Symbolized bar code, Quick ID - oh, yeah

Pits upon some polymer.
A digital decree.
Should scratches on the surface show,
Be gentle with CD.

I’m very glad to have missed the digital revolution at the undergraduate station. By the time I showed up as a freshman the control room had a lop-sided majority of compact discs over long-playing records; probably 20:1 if not higher. Judging on the deterioration of the rock records that were still in rotation, it would been interesting to see how the station coped with its main source of music in ruins: records scratched or broken, sleeves ripped and torn, and playback equipment not kept up to...well, speed.

Enter the compact disc: 74 minutes of digital audio that didn’t suffer from generation loss and was easier to manage and store. Just the thought of long-playing suites spread out over multiple records makes me cringe when I think of the station’s classical library on any non-digital medium. Honestly though, I never knew if the station was ever in that predicament. I never saw classical record holdovers, it was always rock, R&B, or jazz. If that’s the case then our classical collection was relatively new – all 700+ discs of it.

We talked about compact discs in Dr. Propel’s introduction class – and gave them a spin in our lab sessions – but I don’t recall anything that stands out. That probably goes hand-in-hand with those 700 classical CDs: the format had inundated all facets of the broadcasting industry to the point the discs were commonplace and not conversation pieces. Whatever novelty factor they had was long gone. Granted even at college you did run into a few audiophiles who belittled the re-mastered discs and said Zeppelin sounded more pristine and “true” when heard on an old turntable. I always found these rants funny coming from someone my age, someone who was born in the midst of Led Zeppelin’s heyday. You know, someone twentieth-century minded.

Led Zeppelin brings to mind the “classic rock” format, which would have been a good way to use the station’s scattered record collection had it survived. When it was decided about my sophomore/junior year to add a weekend classic rock show we had to go out and purchase copies of all the old standbys: Boston, Fleetwood Mac, the Doobie Brothers, and so on. If only we had kept our collection in better shape! What was purchased at the time as “modern” music would have aged perfectly into “classic” rock in a mere 20 years. Makes you wonder how some of the songs mentioned on Backsells will sound in 2010.

Anyway, it was this new classic rock collection we built that comes to mind when I think of compact discs at the radio station (that is, the classic rock collection and all those classical albums...). I mentioned wunderkind Joey Jones last week...he was the type of kid who would have found the sonic differences between Boston’s debut album on LP and CD interesting. Yeah, it’s interesting to a degree but not the subject you break the ice with at a college radio station. Or at college period. Just play the music, man.

Joey ended up with one of the classic rock shifts one semester and this drove some of us nuts. It wasn’t so much his presentation on air – he was nothing like the Young Dude I would meet a year or so later – but his mannerisms and methods behind the scenes. Student management had made Joey a format coordinator – a position that helped the Music Director – and in this position Joey kept stock of the classic rock library. The main duty in this role was printing playlists for the coming week. Joey “helped” us out by adding tracks to the playlist programming software and added occasional bits of trivia for various songs. The catch was that on tracks he couldn’t find anything to add he simply noted, “Be Gentle with CD.”

In Joey’s defense he didn’t add this note to every song right off the bat. But if “Main Street” on the Bob Seger album didn’t skip on his shift last week and it was today, you knew during the next week that the CD would be cleaned and polished with his personal cleaning kit and a note would be added to the playlist for the following Saturday.

Be gentle with CD.

And yes, the phrase got to be a bit of a joke after a while. Especially when it started surfacing elsewhere: taped to CD cases or written across the top of your playlist or even brought up in management meetings as something funny you heard from the previous week.

Ooops. Sorry, Joey.

Stay gentle.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
21st Century (Digital Boy)
(Brett Gurewitz/Mr. Brett)
Bad Religion
From the album Against the Grain
1990

I cant believe it, the way you look sometimes,
Like a trampled flag on a city street, oh yeah,

And I dont want it, the things youre offering me,
Symbolized bar code, quick id, oh yeah,

cause Im a 21st century digital boy,
I dont know how to live but Ive got a lot of toys,
My daddys a lazy middle class intellectual,
My mommys on valium, so ineffectual,
Aint life a mystery?

I cant explain it, the things theyre saying to me,
Its going yayayayayayaya, oh yeah,

cause Im a 21st century digital boy,
I dont know how to read but Ive got a lot of toys,
My daddys a lazy middle class intellectual,
My mommys on valium, so ineffectual,
Aint life a mystery?
I tried tell you about no control,
But now I really dont know,
And then you told me how bad you had to suffer,
Is that really all you have to offer?

