I found a treasure filled with sick pleasure

We played a lot of Green Day at both campus stations, though certain tracks, especially those with lyrical content, were available at the undergrad station in edited versions via weekly preview discs or, as often was the case if we had only the album, completely left out of rotation. One song that sticks out all these years later is the thundering gallop of Geek Stink Breath.

Why? It all had to do with the time. Clocking in at just over two minutes, the song was perfect filler material if your last song on the playlist ended too early and you wanted to add some padding to get a bit closer to the top of the hour. Station management, which I was part of by this point, wasn’t strict on hitting the exact top of the hour, but there were perfectionists who continually tried.

I picked up on this trick by another DJ – a rather cool kid named Mark – who asked if his constant use of the song on his shift was being disruptive. After explaining his reasons to me, I admitted I loved the logic behind it and took the song out of regular rotation but kept it available in the studio and therefore if ever you heard Geek Stink Breath near the top of the hour, chances are the DJ was making time. There were probably other short songs that were used for similar purposes but we all knew where the Green Day CD single was and could cue it up in no time.

One note about the lyrics: I recall a note warning about language but I could never hear the offending word while I worked at the station. It’s not until I read them with the song now that I realize what’s being said.

Big deal, eh?

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Geek Stink Breath
(Billie Joe Armstrong/Green Day)
Green Day
From the album Insomniac
1995

I'm on a mission
I made my decision
To lead a path of self destruction
A slow progression
Killing my complexion
And it's rotting out my teeth

I'm on a roll
No self control
I'm blowing off steam with methamphetamine
Don't know what I want
That's all that I've got
And I'm picking scabs off my face

Every hour my blood is turning sour
And my pulse is beating out of time
I found a treasure
filled with sick pleasure
And it sits on a thin white line

I'm on a roll
No self control
I'm blowing off steam with methamphetamine
Don't know what I want
That's all that I've got
And I'm picking scabs off my face

I'm on a mission
I've got no decision
Like a cripple running the rat race
Wish in one hand shit in the other
And see which one gets filled first

I'm on a roll
No self control
I'm blowing off steam with methamphetamine
Don't know what I want
That's all that I've got
And I'm picking scabs off my face

The Six 45 Episode

Just as Soda Sandwich (see Everyone is so angry and nobody fits) was the lackluster local band at my undergrad college radio station, the high school sounds of Six 45 were the mind-numbing musicians at station when I was in grad school – and the fast favorite for the "All Around Worst" award. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not dissing them for their efforts. I respect them for trying to get their hands wet with music. It was their less-than-professional manner of gaining promotion and respect that I think drove others to dislike them so much.

The first half of this story happened one evening after class.

As station manager, I would often stop in and take a listen of how things were going, answer questions and make an overall effort to be visible and approachable. I was a grad student and the staff running this station consisted of sophomores through seniors – undergrads like I had been the year before. It was approachng 7:30 and in the booth were the on-air DJ, the music director, another DJ pulling music for his shift that started at the top of the hour, and myself. There was a knock at the front door of the station. Someone jumped up and was gone for a few minutes. When he returned he had two young kids with him – freshmen, maybe.

If the kids introduced themselves by name, I don’t know, but they did say they were with the local band Six 45 and wanted their disc played on the station and, more so, to be included in our weekly show of local and regional bands. To solidify this request they produced a copy of what they called "their new CD," which everyone in the room thought meant “another, possibly a second, album.” The music director accepted the disc, saying he’d have to check the lyrics and that while we’d give it a spin or two sometime, the listeners would be the real test as to how good it was and how much future airtime it received. And so the kids went their way.

They hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the phone rang. The DJ on duty answered and after a short pause – and a sarcastic snort – said, “I’ll see what I can do,” which in disc jockey lingo is the standard response when asked for a request, roughly translated as, “Sure – maybe when Hell freezes over.” With a laugh, the DJ told us the caller was a girl who had “heard” that the station had just gotten the “new” Six 45 record and her request was to hear a track or two.

