Episode 30 transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated, and as such, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.

Chad (00:01.336)
Greetings and welcome back to the Aural Mess podcast. It's been a while since the last episode, but very happy today to have with me a social worker, radio legend, musician, and my brother-in-law, Pete Salant. Hi, Pete.

Pete Salant (00:15.659)
Chad Sutton and I guess I am all of those things but you too are an IT guy as we can see by those things hanging from the ceiling around the wall behind you a musician and you know I mean I know secrets about you that very few people know even you so yeah.

Chad (00:39.407)
Well, hopefully not many of those will come out in today's conversation. Everybody should just leave a comment if they want a secret. Maybe I'll share something. don't know. Yeah, so I'm so glad you could join me. Thank you so much for taking the time on this kind of dreary Saturday.

Pete Salant (00:45.229)
I promise you, none of them will.

Pete Salant (00:54.053)
Yeah.

Pete Salant (01:00.327)
trust me, it is beyond my pleasure having known you for a million years. And having sat and talked to you for hours and hours and hours on end, it's nice to be able to lay this down on a chip or whatever they call it. Used to be on tape and see what comes out.

Chad (01:25.573)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, why don't we jump right in? I would love to start with maybe your radio background. yeah, like, yeah, sure.

Pete Salant (01:35.141)
Sure, sure. I have a way to do that if you want. Yeah, yeah, it just it it all did. What was it on WKRP? It all started at a little 5000 watt radius. Well, for me, it started in 1969. I was a sophomore in high school and I was in a band like so many.

Chad (01:49.126)
You

Pete Salant (02:04.761)
people were in high school. The band was called Alexander Brandy. And I know it was just us four guys. I played keyboards. Is that coming through? Yeah, OK. And so I have my my piano organ, whatever it is over here. And we had a drummer, a singer slash.

Chad (02:20.623)
Yes, yes.

Pete Salant (02:34.489)
guitarist and a lead guitarist. we didn't sound too bad, especially for high school bands. And we one night were doing what high school kids do. I don't know. We were drinking, I think. And we were listening to the local radio station, which was WABC in New York. I grew up in northern New Jersey.

Exit 172, that's how we explain where we're from. And we were listening to Cousin Brucie, the nighttime DJ, and he was doing a contest. Apparently this was a contest I didn't know about, but it was one that had been going on for some time and was going to go on for some time. And it was called the Big Break Contest. And the winner, winner band would get

Chad (03:07.027)
That's right. That's right.

Pete Salant (03:30.917)
an ABC Records recording contract. WABC, ABC Records, obviously, they, you know, it's all on the up and up and stuff. And bands were invited to send in a tape of what they sounded like, like a demo. And I guess he eventually got about 25 or 30 bands. He played each one on the air.

on his nighttime radio show at like nine o 'clock when kids were supposed to be doing homework. long story short, he liked what he heard evidently because we made it to the air, he played us and it sounded good. So the...

We did an old blues song, kind of a remake of an old blues song called Got My Mojo Running. I don't know who originally did it, but we cranked it up to a rocker tempo. And ultimately, we placed in the top 10 and got to play at Carnegie Freakin' Hall. Yeah. Each band was given five minutes to rehearse on the stage, on the hallowed stage.

Chad (04:30.816)
Yeah, sure.

Chad (04:40.469)
Nice.

Chad (04:44.365)
wow.

Pete Salant (04:52.415)
Mind you, I'd never been in front of a Hammond B3 organ in my life, let alone the Leslie speaker and all that stuff. when the show started and it was our turn, we ended up having a false start because I screwed up and didn't know which stopped the push up or down or whatever. But they gave us a chance to start over again and we got through it. And needless to say, we didn't win the contest.

It was fun. A group of kids from our high school had gotten together and pooled their money and rented a commuter bus, a Rockland Coaches Red and Tan Line bus to bring a bunch of the kids from Park Ridge High School into the city to see the show. And that was the highlight, having our friends see us perform at Carnegie Hall. And it was also my introduction into radio.

because we had we had to go into originally go into the recording studio, the same place where who was the guy who did Monday Night? Monday Night Football. He was he used to be a lawyer and I'm forgetting I'm spacing out on his name, but that was his studio where he recorded his his once a week network radio show all.

I'm saying you're to say all things considered, but that's not that's a different network. But got to see all the equipment and it was magical. They played it back for us. It sounded nothing like what we thought we sounded like because they had apparently equalized us and compressed us. And it was really I mean, it really sounded outrageously good. And later on, we.

Chad (06:37.242)
Sure.

Pete Salant (06:46.629)
The night they played the song on Cousin Brucie's show, I knew we were in the top 10 because when when Brucie pointed to his engineer to play the tape, it was silence. And what that meant to me and just with my minimal knowledge of radio was that the program director, Rick Sklar and Brucie had been listening to it back in

Rick Sklar's office or something, and they didn't re -cue the tape. Normally the tape is supposed to, you're supposed to let the tape cartridge go until it finishes, until it stops automatically. So either, you know, if you forget to do that, you may be in a space of blank tape, and that's where we were. So, Brucey had to vamp for a while until finally the tape queued and stopped, and Brucey said, okay,

go and they played us. But I already knew we were going to get a call because of that. that was cooler than actually the whole rock scene and playing the music, just the radio stuff. So I think it was at that point that I knew more or less exactly what I was going to be doing for a living.

