"Bed music" is an instrumental background tune that DJs mix with their voice. The music was usually recorded from CD to tape cartridges (the unending loop of tape) and then played at a lower modulation while the DJ talked live on the air over the music. DJs at my undergraduate radio station had the option of using them during stopsets, or breaks, in the rock shifts. There were only about three or four different "beds" to use, all created in previous years by then Program Director, Syd ("the Kid"), who had popularized the practice as another way to make us sound like a commercial top 40 station.
A lot of people were uncomfortable using them – myself included – as it meant you spent more time fiddling with knobs and meters than focusing on something intelligent to say. In time, as we moved away from that "top 40 sound" to a more low-fidelity, college-type atmosphere, the music director and I pulled the bed music from the control room. It was seldom used and, by my senior year, it was time for a change. However, no student comes to mind as an example of someone who depended on bed music than Super Ron (see You got to take the elevator to the mezzanine).
His affiliation with the radio station continued into my senior year but by then he was noticeably cocky and irresponsible. I believe his ego was first inflated when he interned the previous summer in New York State, returning to us commoners with ideas of how "real" stations sounded. With his seniority at our station, Ron soon became the bane of those who had to work with him: he began showing up late to music shifts and tried to get away with antics on air that he knew wouldn't work. He had also taken to parking right in front of the Communication Building, giving university police a chance to constantly ticket his sad excuse for a truck.
I believe it was the issue of bed music that finally dissolved any bond between the two of us. Even though bed music had been removed, Ron found ways to sneak music out of the station office and on to the air. After using one of the tape cartridges, I dropped in unannounced and explained to him we weren’t using bed music anymore. His response was something along the lines of he either "forgot" or that he would play what he wanted. Fine: I pulled both the tape and him into the production room across the hall and proceeded to bulk erase the tape cartridge in front of him, thereby wiping out any trace of the music. The next week he resorted to CDs, pulling out the Barry Adamson disc from the production library and using Something Wicked This Way Comes. As the disc was used in various radio productions, we couldn't break the disc. And who would want to? I even went out after I graduated and bought a copy and still listen – and laugh – at the memorable grooves, beats, voices and textures.
We weren't speaking by the end of the spring semester and I refused to contribute any report to the faculty advisor when it came to grade suggestions. I did discover, the following year when I was a graduate student and station manager at the other station, that "Super" Ron was glad I was gone and said, in his eyes, I was a horrible program director. The only other thing I learned was that he had not paid off the previous school year's parking tickets and had already amassed another thousand on the then-current school year.
Things were not as super for Ron as they had been the previous year. I hope everything worked out for him, wherever he is.
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
(Barry Adamson/Blackwell/Datin/Del-Naja / Marshall/Middlesbrooke/Shapiro/Vidalin/Vowel)
Barry Adamson
From the album Oedipus Schmoedipus
1996
(Instrumental)
