Free Talk by Michael A Smerconish Page A

what I’d done for Willy only without having to serve beers and put money into a huge holster. That opportunity came when I pestered a 5,000-watt daytimer outside of town to hire me for minimum wage as a weekend morning guy. The station was one step removed from a boom box. It broadcast from beneath its own transmitter in a building surrounded by livestock, and could only be heard during sunlit hours, which meant that my first hour on the air at 5 a.m. was for a crowd of one—but I didn’t care. I was being paid a couple of bucks to do something I enjoyed, and I was no longer trapped in a bar where I kept obsessing over a girl who got away. A sense of ambition I never knew I had began to kindle.
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    Twenty years, five stations, and 1100 miles away later, I was broadcasting live from a classic rock station in Pittsburgh. It was called WBXM and was owned by radio giant Star Channel Radio. It was also where Stanislaw Pawlowsky, now known asjust Stan or Stan the Man, did afternoon drive every weekday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
    â€œYou’re tuned to Buxom FM, WBXM, now let’s get Stanned .”
    I wish I had a nickel for every time that line came out of my mouth in the Steel City. But the catchphrase worked. And I could rightfully take the credit because at a time when consultants and company playlists were becoming the norm, I had minimal interference from the suits and basically relied on the instincts I’d developed at Shooter’s. When my fingers thumbed the carts on which the station library was stored, I asked myself one thing: is anybody ordering a shot over at Shooter’s when they hear this, and will that fucking fake pistol fire? If the answer was no, I looked for something else.
    Pittsburgh was the perfect training ground. It was the nation’s 25 th radio market and a town with a working-class mentality that I really dug. These people worked hard, loved their Steelers, and liked to unwind by drinking shitloads of Iron City beer while listening to rock music. And there was something else: a major concert venue in the Mellon Arena, or as the locals still called it, the old Civic Arena. It was home not only to the Pittsburgh Penguins, but also to every touring act from the Rolling Stones to Radiohead. Our station was on the call list of every major record and concert promoter, many of whom would offer interviews with bands releasing albums or touring. If they were touring, they were coming to Pittsburgh. And if they were coming to Pittsburgh, they were going to want to sell tickets on Buxom FM.
    The interviews were usually run by a service out of California that would book a particular band member in eight-minute increments, so one second a rock god would be talking to me in Pittsburgh, and the next he’d be talking to a guy inDallas. Or Phoenix. Or Philly. This didn’t allow me to develop a rapport with any of the artists, not in the span of a few minutes, and more often than not, the singer or bass player was confused as to what market he was reaching. “Hello, Cleveland!” Still, I loved it, and allowed the suspension of belief to set in like we were old buddies. These were the guys I had grown up idolizing. They were the musicians whose lyrics I had once spent hours reading on album jackets because I thought they had all the answers. And if one of them so much as answered a question by including my first name, it gave me a woody.
    When tours came to town, I could sometimes finagle tickets and a backstage pass from the promoters and attend a meet and greet with the bands. That was great too, and I’d often take not only a date, but also my tape recorder, partly so that people knew I was in the biz, and partly to grab some audio for the afternoon show.
    Some of the stuff that happened backstage you couldn’t make up. Jon Anderson from Yes was always one of my favorite singers. Well, he came to town on a solo tour at a 500-seat club