Turner Watson

Ten years ago, I lost the last radio gig I’ll likely ever have. To this day, people ask me about it. That’s flattering as hell, by the way. It’s nice to know that there were actually people invested in what we jocks were doing on and off the air. By the way, “jock” is a radio term for “Deejay”. Trust me when I say that most radio folks are not what you’d call ‘athletic’. Except for a few guys I knew, like Eddy Crow (formerly of WIKY, WRBT, WGBF, WDVE, now doing a radio talk show in the Pittsburgh region) who had been a college football player…and the legendary Chaka Chandler, who played basketball for the University of Evansville… most of us were a bit too rough around the edges. Some were downright frail, and others mildly obese. We’d play charity softball games…badly…and that was about it for the rank and file. But I digress.

A bit of backstory, before delving into the events leading up to my dismissal. I’d started my professional radio career in 1993, working as a morning show sidekick for WBLZ, The Monster, in Mt. Vernon, Indiana. On the AM side of the dial, I was also a news guy, which meant doing a shift on the classic country station, reading crop reports, doing play-by-play for high school sports, and, I shit you not, reading the obituaries on the air. From there it was WYNG, the #1 country station in Evansville (where I would meet my future wife), then WGBF, where I worked my way up to program director, posting some of the most successful books (ratings periods) in the station’s history. Got married, and whisked the wife to WXNR, Greenville-New Bern-Jacksonville, NC for a few years before finally landing at WBYR in Ft. Wayne. Three morning show co-hosts later, I got bumped to middays to make room for the Bob & Tom Show, and I was juuuuust this side of miserable. Let me explain why.

When I began doing radio in the 1990’s, everything was still very much analog. We recorded phone calls on a reel-to-reel machine, and edited those calls with a razor and tape. Songs were played primarily from CD’s, and the good stations at least had them pre-loaded into little cartridges that you’d slap into a machine, turn the dial to the right track (or wrong track, sometimes. Oops.) and hit the correct fader button on the console to start the song. There were still, in those days, instances when we’d play an actual vinyl record or a song dubbed onto a “cart” tape. Carts were like an 8-track tape cartridge, and they’d get loaded into a bank of usually six such machines. All of the commercials and sweepers (those little drop-ins between songs that would tell you that the station was playing the absolute maximum amount of new rock/classic hits/hot country for the 90’s/etc.) were loaded onto carts and played as needed, then swapped for the next element. So to do a regular on-air shift was to direct a one-person symphony…play the song, open the mic to solicit the phone calls for a contest, play the sweeper, play the next song, swap the CD for the song to follow, remove and replace the cart with the new cart containing the music bed for the contest phone call playback, and while all that’s going on, tell callers 1-14 that they didn’t win, call back next time, then hit the next sweeper, start the next song, and answer the phone to tell caller 15 that they’d won tickets to the monster truck show (and make sure you’ve started the reel-to-reel machine to record the call) while playing the NEXT sweeper element, cue up the call on the reel machine, let the song end, pot up (turn the appropriate slider up on your console/mixer) the phone call, play it back, open the mic at the end to congratulate the winner and inform the listeners that their next chance to win was in the 9 O’clock hour, front-sell the hot tunes coming up, and promise to give the weather report after the break. Play the commercials (usually about six of these), open the mic, and tell everyone about the partly cloudy skies, with a chance of showers in the overnight. “Right now it’s sixty-four, with Jane’s Addiction on The X.” Then you see how long you have to maybe jump outside for a smoke. THAT, my friends, was how we used to do it. It was a rush. It was stressful. Every single radio jock who’s ever done more than a shift or two still, to this very day, has the recurring dream of not having the next CD ready, the old dead air dream.

Then, the computers came.