Chad (08:00.183)
Hahaha

Pete Salant (08:12.645)
for what I thought was the rest of my life.

Pete Salant (08:21.827)
It was really exciting and the following summer my dad was the, ended up being the adult who took care of this bunch of kids who were seniors in our high school who went to our local radio station which was in Hackensack, New Jersey. Everyone's heard Hackensack courtesy of Billy Joel.

And I got to come with them and I sat in the engineers recording control room in shops in the New York market. You're not allowed to touch anything unless you belong to the engineers union. And if you're an announcer, you're not allowed to touch the engineering stuff.

Chad (08:52.02)
Yes.

Chad (09:13.554)
All

Pete Salant (09:21.017)
And you're not allowed to talk on the radio unless you belong to AFTRA, SAG -AFTRA now, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. But I was just in trance. I was sitting there watching. I was more interested in what the engineer was doing than what the kids from my high school were talking about with my dad sitting there. afterwards, when I'm on the ride home, which wasn't very long, I asked my dad, well, how...

Chad (09:38.782)
Hahaha

Pete Salant (09:49.839)
You think I can get a job there for the summer?" He said, well, you never know until you ask. So the following, that was on a weekend, the show was taped on a weekend. On Monday morning, I called the program director of the radio station, who also happened to be the guy who hosted that show that I was there for. And he said, well, what...

Chad (09:54.824)
Bye.

Pete Salant (10:14.181)
What do you do? Why should I pay you to do something that you don't have any experience? I said, I can write. I can. I understand radio. And why don't you have me come in? I can write you a few commercials and see how they come out. And so he did. I took the bus, that same bus that our friends had taken to the big break contest.

play. I wrote, I guess, two or three commercials based on a fact sheet that he had given me. And he was kind of blown away. Apparently he said, well, let's see, minimum wage is two dollars an hour. This is 1970. Let me talk to our manager and sit tight. And the manager came down ultimately and talked to me and

They hired me for the summer. The normal production and copy director was out on medical leave for the summer. So they gave me the job. I was lucky. No, no, no. But man, I was like in hog heaven. I had a lunch hour. So during that lunch hour, I would sit in the

Chad (11:26.326)
Wow, how lucky. Not for him.

Pete Salant (11:41.157)
in the control room watching the DJ do his show. The DJ had turntables so he could play his records. This was, mind you, a country station. WJRZ, The Mighty 97, country -politin music, whatever. And I was more interested in watching...

Chad (11:52.352)
Right, right.

Pete Salant (12:04.613)
the technology, how he would start the record, and the DJ could also play the jingles. WJRZ, the Mighty 97 from tape cartridges. And all the engineer did was ride levels on his board. And the jock could not adjust anything except play the records and play the tapes, the tape cartridges.

So I would spend my lunch hours watching these guys do their thing and I was hooked. And that's kind of the end of the story from that perspective. I knew what my life was going to be about by then.

Chad (12:40.61)
Wow, that's so cool.

Pete Salant (13:00.389)
Let me see, I was a year ahead of most kids because I had skipped first grade. So I was 16 and ready to go into my senior year of high school.

Chad (13:07.298)
Yeah, okay.

Pete Salant (13:17.541)
I went onward and became a DJ the following summer at another radio station. It's the station that Howard Stern ended up starting at in Briarcliff Manor in New York. It was a little, was just a little 800 watt FM station, WRNW.

Chad (13:44.742)
Well, Pete, for my listeners, sorry to interrupt you, if you know, what does that mean in the context of power and distance, right? So if it's an 800 watt FM station, what was the reach, you know, from from Briar Cliff? Yeah, okay.

Pete Salant (13:54.885)
Not much. Not much. The stations in New York or Philadelphia or St. Louis, most of them are 50 ,000 watts. Either 50, depending on where you are in the country, the maximum power you can have is either 50 or 100 ,000 watts on FM. And so we had 800 watts. And it's not because they didn't want more power.

That's all they could shoehorn in in Briarcliff Manor in New York and not interfere with other radio stations. So it was a funny little radio station with not many commercials, didn't make much money, not too many. Most of the commercials were tradeouts for the managers lunches, which means

they would trade commercial time in exchange for the guy's lunch at the same restaurant every day. And the station ended up being sold just at the right time when it was time for me to go to college. So that was that. Did I go to college? I don't know.

Chad (14:58.747)
Right,

Chad (15:12.325)
Okay, well that's...

Well, let's pause there. That's the early days, sort of the inception story. But let's back up to when you were younger and just, you know, musical influences and, you know, how did you end up?

you know, taking instrument lessons. I'm assuming you took lessons, you know, we all did when we were younger. you know, give me some of the background of how you started playing music and some of your favorite things to listen to and maybe earliest memories of stuff that your parents played around the house, because, you know, I know your parents were big into music, right?

