Welcome to Between the Notes! Our first episode take a look at the best - and sometimes only - friend a music fan might have - the radio DJ, with a little mixtape analysis thrown in for good measure.
Welcome to Between the Notes! Our first episode take a look at the best - and sometimes only - friend a music fan might have - the radio DJ, with a little mixtape analysis thrown in for good measure.
Welcome to the first episode of the Between the Notes Podcast. I’m your host Jack Sharkey and I am joined here in the comfy confines of Music Dog Studio in Nashville Tennessee by my co-host and producer, music industry veteran Bob Bender. Bob also hosts the wildly popular Business Side of Music podcast, which is a weekly look inside, well, the Business Side of Music. His guests and insights are a must-listen for anyone involved in the industry.
Between the Notes is built around a similar yet slightly different concept – basically it’s all about exploring what music means to us as humans. We’re going to be covering everything from music history to the current culture of music to the technology that brings music into our lives, and pretty much whatever else crosses our minds on a weekly basis.
I suppose a little about me is appropriate before we dig in – and before you decide, which we hope you do – to stick with us and check out what this podcast is going to be all about.
I come from a musical background and have spent most of my life performing and playing in one form or another. I’ve owned a recording studio, been a recording and live sound engineer and designed and built commercial audio systems. I work in the consumer end of the business as an engineer and content creator, and the genesis of this podcast is all of the material that I’ve got filed away that doesn’t translate nicely to a corporate gig. I’ve been a fan of music and pretty much more importantly, the sound music makes, my entire life. I’m the guy with a passion for all things music who will tell you when the cool part of a song is coming up – whether you want me to tell you that or not.
Bob is an industry veteran who lived the stories us fans of music always like to listen to and with the two of us, Between the Notes is a podcast that looks at music from both sides – from the outsider’s perspective where I come from and the insider’s perspective which is where Bob comes from.
This podcast has been in the planning stages for about a year, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to introduce what it is we’re doing. After a lot of back and forth, I decided the best way to kick off this thing was to revisit two or three, or five or six, of the most important people in my life – the voices of my youth and my life until I opened my Spotify account – the DJ.
Looking back, it seems like I spent the better part of the first twenty years of my adult life driving somewhere, and often really late at night. To and from work, and in my twenties after I sold my soul to be crushed by a giant computer manufacturer those work commutes were in the mornings before the sun rose and for the better part of the year – in New Jersey at least – after the sun had set. Then there were those early mornings coming home from gigs, and the massive amount of time I spent just driving aimlessly as a means of survival and salvation. For a long time, the road and the radio were my church, my shrink and my Fortress of Solitude.
Back then, recording cassettes to make what we all call ‘mix tapes’ was just a way to take the music we loved with us. But recording 90 minutes of music took well more than an hour and a half. Pulling the vinyl, cueing it and then playing it to be recorded, all the while hoping the levels were set right, that the records didn’t skip and most heinously, the tape didn’t run out in the middle of a song. It was a pain in the ass, but it’s what we had.
So regardless of how many mix tapes I recorded, the DJ was still my direct contact to the music I loved. There were basically three stations for me – WMMR in Philadelphia, WNEW and before they sold out, WPLJ both in New York. Although I don’t remember many of their names, the folks behind the mics were a part of my daily life. My DJ’s were the people who had the same passion as I did. For better or worse, their tastes became my tastes. Looking back, I don’t know if they brainwashed me into thinking a song was good, or if they were that tightly aligned with my tastes, but my relationships with my DJs ran deep.
Whether I was escaping family life, a dysfunctional relationship or a crappy job, Pat St. John or Scott Muni or whoever else I can’t recall right now, we’re always on the other side of the radio. Late nights, driving over the Driscoll Bridge on the Garden State Parkway with the amber glow of the halogen lights reflecting the wet road back at me at 2:00 AM, listening to some obscure British pop band was the closest thing to an intimate emotional relationship I could sometimes expect. If you were raised on radio, you have the exact same – but slightly different – memories.
Sitting in the car outside my parent’s house at midnight on a cold October night waiting for the premiere spin of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and understanding immediately upon hearing it that the world had changed. This was a new Fleetwood Mac for a brave new world and me and my best DJ friend were the only two people in the world who were sharing this odd – yet exhilarating – experience.
Of course, it was me and the millions of other people sitting in their cars or lying in their beds or rolling a bomber and kicking back in their living rooms as their personal best friend DJ turned them on to whatever it was that we were all listening to at that moment.
Spotify, TIDAL and Qobuz are all fantastic platforms that allow us experience any song, any time, almost anywhere, but there’s a certain magic that only a DJ can bring into the musical experience. There’s the feeling of intimacy, the veil of belief that this person on the other side of the radio is the same as you, only infinitely cooler and with more musical smarts. Feeling like the world is conspiring to make you miserable? (Hint: it is) That faceless entity living in your speakers knew exactly how you felt and if you waited around long enough, he or she would play the perfect song for however you were feeling at that exact moment and for the next three minutes or so you were sharing a musical experience with a friend – even on those nights when you didn’t have a friend in the world.
A Spotify playlist cannot do that, and I think we’re all the worse for it. I will not give up my Spotify or TIDAL accounts, but I do miss the connection to the outside world my DJ provided me.
So, we’re kicking off the Between the Notes podcast by saying thank you to every DJ who ever spun a record, and to those radio jocks who are out there right now using their musical brains instead of some cheap corporate algorithm to play the exact right song at the exact right moment.