Friday Photo Flashback

I’m not sure why I stopped doing this feature, but it is time for it to make a return. I was sent a photo from a friend that I had forgotten about. When I opened up the email, I remembered this feature. It is probably something I posted on my Facebook or now defunct MySpace, but I don’t think I have ever posted it on here.

This photo will take us back to 2004 or 2005.

This photo was taken as part of a photo project that a friend was doing for college. The idea was to take 100 photos and then tell a story with only 12 of them. She came to the station during a show and shot some pictures of me on the air, it just so happened that my oldest boy was with me that day. He was probably around 2 years old here.

This was not taken in the main studio. This was taken in one of the production studios where I was probably cutting a commercial or working on sweepers. Dante’ loved to talk into the microphone and I always had him say things for my show. Just like they had to do with the kids who voiced those Charlie Brown specials. I would feed him a line in pieces and then edit them all together.

I had him say things like:

“Not funny, Daddy!”

“Is it time to go home yet?”

“I’m Dante’ and you’re listening to my daddy, Keith Allen, on 94-5 The Moose!”

“Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha! Wait, what?” (For play after a bad joke)

I don’t think this was a pose, I truly believe that was meant to be a candid, but I just happened to be looking at the camera.

As I look at behind me in the photo, in the cabinet I can see one of the equalizers. I always wanted to get one for a hone studio (which I never ended up doing). Underneath that is a Mini-Disc player. I loved having one of those. I used it when I DJ’d a lot. It was digital, so you could edit and even loop things on it.

For the older readers, directly below that is a cassette player. When I was on the west side of the state, we would actually get commercials on them for on air play. Needless to say, the quality was NEVER that good. We primarily used it to record commercials to take to the clients so they could see if they liked the way their commercial sounded.

It is not in view, but under that was a CD player. We would dub songs into the automation system that way or rip them in on the computer. Most of our production music was on CD (and you can see some of those sitting directly above the mixer board.

By this time, most of the production was done on the computer (directly in front of my son) or the one to the left of that one. However, one of the coolest things in this picture is the ancient reel to reel machine behind my left shoulder. I believe that is an old Tascam unit. We used to use those to record phone calls at my first couple jobs. If something needed to be edited, you had to mark the tape with a china marker, cut the tape with a razor blade and splice it back together with tape. It was a process, but I remember watching some guys who were masters at editing things in less than a minute to be ready for air.

That microphone was one of my favorites to use. It was an Electro Voice RE20. I was gifted one of them and it remains one of my treasured pieces of radio memorabilia. Perhaps one day, I will venture into podcasting and find a way to use it again.

It is amazing to think that this picture was taken was about 20 years ago. I am glad that I still have some audio clips of my son from this age. Today, he could sing bass in a choir his voice is so low. He just turned 22!! Time truly flies….