DEEJAYS : S.D. Deejays Provide a Friend in Wee Hours

The extensive special on Alice Cooper had just ended, and the euphoric caller wanted to discuss it.

“I’m pretty much an Alice fiend,” he said.

“Really?” KGB disc jockey Bryan Schock replied, juggling compact discs and cassettes as a song played over the air. “Does that mean you have to go to the Schick Center for help?”

“Huh?” the caller said.

Schock spent a few minutes analyzing the social and political ramifications of Cooper’s career with the fan, before moving on to another caller.

This is how Schock kills time during his midnight to 5:30 a.m. time slot--he talks to people. Leprechauns call these the “wee hours.” Soon those who stay up to watch “The David Letterman Show” will be sound asleep.

But some people, including Schock, are wide awake. After seven years of working the vampire shift, Schock doesn’t drink coffee and he completes the tasks of keeping the radio station on the air almost without thinking.

These days, many stations play recorded shows or programs beamed to the station via satellite during the early morning hours; others have stuck with live deejays to bring a familiar, local voice to the audience.

The stations that have live late-night announcers see it as an essential part of their operations, especially the rock ‘n’ roll stations.

“It would be disaster for them” not to have a live voice after midnight, said Joel Denver, an editor with Radio and Records magazine.

There is a different rhythm to the world after midnight, especially on the radio. Each station attracts a cast of characters separate from its daytime audience, which seems like a faraway world.

“People looking for late-night companionship is a major reason people turn on the radio,” Denver said. “If you have a radio station on 24 hours a day, it develops a mental safety net for people. They can turn it on and hear what they want to hear.”

Sometimes, more than anything, it simply gives listeners someone to talk to, the warm feeling of knowing someone else is alive and awake at 3 a.m.

The calls come in constantly throughout the night. Jill West of KGMG-FM (Magic 102) has received several marriage proposals.

“I have the largest collection of weird fan mail you’ve ever seen,” she said.

While the vast majority of the city sleeps, the graveyard deejays communicate to their audience.

“There’s not so much talking at people,” West said. “It’s talking with them. It’s more personal.”

But much of West’s shift recently became a victim of the budget ax--an increasingly familiar scenario these days for the early-morning jocks.

In June, Magic 102 cut back on its live late-night show, switching West from five mornings a week to Saturday and Sunday mornings only. The rest of the week, after midnight the station has an engineer working to handle calls and play music, but no live disc jockey. All the announcements and segues are recorded earlier.

Greg Stevens, Magic 102’s program director, said he would prefer to have a live voice on the air, but the decision to drop the regular late night deejay was made purely for economic reasons.

Dropping the early-morning jock is “happening more and more,” Stevens said. “With management looking for ways to reduce costs, it is becoming harder and harder to justify to management types why they need to hire a person to work late shifts when you can’t sell a substantial amount of ads.”

Most AM stations simply use syndicated or taped programs after midnight. FM stations, generally with stronger signals and younger audiences, tend to prefer the live voices, when they can afford it. KFMB-FM (B100), for example, has John Fox on the air live from 2 to 6 a.m., but KFMB-AM (760) runs a prerecorded show.

Both XHITZ-FM (Z90) and KKYY-FM (Y95), with classic rock and adult contemporary formats, respectively, have disc jockeys on duty throughout the night.

At KIFM (98.1), which features a “Lites Out Jazz” format, Kelly Cole, described by station General Manager Bruce Walton as a “young, aspiring deejay,” doubles as late-night deejay and engineer. The decision to keep a live late-night voice is easy, he said, because there are plenty of young deejays looking for work (translation: deejays who will work cheaply. At most stations in this market, a salary of $18,000 to $20,000 a year for an early-morning deejay is considered high.

KCBQ (Eagle 105) dropped its own local late-night deejay a year ago in favor of carrying the “Satellite Music Network,” a live program beamed out of Dallas. Eagle 105 announcers are members of the AFTRA union, and it would cost about $35,000 a year to maintain a union deejay through the night, program director Sonny West said.