Pete Salant (15:47.449)
Yes, they were. And the music that we listened to around the house was mainly classical music. That's what my dad liked. And my mom liked to listen to that too. But it was like the real thing. Beethoven, Bach, the real classical music, not classical light or any of that. And my dad had built speakers into the wall. He had built a...

Chad (16:09.073)
Right.

Pete Salant (16:17.285)
a receiver and amplifier from a kit and that was his fun when he wasn't being a commercial artist for money. When I was about three years old, I asked for a piano. My aunt, one of my aunts had a pretty crappy piano.

And I used to love, that's the first place I'd go when we went to visit them, was to sit down at the piano and play. the first song I learned was, I taught myself, was the old gray mare.

Did you hear that?

Chad (17:05.192)
No, I'm just getting like a thunking kind of sound.

Pete Salant (17:07.645)
Yeah, let's see. OK. Turned itself off. And it sounded pretty much like that. And I then pretty much, yes. Of course, what do you think? What do you think we watched at home? My sister and I, but anyway. I.

Chad (17:23.753)
Shades of Bugs Bunny.

Pete Salant (17:36.997)
learned songs by ear. I began to be get better and be able to play songs by ear. My parents got me piano lessons, which I took for the next 15 years from a classical, classically trained pianist. And that wasn't where I wanted to go. But it's how you learn to play properly. Billy Joel took classical piano lessons.

And it was the right thing to do. So I did. And by the time I was 14 or 15, I quit lessons and began to play songs I was hearing on the radio by ear. I would go with my mother to the A &P supermarket or whatever. And I would say, I'm going to sit out in the car, listen to the radio while you go in the shop.

I'd listen to, this was New York, so I'd listen to WABC, WCA. This is in the days of AM Radio, and I'd hear the hits. So I was hearing at that time, 1964, 65, when I was 10 or 11, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, those songs. Learned to play, taught myself to play those tunes on the piano.

In the meantime, my parents got me a refurbished upright piano. And, you know, it was a lot of fun. It didn't sound great, but it worked just fine. For my bar mitzvah, when I was 13, they bought me a Yamaha Baby Grand Piano, which was just... I had the chance to, within reason, pick...

Chad (19:25.954)
Wow.

Pete Salant (19:29.977)
whatever piano I wanted. we went to New York and that was the piano to try pianos out. That was the piano that had the best feeling, the crispest sound. It just under my fingers, it just felt right. So that was the piano I had for the next X number of years. And I discovered that playing the piano is no different from playing the organ or any other instrument that

is keyboard based. So that's how I was able to join a rock band. I listened, I guess I was listening mainly to the songs that were the hits, the top 20 of the week, because I was listening to, starting to listen to the radio. And, you know, these were bubblegummy type of tunes. This was

1970, 71. So sure, I could listen to...

some of the stuff that was out there at that time.

But I really liked listening to The Beatles, The Stones, the stuff that we were hearing every hour on the radio. later on, I had an opportunity at that same WRNW radio station, which changed formats to rock. I had a chance to delve into that and to listen to and play.

Chad (20:56.24)
Sure.

Pete Salant (21:14.507)
some of the big cuts from the major albums of the time, Steely Dan and so forth. But it still wasn't, I wasn't able to practice my DJ skills using those because when you play music like that on the radio, you introduce the song or you say what you're going to say, turn off your microphone, start the record and

you don't talk over the musical introduction of the song. God forbid that would be sacrosanct. And what I really wanted to do was what Cousin Brucie was doing, which was talk over the intro of the song as the song started and stop just in the nick of time before the singers began to sing.

Chad (21:52.903)
Yep.

Chad (22:07.911)
There's such an art to that. I never could get the hang of that when I used to practice or play, you know, and as you know, maybe my listeners and viewers don't, but you know, I did have a very, very brief run as an on air DJ in the late 80s in high school myself and, and also in college, you know, had a college radio show on.

Pete Salant (22:09.807)
Mm -hmm.

Chad (22:27.946)
I think it was Sunday mornings early. yeah, like to be able to, you know, it's timing, I guess there's science behind it too, right? There's a little bit of math involved, but just to have that rhythm and be able to sort of just flow into the song and know when to shut up and let the vocal kick in or the intro to be over, you know, it's tough.

Pete Salant (22:45.133)
Yeah, some guys used to actually use a stopwatch because the intro time would be maybe written on the record label or on a tape cartridge label or whatever. we didn't really think much. Those of us who were in the business didn't think much of those kind of guys because if you know the song, you know when to stop. You just know intrinsically exactly where to stop.

Chad (22:54.9)
Right?

Pete Salant (23:15.141)
There's no need to be looking at a back timing clock. If you know the song, you know the song. And I think you discovered that too when your sister, my wife, gave you the opportunity to do that, to play and then later to actually do it on the radio. You discovered that your musical sensibilities helped you do that.

One of the most important, the most important thing is to is to stop talking in time. You've got to stop because if you if you're still talking and they're singing, that's a that's a major train wreck. And there's no particular reason to continue to talk all the way up to the song intro. If you only have a few seconds of things to say, that's all you should say. If you're, you know, if you're any good at what you're at, what you're doing. So.

Chad (23:51.427)
Right.

Chad (23:57.666)
yeah.

