The slightly inspirational story of a random guy bringing his love of funk to the airwaves.
It had been my personal aspiration to be a radio DJ ever since I was five. Local LA radio personalities like KRTH 101’s “Shotgun” Tom Kelly and 95.5 KLOS’ Joe Benson were consistently on the family radio during my childhood. Growing up, I began to develop an admiration for such on-air personalities: I just thought they just sounded so smooth, so cool as they talked about music. And they were all about playing the best music: the stuff that came out of the 60s, 70s, and (to a lesser extent) the 80s. These guys, Shotgun Tom and Uncle Joe, are all about keeping the music of the past alive. It’s their goal, their mission, to ensure that all those old-ass bands — everyone from the Rolling Stones to Sly and the Family Stone — maintain relevancy today.
Through my youthful exposure to the FM throwback stations, it became my prime objective as a teen to be heard on the airwaves. Alas, this childhood career fantasy was completely crushed come high school. It came to my attention that you can’t make a comfortable living out of being on the air. With the advent of iTunes and digital music, there’s no denying that the medium of radio is rapidly dwindling in popularity. Thus, there’s virtually nothing in the way of on-air openings in the job market.
My career aspirations took a blow, yet I was nonetheless still a devoted radio listener. While my friends would cruise around our suburb listening to their iPods, my car radio was (and still is) permanently set to 93.5 KDAY — LA’s prime source for back in the day rap jams. I’m talking Run DMC. Public Enemy. Too $hort. DJ Quik. Salt ‘n Pepa. It goes without saying that the bass of my beat-up Honda was always cranked to the max.
Botoxed moms on their daily power walks would shake their heads in disgust at me as I rolled by in the Civic.
When going through the ponderous decision-making process of college selection, I discovered that the University of Wisconsin had a student-run radio station. Upon further investigation, it became clear that WSUM doesn’t play by the rules of most radio stations. Whereas corporate channels (a la CBS’ KROQ or iHeartMedia’s KIIS FM) assign a rigid play list for their disc jockeys, WSUM DJs can play essentially whatever they want. This made my selection relatively easy. Holy shit. The idea of being able to share the music I love with actual listeners! As a college kid, I would be able to craft an on-air persona like the ones I had spent so many lazy afternoons jamming out to. This was an opportunity to finally share my taste in music with the world. To fulfill such a childhood fantasy would be “dank,” as I would have phrased it as a pizza-faced high schooler.
My peers would say things like: “Dude! You’re doing radio at….Wisconsin? Isn’t that like…really cold?” and “West-consin.. that’s the East Coast right? You’re gonna get fucking frostbite.” In spite of the nay-sayers, I wasn’t too concerned about moving from SoCal to the Midwestern tundra. The very prospect of being on the air far outweighed any personal grievances about freezing my tucus off for four years.
Flash forward to Fall 2008, and I’m an enrolled freshman at UW training to be a DJ at 91.7. All of the sessions took place in the DJ booth under the guidance of a broadcasting host. This room is a music junkie’s paradise: there’s a slew of volume controls, massive speakers, mics, a couple of turntables, and an array of mixing gear. It all just looks so professional — examining the equipment for the first time made me feel as if I was in training to be a big time DJ. All of the volume levers, mini-disc players, and microphones seemed daunting at first. However, with time and experience, handling these broadcasting essentials became second nature.
The booth’s walls are lined with posters for all kinds of music, from Elvis to the Chili Peppers to Mozart. A large glass window behind the broadcasting equipment gazes out upon the foot traffic of the University Square. There’s always serious babe-age hanging out down there, but I was usually far too glued to the soundboard, rambling on the mic, or taking calls from listeners to be staring outside during my show. Through the course of my education, the broadcast booth became my Shangri-La.
You wouldn’t dare think of bringing a beverage inside.
As is the case with all college students, I had gone through many personal changes during those volatile years of higher education. Amidst this coming of age period, I had never strayed away from WSUM FM. I was on the air almost every week between January 2009 and August 2012. At the risk of coming off as schmaltzy, doing my show was a cathartic experience. It was my weekly, hour-long break from the grind. It also really felt terrific to get a phone call from a listener, I might add, even if it was your mother just ringing to say you’re doing a great job but that she’d like to hear you talk on the mic more.
Putting on a weekly show wasn’t always so invigorating, particularly as a freshman. I had to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn on Tuesday mornings and walk across the ice-capped campus to do my first program, the aptly titled “Funk My Life.” It was a daunting challenge hosting a high-energy hour of funk so early in the day. I am not a morning person. However, with the help of black coffee and artists like Isaac Hayes, I think I managed to keep the mood and flow of the broadcast lively.
Hopefully, all four of my listeners felt the same.
Keeping up with the 8 AM slot of death eventually paid off. In my next semester of hosting, I was bumped up a full thirteen hours to the 9 PM Tuesday slot. Primetime, baby. During that fall, a couple of friends and I had a variety show called “Cocktail Hour.” The premise was that we were all aging lounge singers showcasing our favorite hits of the Easy Listening genre. Certainly, this wasn’t traditional college radio: we were playing Dean Martin, not Death Cab. The music was geared more towards the crowd collecting social security rather than the hip twenty-something. “Cocktail Hour” fulfilled a very obscure niche on the university radio circuit. Comedy shows aren’t very common on college radio, lounge music even less so. The music on “Cocktail Hour” was (for the most part) clean and classy, but the humor was more more in the vein of American Pie.
