Radio: Modern Rock News from WTGZ, circa 2000
What Is This Crap?: I worked for an independent commercial radio company during and after college pt. 1. I started as a salesperson and ended as the production manager. This job was awesome, despite the salary (i think i was making $18k/yr when i quit) and all the drama that comes with working in radio.
When I started writing copy instead of not selling ads, the production staff had a 1-minute segment called ‘Modern Rock News,’ which wasn’t much more than a honey-voiced talent staffer regurgitating the daily press releases (which came in fax form back then) from BMG.
The program director asked me to take over this job when I became the production manager, and Modern Rock News became a 3-5 minute editorial that listeners and coworkers often called “libby’s mouth diarrhea.” I spent 4-8 hours creating a new Modern Rock News every weekday for THREE YEARS, and they became increasingly more offensive and retarded. The majority of these things exist only on cassette tapes, but I have a few of them on MP3’s.
Alabama is bible-belt-buckle territory, and the radio company got a fair amount of complaints about these editorials, but I gotta give the crazy cokehead redneck motherfucker who owns those stations due credit: He never once interfered with anything I did on the air, and I think he enjoyed watching people get pissed. If these things had aired in a big, liberal metropolitan area instead of the backwoods of Bama, WTGZ probably would’ve had more trouble with the FCC than they already did.
This episode was my second to last, and definitely not the best (I’ll post the finale next). The male talent was a really smart, cute guy named Phil Caraway. He was so much fun to work with.
(also, posting this stuff weighs heavy on my cringe factor.)