Fire 9699 (2909)
Thursday, November 29th, 2007-6:15 P.M.
The word came down the pipe today that a lot of the radio personnel at WCMF, my old employer, were going to be losing their jobs. It's a shock, to be sure...not that folks in radio are being flushed out, but that the folks who are being fired had held on to their jobs so long.
Radio is a tough business, and anyone who's ever been involved in it knows that it's here one day, gone the next and if you don't produce, you are OUT. There are also trends that go swinging back and forth like a pendulum with a knife on it, first going to the "automated" format (who needs jocks?) to the "live" format (it sounds terrible without a live person to intro and back-announce the songs!).
I worked at WCMF 96.5 FM, fresh out of college, first as a research "rat," then later the director of the department. I produced "hook tapes," 35-song collections of clips from songs that we would "test" by playing them over the phone to people at their homes in the evening, asking them if they'd like to hear the songs played "a lot more, a little more, the same amount, a little less, a lot less, never again, or unfamiliar." We'd then load all of the information into a computer and calculate "burn scores," letting us know things like "people like Led Zeppelin, but they'd rather hear 'The Immigrant Song' than 'Stairway To Heaven.'" It was a lot of fun, and hard work, and most importantly, flexible enough to allow me to do comedy on the weekends, long weekends if necessary.
I was let go in the spring of 1994, and then hooked up with the George Carlin tour, but it still took me a while to get over being downsized. I remember Stan Main, the Program Director, basically breaking the news to me that I was out, and my team was out, which I should have seen coming as we shrunk from eight team members to four and then finally, three. I begged to be reassigned, but there was no place to put me, and I got a nice letter of recommendation from Stan that I never used, and never worked a "straight" job again, if you don't count being General Manager at the Comix Cafe, which was more like being a professional bull-rider in terms of the office decorum and corporate culture (that didn't exist, thankfully). I even wore a denim shirt every day, with the club logo embroidered on the pocket!
When I was at WCMF, I used to stay late after work, and use the computers in the sales staff's cubicles. I basically taught myself Microsoft Word by trial and error, typing up letters and making cool custom cassette covers for my bootleg tapes (also cadged from the station's enormous music library). It was like a playground to me, a playground with a paycheck! Not that the work wasn't hard, it was rewarding, and Stan was relentless in spurring us on. We'd be on the phones, talking to survey respondents and trying not to let them know what station we were calling from (lest it skew the results), and Stan would come into our room on his way out for the day and give us all a beating, usually either a back rub or numerous slaps on the shoulders while he would yell out things like "We're playing the hits and we ain't popping zits!" and shit like that, which to this day, honestly, I don't know what it means. Still, Stan was a great guy and he paid me money to be part of the team, and giving me and my department the axe wasn't his decision, it was the guy above him, so in that regard, I hold him blameless. He probably kept our department alive a lot longer than management wanted him to, in the name of the data that he needed to keep doing his job so well. But now he's gone, fired, a casualty of the merger with Entercom, or the takeover, or whatever you want to call it.
Dave Kane, the Music Director, Assistant Program Director and afternoon host, was always very friendly to me as well. My comedy buddy, Ray Salah and I, used to come in in the afternoons and work with Rich Van Slyke, the production chief, making "spec spots" which are basically fake commercials that the sales staff would then take cassette copies out to prospective clients and try to sell them. We worked hard to make them funny, because funny sells, and I don't know if the sales staff ever sold any of the spots, but Rich wound up taking a reel of those spots and used it as a demo to get a better paying job at a rock station in Atlanta. Still, those afternoon sessions were fun, and Kane-O was always nice to us, breaking our balls and I think once he had lunch brought in and invited us to chow down. Compliments are nice, paychecks are good, but share your food with a fat man and you've got a friend for life.
Mark Cronin lost his gig today....Mark's been in radio longer than foam windscreens on microphones. Marc was the night jock at WCMF, and I saw him every night when I worked. When you're talking about the nicest human beings on the planet, Mark's name has to come up or you don't know what you're talking about. He did a pantomime once to entertain some of us in the break room of a guy getting thrown out of a bar, whereby he grabbed his own collar with one hand and the back of his pants with the other and "threw" himself out of the room, a move that I've stolen more than once. I miss working with a guy like that, and to hear that he's being flushed reeks of age-ism, and more importantly, a complete lack of respect for the skills that he brought to the table. He was a workhorse who cut commercials, liners, and spots, all while songs were playing in the other studio, doing the job of two guys. Now, thanks to corporate culture and the cold, cruel ways of business, he's doing the job of no guys, and the "bum's rush" pantomime is creepily appropriate.
I've been crawling on the web trying to get the whole story, and they are not naming names, but it seems as though about eight people are part of the purge, and I can only talk about the three I know of that were my friends. I got into radio originally because as a comic, I thought it would help my local standing, but basically it did nothing for me in that respect. In order to gain credibility as a comic, you needed to be a better comic, not a mediocre one with ties to a radio station.
There are other names that are being bandied about as far as their futures, like Brother Wease and his sidekick Tommy Mule, and rumor is also that WPXY's Scott Spezzano is done for. Scott's a friend, and he used to host Wednesday nights at the Comix Cafe when I was General Manager there. Tommy and I have a long working relationship, and I think Wease doesn't like me. But I hope they don't go down without a fight, whatever happens.
I'll be interested to know where all of this winds up, as you can't work in radio for as long as I did and not be fascinated by the moving and shaking, but for guys like Dave Kane and Mark Cronin, you're talking about literally decades of being a Rochester radio presence. And Stan Main wrote the music programming software that the station used.
The new guys better be really fucking good is all I'm saying.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
