Deferred

An all too common problem in this day and age is project follow through. That is, this blogger specifically. Our most popular post over the last six months was one we shared concerning a book that I started to write. Well, I wrote—really wrote, rewrote, polished, then trashed, and started over—a chapter of my memoir. It was an uphill battle that in the final analysis was beyond my talents as a writer to complete. My hat is off to any successful author. Writing a book is harder than it looks. It is easy to write, but the struggle is in polishing the work: removing the blemishes, ironing out the wrinkles and making my words universally appealing, flowing logically. When I was done polishing what remained was decidedly unsatisfying. Let’s go back to the drawing board. The project is stalled for now.

Tied for second and third place are posts that concern my podcasts done over the last year and my review of a local radio show now streaming on the Internet. Another failed enterprise is the podcasts because of lack of the availability of new, original material. Most of my podcasts were rehashed radio shows and personal tapes I had done years ago. I do intend to continue writing reviews of shows on the air and the Internet.

Maybe it is me. I have had too many hobbies and interests over the years.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden. Gospel Aircheck blog. All rights reserved.

Brainstorming

Over the last couple of years I have been toying around with several ideas for a new type of Christian radio station. Certainly not to compromise my beliefs, this new station would feature songs and styles from the many different artists both Christian and those not normally labeled as Christian performers per se. Taking some of the liners and id’s from my previous Internet stream, the GRIN, and combining music from the separate genres I put together a demonstration of how it might sound using Ableton Live software. You know what? It sounded great!

Songs such as Foreigner’s I want to Know What Love Is segued perfectly with Big Daddy Weave’s Hold Me Jesus. Good music is good music, no matter what the label. Back in the mid 80’s I wanted so badly to play the hit by Foreigner and thought it would fit perfectly with our gospel format. Secular music was taboo on our air so we played the gospel version by the New Jersey Mass Choir, the actual choir used to back up the rockers on the original song. The gospel cover version was not bad, I just wanted to play the original. 25 years later, I still believe that playing secular music is not a compromise of personal beliefs. However, it does not fit most listeners expectations of what a “Christian” station should be.

My station would have a very deep playlist that featured songs old and new. It would not mirror the new way of thinking with Christian programmers these days: where a song that is older than, say, six months is discarded. For the first time in my life, it would be a format that I would actually listen to. Of course the idea is still incubating.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden. Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved.

The Book

Last month I referred to a book project that I intended to start. Well, I have most of chapter one drafted. Now the polishing stage has begun. Edit after edit has kept me occupied for most of the month. The blogs have been placed on the back burner for now. I will delve into further research and development of my narrative. The Internet is a valuable tool, but nothing replaces good old-fashioned trips to the book store, library, old-timey telephone and, gasp, in-person interviews. It is a work in progress that tells my family story growing up a preacher's son. My parents were both blind and I believe most readers will find their stories very interesting. Particularly how they lost their sight. My dad in an explosion in 1947 and my mom at the hand of her own mother when she was only 10 months old. 

It is also my story in Christian radio and subsequent years. My focus now is writing a fully researched paper that will provide the back-story and basis for the whole. I already have hours of audio tape dairies my dad made and a few relevant newspaper articles. The accident of '47 is available in gruesome detail from the National Archive since it involved a nearby military base. A bomb thought to be a dud landed near my dad's residence. The ordinance was responsible for the death of my 11 year old uncle, his neighbor, the loss of my dad's sight, and an aunt's eye. Obviously, I have my work cut out for me.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden,Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved.

Channel Grazing

Back in 1992 I worked for a small 2,500 watt AM radio station hid near Bremen, Georgia. We played Southern Gospel music and brokered preacher shows from daylight to dark. Our studio location was situated on the same property as our tower facility on about two acres of pasture land. In fact, we had fenced in a cow or two grazing out back near the antenna. I even had one or two bovine interactions when no humans we available to chat. Cows are not very social. I often wondered the purpose of these animals on our land and have learned recently that often these little stations, similar to mine, posted grazing animals in order to keep the grass mowed thanks to a special agreement with local farmers. The following is a story I discovered while reading a radio forum posted by an owner of such a station. I don’t know the source, but the scenario seems plausible. One word of caution to animal lovers: the story is a bit graphic.

“In the late 80's I owned WDGR Dahlonega, GA.  The station's studios, transmitter and tower were all located together, with the tower being in the middle of the 5 acre property.  The station was (where else?) - Radio Road, and the land behind the station was fenced.  Trying to keep the field bush hogged was a job, and after dodging snakes for a summer I decided on a solution that would pay me.  A local farmer needed some grazing land for some cows, and we struck a deal where I'd keep his cows inside the fence where they could effectively keep my tower field mowed.  After getting paid for keeping the cows fenced and fed for 7 months, I was quite pleased.

