I Do Radio
Odd that I haven’t written about this before. Radio has been a part of my life since 1959; two more trips around the sun and it will be a 50-year association. Even the times I haven’t been actually in a studio, I haven’t been far from one and have been doing radio stuff. Next year will be fifty as a published writer.
Being a broadcaster and/or a writer is not a job or a career; it’s something that is part of you, found in the double helix of our DNA. Even if we stop doing radio, for instance, we still look wistfully at any 7-banded orange-and-white tower. A writer will forever cringe at the wrong use of a comma.
Others do not understand this and, what’s worse, never will. To them, writing is –at best—a chore, a painful task, too much like work. They don’t realize the joy of picking the exact right word, the precise phrasing of a sentence, the mastery of a written piece of humor. It is soul-satisfying unlike any other art.
On the air, you can’t beat the perfect network join, when everything you have to do that half hour finishes just one-half second before the top-of-hour time tone and the start of the network news. Or the network “slap,” when it’s far closer than a half-second and there is no pause at all. You have played the music, fit in the commercials, the weather, the community events and joined so naturally that your listeners haven’t the faintest idea how hard it was.
I do radio. I also write. Long may it happen.
Being a broadcaster and/or a writer is not a job or a career; it’s something that is part of you, found in the double helix of our DNA. Even if we stop doing radio, for instance, we still look wistfully at any 7-banded orange-and-white tower. A writer will forever cringe at the wrong use of a comma.
Others do not understand this and, what’s worse, never will. To them, writing is –at best—a chore, a painful task, too much like work. They don’t realize the joy of picking the exact right word, the precise phrasing of a sentence, the mastery of a written piece of humor. It is soul-satisfying unlike any other art.
On the air, you can’t beat the perfect network join, when everything you have to do that half hour finishes just one-half second before the top-of-hour time tone and the start of the network news. Or the network “slap,” when it’s far closer than a half-second and there is no pause at all. You have played the music, fit in the commercials, the weather, the community events and joined so naturally that your listeners haven’t the faintest idea how hard it was.
I do radio. I also write. Long may it happen.
posted by Tom Carten at 5:33 PM
3 Comments:
Long may it happen.
From your keyboard to God's eyes.
The fingers are the estuaries of the river which flows from your brain .... don't lose 'em. Enjoy your ''playing with words''
I loved the turntables, keeping the playlists, those Koss Pro4 aa headphones (loud), compressors, and hitting the tones.
Recording local talent in the studio at the drop of a dime.
The phone calls (good or bad) and the sudden "ideas" for songs and sets that seem to come out of nowhere.
The staff who held the same "radio addictions" that fed off of each other.
There's not a week that goes by without a memory poppin' up.
I still miss it.
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