Pete Salant (24:14.413)
That was another thing that I learned relatively quickly. And the way you make your way up in the radio business is to get a job at the next bigger station in the next larger city. So I went from Mount Kiska. Well, first of all, I dropped out of college. That was just not for me. I was spending more time at the campus radio station.

than I was anywhere else.

I did that, learned how to splice tape, how to edit tape, which is now something you no longer need to know how to do because everything is digital. I found a great deal of joy in being involved in that, so much so that I thought my... It was just...

basically bullshit to go to school. And I wasn't really learning anything, especially not in my communications classes, because these guys were light years behind reality, the professors. So I left school and I started working my way up the ranks of various radio stations, mainly in the Northeast.

Chad (25:39.168)
yeah.

Pete Salant (25:52.101)
because there was a farm team. I worked in Manchester, New Hampshire, Providence, Rhode Island. And then as I continued to work up, I made it to New Haven, Connecticut, and to a pretty decent station there, where I got a pretty decent job doing the nighttime teen -oriented take requests on the air on the phone.

You know, moving up, I gained the trust of the owners of the station. This is back in the day when people owned radio stations and not corporations. And so they trusted me when I gave them advice as to what to do. They owned an FM station and FM was really beginning to come into its own. And I said, why don't we take this AM top 40

Chad (26:35.429)
Right. Right.

Pete Salant (26:53.061)
and put it on your FM station, because the FM station was elevator music. I don't know if that means anything to any of your viewers or listeners, it kind of like people would be listening to a cover version of a Beach Boys song played by the 101 Strings.

Chad (27:21.072)
Hahaha

Pete Salant (27:21.189)
or whatever.

Chad (27:24.037)
Lex De Azevedo. There's a name.

Pete Salant (27:26.373)
Well, yes, there you go. Well, you you know this because the station you worked at had that format. I suggested, hey, let's let's go top 40 on the FM station. And they said, all right, well, we're not unaware of how AM is losing ground and FM is as big. How fast could you make that change, Pete? And I said, well, I don't know. I mean, to do it right, it should take.

few months, they said, how about two weeks? And all we basically had at that FM station, which was in a different location, was a studio. We would play the music off of reel -to -reel tapes, just like you did in Atlantic City. But we couldn't.

Chad (27:57.871)
Hahaha

Pete Salant (28:24.119)
Our AM station was all the music was on tape cartridges, but they were mono. We were going to FM, which was stereo. We didn't have time to make hundreds of stereo tape cartridges. So we had to use the turntables and go back a few generations of technology and play our music off of albums and 45s.

which is what we did. And it was fun. Kept the same staff and those guys were pros. They had already worked at radio stations that played vinyl and they all knew what they were doing. Great guys, still friends with most of them who were the ones who were still around with us.

That's, you know, that was basically that until one day I got a phone call from a guy who ran the NBC FM radio stations in New York City. Well, actually, he ran all of the NBC FM radio stations. There was one guy who ran the AM stations, one guy who ran the FM stations. And

He said, you know, my colleagues and I have been listening to your station in New Haven from out here on Long Island in on the weekends when we come out to to to relax way out on the East End. And we'd like to talk to you about fixing our broken FM station in New York, which is called WYNY. Originally, it was WNBC FM.

Chad (30:11.369)
Wow.

Pete Salant (30:18.853)
And it morphed into having a name of its own, W. I don't know where they got it from. NY is New York, I guess. And I thought it was stupid. But it wasn't stupid for me to say yes to, yeah, I'll be there Monday morning at 10 a And this gentleman, Walter Szabo, brought in his...

Chad (30:29.503)
Right.

Ha

Pete Salant (30:44.791)
national program director from San Francisco. He brought in another guy. He brought in all of his sergeants at arms to talk to me. And we spent the entire day and part of the evening. I was being interviewed and.

I got the job. I couldn't believe it when I went to take the train home to Connecticut. I was looking up 102 stories in the sky at the Empire State Building thinking, boy, in a few weeks, I'm going to be coming. What I'm creating is going to be coming from the antenna on the very top of that building.

Chad (31:06.369)
How did you feel?

Chad (31:32.289)
That's so cool.

Pete Salant (31:32.873)
It was beyond cool and it was the pinnacle. was everybody's dream. Anyone who was in radio and wanted to be a program director, which is like the person who's in charge of how the peanut butter tastes at the peanut butter factory. And I was going to have a lot of autonomy. I had...

people who would give me ideas and people above me and people who had been in the business for longer than I had maybe. But they're all still full of crap and I knew what I needed to do. I was given a budget that was pretty amazing. We could spend $3 million a year on advertising and promotion.

Chad (32:31.49)
Wow.

Pete Salant (32:32.037)
This is a radio station that had lost $600,000 the year before and a great deal more the year before that and a lot more the year before that. They just kept losing money because they were making bad decisions. And I just kind of knew it's like if you play a musical instrument, you know when you're in the groove.

I knew what I needed to do. needed to go to the people who'd be listening to this radio station and ask them what they wanted to hear, what songs they wanted to hear, which we did in a kind of a scientific way, playing 10-second snippets of the hooks of songs for them in an auditorium. And they give us feedback using a knob on a device.

and

I would then add my own ideas and make my own decisions as to which songs were the right ones to play. We would play maybe five or six current hits, five or six recent songs, and two or three hundred recent, we call them oldies, they were songs that had been hits during the past 10 years or so, which included, back at that time,

Chad (33:59.896)
Right.

