Jeffrey Alan Payne - Doczine

We couldn’t figure out what we had to do to break that ceiling into a higher echelon ofratings and sales figures. The sales staff was definitely getting impatient. Most of theirsales were based on relationships, good ole boys talkin’, sellin’, and buyin’ ads on theradio. Local businessmen knew that the station drew a big listenership within thecommunity, but the bigger companies used ad agencies. Those were driven by mediaplanners and buyers, who looked only at statistics. You had to have the ratings to getthe bigger dollars.That became Wookie’s bargaining chip. He convinced Ron that the ratings wouldimprove if he had more control over the music. He said that he and Ron “were gettingburned” because the announcers had too much freedom in selecting the music. We all“played our favorites” whenever we could, which was true. However, we actually metand talked to people on the street, at events and on the phone. The reason particularsongs were our favorites was because that’s what the people who listened told us theyenjoyed. The station was too small to invest in giant market research projects and focusgroups.Wookie took the top five-hundred songs from whatever trade journal he had comeacross and put those songs into an extremely tight rotation. Then, he added morecontemporary hit artists like Flock of Seagulls and Prince, because that’s what DerekKent at Rock 101 in Knoxville was doing.We instantly hated the format, mainly because we saw nothing but disaster ahead. We’dend up playing “Hotel California” by the Eagles about three times in one week. We gotcomplaints on the phone, and our own personal blue collar, pub crawling focus group offans made comments about how much the format now sucked. The consensus amongthe air staff was that this was a very bad move.Four weeks later, Win announced that he was retiring as General Manager. He wasgoing to live off the investments he had made as a result of nearly forty years of radiosales, buy a place in Florida, go fishing and relax while he dies from the two packs ofcigarettes and twelve shots of whiskey he consumed on a daily basis.Win was a racist, sexist pig, simpleton and smarmy snake oil salesman, but he liked Jimand me. He would often stop us in the hallway to come in and impress somebody hewas wheeling and dealing. He seemed to feel that we would somehow do somethingspontaneously entertaining and funny, based the mere fact that we existed.Those were awkward moments, when he would call us into his office and introduce us tosome hayseed mobile home dealer. The two of them would stare at us for a fewseconds, like they were waiting for a monologue. It was like they expected Paul Schafferand his band to be in the hallway, providing rimshots for our punchlines.We were still too naïve to realize the extent of the ramifications that would reverberateacross our careers, as a result of Win’s departure. However, we knew his retirementwas not a happenstance in our favor, particularly paired with the fact that the music wasnow absolutely dismal, thanks to the cunningly incompetent Wookie.51