A short in Mix B

Poem

​Sometimes I’m so lost
I can’t find my way down
To the radio station to
Rejuvenate whatever it is
I lost in the first place.
 
There is something romantic
About talking on the radio
Every morning.

Blog

​It’s 9:39pm on a Tuesday. I did the show this morning with Verlie Suggs, which means I didn’t have to do any prep and once she got there I didn’t have to carry the show on my back. However you think about her political views, she knows radio. Sometimes she points at the board with all the callers listed on it –

But more than that it’s
Head and
Micro
Phones and
Wind screens and wires.
Freaking wires everywhere.
 
Sounds like a childhood
Fantasy of I’d like to play
Shortstop for the Chicago
Cubs or become a priest.
 
Sometimes on Sunday
Afternoons I take out my
Dreams and it’s all childhood.
The thing that keeps
Coming back to me is lying
In bed listening to the
Radio.
 
Dear Mr. Radio:
Sing us some words and
Play us some controversy.
There must be sports and
There must be news.
Whether you admit to
It or not, you always wanna
Know what the president is doing.
It’s human nature.
 
Dear Mr. Radio:
Please let me listen to
What it is that you have to
Say so that my drive up the
Dan Ryan doesn’t seem so
Freaking long. Idiots
Dart between lanes 30
Miles an hour faster than
I’m going and they don’t
Even use their turn signals.
Can you help me out with
That?
 
Dear Mr. Radio:
Let me talk into your
Belly every morning.
There must be someone
On the other side. But if
Not, oh well. It’s still
Good therapy. Beats
Drinking and smoking
Weed all the time.

“JED, let’s take some calls. There’s people waiting.” And that’s what needs to be said at that moment. Sometimes I get lost smelling my own breath and I forget to sniff the thoughts of others.
 
The rest of my day has to do with the end of an era. A couple of the three or four of you may have been to the old WJOB studios at 6405 Olcott Avenue. The 560—square-foot building sits in front of a 400-foot tower. The whole complex – known officially at the Post Office as “Radio Center” – sits behind Smith Chevrolet.
 
Inside that building is one of the oldest functioning studios around, especially when you consider that the Autogram board that’s in there may be older than I am. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really cool board. Huge, with circular dials that went out of style decades ago – now everyone uses slides – the board reminds you of an old Chevy engine. You can open the top of the board and see all the connectors and tubes and even I can fix it. That’s how open it is. The circuitry is like its own map.
 
Try that same technique with a modern board. If you could even get it open, you’d be confronted with the same jam-packed circuitry of a Japanese-built automobile engine. Unless you’ve been trained at the factory, you don’t know where to start to fix something as simple as a short in Mix B.
 
At the same time that I’m throwing all of this romanticism towards the old Autogram board, I’m trying to end its era. For the past few weeks, I’ve built an alternate studio in another part of the old WJOB barn of a building. I’m building it with one of those high-tech boards that I just made fun of. I’m doing it to totally bypass the old Autogram board – and the old studio entirely.
 
I’m doing this for a number of reasons. First, that Autogram board and the wiring that goes into and the hum reducers and the switcher and the audition dials are all so old that I fear that one day the board is just going to die of old age. Or that several wires are just going to fray and I’ll never be able to find the short.

Another reason is that we bought an FM station a few months ago, and it too goes through that old Autogram board. This is a problem in that the Autogram has been used for AM only for 60 years. Now we’re trying to get it to crap out FM stereo on top of AM mono and it just doesn’t sound right. It’s what they call “out of phase.” It sounds okay most of the time, but every once in a while on the FM when you really know a song or a commercial, you can tell that there’s a little whine on the end of the final syllable.
 
Also, I’m really the only one who knows where all the wires go and what processing machine does what. Our engineer can help me with rewiring the Distribution Amplifier (although for the first time I’m gonna try that by myself tomorrow) and he can help with the tower and the transmitter and hooking up the satellites… but in the end the flow of sound inside the building is pretty much mine. So I’m drawing maps and diagrams with little notes so that if I kick off one day that the station can still keep going.
 
That is a major fear of mine, you know – that I die suddenly and in all of the confusion WJOB goes away. Either my family can’t deal with the enormity of it all and they just sell it. Or it gets so complicated that they just chuck it all together and we go dark for a while. Then they sell it. These really shouldn’t be things that the three or four of you who read my blog worry about. Neither should I. But I do and do too and that’s the reality of the situation.
 
So to sum it up, I have been talking away the evening with an engineer who lives hours away about how to rewire a distribution amplifier. You would think that with no formal electronics education that I should leave that to a professional. But at this time, after owning WJOB for almost 13 years, I picked up a few things along the way. And one of those is how to wire a distribution amplifier and calibrate the transmitter and adjust the modulation. I even installed an FM transmitter with our engineer when we bought the station a few months ago. It was fun. Now I can take it apart and adjust it myself and instead of sitting in a bar laughing with my friends I would almost rather adjust the decibel levels and install increased processing on the FM feed. So there.
 
These are the kinds of things on my mind right now. It’s just another aspect to My Radio Life. Some parts are cooler than others. It’s much more interesting for the three or four of you to read about me fighting with some local politician or to hear about what some very excited caller had to say. But the truth of the matter is that as I sit down to write you Another Thousand Words about My Radio Life and to maybe even slop out couple of poems, the things that come to my mind are connector cables and ground wires, satellite feeds and stereo modulation. Get some sleep. Here’s the schedule for tomorrow.
 
Andy Qunell – 6:05. Barbara Muckel – 7:05. Al Hamnik – 7:20. That should do it for Another Thousand Words. Good night.