Pete Salant (34:04.037)
The turtles, the... It's ancient now and you don't hear these on the radio anymore because the listeners have aged out. But at the time it was the right thing to do. we played four of those an hour, two current hits and two recent hits. We had...

Chad (34:17.925)
Right, sure.

Pete Salant (34:33.857)
the very best DJs that money could buy, several of whom were already there. I didn't have to hire new guys because these were guys I would have hired if I had needed to.

I had to let go of a couple of guys who wanted to talk too much. They were in love with their voice and all that. But it didn't take long before the station, had been number 22 in the ratings, number 22 out of 25 stations in New York, FM stations in New York, I think it took us three or four months.

Chad (34:55.556)
Yeah.

Pete Salant (35:18.629)
And we were number one all of a sudden. Number one in adults 25, ages 25 to 54, which is what the advertisers were looking for. So that was a no -brainer because although I was only 26, I was at the beginning of that age group and knew what they wanted to hear, did my research.

Chad (35:21.347)
Whoa.

Pete Salant (35:46.661)
was rewarded handsomely for doing the right thing and making this radio station sound like a million bucks. I'm still told to this day, 45, 50 years later, that no other radio station can touch what we did. We were very fortunate in that there was no

all of the top 40 hit stations were on AM at the time and they were gravitating to FM but we were it. So there was no other station playing the top hits other than us. So we could occupy a very broad spectrum of music. Everything from Eye of the Tiger to... Well, I mean, you name it, we could play it. know, softer stuff.

Louder, more strident music. Even if it sounded like a train wreck on the air, it still had appeal to the people who were listening.

Chad (36:57.676)
Right. Well, how long did it take before the rest of the market sort of woke up and started to hustle to get that format in place on their FM stations? And when did you start seeing all the copycats jump on?

Pete Salant (37:09.029)
Thankfully, good, very good question, Chad. Thankfully, I don't think it took more than well, it did take a couple of years before they started catching up to us and a company based out of Cleveland, Mallwright decided they were going to buy an elevator music station, WVNJ 100.3, licensed to Newark, but

with its antenna on top of basically the same place we were, right in the midtown Manhattan at 1,400 feet above average terrain. they bought the station and decided that all of a sudden the word got out they were going to do top 40.

Until then, WYNY had deliberately been occupying that niche. That was us. I mean, that and softer songs and never going to let you go. know, that kind of stuff. We were all kind of all over the road. But we had a purpose and we had a target audience. And it took...

a total, a grand total of three years before we had a rating that didn't go up. The ratings were taken every three months and it was three years before we had what we call a down book, ratings that were not at the top of the heap.

And it was at that time that I decided, wisely so, that I would leave and perhaps do this for stations in other places in the United States. Philadelphia was one and was my first.

Pete Salant (39:12.005)
a station that is at 104.5. It was called Sunny WSNI. They wanted it to sound just like WYNY. And of course, I didn't give them that. I gave them what was right for them. And then another station in Oklahoma City, a station in Salt Lake City, stations all over the place started to call me. And I never dreamed that I could be collecting checks from these...

from all of these stations for telling them what to do, giving them the right music to play, coming into their market four times a year for two or three days at a time to make sure that their DJs sounded the best they could. One big thing that was important to me, and it turns out it was important because

It was a psychological basis to this. The station had the sound at least as good as the CD the music came from, and in fact, hopefully better. And I was a sound hound. I was a guy with golden ears. I could tell when it sounded right. I had a little secret.

Chad (40:20.442)
Right.

Hahaha

Pete Salant (40:37.861)
We would speed up the music by just 2% to make that same song when played on the competition sound just sort of off, just wrong and nobody could put their finger on it. In fact, most listeners weren't even aware we were doing it, but it would give us a competitive edge that made it possible for us to

you know, get another win every time. You know, we would win in the ratings. And, you they just, these other stations didn't catch on. It was very easy to do.

Chad (41:22.401)
That's fascinating. How did you ever come up with that? Like what made you think, okay, let me speed up just ever so slightly, barely noticeably, you know, and that makes it sound more exciting. Like where did you get the psychological basis for that?

Pete Salant (41:32.964)
Well...

Yeah, I think I think you mentioned that I am I am now a clinical social worker, which is a shrink. When when radio began to consolidate and we began to lose radio stations to the corporations and I had I ended up having to find different kind of work.

So I went back to school, got a master's degree in clinical social work and got a license to practice head shrinking, if you will. And I chose Virginia because that's where we wanted to live. Licenses are given out based on what state you live in. I knew

By then, I knew that there were things that were important that no one could really put their finger on as far as radio was concerned. So I didn't just give up radio like that. It took a while. And I continued to apply the things that I learned in social work school to radio.

speeding up the music was one thing. I knew it was too fast if anyone could actually identify that we were doing it. So we just didn't want them to know we were doing that. I don't think the artists would have been particularly happy. And it was so subtle that it just didn't register with the listeners. Some of the other things we did

Chad (43:22.806)
sure.

