I was five when Elvis died. I don't remember the news; nobody my age does. I remember my mother taking a phone call from her sister, because in 1977 that is how news reached a living room, and I remember that afterwards the Elvis records went on the console in the front room, one of those cabinets that weighed about three hundred pounds, and I danced around it until the side ran out.
I think that is where all of it comes from. I feel music differently.
I watch people on the bus, at work, in headphones, listening to something and sitting perfectly still, and it honestly surprises me. When I hear a record I want to move, sing, get into it. I have never managed to say that out loud with dry eyes, and I have stopped minding.
My mother kept WUNI on in the house, 1410 AM in Mobile, and WUNI had the Wuni Bird. To a kid that was the whole show. That is when I knew what I wanted to be: the person on the other side of the speaker, entertaining somebody like me.
By nine I was ringing request lines and getting to know the jocks, inviting myself into their world, if I am honest about it. That year I called WKRG and asked for a tour. They did not do tours. They told me I would need a résumé, and I did not know what a résumé was. My grandfather did. He was the most organized, most professional man I have ever known, and he sat down with me, helped me write one, and then let me send it in crayon. Name, address, phone number, a short bio. At nine there was not a lot else to put on it.
A week or two later a letter came back from Wes Diamond, the general manager, inviting me in. WKRG was on Broadcast Drive, radio upstairs and Channel 5 downstairs. They sat me in the newsroom, which had a window into the studio, brought me snacks, and let me watch Scott O'Brien do his show. It cannot have been fun for him, being stared at through the glass like something at the zoo, and he was gracious and kind about it anyway, and he talked to me. Leaving was a kid leaving Disney World for the first time. I did not want to go.
To me the DJs were no different from the people on the records. Without the DJ I would never have known the record existed. So I kept calling, kept turning up at remotes, kept hanging around, and at twelve I was on the air at WGUD in Pascagoula.
What I think about now is how much of that was other people deciding to let me in. A general manager who answered a crayon résumé instead of binning it. Jocks who took a kid's calls. A station that found a nine-year-old a chair in the newsroom. Nobody owed me any of it. So it bothers me, more than it probably should, that a station owner today can't get the people who built their website to answer an email. I wrote about what to do when your vendor won't talk to you, because somebody once answered me.
I also wrote a song about all of it. Hear "The Radio Game".