One afternoon I heard a loud pop from inside the station and we immediately went off the air.  I headed out the back door where I saw a small fire in the middle of the field.  As I went down the steps with an extinguisher I noticed the rail was dotted with red paint, something else to fix.  I noticed all the cows were bunched tightly together way down at the bottom of the field, and at the same time I saw to my horror, a cow leg and hind quarter lying next to my car.  Further down inside the fence I saw another.  A fire, cow parts - I couldn't put all this together, and as I looked at the back door I saw that the entire back of the station was dotted NOT with red paint, but blood.  An extremely unlucky cow had bitten into the transmission line buried close to the transmitter building and 10,000 watts had literally blown it up.  It was a pretty horrible sight, and also pretty hard to explain to everyone calling wanting to know when we'd return to the air.  ‘We'll be back on the air soon - a cow blew up and took us off the air.’

I went back to bush hogging the field - the money I'd made from fencing the cows went to repairing the transmission line.  Wild days, and I wouldn't trade them for anything.  I'm sure the cow would though.”

Jay Andrews
VP & General Manager
Jacobs Media Corporation

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden, Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved

Brick Wall Broadcasting

Do you ever get discouraged on your job? Does it seem that despite your best efforts success eludes you? I found myself in such a situation at my second radio home. Just a few months prior to getting this job I had resigned from my first broadcast station leaving to pursue major market radio. I launched out not knowing for sure if I would land a DJ gig at all. Gospel 90 had offered me transfer to their 50,000 watt sister in Atlanta. Determined to make it on my own I, at age 20, turned down a sure thing and a 100 mile daily commute for something closer to home in suburbia. Had I made a bad move?

I was at this new home on 1520 AM only four months when the news came down that the charismatic church  that owned WSPZ was selling the facility. Budget crunched owners lost interest in the station shortly after their pastor (also station general manager) unexpectedly resigned. He championed our little station; with him gone the gloves were off. The deacons now had free reign to unload the little thousand watt daytimer that signed my paychecks. Key staff dropped like flies and I became program director having jumped two pay grades in short order. For all intent and purposes I was my own boss with a skeleton crew on a shoestring budget. We made the best of the circumstances with decent content and better than average talent   making a little money by adding high school sports coverage with both local and national sponsors.

The owners wanted $750,000 for the station and wound up settling for $70,000 three years later having kept us paid without fail. The whole crew, although discouraged, must have been surprised the station didn't go dark; to the owners' credit we were never laid off or asked to take pay cuts. Today's aircheck is my final morning show on April 20, 1990, for the church owned 1520 AM which ceased broadcast operations 4 O'clock that afternoon. Listen as I almost reveal the transition which was kept mum until it was legal later that day. 20 years have obscured details of officially passing the torch to the new owner. Such as it is, the recording remains.

©2010 Gospel Aircheck. All rights reserved.

Let's Roll!

  For those of us schooled in the Pentecostal and Southern Baptist conventions dancing and rock music, for instance, was taboo in any form so the youth of my day felt they needed a substitute. The ultra conservative “Holiness” sects would argue that even innocuous substitutes for raunchy dancing and, by extension, even roller skating was just as sinful and viewed as a gateway to Hell.

  Shoot, in modern churches dance teams Rock-n-roll bands are very common in worship; my, how times have changed. I recently attended a church youth presentation of a mainline denomination that featured fast paced dancing to secular popular music accompaniment with no pretense of using a Christian alternative. Funny how even the churches are becoming more politically correct, omitting Christ when convenient. Those kids knew nothing of the restrictions I grew up with so I took no offense, especially considering the current rueful tone of Christian music.

  Winning the “lost” teens of my day involved using our generation's happier gospel music set to a modern beat. As I have noted in a previous post; I briefly moonlighted as DJ on Christian skate nights. The pairing of Southern Gospel and skates has always been surreal to me. I never thought the genre was compatible. So in 1984 I jumped at the opportunity to spin rock derived Contemporary Christian music (CCM) for the attending youth groups each week at the Savannah Skate Inn on Saturdays . The tunes were fast paced and skate-able, freedom for our otherwise restricted youth. Not so in today's more bland homogeneous and bleak themed CCM. Christian skate night simply would not work for the present generation.

  It was hard enough selling the idea of rolling to gospel music in my day when CCM was generally better, stylistically. The unchurched scoffed; we were preaching to the choir of those who attended (maybe a few invited their “unsaved” friends.) The ultra conservative simply weren't allowed or came without the knowledge of their pastor. It was a wholesome activity, I figured, so why did it fail? It might just boil down to a fickle public that summer. Who knows?

  My passion was reaching my peers. In some ways I was successful. My 2 years of persistent argument finally broke down the tradition machine that was my radio employer. They allowed us CCM six hours in the afternoon where I had been playing mostly Southern Gospel. Previously one or two CCM selections would sneak through unnoticed. Because of my commitment to the music, I finally got up enough courage and did a whole unauthorized contemporary show early one Saturday morning with the same record collection featured in the skating parties. Listener response, although small, was mostly favorable.

  It seemed that management was afraid of the CCM genre due to the possible backlash from our bread and butter religious brokered programs until we broke the ice with a few experiments. Spooked by the possibility of financial ruin they never totally committed; most of the conservative local preachers were on mid-day, but I believe the station would have reached more listeners with an all day consistent format of more modern sounds. That has been a purely hypothetical idea, of course. My second radio home was 100% Contemporary Christian weekdays and they never lost a brokered program because of music format, go figure.

Stay Tuned

© 2009 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.