Now, a jock sits at the board, watching whatever’s on the control room TV, scrolling social media, while the on-air computer plays fifteen minutes worth of songs, on-air elements, sweepers, etc. You wait for you chance to open the mic and say your bit. Then you wait some more. The good jocks use that time to scour the internet for interesting show fodder, they record a phone call (or use one of the ones they’ve digitally saved for later use. You’re not crazy: you really have heard the same request for the same song multiple times.) For an old salt like myself, this is literally soul-crushing. It’s boring as fuck. And half the shows you hear are now pre-recorded, so that the jock is free to do more commercial production or work on tomorrow’s logs or even voice-track (pre-record) a show for an entirely different station.

So that’s where I found myself after losing the highly successful TNT show. A show that was only cut for two real reasons: the first being that the Bob & Tom show already had a sizeable financial commitment. They couldn’t just cancel B&T without paying out the rest of the contract. But when their station, 92.3 The Fort, flipped formats, there was no place for them to go that made sense, other than 98.9 The Bear. The second reason was that the GM always hated me, and never understood what it was about our show that made it so successful.

After doing a couple of years of the midday show (which wasn’t without a few bright points, among them the Power Hour, the overlap between myself and John Arroyo’s afternoon show, which felt like a brief little slice of morning show creativity each day) I finally did it. I gave them the excuse they’d been waiting for.

I happen to be a big fan of dinosaurs. I aced my Prehistoric Life classes in college, when people were failing left and right. I owned a hardback copy of Bakker’s “The Dinosaur Heresies”. I absolutely devoured the novel and movie versions of Jurassic Park. And along the way, I’d developed a pretty mean velociraptor impression. So, one afternoon, whilst walking down the hallway towards the break room, I was high-stepping, hands drawn up like velociraptor forelimbs (okay, full disclosure time. I was more realistically doing a deinonychus or Utah raptor, as velociraptor was much smaller than they were depicted in the films. Just felt like that finally needed some clarification, for I am a geek.) and making the barking, hissing, and snarling noises for which the cinematic raptors are well known. Walking down the opposite side of the hallway was one of my counterparts from sister station WOWO. This gentleman, who I believe did their farm report, looked at me with a cross between fear and disdain, cradling his coffee close to his body for fear of this rabid rock jock doing something frighteningly unexpected, which would surely cause him to flinch, drenching his moisture-wicking button-up shirt with his overly-sweetened coffee. I passed him by, thought nothing of it, and returned to the studio. On Facebook, I posted that “Apparently the squares at WOWO don’t appreciate my velociraptor impression.” Important note, here: this was on my ‘personal’ Facebook page. I carried (and it’s still there, I use it from time to time) a Facebook ‘page’ for my more public stuff, radio and such. I soon received a call from our Operations Manager, who suggested I take the status down.

“Why? It’s my personal page, and doesn’t even mention anyone by name. It’s a joke,” I argued.

“You know WOWO doesn’t have a sense of humor about this sort of thing,” I was told. “I think you should take it down.”

I relented, and deleted the post. By that point, the comments had proliferated, and it was great. A friend from the UK asked if WOWO stood for “Word Of Warcraft Office” and it spooled on from there. My friends are very creative and hilarious. This was probably the sort of behavior which my OM believed would not make WOWO happy.

Oh, one sidebar, regarding WOWO. I have had great friendships with some of their crew. I’ve seen several of their on-air staff go on to do some amazing things, and had a strange friendship with the late Charly Butcher, who would come down to the Bear studio to chat with “the cool people” and also to throw knives at the wall. (Yes, we did that.) I never had, and still don’t, any beef with the station or its employees. This whole thing seemed more like management being overly cautious. Just wanted to be clear on that point. This was never really about our sister station.

