Cranking Tunes For All To Hear

I have hosted radio in some way shape or form for just over three years now.  Not all of that time has been spent on the FM airwaves, but most of it has, and the memories I have made are endless.  There's been volunteer shadows, guest appearances from members of the community in positions of power, rapper interviews, and lots of high school athletes.  It seems like an endless stream of fun that's not set to end anytime soon, which I take as a good sign because I don't want to be done with radio anytime soon.

Today, I'd like to take some time to talk about what got me into radio, and tell you about some of my favorite memories from my time on the airwaves.  I promise not to make this too long so that it's hard to read in one sitting.  I'll share stuff from 2015 to today, and tell you about my before and after show processes, so you better understand how what you hear on On The River and Untitled DJ Rollie D Radio Show is conceived and executed on-air.  I assure you that it's not all boring process in a writer's room or station meeting, though someday I think it would be cool to have a team of writers for something.

It all started back when I was young, and listening to the radio on a daily basis via either the school bus or a car trip somewhere.  Being a person who drives cars was my first choice of profession, and then it evolved to meteorology, with writing and voice acting thrown in there somewhere too.  But one day, I was listening to a local station, and something in me just clicked and said "I wanna do that", being the person who talks in between all the songs and reads the weather and maybe does a few of the commercials you here along the way.  It was at that point that I really started getting excited to host radio, and slowly that's what my plan for college became. 

Fast forward to January 2015.  I was a Junior in high school, awkward as can be, and really only a sports announcer for varsity sports at that point in time.  Outside of Cherry I wasn't too well known, and I was alright with that.  But when I heard that former sports broadcasting service Free Range Sports was up for passing off to someone to carry the torch, I put it in the back of my mind.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to give up announcing at Cherry, as it was something I loved and wanted to keep doing all the way through Graduation year.

Then, at the end of the month, I finally decided to take the leap and go meet with the guy who owned the business back then.  We worked out some details, and agreed to meet again at a later date.  By the time two months had passed, I had successfully purchased the business and was ready to rumble for the Spring 2015 season, which came with it's ups and downs as I struggled to find ways to fill two hours plus of baseball and softball and also three hours plus of track with no pre-recorded material, something I had no real idea how to create.  I always tried to keep a water bottle by my side for moments like these, and man was I grateful to have them.

I ran Free Range Sports through Graduation, covering a total of four sports seasons and driving as far south as Moose Lake and as far north as Littlefork to cover games in numerous different sports.  I even went to Two Harbors in a blizzard once, constantly turning the windshield wipers on to wipe the snow away.  I met several different radio personalities from various stations around the Northland, and got to know a lot of community members.  Listenership started low, peaked during the Winter season my Senior year, then went back down in the Spring 2016 season.  I was still having the time of my life, and wanted to broadcast some legion baseball games that Summer, but they decided not to carry that, and things kind of ended there when I opted not to bring the station to Fargo with me.  The box still lays in my room back home, a memory I will treasure forever, and also keep should I need to use it again for another purpose. 

It was in May of 2016 that I traveled to beautiful Bemidji for a volunteer training session for community radio station KAXE/KBXE, known to most as Northern Community Radio.  As of this year the station has been running for 42 years, and has delighted many with it's programming, especially it's in-house arsenal of news and music programming.  Staff and volunteers work out of studios in Grand Rapids and Bemidji to bring community-oriented programming to it's listeners every single day of the year.  I've been lucky to be part of such a well-respected institution. 

I began hosting On The River in Grand Rapids on July 29, 2016 after a volunteer training session earlier that same week, and ended up loving it so much I hosted it the next three Fridays afterwards, doing the last one August 19 right before driving out to Fargo less than an hour later.  I knew that those four shows wouldn't be enough for me, so I signed up for some dates in Bemidji starting September 16th so that I would have some time to get acclimated to Fargo.  Yes that's right, I drive the two and a half hours between Fargo and Bemidji just to host radio.  You'd say it's crazy, but I say it's great fun, unless you're driving in a major snowstorm, which I underestimated once because I didn't want to cancel a show one cold November day.  While I used to drive up there at least three to four times a month, that's since been cut down to once or twice a month.  And while I broadcast primarily from the Bemidji studio, I find myself at the Grand Rapids one whenever I make a trip home.

