Jeffrey Alan Payne - Doczine

That explained it. He had that poor pathetic sot, Wookie, sit up all night and tape me.That’s when Wookie decided to speak. He smelled like a cross between cheese puffsand pork and beans this morning, “Now in morning drive, we expect you to stick with theplaylist. None of your adventures on album cuts; we play the hits in the morning. I knowyou pull out some “B” sides late at night, but nobody except you knows about “MemoryMotel” off of the Stones’ Black and Blue album. I don’t care how good of a song it is.”Memory Motel was a fine song by the Rolling Stones, that always brought a tear to myeye. However, it was about eight minutes long, and it had come out many years earlier,so fair enough. This wasn’t the university radio station; it was a business that soldadvertising based on listener numbers.The average professional person didn’t really care about getting a musical educationwhile they were preparing for work in the morning. It was different at 3:00am; many ofmy listeners worked the night shift, generally in semi-solitude. I know that becausescores of them called me and tried to keep me on the phone all night. Either that orthey’ve had a couple of beers and several bong hits; those guys wouldn’t care if I playedMick Jagger belching, while Keith Richards snored in the background.Fair enough. “That’s not a problem,” I said, “Sorry.”Ron started grinning, “That’s alright Wild Man. We dig your stuff, man.”Wookie had a look of spite and jealousy on his face, sitting up on his little stool. Ronwas staring at me with a grin that was wider than most men’s heads; my instincts told meto check to see if he had grabbed my car keys or not. I almost expected him to startjumping up and down on the top of the desk, while picking ticks off of Wookie’s head andjangling my keys in the air, gleefully chattering and playing with himself.“What about Billy?” I asked. Billy Thunder was the current morning guy. He was a bit ofa dinosaur, an icon within the market. He had been on the air for about thirty years, andhe essentially sounded like it. He sleepwalked through his shift, occasionally tossing insome hokey joke that he probably told the first time in 1973.Jim and I often listened to him in the morning, as we enjoyed a couple of beers to rewardourselves for staying up all night. After all, 6:00am was the start of our evening; we evenate cheeseburgers at the HoHum Diner, when they opened at 7:00am. If they servedbeer, we probably would have sat there till lunchtime. This was going to be a completechange of schedule for us.Ron took on a serious tough-guy expression, “I just told him. That’s my decision. I don’thold back, I just tell it like it is.”We glanced at each other, choking back a laugh. Jim once said mockingly, “He’s socute when he tries to act like a Program Director!” We both got a laugh, because it wasso hard to take the guy seriously. However, as it all began to sink in, we owed this guy alot. He was giving us our chance to really make an impression and start our climb withinthe industry.35