See Im a 21st century digital boy,
I dont know how to read but Ive got a lot of toys,
My daddys a lazy middle class intellectual,
My mommys on valium, so ineffectual,

Thats what I yearn for (21st century digital boy),
Neurosurgeons scream for more (21st century digital boy),
Innocence raped with napalm fire (21st century digital boy),
Anything I want I really need (21st century digital boy),
21st century schitzoid boy (21st century digital boy),
21st century video boy (21st century digital boy),
21st century digital boy (21st century digital boy),
21st century sofa boy (21st century digital boy)...

You're so warm, oh, the ritual, when I lay down your crooked arm

If there’s “LP” on its label
Spin the disc on a turntable
Drop the stylus on the grooves
RPM - how quick it moves.

I was surprised at just how much vinyl there was laying around when I was an undergraduate. Yeah, there wasn’t as much of it as there were compact discs, but still there was more than I had ever seen and it was one of the few mediums I recognized. Like most kids my age I had a record collection growing up but, unlike most of the kids, mine had zilch in the way of popular music and consisted more of stories read by Danny Kaye or soundtracks to kid-themed television shows or – my very first – a bizarre exercise in customization with a ridiculous song that repeated my name, or its closest equivalent, over and over. I can still hear echoes of “Martin, it’s ja birth-a-day” to this day.

But everything before college was “records” and now I got to identify those blacks discs as that: discs. Also frowned upon was calling the playback device a “record player,” as it was in truth a turntable and made of more stringent stuff that your home version. But the concept was the same: the discs are placed up on the plate, the tonearm is moved into position, the stylus is cued to the proper track of the disc, and – voilà – you have sound. Contrary to what we were told by the Criminal Element Orchestra, the cartridge did not contain a needle to drop upon the record; rather, the stylus was made of diamond and the vibration of the stylus was converted into an electrical signal through the process of transduction – which I see from my notes was a vocabulary word on one of Propel’s quizzes.

There were a few things students had to be careful with when it came to using the turntable. First was the speed. Young music fans will find nothing notable about the numbers 78, 45, and 33, but these numbers corresponded to the revolutions per minute (rpm) of the phonograph record. Most of the albums we had in the studio were LPs that required playback at 33 1/3 rpm; they could be made to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks if played at 45 rpm. This was something we had to learn to pay attention to as early as our practicum labs with Dr. Propel, who enjoyed nothing more than fiddling with switches and knobs for our hands-on quizzes. The instructions would be to play the turntable “on air” in one of the production rooms. While the student might flip all the switches on the console correctly, if she or he forgot to check the turntable speed then you knew that Propel would be sitting with his half-tooth grin and chuckling for being able to pull one past you.

Secondly, students had to know how to properly cue a record. Keep in mind that the turntable sat stationary until the motor was activated; only then did the plate that held the disc begin to move. If the turntable could not get up to its proper speed before the sound began then there was often an odd noise known as a wow. I suppose, if I needed to write out the description, one could say it sounded like someone talking in slow-motion that rapidly sped up to normal. To prevent this wowing noise, the user had to set the stylus on the lead groove preceding the desired track and then spin the plate (and record) until the exact spot where the sound begins is pinpointed. From here the user spun the plate counterclockwise about a quarter turn or so and then waited.... When it was time to play the track, the DJ made sure the audio console was ready and activated the turntable. Once powered-up, the turntable spun the plate with the disc, the stylus transferred the vibrations on the disc into an electrical signal, something else I’ve probably forgotten to mention happens, and finally the amplified sound is broadcast over the air.

And, if you’re lucky, the disc isn’t scratched. I suppose that could be the third problem with records – when previous users didn’t handle them the best they could sometime receive irreversible damage to their surfaces.

Our main studio had two turntables, neither of which was in regular use by the time I showed up. Most records had been phased out of the control room by my junior year and those that weren’t permanently borrowed by students usually got shuffled from one production room to another in someone’s attempt to get them out of sight. A few of the “good” ones that showed up in the Music Library at one point were The Blue Album of Beatles hits; a 12” single of a Whitesnake song; some David Lee Roth, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop solo albums; and volume 4 of a 10-piece sound effects set. When the studio was remodeled a few years later one turntable was removed.

