A Little Life And A Lot Of Radio!
The life rule has always been … Men are soft when they are hard and hard when they are soft.
Michael never got to be a Kid, now he doesn’t get to be a Senior either.
I remember years ago attending a Sandusky Radio seminar in Phoenix. At the time they seemed to have stations every where in America and their newest one in Kansas City had been turned over to me a few months before to become the 2nd CLASS/CLASSY station in America.
The GM, Steve Dinkel and I were sitting at a table together looking a little out of place with all the rockers present. But were soon joined by Dana Horner the GM of Sandusky’s AOR operation in Seattle.
Most of all of the Sandusky stations at the time were some kind of AOR except for us. I think we were looked at by everyone as Sandusky’s wimpy A/C experiment at the time.
We were all sitting there listening to each station’s presentation tape which were all very good but consisted mainly of a bunch of music sweeps with nice segues.
Now it was time for our little tape from Kansas City. Man it just blew out of the speakers with some very exciting sounds of crazy Jox jumping out of airplanes live on the air plus another pair doing live reports from all over the world as they raced each other around the planet in opposite directions.
Then of course there was the Mayor of Kansas City on our air and local TV spanking us for blowing up the phone system and putting the city in danger.
All of this was mixed together with some very tightly edited music which made it pop and listeners sounding like they were having orgasms as they won some very exotic prizes I’m not sure what the rest of the Sandusky folks were expecting from us, but not this, thats for sure.
I think they were kinda expecting a pretty sweep of The Carpenters, Bread and maybe even a little Barry Manilow.
All I remember is the whole room breaking out in shocked applause when our tape ended.
The President of the group at that time was Toney Brooks who was MCing the whole affair. After the tape was done Toney brought the mic over to our table and said … George the reason I have Dana Horner sitting with you and Steve Dinkel at your table is this, I am very proud to announce that his station is going to be our next station to do your CLASS/CLASSY format, and in fact we already have the new call letters standing by KLSY.
Now George do you have any special advice for Dana that might better prepare him for what is about to happen in Seattle. Toney then quickly shoved his microphone in my face and I said yes, Dana, your going to need to get a brand new Mercedes immediately.
Wow I just got an e mail from Mark Parr who stumbled across georgejohns.com
What makes Mark so special was he was the person responsible for me being in radio to this day. Back in the day when I was playing for THE JURY the local radio personalities would be hired to MC the dances and throw out free records to the crowd.
Now this was pre Beatles time so the DJ’s were a very big deal and were much more of a draw than we the band were.
Mark was the night time DJ from CKY, Winnipeg and was very popular with the ladies, his prowess with them was, and still is legendary, just check with Lainie Kazan.
The Jox didn’t stay at the dace the whole night because some of them like Mark were very busy attending to the responsibilities of having fans. So I would have to go to the station on Monday to pay them. That’s how I got to know Mark.
Mark’s recent e mail brought flooding back, the memory of a very very special day in my life. I was at CKY one Monday around noon to give Mark his money from a weekend gig we did together.
The receptionist told me that he was in the FM studio and was expecting me.
Now this was in the day when FM wasn’t cool, and Mark had a duty at the station he really disliked. He had to be a board op on the FM station for the lunch hour, while the regular board op got some lunch.
There sat Mark behind the FM consul as I walked in to pay him, and he says to me, George have you ever thought about working in radio?
I responded with, hell yes but where do you go to learn how to run all that equipment. He said that’s the easy part, here sit down and I’ll teach it to you right now.
At that time in radio there was no automation equipment, so the time was on a big reel of tape as was the temperature. The liners and public service announcements were on another separate tape deck and the commercials were on two cartridge machines. The music was on four turntables.
Mark proceeded to show me how it all worked and I was kinda doing it, all nervous and very excited of course when he scares me to death with … Hey there’s Daryl B in the production studio I have to go see him for a moment, and out he goes.
A little while later the station owner walked into the FM studio giving a small tour to some business men. At that moment I have everything running at once. Different sound was coming out of all the cue speakers at the same time. Music, temperatures, times, liners, psa’s, commercials all playing at once and all coming out of different speakers, I couldn’t figure out what was on the air and what wasn’t.
I was in a panic but didn’t want to show it with the owner present, so I was casually waving at Mark whom I could see two studios away. Mark just waved back at me and smiled.
By the time he wandered back into the studio everything was back to normal, and I was a radio man forever. Thank you Mark!
My Dad had one of those great winning smiles. You know the kind, one of those big ol’ salesman smiles. His smile was so good that my friends use to say … It must be fun living at your place ‘eh ? Yeah right!
