Prime Time Keeps On Ticking
Ugh yuck weekend. Spent Friday in a crampy Tylenol PM haze and slept for nearly 17 hours. More aches and yuckiness Saturday, up all night with stomach issues. Sunday was better but still tired from the weekend, and it was my brother's birthday so I had to manage to keep my eyes open during dinner out with the family. I am thoroughly ready for real, restful REM sleep for a change but first I wanted to post some pictures that my old college friend Jay sent me tonight that I haven't seen since they were taken back in 1987. Namely, the old radio station we set up in Jay's dormroom, a good three years before the movie Pump Up The Volume hit the big screen.
A photo of Chuck sitting in at the old official college radio station where I started out as a DJ (and where Jay was the frustrated music director). The station was still just AM and you really couldn't hear it anywhere on the campus unless you just happened to be standing right next to the station itself, and they didn't really train their DJs worth a lick. And we weren't allowed to play Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" because the program director was afraid that we might offend somebody. Honestly, there was a girl at that station whose shift consisted of little more than dropping the needle onto side one of Hotel California and sitting there letting it play through, then flipping it over on the air and fumbling with the needle to start side two, again while sitting there staring into space. Already being a friend of Jay's it didn't take long to recruit me for his new radio project, and although Chuck initially resisted, he eventually came aboard later.
With our college trying to raise thousands of dollars to go FM all year, we did it in a week for basically free. There was a giant mono single cart player under the desk with a remote start that Jay had wired to the desk and bingo... we were broadcasting under 1/40 of a watt which was just enough to be heard all over campus on the FM dial. Technically we were just under the amount of wattage needed for an FCC licence, but we still tried to keep our noses clean by abiding FCC laws: no cursing on air, call letters on the hour, regular readings, etc. Jay taught it all to us. Oh, I was such a basket case every Tuesday night, lips pressed nervously to that microphone, desperately trying to segue Public Image Ltd. into Parliament-Funkadelic. I think I still have one of my old air checks laying around here somewhere.
A picture I took of Jay sitting at the "DJ booth" at our station Christmas party, which consisted also of Joe and three other guys (I was the only girl, how does that always seem to happen around music geeks?). Speaking of Pump Up The Volume, I always thought Jay looked an awful lot like Christian Slater back then. I remember what a big deal it was to get him to wear that hat because it would flatten his "foof", which is what we used to call his carefully moussed-up 80's hairdo. Jay also really enjoyed it when I brushed and styled his arm hair. I would give it a nice part down the middle and Aquanet it in place for the rest of the day. Jay loved showing off his sporty arm hair "foof" to the world.
And last but not the least bit least, Jay's 1972 Camero Z28, which I remember loving to ride in because back in 1987 I was so impressed that it had a CD player which as far as I was concerned was real state of the art cutting edge technology back then. That was like, somebody owning a jet pack or something. Oh, the memories of that cul de sac where Jay lived in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Halloween '87 party where some mysterious guy in a long brown trenchcoat wearing a child's plastic Glo Worm Halloween mask was cranking "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller (from the Disney Robin Hood soundtrack) and banging his head against Jay's bedroom wall. Later as Leeann and I sat out in the middle of that street circle under the stars the Glo Worm Guy got in his station wagon and slowly drove past us, with the Glo Worm mask still on his face and "Whistle Stop" blaring out of his car windows as he disappeared into the night. And 23 years later I still can't stop laughing about that.
A photo of Chuck sitting in at the old official college radio station where I started out as a DJ (and where Jay was the frustrated music director). The station was still just AM and you really couldn't hear it anywhere on the campus unless you just happened to be standing right next to the station itself, and they didn't really train their DJs worth a lick. And we weren't allowed to play Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" because the program director was afraid that we might offend somebody. Honestly, there was a girl at that station whose shift consisted of little more than dropping the needle onto side one of Hotel California and sitting there letting it play through, then flipping it over on the air and fumbling with the needle to start side two, again while sitting there staring into space. Already being a friend of Jay's it didn't take long to recruit me for his new radio project, and although Chuck initially resisted, he eventually came aboard later.
With our college trying to raise thousands of dollars to go FM all year, we did it in a week for basically free. There was a giant mono single cart player under the desk with a remote start that Jay had wired to the desk and bingo... we were broadcasting under 1/40 of a watt which was just enough to be heard all over campus on the FM dial. Technically we were just under the amount of wattage needed for an FCC licence, but we still tried to keep our noses clean by abiding FCC laws: no cursing on air, call letters on the hour, regular readings, etc. Jay taught it all to us. Oh, I was such a basket case every Tuesday night, lips pressed nervously to that microphone, desperately trying to segue Public Image Ltd. into Parliament-Funkadelic. I think I still have one of my old air checks laying around here somewhere.
A picture I took of Jay sitting at the "DJ booth" at our station Christmas party, which consisted also of Joe and three other guys (I was the only girl, how does that always seem to happen around music geeks?). Speaking of Pump Up The Volume, I always thought Jay looked an awful lot like Christian Slater back then. I remember what a big deal it was to get him to wear that hat because it would flatten his "foof", which is what we used to call his carefully moussed-up 80's hairdo. Jay also really enjoyed it when I brushed and styled his arm hair. I would give it a nice part down the middle and Aquanet it in place for the rest of the day. Jay loved showing off his sporty arm hair "foof" to the world.
And last but not the least bit least, Jay's 1972 Camero Z28, which I remember loving to ride in because back in 1987 I was so impressed that it had a CD player which as far as I was concerned was real state of the art cutting edge technology back then. That was like, somebody owning a jet pack or something. Oh, the memories of that cul de sac where Jay lived in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Halloween '87 party where some mysterious guy in a long brown trenchcoat wearing a child's plastic Glo Worm Halloween mask was cranking "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller (from the Disney Robin Hood soundtrack) and banging his head against Jay's bedroom wall. Later as Leeann and I sat out in the middle of that street circle under the stars the Glo Worm Guy got in his station wagon and slowly drove past us, with the Glo Worm mask still on his face and "Whistle Stop" blaring out of his car windows as he disappeared into the night. And 23 years later I still can't stop laughing about that.
posted by Melissa at 11:13 PM
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