Once in a while something new showed up – a Beck single here, a Sean Lennon single there, and more than enough R&B remixes – that required a turntable and the DJ on duty had to recall his or her turntable etiquette. Most people shunned away from using the turntable but there were a handful of people that enjoyed dusting it off now and then. For example, when I had to fill in on a Friday night (9 pm to midnight) shift for a month or so my senior year I usually concluded my three hours with the “final vinyl.” I always assumed that no one cared the song was on vinyl but I thought it was cool. In fact, the only person who probably thought it was really cool was Joseph “Joey” Jones, the commercial radio geek-fan who took surveys of radio stations to get find out how many still “cued the disc.”

“Cued the disc.” Man, I always thought it odd when he said that.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Spin the Black Circle
(Pearl Jam)
Pearl Jam
From the album Vitalogy
1994

See this needle...a see my hand...
Drop, drop, dropping it down...oh, so gently...
Well here it comes...I touch the plane...
Turn me up...won't turn you away...

Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...spin the black, spin the black...
Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...whoa...

Pull it out...a paper sleeve...
Oh, my joy...only you deserve conceit...
I'm so big...a-my whole world...
I'd rather you...rather you...than her...

Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...spin the black, spin the black...
Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...whoa...oh...

You're so warm...oh, the ritual...when I lay down your crooked arm...

Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...spin the black, spin the black...
Spin, spin...spin the black circle
Spin, spin...
Spin the black (5x) circle
Spin the black circle... (4x)
Spin, spin... (6x)

Tape loop, keeps on turning round, forever

And now an ode to cartridged tape,
Against the capstan did it scrape
And from two tracks it did spew
Endless noise and a cue.

The next audio format we discussed in Propel’s practicum course was the item that most everyone said (with a groan) reminded them of eight-track tapes. As I had never been put into the awkward predicament of using an eight-track tape – let alone ever seeing one up to that day in class – the cringe-factor was somewhat lost on me. What Propel introduced to us that day was the spool of audiotape called the cart, or cartridge, which, to justify the collective ridicule from the class, was sort of the broadcast equivalent of the very same eight-track cartridges that were popular in the retail industry in previous decades. Propel had dug one out of his personal archives for this bit of show and tell, too.

Tape cartridges were, once upon a pre-digital time, what the radio industry used for the playback of material over the air, be it music, commercial spots, or other elements like jingles or liners. Those who were not privy to the true differences might actually confuse them for their somewhat ridiculed eight-track brethren but we would be trained to tell the two apart. Which, we found out quite quickly, was a wholly simple task.

What made the cart memorable was the key fact that was beaten repeatedly into our heads: the tape is endless. If a brand new, never-been-used cart is placed in the playback machine and the “play” button is pushed, the tape would roll through the machine indefinitely with nothing save a power outage able to stop it (I suppose you could unplug the cart machine to make it stop but then that’s messy and cheating...). No, the only thing that could stop the tape was an inaudible 1 KHz cue tone that was added to the tape during the recording process.

Say you had cartridge that held the equivalent of 0:70 seconds and you’re recording a 0:60 second public service announcement. When the user presses the record and play buttons a cue tone is placed on the audiotape to signify the “start” of the tape. Once the 0:60 seconds are completed the user presses the stop button. To return the tape to the “start” the user presses play by itself, allowing the tape to run for approximately another ten seconds before it stops – the inaudible cue tone has told the machine that this is now the stopping point. More importantly, the cartridge is now “cued” such that it will play from the “start” when the play button is pressed.

Here then was one of the ongoing issues we had at the radio station: people stopping carts before they were cued. It was a major inconvenience (and embarrassment) for a DJ to finish talking during a stop set and then hit the play button on the cartridge machine only to have the sound of shuffling audio tape hiss out over the air. Why did students stop the tape if the machine would do it automatically for them? Who can really say. I sometimes chalked it up the “neat freaks,” the students who assumed that once the 0:30 second spot was done playing that they needed to remove the cart as quickly as possible to get it out of their way. Too much clutter bogged these people down. There were other excuses, too. One person stopped them because the machine was too loud and she complained it distracted her. Another countered that all his carts were always stopped so he felt he should return them the way he found them. I recall one student who “bragged” that he only cued his carts at the end of his shift – it made “more sense that way” he claimed, although it didn’t to me. (It still doesn’t.)