The rest of us in the studio groaned, realizing the pawns we had just become. The DJ who started in thirty minutes said he’d play it next hour but wanted to preview it in a nearby production room first. His review was something short, like “not good.” First he had discovered the disc was nothing more than a cheap read/write disc, not known for the best sound quality. Second, the five or six tracks sounded sludgy and undecipherable; in short, not enjoyable. Third, he found out from the album credits that the kids were in high school. He joked at the thought of the band throwing their music together after school that day and unable to think of a name. We all laughed as we pictured the kids finishing the recording of the disc at a quarter to 7pm and using that time designation as the band's name (6:45...).

It was playable nonetheless and the DJ made good on his promise of playing a track. The next day he somewhat bitterly revealed that his only requests all night were for “new” Six 45 tracks. And it got worse from there: other DJs were getting calls for it, too – regardless of format. Even the jazz shift, whose DJs didn’t even know what a Six 45 was.  When it wasn’t played during the nightly rock shifts, I was told, members of the band called and complained, saying they didn’t bring a copy of their disc to our station to have it sit and collect dust. Obviously attitudes like this didn’t win over any fans at the station. 

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The second part of the Six 45 story came a number of months later, when the DJ for the weekly local music show came by the music office and Six 45 was station lingo for "local joke."

He worked at Hastings part-time and said Six 45 had been in many weeks ago, trying to make a deal so they could sell their music to whatever fan base they had in the community. Hastings agreed and the discs were set alongside the other albums. During the proceeding week, however, Hastings management had discovered the Six 45 albums were getting moved from the "general sale" bins to prime areas at the end of the aisles. The student who worked at Hastings reported the store had called the band members a couple of days prior and reportedly said one night after checking their stock that all the Six 45 albums had apparently been stolen, as they came up missing from the bins. The band then reportedly all but confessed their true actions, saying that when they were in the store the day before, they had "seen" their discs in the display at the end of the aisle.

This clinched it for Hastings: the store claimed to receive money from record companies to have certain albums prominently featured in special displays and Six 45 had jeopardized Hastings’ trust. As a result the store told the band they had 24 hours to come remove all their albums or the store would throw them out. The student telling the story said he had just come from his workplace, where Six 45 had arrived a bit too late. I don’t know how much airtime Six 45 got on the station after this. If anything, we didn’t play the disc since it was probably the only copy left in town. And you know how rare treasures like this can be. So rare, in fact, that we don’t know any song title nor have any lyrics. No giant loss. - - 

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unknown title (unknown writer)
Six 45
From the independently self-released album
c. 1999

[Lyrics not known]

We share the same spaces, repeated in the corridors

The content within the daily sign-on announcement (see Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125) did not change much and neither did the recorded version played every morning, though memorable modifications were altering the station slogan and updating the area code of the phone number. There was, however, one version created by undergrad station superstar, Jim "The Sparkler" Drake. Early on, Jim was doing one of the five-minute sports shifts; he would later go to do color commentary during basketball season, where he suddenly started self-applying the nickname, "sparkler." The guy meant well but wasn't exactly a "sparkler" in sense of personality: sort of a spotty, mild-mannered guy with an off-pitch voice and whose attempts at facial hair were outdone by Chia pets.

Jim was enrolled in the "Introduction to Broadcasting" class and, as part of the accompanying lab, had an assignment due that did not meet with passing marks by the instructor. Most of these lab hours graded assignments not as "pass verses fail" but "pass verses try again and, to ensure you do it right the second time, here's another assignment." Meaning, as I learned once when my 0:30 station promo did not meet "broadcast standards," I not only had to redo the original project and resubmit it, but also traipse all the way to the library, find the class syllabus and workbook that the instructor had hidden away in the reference section, choose a second assignment, complete it, and then submit it for a grade and hope it too met broadcast standards or I'd be back at the library giving myself more work to do. Doug Spadowski found this out the hard way...but we'll get to him later.

Whatever Jim's first assignment was had not passed and as his additional project he was to create a sign-on announcement for the station. These "secondary" assignments usually had little instruction but strict rules (such as 30 seconds, not 31, on promos...) and if he didn't know what a sign-on announcement was then he had precious little time to find out and get one produced.

