Category Archives: Radio

Christmas Music Overdose

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We’re well into the Christmas music season as many of us have been rockin’ around the Christmas tree since before Thanksgiving. (Thanks, radio stations!) Christmas music fatigue makes some of the worst songs unbearable. I’ve seen a few discussions on Facebook regarding worst and best songs, and I’ve put together my own list of holiday dreck as well as favorites. For brevity’s sake each list is limited to 10 titles. Let’s start with the good stuff:

Play It Again

Please Come Home for Christmas – Eagles. The Eagles released this Charles Brown cover in 1978 between their Hotel California and The Long Run albums. It has the patented Don Henley melancholic delivery.

Wintersong – Sarah McLachlan. This is such a poignant song — one of my favorites of any season.

Merry Christmas, Darling – Carpenters. Karen Carpenter. What more needs to be said?

O Holy Night – Mariah Carey. This is one of my favorite Christmas carols, and Carey does a quality pop song version. I like how she shows restraint at the beginning before letting it rip at the end.

Mele Kalikimaka – Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Christmas in the islands, circa 1950! The song found a new audience thanks to the swimming pool scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) – U2. This is a fun 1987 cover of the old Darlene Love song.

Last Christmas – Wham! Is it cheesy? Yes, but once again I’m 13 and lovelorn. What happened to that junior high crush of mine?

Same Old Lang Syne – Dan Fogelberg. It’s a true story! A little trivia: The main piano riff is taken from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture — sped up a bit.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Carpenters. Richard and Karen make a second appearance on my list with this song Judy Garland performed in 1944. The Carpenters covered it in 1978.

Winter Wonderland – Huey Lewis and the News. This was recorded at some point during the Sports Tour. It was an unreleased fan club gift in 1984. Of course it’s an a cappella arrangement!

Play It Again Honorable Mentions

All Alone on Christmas – Darlene Love and Mary’s Boy Child – Boney M. Yes, this technically makes 12 titles, but it’s my list and my rule to break! Both songs are fun and not heard all that often on the radio.

Now we move along to Christmas music that makes us wish it were January:

Never Again

Wonderful Christmastime – Paul McCartney. It would be wonderful to never hear this inane 1979 release again. By the way, while Wings members are in the video, this is actually a solo project. It’s all McCartney’s fault.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Jackson Five. The song was originally recorded by a 13-year-old in 1952. The Jackson Five covered it in 1970. The song tries to be cute but ends up being grating. I can’t switch stations fast enough when I hear it.

Do You Hear What I Hear? – Harry Simeone Chorale. This song was written by a husband and wife as a plea for peace during 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. It was released later that year and has been covered dozens of times. It has an interesting back story, but the song has never been a favorite of mine.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. This is another song I’ve never really liked, regardless of performer. Bruce yells his way through this version, and it gets tiring quickly. I’m good for one listen per season because it’s Springsteen, but that’s it.

The 12 Days of Christmas (unless it’s the Muppets!) This song was published in 1780 and would be more interesting today as a telephone game than a Christmas tune. The cumulative repetition drags on, but the Muppets — especially Miss Piggy — make it fun by giving the song the irreverence it deserves.

Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley. I’m just not a fan. The song sounds old and tired.

You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch – Thurl Ravenscroft. I like How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by Dr. Seuss. This song comes from the 1966 cartoon adaptation, but it’s annoying on its own. I can’t sit through the whole three minutes.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Dean Martin and Martina McBride. Dean, it’s late and she wants to go home. Let her. Talk about a relic that today screams, “INAPPROPRIATE!” The song was originally recorded in 1949 by Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark. The well-known modern version is the 2007 McBride overdub of Martin’s 1959 recording. The technology is so much better than the actual song!

Little Drummer Boy (unless it’s Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band!) Based on a traditional Czech carol, this was written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. The Trapp Family Singers recorded it first in 1951. This is another song I find dull, but Seger’s heavily produced version is good for one play a season.

The Christmas Shoes – NewSong. This is a masterful piece of crass emotional manipulation with the gravitas of an Afterschool Special. Am I being too subtle?

Honorable Mention for Either Category

Merry Christmas From the Family – Robert Earl Keene. Some find this song of a dysfunctional Texas Christmas of questionable taste. Others find it hilarious. It likely depends on one’s life experience or intolerance for the Christmas jams that usually make playlists this time of year. Having worked in country radio, Keene’s tune makes me laugh out loud, as does his Cheshire Cat grin in the video. The song has since been covered by mainstream acts Montgomery Gentry and the Dixie Chicks.

Your turn! What did I miss, and what would you add? What do you never want to hear again? What would you like to hear more?

Newport Tales – Part XV

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Our original group went through changes quickly at KSND after signing on in March 1995. (Quick refresher on the originals and their roles: Jack [owner-general manager], Keith [owner-operations manager], Bonnie [reception-traffic], Corey [sales], Paul [sales], Clarke [weeknight studio engineer], Cindy [weekend studio engineer].)

Before long, Cindy moved from weekends to full-time days, and we hired a couple of kids younger than me a short time later. Summer joined our staff while going to school, hosting a program we designed called Sunday Morning Coffee. The music was smooth jazz and laid the foundation for what would later be a costly misstep in our station’s programming. Gary joined us as a weekend overnighter.

