The worst seque from one song to another in the history of radio occurred one afternoon in early June, 1989 on K-JO 105 FM in St. Joseph, MO, barely more than 24 hours after I’d handed in my notice there. Imagine, if you will, grooving to Deep Purple’s "Smoke On The Water" (the infinitely superior live Made In Japan version, no less) and then being abruptly thrown into Wham’s "Careless Whisper". I’m not making this up—it really happened. The crowd noise following Ritchie Blackmore’s climactic crashing chord hadn’t even begun to fade when the listener was immediately launched into the lush saxophone intro to one of the wimpiest songs of the ‘80s—talk about stripping one’s musical gears! One of my biggest pet peeves with radio stations is when they play a hard-rocking song, then bring you crashing back down to earth with something wussy next. There’s such a thing as FLOW, and I always made sure to put on something like The Doors’ "Love Me Two Times" after a really heavy song to cushion the fall before playing something wimpy. The DJ who executed the above bon mot seque—whom I’ll simply refer to as "Mildred" to avoid lawsuits—knew absolutely nothing about flow.
Since I’m on the subject anyway, it’s time for me to take out some mental garbage here and vent my wrath on a couple people at my former radio station whom I never properly told to "piss off!" It’s kinda long, and a bit self-indulgent, so I’ll leave it up to you, gentle reader, whether to pass or play…
Mildred is a woman I have precious few good things to say about. At the time I worked with her, she was a late-30-something Bette Midler wanna-be who would often go around the station singing "Wind Beneath My Wings", and was our music director at K-JO—in name only, that is. She’s one of these people who wanted all the glory in radio, but didn’t want any of the work that went with it—sort of a female equivalent of Dr. Smith on "Lost In Space". She was not only lazy, but chronically late. In fact, after my very first airshift ever at K-JO, she was due to follow me on the air at 6AM on Saturday, and I actually had to call her at home and wake her up around 6:15—having never even MET the woman before! She was quite the partier too, and I seem to remember she had a penchant for calling in sick a lot, for a variety of excuses—everything from hangovers to hangnails. She and I never really hit it off, and our working relationship was strained, at best, throughout my brief tenure there.
What drove a permanent wedge between me and Mildred was her PM drive shift show appropriately called the "Afternoon Barnyard"—you always felt like you'd stepped in something while listening to it! On the AM side in the weeks leading up to the big format switcheroo (see my January 27th entry "Radio Ga-Ga, Part 2" for the details on that), she and another jock whom I’ll call "Dork" tried (and failed miserably) to really yuk it up on their show with these half-baked David Letterman Top Ten List rip-offs, many of which included jokes at MY expense! I’m not talking good-natured ribbing here, but rather snarky sophomoric barbs about things I did on the air, including my nightly rundown of the hockey and basketball scores. In my defense, what else did I have to talk about at 2:00 in the morning, the fucking dew point?!? Now I can take a joke, and I sure don’t mind a little harmless jibe or two directed my way now and then, but this shit got downright vicious and personal towards me at times, and it was totally uncalled-for. It’s one thing to razz someone from a rival station, but have you ever heard of radio personalities constantly targeting someone from their own station? I took it up with the station manager and he got Mildred and Dork to cease and desist aiming their verbal bazookas at me, but the damage was already done. I never even received an apology from either one of them...
Just as an aside, Dork—an average DJ, at best—is another phony person I encountered along the way in radio. Tipping the scales at well over 325 pounds, Dork did a ludicrous series of commercials for some weight loss outfit in which he bragged about how many pounds and inches he’d supposedly lost. "Look behind you, Dork, and you’ll find them," I would often grumble to myself as I played those ads on the air. Many’s the night I had to clean up after this Neanderthal, as he’d always trash the studio with empty Dorito bags, candy bar wrappers and Mountain Dew cans. He also made the mistake of leaving copies of his resume that he was shopping around to other stations laying around the studio one night, one of which I still have in my possession. He puffed his experience and credentials up more than the Michelin Man, and it was laughable how he claimed to single-handedly "bring in strong numbers" during his airshifts. I hadn’t seen a load of bullshit like that since that time the manure truck fell over on the highway—his ratings were no better than mine were on graveyard shift! But I digress…
Getting back to Mildred, her exploits were fairly humorous. She did not use her regular speaking voice on the air, but rather she put on this fake macho bravado tough-broad tone that made her sound like Pinky Tuscadero from "Happy Days" (minus the Brooklyn accent), thus rendering her kinda butch and slutty-sounding at the same time. I never understood why she didn’t just use her regular speaking voice, which was actually quite pretty—think Roz on "Frasier", only more soft-spoken. Hell, about the highest compliment I can give Mildred is that she had a lovely speaking voice in normal conversation. She could have excelled at being a phone sex operator—she probably does now, come to think of it! I also loved how she would mispronounce easy words when she did commercials, like "cooking", which came out "KOOKing", and "Jacuzzi", which she pronounced "ja-CUE-zi"!
Among her other peccadilloes, Mildred often would borrow equipment from the station to do her own personal moonlighting DJ gigs, and one Tuesday evening in November, she came barging into the studio and proceeded to unplug the cassette player that I was currently using to record election returns for later broadcast. I found out later after I left the station for good that she went around claiming that she "blew me out" (that’s radio talk for "fired"), which is a total fucking lie—I resigned that job and everybody in the building knew I was going to before it happened. I can honestly state that I have NEVER been fired from any job in my life, either. Oh well, what goes around comes around, because about a year or so after my departure, Mildred got knocked up by one of the part-time weekend DJs there, thus her partying days came to a crashing halt. Not long after that, Mildred got fired after she was caught in a big lie over some equipment she "borrowed" from the station and never returned, as well as attempting to gaslight my good friend Easy Earl by trying to implicate him for it. Earl is as honest as Joan Rivers is ugly, and the station manager knew he wasn’t lying when Mildred tried to make him take the rap for her misdoings, so they booted her lazy ass out the door. When I heard that piece of news, I laughed. Hard.
What a waste of pretty red hair, too…
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