I removed the post, but then, because I am a stubborn little shit, I posted a follow-up question, asking all my radio and media peeps how THEY would have handled a request to remove a post from a personal Facebook profile. And, yeah. That’s what got me in trouble. I got called into our GM’s office and was told I was suspended until the following Monday (this was a Thursday afternoon, I believe.) I was told that my fate would be decided then, but let’s be clear, I knew exactly what was about to happen. Sure enough, Monday morning, I came in and was told to clear out my things. My time at 98.9 The Bear was over, after ten years in various roles. I wasn’t shocked. A little sad, maybe…and, in the back of my mind, a little relieved. I had felt the rumblings, knew there was change in the air. For starters, I was a midday guy making morning show money. Radio jocks don’t make a lot, mind you…but the morning and afternoon jocks usually pull down more than the other dayparts. So, there was that. Then, they had recently re-hired an old voice form WBYR, Matt Talluto, The Gasman. He had been hired to be the new program director. And while I’m not convinced that any of this was his idea, it wasn’t lost on me that he’d been fired back in 2004 to make room for the new TNT Morning Show, so it was a full-circle sort of thing. Again, I don’t think it was his idea…but management had hired him to be an off-air PD, so he was supposedly there to run the station, not hold down a show of his own. Please. No way they hire a guy like that, a legend in the market and the station itself, and have zero plans to put him back on the air. It didn’t make any sense. I knew they were going to find a slot for him. It made total sense to do so. And there was Turner Watson, a thorn in the side of management, making more money than the usual midday person. All they needed was an excuse.

Of course, it was deeper than that. In the week after I was let go, so was our night jock and our sales manager. “Nothing personal, folks…we just gotta save money.” I guess I should feel honored that at least there was a tangible reason for me to get canned. Not sure the other employees got anything more than “Sorry, we’re making changes.” That’s radio, baby. It’s a business now. All that ultimately matters is the bottom line. I guess that means that the media has finally grown up. Pity, that.

The choice for me, then was what to do next. My family still needed to eat. Would I scour the classifieds for radio gigs in nearby markets? Load the family into a U-Haul and drive across country to a rock station in Sacramento? Find a part-time gig in town until something opened up in Ft. Wayne? I decided to do none of these things. I decided, instead, to start flexing my writing and creative chops again. I got a job as a copywriter at an ad agency, then a few years later took the gig (facilitated by, of all things, an old radio chum…who now calls Ft. Wayne Komets play-by-play on, you guessed it…WOWO) as Creative Director of a smaller ad agency, and I’m putting the finishing touches on a couple of novels. I guess you could say this is my second act, and it’s been pretty amazing.

I am often asked “do you miss it?” The radio life? Some of it, yes. I loved the camaraderie. I loved the spontaneity of it, the “big” moments like introducing bands like Social Distortion or Volbeat, of hanging out with rock stars before and after shows. I miss the free drinks, I miss the ego-boosting words of appreciation from listeners. That was all great. But I don’t miss the behind-the-scenes politics, the dreary meetings and conferences. And I don’t miss the schedule. That’s something I think jocks don’t get enough credit for: the work ethic. There were days, doing the morning show, where we’d be up around 4:00am, to the station to prep for the show, four hours on the air, two hours of production time afterwards. Then, on Wednesdays, it was out to Bear on the Square to serve up hot dogs and drinks to the public from 11:30am-1pm. Then, maybe, you’d have a live remote from a car dealership from 3-6, and a show at Piere’s (probably Saliva or Sevendust) from 7- 10:00p. Then to bed for a few hours’ sleep before getting up to do it all over again. As a single 20-something, this is no problem. As a 40-something father of two, it’s rough. Leaving radio behind allowed me to have my life back. It allowed me to coach both my sons in hockey, and take weekends to do whatever I wanted. I am free to breathe. I am free to make plans. I am free to live. And it’s been great.

So, to everyone who ever asked, there you have it. Hard to believe it was all a decade ago. And a big shout-out to the folks who come up to me and tell me about their memories of the TNT Show, or meeting me at some far-flung remote in Waterloo, Indiana or wherever. The time I got them to meet the guys from Puddle of Mudd, or the bus trip we took to see the Colts. Even those of you who say hurtful things like “I used to listen to you in middle school.” Hahaha, that sort of remark underscores how long I was at it, I guess, so even if it makes me feel old, it makes me smile. Because I know I had a helluva run. Even though I wouldn’t go back, I wouldn’t trade it all for anything in the world.

Peace and love,

T.