the afternoon and nighttime dayparts.

The AM was a daytimer then and the FM was mostly automated with truly bad elevator music. The automation system was a box (about the size of a big microwave" that contained several reels that repeated. We called it the "fairy box". In those days, the FM would sign off at 11pm. There was no provision for playing spots while on the fairy box, even if they HAD sold any. The place was full of memorable and colorful people.

It was the perfect place to allow a complete beginner (me) the opportunity to be truly bad on the radio...and slowly improve. Yeah, the place sucked...but it was RADIO, man. I would have worked for free.
 
I've always been under the impression that Tinkle doesn't know too much about programming. I think, to him, the radio station is a vehicle to sell ads. Granted, at the end of the day, revenue is what pushes the station but, without proper programming, it's just a hodge-podge of stuff.

I've tuned into WCMT on a few stations and you can tell that a proper emphasis isn't put into station imaging or formatics.

To me, his stations are a turn off. But, to your average Joe listening, they work.

He owns quite a few stations, so he must be doing something right. I guess?.!

NSCC
 
You got it FB. 20 years ago someone wet behind the headphones could get a job in radio and learn the hard way of how the business was. Now with all the small market stations bought up.(the FM's that is) there isn't anywhere left to start out and hone your skills.
 
NotSoClearChannel said:
I think, to him, the radio station is a vehicle to sell ads.
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I believe upper management at Clear Channel was quoted a couple of years back saying just that thing!

Bringing FM stations into the mix, if you will allow me license to stray just to the south of Tennessee, I recall in the late 70's stopping by the AM/FM in New Albany, MS. The FM at that time was a record changer with a stack of country LP's. The AM announcer would stop in and give a legal ID once an hour (if they remembered). No provision for running spots, and probably no need for one.
 
robgrayson said:
I believe upper management at Clear Channel was quoted a couple of years back saying just that thing!
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Don't get me wrong, the key is to turn a profit. But, at least put some effort into the programming. Follow some form for of format...it makes it nicer for the listener.

NSCC
 
Bat Fastard said:
Yeah, the place sucked...but it was RADIO, man. I would have worked for free.
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If you had worked there after Tinkle took over, you would have just about had to! He probably puts in something like 100 hours a week into the station, including selling ads, high school play-by-play, and those oh-so-boring remotes, and he expects his staffers to have that kind of dedication, too, only without the pay. No wonder turnover was always so high there!
NotSoClearChannel said:
I've always been under the impression that Tinkle doesn't know too much about programming.
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And yet, he is a micromanaging perfectionist who insists on being kept in the loop on every nano-detail about what goes on at the station, including while he is not there. If the automation screws up, he WILL hear it, and WILL call the station, immediately!
To me, his stations are a turn off. But, to your average Joe listening, they work.
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I've often wondered if all those "awards" that the station has won (and proudly hang on the wall there) were ever issued by any organization whose members actually ever listened to the station. My guess is that they did not. I suppose, like the rest of you, that WCMT is good at what they do, but they would never make it in the big city where they actually had some real competition. Like so many small-town stations, they are a big fish in a small pond.
knoxbob said:
Now with all the small market stations bought up.(the FM's that is) there isn't anywhere left to start out and hone your skills.
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That is true. But at the same time, the current generation is smaller than the baby-boom generation, and also at the same time, I don't see quite as much interest in radio (at least, as a career) among kids today, so it may be balancing out somewhat.
 
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