One evening I decided to air a lounge cover of 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny.” I was well aware that I was rolling the dice here. The FCC would never allow such a lewd song to be aired before 10 PM. Considering that senior citizens made up a significant portion of my audience, I should have known better than to play a tune that poses the question: “Won’t your mama be so mad if she knew I got that ass?” Admittedly, this is probably the most G-rated lyric of the song. In all seriousness though, who is going to make the effort to actually call the FCC and report some small-time college DJ for a decency violation?
The following week’s broadcast saw management bust into the DJ booth mid-show, just as I was about to cut to a voice break. Dave Black — the General Manager of WSUM and founding father of the station — is a bigger, bald fellow known for his hearty grin and positive attitude. At this moment, however, he was giving me a death stare.
I should have been wearing a diaper.
“Matt, I have to speak to you about two on-air incidents that have occurred within the past couple of weeks. Do you know why exactly we need to have this chat?”
“Erm, no, Dave.”
“Well, listeners have been calling in complaints about your broadcasts. Your, uh, ‘Me So Horny’ broke multiple FCC decency codes and you said ‘shit’ during one of your voice breaks recently. That kind of stuff really just doesn’t fly. Consider this your warning.”
“Right. Sorry. Really. I won’t do it again.”
“We want to keep you around. Anyway, really enjoy the show, Matt. Funny stuff. Keep it up.”
The fact that WSUM granted me a second chance after a blatant rule violation illustrates their mellow, forgiving nature. Suffice to say, I made absolute sure not to defy the FCC rules of decency ever again during my broadcasts. I was lucky to not get my DJing privileges revoked due to my sophomoric shenanigans. From then on, cursing on the air was a thing of the past, as was the airing of bawdy rap. Radio-edits were certainly an option, but come on, who wants to listen to a radio edit? Part of me dies each time I hear the FCC-friendly version of Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You” on Real 92.3.
Doing “Cocktail Hour” was a blast. It was seriously exhilarating to ad-lib comedy while on live radio. Unfortunately, most people just didn’t think that the material was very funny. My next show, “White Chocolate,” was more in my wheelhouse. It was a total nostalgia trip: a slick sexy mix of old-school funk, rap, soul, R&B, and disco (by far the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures). The tune selection was always varied — one moment I’d be playing Naughty by Nature and the next I’d be jumping into some Sheila E. Having ran for five semesters and two summer sessions, it was “White Chocolate” that really defined my time at WSUM. As I had been on the air for exactly a year when the show debuted, I had finally become comfortable enough speaking on the mic and handling all the studio equipment to deliver a quality hour-long program. It goes without saying that having a true passion for the music didn’t hurt either.
While I had hit my stride with “White Chocolate,” not all of my broadcasts went off flawlessly. I’ve had my share of on-air screw-ups in my DJing career, most of them stemming from technical difficulty with my virus-ridden Mac Book. I would be streaming a sexy porn-groove from my music library, like Prince’s “Erotic City,” and the audio would suddenly cut completely out. The resulting silence is called dead air — no sound at all. This type of situation is essentially every DJ’s worst nightmare.
To be listening to such a hot track, only for it to abruptly go mute, is the musical equivalent of getting blue-balled. It is also a massive disservice to the everlasting spirit of Prince.
Though all radio stations have a protocol for dealing with dead air (at WSUM, we would immediately queue up the station’s automated playlist), I would often have to figure out exactly what the hell was wrong with my computer and fix it immediately so the show could go on. These what-the- fuck, think-fast scenarios really suck. Time comes to a painful slow down as you scramble over the sound controls, trying to figure out how to remedy the bitter absence of music. Thankfully, it’s really not a big deal if you flub while broadcasting at WSUM — this isn’t professional radio we’re talking about here. College radio isn’t very much about craft and presentation: it’s about cutting loose, getting down, and having fun.
My time as a DJ at WSUM came to an end in the summer of 2012. Following my graduation that May, I spent an additional three months in Madison. I needed a long goodbye — I wasn’t ready to leave my friends, my school, my radio station. Alas, I had a degree in English and no job prospects whatsoever, so moving back in with the parents was really my only option. But an interesting thing happened to me that last summer. One evening, when I had arrived at the station to do my show, there was some mail waiting for me at the front desk. To my surprise, it turned out to be a fan letter from an inmate at a prison in nearby Oregon, Wisconsin. I couldn’t believe the contents of the note:
“Dear White Choc:
Hi. My name is Melvin Boone. I am one of hundreds of loyal listeners here at Oakhill (a minimal security corr. inst.) who enjoy listening to you each Thurs evening. I was chosen to represent us by writing and asking if you — when you’re able — play some of the most funkiest songs recorded, songs we haven’t played in decades?”
The list of tracks included “Person to Person,” by the Average White Band, “Mothership Connection” by Parliament and Cameo’s “Shake Your Pants.” These guys had fucking good taste. I made sure to play as many of their requests as possible.
Then I began to receive more letters from prison.
A different inmate wrote “I thought I would never hear that song again!” in response to hearing Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop” on my show. Getting those letters might just be the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me — and the timing of it all made my final summer of broadcasting all the more bittersweet.
It’s been a little over three years since my swan song on 91.7 and I’m currently working in the senior care industry back home in my native Los Angeles. The days of doing it live really aren’t all that far in the past, but they feel like a long time ago. Don’t get me wrong: life’s good. But I frequently reminisce about my nights in the DJ booth, dropping all those grooves by Whodini and Chaka Khan. I may not be on the air anymore, but there’s no denying that WSUM is still a big part of who I am. When I was beginning in my current position a year and a half ago, my manager asked me what I wanted my office nickname to be. I had an answer for him right away:
