Mike Cleaver wrote:For most of us who were jocks, it was the first time we ever had to work with someone who told us what we must play and how often those records should be played.
Before that, if it was in the record library, it was available for airplay and new releases were auditioned and added or discarded on the decision of a music committee, made up of the pd, the librarian and the jocks.
There are a lot of dirty little secrets in the commercial radio business and you had to be there at the time to learn about them.
This must have been quite a shock to all those new arrivals from Podunkville. Imagine working in an environment where there is some structure. I'll bet the station even had commercial logs that told you what commercials to play andf when to play them. Reading over your posts, you try to make it sound like every jock was the PD and MD of his 3 or 4 hour time slot. From 1963 onwards I worked at several stations, and not once was there one where you had the freedom to play what you wanted. Nobody had the freedom to grab a stack of records from the library and play what they felt like hearing that particular day. If you were playing tracks from albums, it was the proven hits that you played, not some obscure track from side II of a Freddy Cannon album. The new music that got played was what was on the weekly playlist and it was in the control room. Jocks couldn't just grab a stack of new releases from the Music Director's desk and play something for the hell of it. Oldies were usually categorized and you could choose stuff from each category so it had some sort of rotation.
The jocks at M-O-R stations usually had a little more flexability than their Top 40 counterparts. Things were pretty safe if they were playing music from familiar artists like Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Andy Williams etc. Their listeners listened for the sound and familiar artists, they didn't care about hearing the latest and greatest from whoever.
Over the years tighter controls on the music were made so the station would have a consistant sound. Let's face it, many on-air people have virtually no music or programming sense whatsoever. As a matter of fact, some are downright stupid. They may have a big voice, but they can't ad-lib 5 words without ummming and awwwing. How would you expect these clowns to be able to pick music? You might have a guy who's girl of the week likes country, so he tries to take his four hours in a more countrty direction just to please the little woman. Someone else might think he's a jazz expert and thinks he can spice up his daypart with a bit of Dizzy Gillespie or Stanley Turrentine. The morning guy might be a few years older than the young punks at the station and he decides some Mitch Miller or Lawrence Welk would be good aronund the breakfast table.
There is a god reason for control over the music of a station. It's their product. Likewise there isa good reason many one time jocks end up driving taxi, managing a McDonald's or greeting people at Walmart. Once again, these are all new careers that have structure and guidelines to them.