Carts and Cue Burn

Do you remember how radio used to be, when we handled actual physical objects?

Videos of urban explorers wandering through abandoned radio stations crack me up.

“Looks like some kind of video machine,” he says, pointing at a CD player.

“Here are some weird tiny records — guess they didn’t hold many songs,” she says, holding up 45s.

“No idea what this is, maybe a cassette player?” he adds, staring at a cart machine. “No, wait, are these 8-tracks?”

But it does bring back memories.

Yeah, that’s me, somewhere in 1982

In my first radio job, we played all our music from turntables. The first thing I learned was how to slip cue. I got used to cue burn — which labels’ records wore out faster and which held up better. There were some that got damaged after the first spin.

We had a cart machine, but it wasn’t in stereo and only used for commercials, PSAs, and imaging. Three decks. That was enough. We didn’t have many spots to run back-to-back. Small-town radio, 1980.

When I first faced three-minute commercial breaks, I remember thinking, “My god, are we getting rid of all the music?”

The next station still had turntables, but we mostly used carts. I was moving up — two three-deck machines side by side, stacks of carts laid out for each hour.

A couple of stations later, I played commercials on a computer controlled by a touch screen. The music was on CDs. That’s how it was when I got to my first Los Angeles station in 1999, KBIG. Music was still on CD because Jhani Kaye, our program director, insisted on audio quality. He burned the CDs himself to ensure proper volume levels and EQ.

Then came automation. Everything inside a computer. One or two screens controlled it all. Music and stop sets ran automatically, giving the DJ time for a bathroom break — nice, long ones.

Radio was still radio then. They still call it radio now, but it barely resembles the magic I knew in my youth behind the mic — the magic of handling things: tone arms, carts, paper, pens. Things that occupied space.

Sure, the studios got more convenient and let me focus on performance instead of mechanics. But I was young then — not the old dinosaur yelling at you kids to get the hell off my lawn.