Hey guys,
Rick Buser here. My ears were burning (ok, vain self-Googling) and found this board/thread.
A lot of those PDH days are a blur right now as far as exact dates go, but if the person was asking about me, I appreciate the compliment.
I did leave radio after working around the Hudson Valley post-PDH. I did not leave PDH over money. I left after being not-so-politely told to leave by GM Mike Harris.
He wasn't without his reasons, though.
If you recall, WPDH had forged its reputation in those early years as more than just a "classic" rock station. It played a wide-spectrum of music that sometimes only tangentially could be called Rock and Roll. One "jump the shark" moment was when then PD Ron Rizzi decided to add Donna Summer and Michael Jackson's Thriller albums to the playlist. The Donna Summer was because, as he wrote at the time "WBCN (Boston) is playing it!". The Jackson add was due to the Van Halen guitar on "Beat It". But I digress...
Other than those particularly curious playlist additions, PDH could be counted on to play such a gamut of rock that no one really came close, save for QBK in Albany, and, to a lesser extent, 'NEW in NY.
Ok, fast forward. Rizzi is gone, Harris is GM. I'm Music Director, and reporting to the trade magazines, like "Radio and Records", and "The Friday Morning Quarterback". Someone in management decided the time had come to severely cut down on our on-air catalog of music. In other words, we were taking the first step in becoming a classic rock station. I, in my infinite wisdom (lol) chose to take out my disagreement with this decision in the trade magazines, lamenting the fact that a heritage station that offered such a wide variety of music was now going to be relegated to the same old 700 songs that one could expect to hear on I-95 (Danbury) or PYX-106 in Albany. Going public in the trades castigating my own station's management made me some kind of small-time martyr, I guess. It didn't change anything, though, save for the fact that I was soon given my walking papers. And, PDH's decision was vindicated for a time by higher ratings. My problem was that I actually believed that radio owners had a loyalty to a format and station history. How wrong I was, and how naive. They cared about revenue.
Anyway, that's the story with 'PDH. I worked at a couple of other stations in the market like Rizzi's "Next-FM" (WEXT), kind of a cool-jazz format that never did any real sales. From there, to Q-92 FM to do evenings. In between, I worked at WKZE in Sharon, CT, and later at WKZE-FM in Sharon. KZE was an AAA type of station when I was there, but really was all over the place, format-wise. It was my last experience at KZE that soured me on local radio for good. That's another story altogether
.
One of the guys I worked with at "Next-FM" had done some television tech work in the past, having helped build the NBC Today show studios in NY. He got a call asking him if he wanted to help put a new cable channel on the air in NYC called "fX", a Fox cable station. He became a tech manager there, and called me and asked me if I wanted to try something "new". He told me what they paid freelance workers for 8 hours, and me, coming from a local radio salary background, said "woo hoo! I'm there!".
I've been working in TV audio ever since on the tech side. So, there's the history in a nutshell. I'll always look back on those PDH days as some of the most fun and most musically informative that I've ever had. I had the chance to meet some incredible entertainers in the biz. Not once, but twice, the late Stevie Ray Vaughn played live not three feet in front of me in the PDH studio. Unreal.
Anyway, enough blathering for one post. Thanks for remembering.