Pete Salant (43:25.349)
were emphasizing the bass and the treble in the music by separating the bands into three or four bands, bass, mid -bass, mid -range, and highs and treble, and processing, meaning compressing the sounds in each of these bands separately and then mixing them back together so that

Chad (43:52.34)
I remember you explaining this to me years ago and I was gonna ask you about it, sort of your secret weapon, so yeah.

Pete Salant (43:54.743)
OK. Yeah, it's like remixing a song. This is kind of the same thing that they do in the recording studios, but they don't do that. They do every instrument individually. I couldn't at the time, we didn't have the technology to separate the instruments like with using AI or whatever.

But what we did have is the ability to separate the bands of audio into 0 to 200 hertz, 200 to 1,000, 1,000 to 5,000, and then 5,000 and up. Let's say just four. And you can go as high as you want. There's a company that took the idea, I think, from me and ended up with 31 bands of sound.

And that was a little overkill, but it did sound way better. And I had started doing this in New Haven with the AM station that made the AM station sound better than the FM. And then in New York, where we had all kinds of money to play with and an engineer that I could assign to do nothing but build.

the gizmos that were required to do this stuff because it wasn't available. You couldn't just buy a box off a shelf and have it do this. had the WYNY. We had the very best sounding audio that a radio station could possibly have and all the stations I worked with after that as a consultant.

actually sounded better, I think, than the original performance. In fact, they got a lot of compliments from engineering types and non-engineering types who thought the music that they were hearing out of the stations I was working with was better than the original.

Pete Salant (46:09.317)
I became a consultant. worked for 20 years as a consultant. the middle of that, I'll shrink this down a little bit. In the middle of that, I bought an AM radio station in New Haven, Connecticut. It was off the air. So it went for a song, like cheap, like almost nothing. it was, in fact, it had been off the air so long that the lights at the top of the tower were no longer flashing, which was illegal.

Chad (46:36.03)
wow.

Pete Salant (46:38.021)
And it was not a high power station. It was not 50,000 watts. It was 1000 watts, but that was enough to cover the market. And we played. There was there was an opening for oldies. I'm taught this is at the time, 1985, people who were at the time my age, anywhere from 30 to 60.

And AM stereo had just come out. So we bought the gear that it took to do AM stereo. I was also the engineer. I had help with that. I would be working on those four band sound effect things. we did everything we could to get out as far as we could, distance wise.

clarity wise and so forth. But then an FM station, this only took about six months, an FM station in our area decided they were going to play oldies. And of course, FM is better than AM no matter how you work it. And we were starting to actually make some money by selling commercials. The station had been on and off the air for years.

Chad (47:49.711)
Chad (47:55.175)
Right?

Pete Salant (48:07.941)
No one had made money with it until we began to. And unfortunately, we didn't make money for long because along came a 50,000 watt FM station licensed to Hartford, but that covered our area, the entire state of Connecticut. It's called WDRC-FM. And they...

all of a sudden came out of nowhere and of course their ratings were 100 times better than ours because they covered a larger area. They sounded better because they were FM. that was that. Sold the radio station for the shirt on my back basically and went back into consulting. After a while.

Chad (48:43.721)
Sure.

Pete Salant (49:03.429)
I did whatever I had to do to make a living. was creating TV commercials for radio stations. Nowadays, all it takes is an iPhone to do that. Anyone can do that. But in 1990, it required some software and the latest PC and music videos and all that stuff. But I made a decent living for about 10 years doing that.

Chad (49:14.613)
Right?

Pete Salant (49:33.349)
until I decided I needed to get back into the front lines of radio, of a radio station. was no more consulting because these big corporations had their own consultants built in. Didn't need a consultant, didn't need to hire an outside gun to come in and fix because if it was broken they could fix it themselves or least so they thought.

Chad (49:52.5)
Right.

Pete Salant (50:02.117)
So I took a job in Hartford for a country station and you know that country is my least favorite type of music in the entire world. But I also knew that it was a job that happened to pay better than I had even ever expected.

At the time, I was given an enormous amount of flexibility to program it myself. The manager gave me lots of leeway. And for two years, the ratings grew and grew and grew. I was paid in part based on the ratings and how fast they grew and where they were in the...

Mostly we were looking for men and women ages 40 to 60 or 35 to 40, whatever. And I got, every time we were number one, I got a $25,000 bonus. That was more than I was making from my salary. Not a bad gig, but then this, and the company that owned this was Clear Channel. Clear Channel made some changes two years in to my job.

Chad (51:08.162)
Cool.

Chad (51:17.89)
Mm

Pete Salant (51:22.989)
They got rid of the manager who'd hired me. They centralized control of the playlist, what songs would be played. I knew that the key to winning in the Hartford and New Haven Connecticut market was to kind of be a montage of both country and rock and

They didn't want me to do that. They just wanted me to play howdy, hi -yo, you know, whatever the hell.

Chad (51:59.937)
Ha ha ha.