I was always just a user of the carts during my undergraduate years, but about my junior year something sparked a sudden interest in rebuilding carts, something I found utterly out of my league. The idea was to find chipped or broken plastic cartridges and carts with bad audiotape and then combine the best of both: quality audiotape was put into well-kept cartridges and bad audiotape and irreplaceable cartridges were discarded. It may have not been time consuming but there were a lot of tiny parts – wheels, levers, pieces of plastic, and so on – that deterred me from learning the reassembly process.

Usage of carts never diminished: we were using them when I started working at the station and we received a shipment of new ones shortly before I graduated. Carts weren’t a new concept – they seemed the antithesis of anything digital – but we gave them the love they deserved.

...an endless loop of love....

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Tape Loop
(Skye Edwards/Paul Godfrey/Ross Godfrey)
Morcheeba
From the album Who Can You Trust?
1996

Tape loop, keeps on turning round, forever,
Patience, love is coming 'round for your pleasure,
Wait now, no use trying to push, there's no need,
People, go against the grain, with their greed.

I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more,
I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more.

Focus, your mind will be strong, no distractions,
Soak up wisdom all year long, and then take action.

I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more,
I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more.

I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more,
I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more.

I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more,
I've been here before, it ain't gonna work no more.

See what is real and what is make believe

Magnetic tape wound on a wheel
Record and playback, reel-to-reel
Splice because it's not encased,
Shake the rust – it's bulk-erased.

And now a few thoughts on audiotape. It was, simply, everywhere. Thin, brownish-black strings of tape snaked its way up, down, and around every room of the radio station and often into every aspect of the student life. You discussed its measurements and width and movement in class, you practiced using it lab, and then you made it work – ready or not – on staff at the radio station.

The first format for magnetic tape sound reproduction was using reel-to-reel audio tape recording. In the audio profession, reels are the round, somewhat flat plastic or metal devices used to store and playback audiotape. The operator affixed the reel of tape to the spindle of the open reel-to-reel machine and then manually feed the tape over, under, or across the various knobs, rollers, and tape heads to the empty take-up reel. Correctly done, the tape would be pulled across the heads and sound would be produced.

Knowing how to use these machines was expected of practically everybody: Propel’s Introduction course first presented the medium to students and LeMeck’s Advanced course would build from that with topics of tape speed, tape thickness, reverberation, and the anxiety of splicing. After these two required courses students rarely used audiotape reels unless they spent their time working at the radio station. Every audio production room in the Communication Building had one of these open-reel machines, so named because the reels of tape were “open” instead of closed within the confines of a cassette cartridge. Another such device was found in the radio station’s main studio; here the DJ might use the machine to air a lengthy public affairs program.

Students often pointed out that the concept of audiotape was nearing the apogee of antiquation. Why, with all the rage of digital devices, should we be taught how to use the outdated analog equipment? Easy enough, the faculty responded: money. The newest and best digital toys were often so expensive that only certain big market stations could afford them. Not everybody graduates and immediately takes a job at these major market station, but, instead, usually gets their feet wet at middle market stations or, perhaps, at that 900 watt-job out west of the middle of nowhere that’s never heard of digital (those stations, Propel joked, played country music). Those stations, so went this theory, would not have had the resources to purchase the digital equipment and would still be using reel-to-reel machines. Therefore it wouldn’t bode well for a newly graduated radio station employee to not know how to use the most basic of equipment. While that is a somewhat exaggerated theory, the more important reason was to instill students with the fundamentals. If by splicing audiotape the student gained a better understanding of multi-track recording, chances are they would better understand the concept when they had to use a computer to perform a similar task.

Using open-reel machines could be fun, such as when you created echo or reverberation effects with the output. The biggest headaches came from splicing the tape – marking it properly and cutting the tape to remove an unwanted noise and then fastening it back together. It took practice but soon we all mastered the moves. That is, most of us mastered it. During my junior year that Spadowski kid couldn’t reel the thread...I mean, thread the reel.

Really. And he would be graduating at the end of that semester.

Really.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Real
(Ronny Moorings)
Xymox
From the album Metamorphosis
1992

You sit in a garden
locked away from the world
find no reason to see your friends
everything you need is here
but your eyes are open
enough to see you said
all i read are memories
with a black line of love

you make me feel
real

see the hand in front of your face
and see what is real and what is make believe
would you run away to catch the ocean if it called you name ?
Everybody is looking for heaven on earth
and you believe to be bling
your mind is the watchman at the gate
faith is all you need

you make me feel
real
real