If you are in Radio, send me your very first on the air radio gig experience to Robin.MarshallsOffice@gmail.com! Calls and all! I’d also like your WORST radio gig experience, with calls. That moment that has given us all nightmares! Please include where you are today, whether you’re in radio or not.
We all need to share! What great fun to read each others’ blessings and disasters! I started this group page on FB called “Disc Jockey’s Nightmare,” and have had such great response from it, that I decided to follow through on this. If you know me at all, you know I’m the, “FOLLOW THROUGH GIRL.” This will get published.
I’m just completing my first book, called “25 years on the air in NYC… and nobody knows my Name!” (Thank you Scott Shannon– an ‘insider’)
I’m just working out what I CAN say… and what I CAN’T! I think it’s called ‘editing.’ 🙂
I’m about to be free to lay this second book out. Whatever you write, will go to press. Be mindful of that, but ‘let it roll’! I look so forward to hearing your stories, as will everyone else!
Thanks-
Robin Marshall
My first gig was with a little AM/FM combo in Waupun, Wisconsin. I had the exciting task of doing the weather once an hour, and make sure that the carousels and reels in the automation ran properly. 2 weeks later, I got my first check…it bounced, and the following day, when I pulled up to the station, a truck was out front loading up everything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were, due to non payment of taxes. So, there I sat, in the parking lot, with a check (for $40 bucks) that was worthless, watching a u-haul pull away with the stations equipment. I was just getting ready to leave, when another car came down the driveway, and out popped the new owner. He said he “liked the way I read the weather” and kept me on. And I stayed…30 years and a lot of grey hair later, I’m still happy I did.
Don- thank you so much for writing this. I have so many great stories that have come in, and yours is one of the best!
All the best to YOU, and spread the word. Maybe you have friends that would like to tell their stories too.
Robin
When I programmed Country station WHN in New York, i produced a series of live broadcasts from the Lone Star Cafe. One night I learned that even a Country station needs a delay. Delbert McClinton was in the middle of his set, when Elvis Costello joined him on stage. Delbert was so excited, he said “Holy s**t, Elvis Costello is here.” Lone Star owner Mort Cooperman told me not to worry, he would handle it and he wrote a note and handed it up to Delbert, who looks at it and then says “Oh f**k, I wasn’t supposed to say s**t on the radio”, at which point I ended the broadcast. The event was written up in Rolling Stones’ Random Notes column the next week, which was the first time I had ever been mentioned in that magazine, and I still have my note from Delbert apologizing for the “bad mouthing”.
You are an amazing man… I’m so happy to know you, even though you ROYALLY F$#&^-ed UP! (back then)
This goes in the book! I would love to have your FIRST radio gig story too!