| Bill Gavin on DJ's, from 1964...
Mike's preface: Bill Gavin was a legend in music radio, moving from a Music Director's position in San Francisco to become the publisher of what was, from the '60's through the '80's, the premier music tip and gossip sheet in the radio business. Not one of the Old Dogs I know will ever forget reading those stapled blue pages received every Monday in the mail, just so we could follow Gavin's music recommendations for our playlists..and track our peer's careers. Gavin, his wife Janet and his staff had the best ears in the business and they could nail a hit in the first thirty seconds and they had the best list of contacts ever.
And for those decades our careers were carved in stone once every week. To be named as "moving to" or "available" in Gavin we achieved a gravitas that could not be matched anywhere else in the biz. Gavin's tipsheet's influence declined after the growth of Bob Wilson's Radio & Records in the mid-1970's. Following the Gavin's deaths, the paper was taken over by former staffers, but it never held on to its previous position in the industry.
If you do a search online now, there's not much to be found about Bill Gavin, except in occasional articles by Ben Fong-Torres. But Frank Absher found an old passage from Bill on microfilm...
Frank Absher writes: As you know I spend a lot of time doing research. Came across this on microfilm in the university library in Normal, IL. It was written by Bill Gavin and appeared in Billboard January 11, 1964.
Read it, and maybe you'll understand why, even with advice from 40+ years ago, you might want to consider selling insurance or office supplies...trust me, your Father is right.
It is amazing how many young men want to become disk jockeys. It must be that with his hops, his regular air shows, his apparent closeness to the record stars and his obvious importance to so many people, the disk jockey appears as a glamorous person. His profession seems surrounded by all the magic glitter of show business. Unfortunately for the ambitions of the young hopefuls, the real contents of the package are not nearly as attractive as the shiny wrapping that encloses it. Being a disk jockey is not nearly so rewarding as so many seem to think.
As a group, disk jockeys are not highly paid. On the average they do not receive as much as truck drivers, machinists or brick layers. The highly paid luminaries in a few large cities are the exceptions. It is as hard to break into their select circle as it is to make the major leagues in baseball.
Most disk jockeys work in smaller towns. They lack any union protection of wages or working conditions. It is not uncommon to find them running errands, cleaning floors, selling time, repairing equipment, writing spots and so on, with no extra pay for the extra work. They are not wooed by record companies; they don't have artists begging to appear at their hops. They don't even receive many of the important hit records. If they insist on playing certain records, they have to buy them at the store.
The small town disk jockey has only one hope to keep him at his unrewarding job; he might someday land a job in the Big Town. Most, of course, do not. The turnover rate for small market disk jockeys is very high.
There are a few who make the grade and hit the big time. They have it made now, they think. But they don't. They learn, first of all, that they live and die "by the numbers." The listener surveys show each month what perce ntage of the audience is tuned in to their show. Let their share drop below the station average and they are finished, no matter how much the boss may like them and their work. They learn to live with insecurity.
The professional disk jockey, even with proved ability, has to take his work where he finds it. If he needs a new job, he must go to where the job is. It may be in Minneapolis or Dallas or Cincinnati. Job openings are few, and so he packs up his family and moves. Generally speaking, disk jockeys are among the nation's most rootless professionals.
The disc jockey who has just come up from the minor leagues of radio into the big city job is often surprised to learn that his salary isn't as large as he had expected. If he wants to increase his earnings, he has to make it on the outside with record hops. In this field he usually finds himself in fierce competition with other disk jockeys for any available "live" talent. He may begin evaluating records, not in terms of their merit, but with reference to how cooperative the promoters or distributors have been in providing his hops with artists. He may even reach a point where his boss considers his behavior unethical and inimical to the station's standing with the FCC. That means trouble.
The would-be disk jockey has visions of playing his favorite records on the air, chosen from thousands available in the record library. How wrong he is. Record programs on almost every pop station are made up from a list of less than 120 titles. The deejay has little or nothing to do with making up that list. He must make up his shows with a majority of selections from the top 30 or 40 from the list. His own preferences have little to do with the case. He learns to "sell" the music he plays as effectively as he sells the sponsors' products, though he may have as little personal fondness for the one as for the other.
He is supposed to be a "personality" but he must conform to the station's "sound." He is urged to be creative and to use his imagination, but the boundaries within which he can operate are rigidly prescribed and extremely narrow. A disk jockey on a formular station needs to work hard to find a continuing challenge in his work.
Being a disc jockey is not without its rewards. But those who seek such a career should do so realistically and not as glamour seekers or status chasers.
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