Pete Salant (52:03.045)
That was the end of Connecticut country 92.5. They let me go after another year or so of me doing exactly what I was told to do. I was also at a certain age that, you know, they deny it, of course, but I was 55 at the time and

That's the time when someone turns 55, that's too old to be the program director. I even offered to take a pay cut, a major pay cut. I offered to do anything it took to keep the job. That's not what they wanted. So it was time for plan B. They did give me a handsome payout because I had a contract.

Chad (52:39.909)
Right, sure.

Pete Salant (53:02.661)
So they paid me for a year. And during that time, I came to the realization that I had to go back to freaking college, which I did. I had never finished. I had never gotten my bachelor's degree. So I went to Connecticut, Southern Connecticut State University and finished the

Chad (53:12.549)
Hahaha

Pete Salant (53:26.117)
the education I never had finished at Boston University 37 years before that. And I was able to finish that in a year.

I won't say exactly what I did, but I had some very cooperative professors and deans who helped me along the way. I was the oldest guy there, you know, everyone else was 22. So I finished and got my bachelor's in a year and then got... I decided I would go to Fordham University, which had an excellent...

clinical social work department. And I only had to go to school twice a week. So it wasn't a big deal go to New York and take some courses. They were not doing any virtual stuff. It was all right in the classroom. And I got a two-year master's in one year.

except for one little thing, I couldn't do the math. what was the course that they were requiring? It was an advanced math course. I got a lot of help from the professor, and I mean a lot of help, like open book tests. And I was allowed to take the answers home with me. He just wanted me to pass.

Chad (54:36.05)
Wow.

Chad (55:05.074)
Right, sure.

Pete Salant (55:05.093)
tremendous guy. love him. mean, I'll never forget him. And after that, I had to work for, was it two years or three years under supervision in order to get my license. So I did that and got my license, scored 100 on the test. Yeah. And

Chad (55:31.014)
wow.

Pete Salant (55:34.371)
got my license in here in Virginia to be able to see patients. And I had an office. Your sister, my wife, and I shared a waiting room. And we had two little offices off of there. And for four years, we did that. We worked separately together.

She had beat me to the... She knew that radio was not going to be where it was at, and she had been in radio as well. So she had gone and gotten her doctorate in clinical psychology way ahead of me. In fact, in 2006, was almost 10 years ahead of me. And she was able to command higher...

reimbursement rates from the insurance companies and so forth. And thank goodness for that. And it was the fact that she went from radio to mental health that I got the idea to do so and have been doing it ever since. when

was it March 2020 that came around and it was no longer really smart to have to be seeing people in person. We got our Zoom subscriptions with all of the add ons that you needed in order to make it legal to do to make it legal to to to see people and continue to have.

Chad (56:57.92)
Yep.

Pete Salant (57:23.397)
to be, how can I say it, to be, yeah, but what is HIPAA, but it is, yes, to be HIPAA compliant. was basically paying an extra couple hundred bucks a year to ensure that everything that was said during sessions was just between the patient and me.

Chad (57:30.133)
like HIPAA compliance or...

Pete Salant (57:53.669)
And I've been doing that ever since. When I turned 70 earlier this year, I started cutting back on the number of hours that I was working because it was starting to... I wouldn't say I was burning out, but it was starting to become more of the same. And Stacey, your sister, also finding the same thing. So she found another niche.

to enter, interviewing people who have either recently left the military or who are in or active military to assess whether they should be getting special treatment or extra money for

things they went through that like PTSD and stuff. I'm not allowed to do that because I don't have a doctorate and she is. So I do the bookkeeping and the IT and I have my own, I'm continuing with my own small.

clientele. My census is working three days a week. I'm seeing seven or eight people a week and a few of them I've been seeing for six or seven years. And I can continue to do this as long as I can sit down.

Chad (59:22.547)
Okay

Chad (59:36.276)
Alright.

Pete Salant (59:36.835)
So, and the music continues to be my fun and I don't play enough and they should. But one thing I don't do is listen to the radio anymore. There's absolutely nothing on the radio that's attracting me other than if I happen to be in the car at the right time.

Chad (59:45.507)
Yeah, neither do I.

Ha ha ha.

Pete Salant (01:00:03.459)
National Public Radio's morning show and afternoon show can have their interesting moments. And I'm still kind of stuck on interested in some of the things about old radio, like jingles, like station jingles, singing the call letters. And there's even a guy who once a week does a three hour radio show about jingles because he's been the

guy who creates most of the jingles since 1976 and he's still doing it today. So I listened to his show on his internet, on an internet radio station that he, that they gave him three hours a week to play with. So that's lots of fun. And I stay in touch with old friends from radio. Every Friday at 9 .30 we have a Zoom meetup for an hour and half and

Chad (01:00:38.874)
no way.

Chad (01:00:50.003)
Sweet. Yeah.

Pete Salant (01:01:02.213)
Once a year we get together in person in Connecticut and have some fun and that is the, that's the limit. That's all I do in radio. I love what radio was, but I can't stand what radio is. Because it's not the same. It's just not, it doesn't even resemble what I did because we're not allowed to make decisions. They're made centrally.

Chad (01:01:13.64)
Ha

Chad (01:01:19.197)
Yeah, agreed.

