Friday Photo Flashback

I had forgotten all about this picture. I’m not even sure who took it, to be honest. This is me and my lifelong friend, Jeff, in the studio at WMXD in Detroit. The photo had to be taken around 1990.

This studio was tiny. Behind me was a wall that had the station’s CD’s. about 4 feet from where Jeff is sitting was the door to the studio. There wasn’t room for more than three people in there at a time. It got a bit close when the next air personality was getting ready for their show.

I love this picture because, while you can’t see everything, there is so much in this room. Behind me to the left is the reel to reel machine we used to record phone calls. Every once in a while, I would get called in to play voice cuts from jocks who couldn’t be there. They would prerecord the intros on the reel to reel and I would play it back on the air when they were normally supposed to be there live.

To the right of my head in this picture, on the top shelf is a cart machine. It had spots for three carts (one is in the machine in the photo). These carts were tapes that had our commercials on them. They also had the sweepers of our big voice guy saying “This is new music! On 92-3 The Mix!” To the left of the cart machine, you can see about 6 carts stacked up. That was probably the next commercial set.

Below that on the bottom shelf was the CD players. You can see one is playing and Jeff’s head is blocking the other one. In front of me was the control board. Oh, how I miss those slider pots. Each one of those colored sliders went to something – CD #1, CD #2, Cart #1, Turntable #1, Reel to Reel, etc…

Up above the board is a little shelf that held liner cards or station liners that needed to be read throughout the show. It would also hold your “copy” for news or weather. Anytime I wrote out something I wanted to say, it would sit there on that shelf.

To Jeff’s right you can barely make out that turntable. There were two side by side in the studio. When the Electrifying Mojo did his show, he played almost everything off of vinyl. There would be records all over the studio. He’d also have the heat cranked up in there. It was always an oven when I’d have to follow him on the weekend.

This picture brings back some great memories. Jeff used to come up and hang out a lot. We’d stay up all night and he was always trying to crack me up on the air. He did it more times than I could count! Lord knows if it was the other way around, I would have been trying to crack him up, too.