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]
Six 45
From the independently self-released album
c. 1999
[Lyrics not known]