While cost efficiency is a consideration, there is growing attention in the industry to the early-morning listeners.

Last winter, Arbitron added a page of sketchy “overnight listening estimates” to its quarterly ratings books, which previously did not include any information on the midnight to 6 a.m. shift.

According to the estimates in the spring Arbitron book, measuring listeners 18 years old and over, KSDO-AM (1130), which features a satellite feed, had the biggest audience in San Diego from midnight to 6 a.m., about 5,700 people during an average quarter hour. KNX out of Los Angeles, an all-news station, registered 4,700 listeners. KGB followed with 4,400 and Q106 was third with 4,100.

“There is a significant audience out there,” said KKLQ (Q106) program director Garry Wall. “It is a very loyal audience.”

More than just insomniacs and party animals, there are people who are simply working or traveling, or people with a variety of other logical reasons for turning on the radio at 2 a.m.

“When people say that nobody listens, they are conforming to society’s thinking that the world lives 9 to 5, and then it stops,” West said. “In fact, there are millions of people with different life styles.”

Supermarkets and convenience stores open 24 hours are a major source for listeners. West said she gets a lot of calls from taxi drivers. Gas station attendants make up a major portion of the KGB listeners during his shift, Schock believes.

If someone is sick, Q106’s Wall said, he wants them to know they can turn on his station and hear a friendly voice.

For the rock ‘n’ roll stations in particular, the late-night audience often consists of teen-agers.

“I used to get calls from a lot of post-pubescent girls into experimentation,” said KGB promotions director Scott Chatfield, who worked the early-morning shift for a year. However, the callers would rarely get more suggestive than “Let’s get together at Denny’s,” he said.

At least one of Schock’s listeners was a little more aggressive--a stripper, one night she performed her act outside the studio window.

Many of the callers, though, simply want to talk.

“I can tell the people who are just starting to work at night, who call to say, ‘Hey, this sucks,’ ” Schock said. “You reach a point when you realize that you’re working in the middle of the night and that it sucks, and you just have to get by it.”

Of course, the late night deejays can relate to their audience. They are on the same cycle of life.

“It’s hard to feel like a Homo sapiens when you stay up all night,” said Bill Kalagian, a.k.a. Billy Bones, host of XTRA-FM’s (91X) “Dawn Patrol.” “You never completely resolve it, but I’m used to it.”

Bones has worked the 2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. weekday shift for nearly four years. These days, he is simply happy to no longer be broadcasting from Tijuana, where he had to travel every night until recently. Schock made that drive for three years, before switching from 91X to KGB.

Bones usually sleeps until 1 or 2 p.m., then tries to catch a quick nap before going on the air.

“It makes me a little more alert,” he said.

But work commitments during the day--a promotional event or something similar--often means he will be able to sleep little more than two or three hours during a 48-hour stretch.

“At some point, you have to catch up,” he said. “I might spend a better part of a weekend catching up on sleep.”

Weekends for West are especially hectic. Squeezed in between her Saturday and Sunday morning shifts on Magic 102, she drives to Redlands for weekend shifts on KCAL-FM (96.7).

Most late-night deejays certainly yearn for the normalcy and bigger salaries of the day shifts. But it’s not necessarily an obsession for some of them. There are advantages to the early-morning time slot.

Schock, a golfing addict, wants a day gig, but in the meantime he is the first one on the Torrey Pines course at 6 a.m. several days a week.

On the air, West says she has freedom most modern deejays don’t share, the ability to program more of her own music, to function in a relatively unregulated manner similar to disc jockeys of the past.

Most of the songs for the evening are laid out for the disc jockeys--Shock only plays one or two requests an hour--but the wee hours format is far less rigid than the prime time shifts. Instead of one or two songs, Schock, Bones and West usually fill much of the end of their shows with requests from audience members, as well as their own choices.

“I get the place to myself,” she said. “I have peace of mind, no interruptions.”

There are other advantages to starting work at midnight. Schock wears shorts and a T-shirt to work.

“There is never any traffic on my way to work,” Bones said.

And, when bored, entertainment for the disc jockeys is only as far away as the request lines.