back in the day
In the mid-1990s, I hosted and recorded “radio show” on the fictional station WETO 94.5 FM, which existed only in the little black plastic world of my Sony cassette boombox. (Who else misses that term?)
Songs were painstakingly dubbed from tape to tape, and in between I recorded cute/cringe-worthy DJ segments in my full Connecticut-accented glory. The shows complete with “contests” (which were all won by my sister, who was recruited/forced to call in and alternately “win” and “lose,” using different voices to represent different callers), weather reports, traffic reports, and special dedications for things like my parents’ birthdays.
This was not just a one-time project. Whenever I get into something, I get obsessed with it, so I have hours and hours of WETO 94.5 shows on cassettes somewhere in my childhood bedroom. At some point in between wanting to be a ballerina when I grew up (dream deferred) and wanting to be a magazine editor when I grew up (check), I wanted to be a radio DJ. I’m sure listening to the tapes from my father’s days as a DJ in Tallahassee, Fla., in the late 1970s had something to do with it.
From 2003 to 2006, I hosted a real radio show on the very legitimate station WZLY 91.5 FM. Yes, college radio. Despite being on the air for three years, I never really fit in with the college radio kids. Honestly, I wasn’t cool enough. I couldn’t keep up with the lingo, the fashion, the parties, and especially the music. I secretly hated a lot of what I was supposed to like and persisted in liking dumb bands no one else liked. Or, worse, that too many people liked.
The wondrous thing, was, though, my two hours on the air every week were my time. People were not my sister with disguised voices were actually listening worldwide (thanks, webcasting!), and as long as I played eight songs from heavy rotation from three genres, read public service announcements at the appropriate times, identified the station every half-hour and didn’t play any songs with FCC-forbidden words, I was free to do anything. And at the time, that meant playing a Wallflowers song every single week.
This isn’t to say that my time in college radio didn’t expand my horizons. I can’t even begin to list all the artists I discovered through the station that I still love today. Even though it makes me feel really, really old at this point to imagine today’s college radio DJs spinning their songs as part of some 2000s “old school” or “flashback” special.
Part of the tradition of being a DJ was making an ad for your show to email out to everyone and post on the electronic messageboards to remind everyone to listen. My show was called Vitamin Sensation, after a line in The Wallflowers’ song “Asleep At The Wheel” (“all these sugars with no vitamin sensation”).
So this was my ad for a while. [CLICK TO ENLARGE.]
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Every single detail on that label was carefully modified and reworded. (Papers? What papers to write?) I think I even got the official Vitamin Water font somewhere. Ah, the days of educational Photoshop licenses.
And don’t worry, a couple Vitamin Sensation shows are archived, too… in mp3 form.
