After college, or maybe it was during, I had a job for about a year as an overnight DJ at an adult contemporary AM radio station in Southern Virginia. Actually, it wasn’t just an AM station. It was, and still is, AM stereo, which, at the time, had been struggling to gain a foothold ever since that pesky FM came along. The signal actually sounded pretty good if you had an AM stereo receiver and avoided driving under overpasses, during rain, or at night.
WBTM.
World’s Best Tobacco Market.
Though I also heard, World’s Best Textile Mill.
I spun easy listening adult contemporary hits from 10 pm to 6 am and had a very small but loyal following of mental ward inmates, the elderly, and insomniacs. You’d be surprised to know there are so many people who call in at 3 am to request songs or comment on current events. I know I was! Not only were there the regulars… there were fans! I had actual fans! I had a guy call in most every night to predict the air quality index for the next day. At first, I thought he was a 70’s-era prank caller who’d ring just to breathe heavily into my ear, hoping that did it for me, but during our relationship, I learned he suffered from an assortment of breathing-related issues and probably lived in an iron lung. Often, he would call to request “The Air That I Breathe” by The Hollies on what he hoped would be a good Air Quality Index day.
He’d cough into the phone, “It’s gonna be a good day, Winston. Could you play our song?”
He wanted to meet up once. I declined.
I assumed the on-air persona of Chris Winston because I thought Chris Stork sounded too much like Chris-Dork. It was college—things like that bother you at that age. Actually, you never get over being called Chris Dork as a kid. Also, remember… this was the South. I wanted a name that fit in. Chris Winston I hoped would remind people of Winston Cup Racing or Winston cigarettes. I figured people would trust me, like Tom Brokaw. Personally, I liked Winston as in John Winston Lennon, but no one ever called to say, “Play some Beatles, Winston. Wink, wink. But nothing with Yoko!”
Another regular was the “Bob Dylan guy.” Nope, he didn’t call to request Bob Dylan as you’d imagine. Oh… he hated Dylan and called to tell me so every time I played something off of “Highway 61 Revisited.” Often, on long quiet nights at the Stereo AM WBTM, when nothing fun was coming over the raw news feeds and old Bette Midler tracks weren’t cheering me up, I’d play a Dylan tune and stare at the phone like a kid after meeting the girl of his dreams at the roller skating rink. (P.S… this never happened to me. Not just the girl of my dreams part—the girl part. I was the kid who couple-skated with his Aunt when she forced me away from the arcade so I could get some exercise.)
But, the Bob Dylan guy. I’d play a tune, and he would call to tell me how he wrote that song and sent it to Bob “when he was still going by Robert Allen Zimmerman! That traitor!” Apparently, my fan was a poet and sent most of his stuff in letters to Dylan. “Once Zimmerman arranged to meet me to talk about my papers.” He told me this often. Actually, he told me this every time he called. This is how every call started. “Once, we were to meet.” I forget the song he’d quote most often, but he pulled it apart during every call to explain to me the clues about how Dylan was talking directly to him. “See, he’s telling me when and where to meet him. I went, he never showed. Traitor! I think he got cold feet! Thought I’d demand money for my songs! I’d give him those songs. Well then. Not now. When we meet, he’s gonna pay me. Traitor!”
So, on long, lonely nights… I’d play a Dylan tune to send the call out to my fan. I’d aim that bat signal at the asylum that surely existed within our coverage map. Although this was the mid-90s, most of the tracks we played were digital, so we could line up the songs in a cue using a touch screen. You could drop in a Public Service Announcement or a promo for a church bake sale or the weekend swap meet into the mix or even record your voice as a track plugging the upcoming songs. I’d play a game where I’d do the math backward between when I wanted my recorded voice to play and the current time so I’d get the time spot on during my interlude. “It’s 3:37 and 25 seconds in the morning, and up next is a classic from Bette Midler.” I’d say this even though it was recorded hours before. I’d line up a number of songs and a few recordings of myself and take a break to walk around the station or use the restroom. The audio board we used in the booth had faders for all the various inputs, including several raw news feeds for breaking news or the news we’d play at the top of the hour.
Once, I had lined up a half-hour of long songs and a few PSAs and went out to sit in the early morning Virginia air. During a 7-minute and 37-second Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” I started to hear faint voices under the orchestral center of the song. The voices were about tornadoes and destruction and people losing their homes. I listened in and tried to clear the early morning fog from my mind and thought, “I’ve never heard this part of the song before.” When I heard the ABC news slug and the countdown for the 30-second version of the sound bite, I realized I had left one of the faders up, and it was bleeding out over the air and under the Moody Blues. Luckily, it was 3:37 in the morning, and those listening probably enjoyed the confusion… or were confused already.
This was just one of many errors I made during my career as an overnight DJ. I once played Elvis’ “Pretty Paper” in June, not realizing it was a Christmas tune. I ended it with, “Let me be the first to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.”
I retired from that job, having never gained the fame I hoped would come with the job. I never even had a fan run into me on the street and beg for my autograph. The closest I came was once I had a lady on the other end of the drive-thru machine at a biscuit restaurant (named BiscuitVille, of course) say I sounded familiar.
When I pulled up, I asked if she recognized my voice yet.
She said, “No.” I gave her my best AM stereo DJ voice and told her my stage name, but it still didn’t ring a bell.
Maybe Chris Dork would have been more memorable?