Some of my favorite memories at KAXE/KBXE include pledge drive shows, hosting a show made up of as many musicians from MN as possible, playing Password on air, and enjoying numerous volunteer shadows, which is an opportunity to meet more people from the communities I often stop in or sleep overnight in.  It's always a joy no matter which trip up it is.

My process for hosting shows on KAXE/KBXE is short and sweet.  Before I drive up, if I have any songs I for sure want to share on the show that night, I plug them into our playlist software.  Most of my shows though see me arriving at the station with not much planned out before hand, if anything has been planned.  I grab two albums to play from right off the bat, and then keep going from there as to how to keep up with the show's format and which tracks sound good to play on air, and looking up lyrics for songs that feature expletives, otherwise known as "The 7 Dirty Words As Outlined By The FCC".  I try to put my own spin on the show too, by including segments such as A Facebook Friend Suggests A Song and Your Daily Dose of Banjo, both of which are unique to when I host the show.

After the show, I go through my playlist and sort out which songs I want to add to my personal collection on Spotify, and which songs I'm going to play on a future episode of Untitled DJ Rollie D Radio Show here in Fargo, which is what I'm going to talk about next.

I approached KRFF otherwise known as Radio Free Fargo, in May of 2017 to ask about hosting a show on Thursday nights, a slot I found out wasn't quite available just yet, but I was able to be put on a waiting list.  In July a slot for the start of August on Wednesday nights opened up, and I jumped at it.  So on August 2nd, 2017, Untitled DJ Rollie D Radio Show aired it's Pilot episode on KRFF and it's been there ever since, and with 36 episodes under it's belt as of last week, there's been some changes.  When I first started the show, I would just play music two hours through and not talk too much, but then I decided to put my own spin on the show and add Our Musical Neighbors,which was the first segment.  In December of 2017 I began reading news at the start of the show, and not long after in March DJ Rollie D Sits In An Armchair & Remembers The Classics came to fruition and saw me sharing a favorite song from the past.  In the weeks following we got A Last Minute Health Tip and Pop Culture Segment started up, and now the show has four segments total not counting the news that airs at the top of the program's first hour.

Favorite memories on this program include being my own content creator, meeting other show hosts, sharing the music of my friends from back home on-air, and some of my themed shows, most notably a week where I used a Kermit the Frog sound byte from Family Guy as a symbol of how tired I was that day, and also a show where I played two full hours of orchestral, operatic, and jazz music, again because I was tired.  I also got to meet and interview two local Fargo-Moorhead rappers (SKEET and xxxSuicidexxx) in April and May, both of whom are vibrant personalities who will be coming back to the show within the next month or so to do a joint episode where they both appear.  The episodes they appeared in are both available online for your listening pleasure.  On xxxSuicidexxx's epsiode, the health tip was about how to attend to a stab wound.  I don't think I've ever laughed so hard yet this year as I did that night. 

My process for this show is to gather music from both previous On The River programs and my personal collection on Spotify and mix them together to create something I feel most will find entertaining and enjoyable.  I then get a promotional post ready for Facebook, and get that up on both my personal page and the show's page.  After I broadcast the show, I upload it to music sharing website Sound Cloud so that my friends can listen to it later on, then share that back to my social media accounts.

Lastly, I did a stint on KNDS, which is the radio station for North Dakota State University.  From April to July I ran musical interview show A Basement with A View, inviting students and community members to come on for interviews.  In this time I talked to members of sororities, campus media giants, local card game judges, comediennes, and even my co-worker Andrew Harrison, who ended up sticking around through it all, and joining me and co-host Jay Lennander for the KNDS Morning Show from May through November.  Some laughs from there include me saying a very serious line about seat belt safety ("Secure your children") only to have a five-minute discussion about why that line was bad and out of place, to talking about Andrew's strangest stories live on air.  In a time where KNDS didn't have all that much going on, we took it and made it a fun thing to listen to whenever we went on.  Sadly, I left the station in November, but I wished them the best in their futures and I think they're still going pretty strong to this day, and for that I give them major props!

And there you have it - my entire radio journey from one end to the other.  I hope you'll tune in and see what all this is about the next time you see me posting about going on the airwaves.  And to everyone who's tuned in already, thank you so much.