Other staff changes also took place. Paul abruptly left his sales position to go back to running the Sandbar and Grill with his wife. Being a well-liked and valuable member of the team, that was both a surprise and a disappointment. Not too long after he left, though, Cheryl joined our staff. She had worked in the market for quite a while and brought an established client list with her, which we hadn’t had up to that point.

If I didn’t make it clear in my previous posts, working overnights was an unpleasant experience, but I was off that shift by early 1996, taking a promotion to production director — the creative force behind our commercials and on-air promotional material. I had made Keith proud during December of 1995, picking up the slack on production that needed to be taken care of for our first huge on-air contesting event.

The promotion was called, A K-Sound Christmas. We stockpiled a boatload of CDs in the prize vault to be given away over a two-week period. Whenever a contest sounder was played, the first five callers each won a CD from a particular artist. We ran the contests several times a day. My job was producing those sounders, which included snippets from hit singles on each CD we were giving away. The sounders invited listeners to call and win…NOW!

I had fun with the production. We still had a limited sound effects library and little production music. I was making a lot of the sound effects on the fly with whatever I could find in the building. Santa coming down the chimney with a big bag of CDs was me grunting in front of a microphone and scraping Styrofoam blocks over a ski jacket I was wearing. It worked! As I recall, Santa had an accident flying down the chimney too fast and landed with a big crash in the fireplace. Theater of the mind.

This work really helped launch me into the new 3:00 am to 11:00 am shift as production director, which might not sound great, but I loved it. I lived just a few blocks away, so I could get up late, take a long afternoon nap, and then go to bed late. It gave me plenty of free time and more importantly, a life. The change made a huge difference in my mental state and allowed me to meet people and socialize.

The vacated weekday overnight shift was offered to Kiera, who had worked for one of our competitors. I believe she may have been part-time on the weekends for us, but going full-time meant she would get health insurance. We were the only station in town that offered that to employees — fully paid.

As much as things were looking up as we began growing, the station was in some trouble. We were deep in debt from start-up costs and hadn’t reached the point of being able to pay monthly operating expenses. Frankly, we weren’t even close. We had to rely on the silent third owner who had paid most of the bills up to that point. A major incident in late summer of 1995 turned everything on its head in that regard. That’s when we all met Will.

More to come in Part XVI…

Newport Tales – Part XIV

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I wrote about my job as an overnight studio engineer in Part XIII. Living the life of an overnighter — a brutal existence — is today’s topic.

There is a certain antisocial nature to working overnights in radio. Most, if not all of the gig, is worked alone. To an extent, a person starts getting used to that. At home during the day, one sleeps while the world awakes and goes about its activities. In my experience, it’s not a healthy existence. Social contact is important, but it is so limited for an overnighter. As a colleague of mine once said, overnights is a single man’s game. I actually knew of people whose marriages suffered because of the spouse’s graveyard job.

There’s also the complete disruption of circadian rhythms that takes place, which has been linked to obesity, diabetes and depression. I certainly had some struggles with the latter: I worked in a small town where I didn’t know anyone other than my co-workers, and there were few opportunities to meet new people. Gray, dark, rainy and windy were the seasons, and when there was sunshine I slept through it. No fun!

I employed various strategies to improve how I felt. I purchased a full spectrum light bulb that mimicked the sun. Unfortunately it was expensive and a poor substitute for natural light. I tried staying up a little while after getting home in the morning and also attempted going to bed as soon as possible after arriving home — getting to sleep before it got too light outside. Ultimately, the latter worked better. Finally, I reversed my meals, having dinner food when I got home from work in the morning and breakfast food at night. That didn’t work at all! Cheerios before bed in the morning was a lot better than pot roast prior to a daylong snooze.

A problem overnighters face during those day sleeps is the rest of the world working. The biggest irritations I had were apartment inspectors coming in during the day to check appliances and fire detection equipment and maintenance workers sawing through drywall in the common hallway to work on plumbing — noise that could wake the dead. Never mind the sign on my door reading, “Day sleeper. Please don’t disturb.”

I worked the overnight job from March 1995 until early 1996. There was one week in August where temperatures got into the 90s during an extraordinary Oregon Coast heat wave. The average temperature that time of year is 58 degrees, with the high average being 65. It made sleeping in a stuffy apartment difficult, and the high humidity didn’t help. One thing I did enjoy, though, was going to the beach after work. I liked standing in tide pools because they were so warm. That’s unheard of on the coast.

The truth is that I never really adjusted to graveyard. I tried lots of trickery, but my body knew what was going on. I just slipped into an existence of perpetual jet lag and was alone most of the time. My friend and colleague, Cindy, implored me to get involved in the community when I wasn’t sleeping. I loved lighthouses, and became a member of the Oregon Chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society. The problem was that I was the youngest member by at least a decade or more.

The best thing that happened to me was getting promoted to production director, which came about in a sad way that I’ll detail in a later post. The promotion with improved hours certainly changed my disposition and kickstarted my upward career trajectory at KSND.

More to come in Part XV…