I shouldn't have known about Jim's assignments except that people occasionally left items in the production rooms on accident and some of the senior staffers loved nothing more than to find these misplaced items – borrow them briefly, if you will, to dub a copy – and later use them to our advantage...usually on the air. It didn't take a genius to figure out why Jim was in the production room but his second project had a few jarring items: first, there was a distinct buzzing noise throughout the entire piece, as if there was a bad connection during recording; I couldn't imagine why he didn't hear it. Secondly, the audio levels were not up-to-par; it wasn't inaudible but the meter readings weren't off the roof, if you know what I mean. Lastly, for the music bed, he had chosen the instrumental section of the INXS song, The Stairs. There wasn't a music requirement on the assignment, I'd wager, as the then current announcement had some light music, but it was a sort of odd thing to hear the Sparkler's choice of music. Anyway, the music wasn't the problem, it was the buzzing and I wagered after he submitted this project and gotten his grade that the poor guy had to walk over to the library, find the class workbook....

Another thing that stood out was his uncertainness in delivering the copy – strange pauses in the middle of sentences where you wondered if he wasn't silently asking himself if he'd said the right thing. I'm sure he had a script but you wouldn't believe it; hence, after giving the technical bits of the station in a voice that sounded almost, but not quite, entirely not casual, he sort of flubbed a few lines about how great the station was and for listeners to stick around and hear "some of the best...of...what radio...does best." You got the impression from listening that he knew he had said the wrong thing as soon as he closed his mouth.

After a few initial rewinds to make sure someone actually babbled that line, I got a copy and used it a year or so later in a station liner compiled of various audio outtakes. I don't think Jim was around to hear his contribution but I'm sure he would have found it sparkling.

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The Stairs
(Andrew Farriss/Michael Hutchence)
INXS
From the album X
1990

In a room above a busy street
The echoes of a life
The fragments and the accidents
Separated by incidents

Listen to by the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

Storey to storey
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

Storey to storey
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

Listen to by the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

The nature of your tragedy
Is chained around your neck
Do you lead or are you lead
Are you sure that you don't care

There are reasons here to give your life
And follow in your way
The passion lives to keep your faith
Though all are different, all are great

Climbing as we fall
We dare to hold on to our fate
And steal away our destiny
To catch ourselves
With quiet grace

Storey to storey
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

Listen to by the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

Storey to storey
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125

Because neither campus radio station I worked at was a 24-hour operation, we had to sign-on the station every morning. Talk about an ode to joy. Most notably at the undergrad station, all DJs were required to be at the station 15 minutes before their shift and this was especially important for the first operators of the day, the person who would activate the transmitter.

Of course, first you had to get inside the building – students were required to drive to the far side of campus to the University Police and Security (UPS) offices and get the key to the building: a list of the designated students (as well as all student management) had been provided by this point, making retrieving the key a relatively effortless ordeal. The lucky person got a silly little key ring with two keys: one to get inside the building and the other to get inside the main studio. Ideally you wanted to time your waking up and driving and relaxing so that at 5:45 you could begin the transmitter process.

Our actual radio tower was outside the building; to prepare it for use we had to push three different buttons on a mechanism in the control room. There was a system to the buttons – you had to push the circular one first, actually push and hold it the button in for five or ten seconds. Then you had to wait a few minutes for it to "warm up" and get a reading off a meter. A second button activated something else, and then the third button or switch or whatever finally readied us for broadcasting – you knew this because the volume and wattage meters on the equipment awoke. If you had been listening to the radio station at that time, before the button pushing began, you would have heard static; once the meters moved, you heard the silent lull of dead air. These meters readings were so important that we had to not only log the time we activated the transmitter and what the meter readings were, but at the start of each shift the rest of the day (every three hours), whoever was "in charge" of the control room had to also log the meter readings. This was the transmitter log, as required by the FCC, containing that day's list of operators and what time period they were responsible for the station.

The button pushing probably took five-to-ten minutes tops and it wasn't something you could breeze through if you were running late. Once the transmitter was ready, we had to wait until 6:00 – okay, 5:59 for purists – and then run the sign-on announcement. This was a produced element that contained basic elements such as the station call sign, transmitter power, ownership, and other general information. After the announcement ended it was straight into music and, depending on which semester this was, that could mean either jazz, some sort of rock (as seen with the "morning shows" of my Freshman year) or, more probable, classical music.

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Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
(Ludwig van Beethoven)
Performed by Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique with Gilles Cachemaille, Anne Sofie von Otter, Luba Orgonasova, Anthony Rolfe Johnson
Conducted by John Eliot Gardiner
From the album Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies
1994