After I finally left home, my brother Reg said that our parents turned to him and said … We only took our eye off your brother for a moment and now we have no idea what’s gong to become of him as he heads off to the radio world. But you, you we are watching every second of everyday. That must have been a fun ride for Reg.
My Daughter Candis and her husband Charlie are both extreme athletes. They both are very assertive and competitive. Candis also is a singer, actress and intense business person, who became a mother. Charlie in his spare time is saving Mountains.
When they had Nathaniel we all wondered how he was going to turn out, what with all that aggressive DNA churning in his body.
Candis recently told me that the wait is over and the results are in. He’s a four year old teenager!
I guess most of radio missed the passing of Michael Jackson. It seems that voice tracking and what’s happening right now live don’t exactly go together.
Now if those hurricanes just stay away from Florida we should be OK and wont need any live radio.
Yeah thats the ticket, just turn up some Jimmy Buffet and pass me another ‘Rita we’ll be fine we don’t need your stinking hurricane warnings.
Years ago Jack McCoy told me that he recently discovered in a research project he had done that there was only one reason a person went back to AM radio after switching to FM. It was to get the weather because FM didn’t seem to do it. I think it might be true again.
Is it just me or do radio sales people seem to do a lotta lotta talking but very little listening. How does that work out for them I wonder.
The first radio sales person that I ever had any kind of strange dealings with was Sy Brownstone in Winnipeg at my first radio gig. I was the production board op at CKY.
Sy would always whine at me first thing everyday to get his stuff put up front in production, even though he followed none of the rules.
Sy was also the first to ask me who I thought paid my salary. I’ve been asked that many times since but he was the first. Sy also always had an emergency a day that needed to be recorded right now, you know the type, I see you nodding along and substituting a name or two for Sy’s.
But hey for my extra help he would always reward me with one movie ticket, yep one! I don’t think I still have an issue with any of that, surely I’ve let it go by now ?
When my daughter Candis was going to NYU we went out to dinner with Rick Moranis who had an office in New York at the time where he did most of his script writing.
He claimed he was working on a script about all the goings on at the early CFTR. He explained it was the perfect scenario for what was going on in the world at that time. I asked him if he was going to play a part in the movie and he replied that he was going to play the part of The Magic Christian.
How are you going to do that was my next question. He said, oh that’s easy I’ll just smoke two packs of cigarettes during the playing of one song.
I still remember all the things that used to get my attention on the radio before I became a radio guy.
They still work to this day.
Women seem to love menus, is that because they are always hungry, or do they just like lots of choices.
I have chased women on the radio it seems for most of my life. I was forced by necessity to do a lot of research with them in order to learn as much as I could about how to attract them.
By now I think I know more about women than most men, and I know next to nothing.
Back when I was with Fairbanks Broadcasting in Indianapolis and my boss Jim Hilliard was busy flying around the country trying to sell the Indiana Pacers I had to deal with Mr. Fairbanks for the company’s programming needs until Jim got back.
At that time almost every station in town carried The Indy 500 live, but the ratings weren’t going during that period so we had no idea what station most of the folks were hearing the race on.
I came up with a plan that I needed to present to Mr. Fairbanks. I told him that I thought we should commission ARB to do an overnight rating survey on race day. My theory was that seeing as the national network that originated the broadcast used most of our guys to call the race in kinda sounded like it was our broadcast and hopefully we had most of the listeners but who knows. Mr. Fairbanks agreed and as I tried to continue my well thought out presentation about how if the survey showed us # 1 next year during race month we could really charge some good rates, he interrupted me with …
George you’ve already got a yes from me, if you keep going you just might manage to turn that yes into a no. I left his office immediately.
When I was officing in Boston a few years ago Tim Reever and I used to run along the Charles a lot and we even spent quite a few weekends racing all over New England. One winter we spent the whole winter indoors training on the tread mill for a 1/2 marathon in sunny San Deigo at the start of spring.
When we got back to Boston I overheard Tim telling Hilliard about our trip.
He said, Jim you now intense George gets well I met his daughter Candis during our trip and she makes George look almost mellow as I’m sure you know. But Jeez have you met their dog!!!!!
The real person inside you is the person you are when you think nobody is watching.
I think America might have a lot of trouble getting out of this financial crises we are in. The people in Congress trying to fix it are mostly lawyers and other than charging their exorbitant fees, what the hell do lawyers know about money.
When my daughter Cami was in the 5th grade I asked her if she had any male teachers. I asked because her older sister Candis had her first male teacher around 5th grade and he had really had a big impact on her and turned her on to super grades and how to get them, which served her well all the way through college.