Chad (01:01:31.219)
Yeah, I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore. There's maybe two stations, three stations that I would tune into and I can probably name them. One's WBGO in Newark and it's the jazz station. They're still around and I think they're still independent. There's FMU and I was...

Pete Salant (01:01:42.767)
The Jazz Station. Yes. Wow.

Pete Salant (01:01:50.469)
Mm -hmm.

Chad (01:01:53.152)
a fan of their morning show during my morning commute once in a while, because they were just playing like a really eclectic mix of like alternative college radio type music, but also peppering in some older stuff and some new things. And they would have theme shows, you know, so they would, and they would ask people on Twitter to submit songs for, know, Hey, the theme of the day is, you know, spaghetti and meatballs, or, know, something silly, you know, and people would just submit songs that had something to do with the theme. And the only other

Pete Salant (01:02:06.083)
Yeah, it's a good station.

Pete Salant (01:02:18.125)
huh.

Chad (01:02:23.065)
Everyone I listen to and it's because of the traffic updates is 1010 wins which is now on FM on I think 92 .3. So yeah, so those are my three presets in my car and I don't care for any other stations.

Pete Salant (01:02:29.829)
That it is, yep.

Pete Salant (01:02:34.437)
You ever listen to Q104 .3, the classic rock station? It's too repetitive, maybe?

Chad (01:02:42.271)
Yeah, probably. Yeah, and they play the hits, you know? I mean, back in the day, FM and, you know, album rock stations were great because you would hear a deep cut, you know, or something that you really wanted to listen to. But now it's just the same, you know, hits.

Pete Salant (01:02:55.267)
There is absolutely no, there's nothing left that is edgy or current. If you want to discover new music, you have to find new ways to do it. I have a couple of friends who work there and they're very lucky to be working into their 70s.

they are the exception. They are great, they are entertaining, and they are able to rise above the repetitious music and engage the listener in something, you know, a little bit more. But that's, I mean, that and the stations you mentioned is all there is to listen to in the New York area, so...

Chad (01:03:49.421)
Yeah. Alright.

Pete Salant (01:03:50.617)
Well, I seem to have usurped all of the time here, but I guess there was a lot to talk about, at least for me to talk about.

Chad (01:04:02.341)
Yeah, no, there was this was great. You know, I'm glad we were able to capture sort of this this condensed version of the history and you know, I continue to be fascinated by, know, what you did and I think you were, you know, somewhat of a pioneer in radio. So I think it's it's really great for for my audience to be able to get that story. And I know that you were just recently on another YouTube channel. So I will post a link to that video in the comments. mean, in the in the show notes as well, because I think you go a little bit

Pete Salant (01:04:27.502)
Chad (01:04:32.404)
deeper into some of the actual radio industry stuff, right? So for anybody who wants to hear more, you can check that video out.

Pete Salant (01:04:40.677)
Right. And there's there's another video we don't need to link, but there's a guy who did parody Christmas songs, Bob Rivers. He and I worked together in New Haven in 1976 at WAVZ. in New Haven, and we've been friends ever since. He's currently fighting a really difficult cancer and has been for

Chad (01:04:53.141)
sure!

Chad (01:04:58.839)
I didn't know that.

Pete Salant (01:05:10.622)
a number of years, but Stacey and I recently had a chance to see him, it was a couple of years ago by now, but he's...

hopefully going to live. But we're hoping so. But he's my most famous friend because he made a lot of money and put out, I'm thinking it's eight or nine gold records.

Chad (01:05:28.846)
Hahaha

Chad (01:05:37.562)
was going to say there are a bunch of those, I remember.

Pete Salant (01:05:38.325)
Yeah, and there's the I guess his biggest hit was called walking around in women's underwear, which is which is which his son, who is a Hollywood producer recently put to video. And it's pretty neat. Yeah. So anyway, he's he's my most famous friend that I count a lot of them. I guess those of us who.

Chad (01:05:46.776)
Yes.

Chad (01:05:54.712)
Really?

Pete Salant (01:06:06.593)
took pride in our work and took it seriously, kind of hung together for life. And that's really been the way it is. And yeah, when I think about it, yes, I invented some of the things that are commonplace now in radio. And I'm proud of having done that. And thank you for noticing.

Yeah, and you know, I think the world of you and I love you, Chad, and I know that there's a musician in you and someday I hope you get back to it.

Chad (01:06:36.422)
Of course, of course.

Chad (01:06:42.039)
hahahaha

Chad (01:06:50.554)
Yeah, I will. I've been noodling here and there. So just a matter of time before I put more energy into it. Yeah.

Pete Salant (01:06:57.455)
Sure. Sure. Well, thanks for talking to me today. It's been great.

Chad (01:07:02.074)
Yeah, well, thanks for coming on again. I really appreciate you being here. And I've really enjoyed the two episodes that I've done with Cal, your daughter. And we have another one potentially in the works. So hopefully that'll come out pretty soon. Yeah. Absolutely. All right, great. Thanks, Pete. Love you too and talk to you soon. All right.

Pete Salant (01:07:08.782)
Yes.

Pete Salant (01:07:15.343)
Fantastic. Yeah, you guys really click. It's so nice to see. Yeah, thank you, Chad. Okay, good enough. Bye.