I Dream of Radio
I had that dream again last night. The one where I am at the radio station and desperately trying to get something on the air and nothing is working. The “dead air” alarm is going off and I am pushing buttons, twisting knobs and moving sliders up and down to no avail.
Almost every person who has spent any time as an on-air personality has had this dream. There are variations of this dream; being locked out of the studio as the record runs out, not able to find the music you need to get on to the record player next, mic not working during a newscast, etc. It is the height of anxiety. I have been out of radio for more than a decade and off air for twice that, but I still have this dream, not as often as I did when I was on air, but enough to wonder if this dream will ever go away.
This particular night, my dream had me producing the morning drive talk show. I couldn’t get the computer to play the morning drive music. The touch screen, the keyboard and mouse were all frozen. I went to my backup cart (old 8-track cartridge tapes of varying lengths with audio on them,) labeled morning drive and popped it into the machine. Nothing.
On the other side of the studio glass, the morning show host, Larry, is becoming impatient. He talks to me on the intercom.
“What’s the holdup,” he asked politely.
“I don’t know! I don’t know,” I respond in a panicked voice.
“I’m usually on by now,” he says a little more urgently.
Morning talk drive shows are meticulously times with news, traffic, weather and even the commercials broadcast at specific times. Guests are scheduled and even the bumper music is timed out at specific lengths. One miscue, late guest or mechanical problem and the whole thing goes up in smoke.
As the dream unfolds this night, the dead air alarm gets louder, there are shouts from the newsroom and the studio phone rings non-stop as people try to call in to let me know that we are off the air. And then I wake up.
The first time I had this dream, it was understandable. It was after my first night on air. I was working at a small AM Christian radio station way out in the sticks that played a mix of contemporary Christian music and evangelical preaching via satellite or on tape. I had trained with the DJ who was going to be moving to a new time slot and I would be replacing her. The station had news at the top of the hour followed by yours truly doing the local news and weather. I would then give the time, repeat the call letters of the station and start the first record and intro the title and artist over the first few seconds of the song. If I did it just right, I would finish my spiel just as the singer sang his or her first note. We call that hitting the post.
I had trained for two weeks and arrived early for my shift, arranging the music and tapes I would play, pulled the local news from the printer and was ready to go. The guy before me introed the last song, wished me luck and headed out the door. I sat myself down, plugged my headphones in, listening for the sound of the tone from the network counting down the seconds to the news. When I got the ten second tone, I played the tape announcing our call letters and city of license and went to the news. Bam! Right on time.
The news went on for five minutes and I hit the news sounder, a four-tone synthesized intro followed by the sound of a teletype machine on an endless loop. I opened my mic and read a minute of news, sports and weather, started the record and hit the post perfectly. I was going to be good at this new job.
The studio had a large red light like you would find on an old cop car. Whenever we got a call on the studio phone, the light would go off to alert you to the fact that there was a phone call coming in since there was no ringer on the phone.
“KXAK,” I said brightly in my best radio voice. Obviously, it was someone who wanted to compliment me on my wonderful voice or my truly professional performance. Or it might be my mom telling me how proud she was of me. It was the general manager of the station.
“You forgot to turn your mic on,” he said, flatly.
I felt myself go flush. This would be the shortest radio career on record.
“Uh, oh…I… um…” I stammered.
“Welcome to radio,” he chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. It happens to everyone and besides, you’re the overnight weekend guy. Nobody’s listening except the crazies and the insomniacs.”
“Well,…okay,” I said a little disheartened. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll do better.”
Just remember. It’s the big red switch. I’m going to get some sleep now. See you in the morning.”
And with that, he hung up. I spent the rest of the night making sure that I had the mic on well before I had to speak and never missed another cue. I figured that the worst that could happen had happened and not much else could go wrong. The morning guy called in sick, and I had to work twelve hours until they could find someone to come in, but I did alright. I went home and went to bed.
I woke up that afternoon panicked. I had had the first of a series of dreams that would haunt me over the next 26 years of radio. In this one, you guessed it, I couldn’t get my mic to work.
As my radio life moved forward, I would have these dreams, always different, but always the same. Sometimes it would be that I wouldn’t be able to get the national or local news on the air. Sometimes it was that I wouldn’t be able to get an important caller or guest through to the radio host. Sometimes it was that none of the record players in the studio would work properly, playing the music at a weird, slow speed or the needle skipping across the record. Even after I left my on-air position and became an engineer, I would dream that the radio host or producer would call me in because they could get nothing to work and now the responsibility was on me to get anything on the air and I was failing at every turn. It was maddening.
After I left radio, I thought that the dreams would stop, but they didn’t. I have heard that people with post traumatic stress often have recurring dreams, but there was no real crisis in what I was doing. The worst that might happen was an advertiser might call up wondering why their ad wasn’t played on time or the program director calling the hot line to ask me why we couldn’t get something on air and on those occasions when it did happen, it was usually something outside of my control.
A longtime friend of mine from radio told me about a program director who would take a small, radio-controlled inflatable shark and sail it down the hallways of the radio station whenever he was about to let someone go. Staff, he said, would run screaming from the building. I plan to write a screenplay about radio someday and that will be my opening segment. If that doesn’t give you nightmares, nothing will.
Copyright 2024 by Jose Antonio Ponce