Cami said she didn’t have any because they only taught the ungifted.
My good friends Betsy Cameron and Barry Smith have a new product out they are presently marketing to clubs, hotel bars, and cruise ships called LIQ.
It looks very much like a Popsicle but it’s made of alcohol in a few different flavors. I guess it’s supposed to be delicious and very entertaining to watch it being consumed. Hmmmmmm I’m keeping my daughters a long way from that kind of activity.
But I may need to check it out for my own research purposes. A guy needs to stay sharp don’tcha think.
We tend to like the people best that like us.
Toney Brooks claimed that at an important meeting, one of his PDs gently explained to me why he thought it was a bad idea to “hype” the station’s call letters on the air. Toney said I turned to him and said “Get McDonald’s on the phone! They’ve got to pull those arches down immediately!”
The legendary Magic Christian was a whole lot funnier off the air then he ever was on. In an attempt to get some of that great humor on the air I hot lined him once and said … Magic I’m going to pay you per break today and here’s how it works. After each break I will call you and tell you how much I thought that break was worth.
There will be $5 $10 $20 and $50 dollar rewards. After each break I would call him and he would of course argue with me about what he thought the value of the last break was worth.
By the end of the show they were all $50 dollar breaks and on one I even had to give him a $100, I was on the floor!
Magic was definitely the jock of the year that day.
I think the problem with the financial crises is none of the people working on it have a financial crises.
Unfortunately the man ingredient in becoming somewhat wise is the passage of time . The other day I was thinking about an old Canadian friend of mine Doc Harris. When I was just a pup PD, I had Doc join me several times at several different radio stations.
The problem getting him hired at each one of these stations was management never liked his audition tape, but they would go with my decision anyway because I was in my” honeymoon ” period. Doc’s first show would always blow the room away and the same management who were not in favor of his hiring would be calling me halfway through his show saying this guy is incredible no wonder you wanted to hire him, what a bargain.
What I just now realized was Doc’s first show was the real gifted him. The rest of his shows were just his impersonation of what he thought a good Dee Jay sounded like.
I don’t think he has any tapes of any of his first shows. Pity!
There is and old song that goes Accent The Positive Eliminate The Negative And don’t Mess With Mr. In Between. What that always meant to me was that it was my jog to figure out what gifts the air talent had, then exploit them.
The best way to get this done I found was through begging. Once the begging was accepted I tried to convince them to use their gifts so often that the rest of the ordinary stuff they used to do, just disappeared.
One of the biggest dilemmas in a persons life, is becoming successful.
The 3 things that a man most regrets on his death bed is #1 – Not spending enough time with his family. #2 – Not making love to all the beautiful women he could have. #3 – Not spending enough time with his real friends because he was tied up with all his acquaintances.
In a novel written by a female the novel usually ends with the wedding and takes the whole final chapter to describe it. In the same type of novel written by a male, the wedding is in the middle of the book somewhere and takes no more than a page to describe.
I think radio sales brought these low billing days on them selves. I remember a long time ago hearing the theory that 20% of your clients do 80% of your revenue, so you need to Super Serve them. Super Serve them they did and now that 20% is backing way off, and radio forgot who the other 80% of their clients were.
Bill Finginshu told me that most sales guys he gave stripes to, turned into art directors and immediately started designing the new station logo.
When I turned 50 I went back to Winnipeg for a Half Marathon that I was going to run with my young nephew Jamie Boychuck. I arrived a few days before the race and noticed that Olympian runner Jeff Galloway was there and was having a little warm up fun run a couple of days before the big event.
I have read most of Jeff’s books on running so I took Jamie with me and we ran and chatted with this great Olympian runner, what a thrill.
Because I had just turned 50 I had hired a running coach a year earlier by the name of Thom Hunt a World Class Elite runner, to get me ready for my new age group.
On race day I started like Jeff’s books said to do nice and easy, then started to pick it up in mile two. About mile three I caught up to Jamie and went by him.
For the rest of the race I was sure he was right behind me waiting to whip past me near the end. That thought kept me going a little faster than I wanted to.
At the end of the race as I was stretching, waiting for Jamie to come across the finish line I noticed Jeff Galloway come running in.
Later on when I called my coach to tell him I got third, I also mentioned that Jeff was there and had finished behind me. Thom of course knew Jeff so I quickly said, I bet he does these races all the time now to sell his books, and just takes it easy.
Thom said, well thats his story … Yours is you beat him!
MORE @ www.georgejohns.com
