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Unless otherwise indicated, all commentary and photography on this site are by Grady McAllister.

Frequently Asked Questions

"What kind of airchecks are you seeking?"

This site will never become a general depository for any and all airchecks. It is not the DJ warehouse. It is not the audio equivalent to a newspaper morgue. There are already other sites which can do a better job at that.

This collection is mainly things I recorded myself.

Beyond that, I am only looking for a few good airchecks from other people. I hope to find recordings relevant to Houston radio history, especially things that I wish I had recorded myself.

As a rule, I avoid the following kinds of materials:

1. I generally avoid highly scoped airchecks which don't really go anywhere of interest. Heavily scoped airchecks are mainly time and temperature announcements. An aircheck should reveal more than a DJ's voice quality and ability to conform to a Bill Drake format.

I don't want to hear any more recordings where every song is scoped and every newscast and commercial is chopped off in mid sentence.

Highly scoped tapes served their purpose in that they didn't waste the time of the program director when a DJ looked for a job. However, what we are looking for here is something which helps capture a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. Hacked up recordings of radio hacks simply frustrate the listener.

I ask myself, "Is this something that would interest someone who listens to radio but never worked in radio?" So far, my readers have exercised good sense in what they send me, and I haven't turned anything down.

2. I generally avoid recordings from other web sites which have already been heavily circulated among Salty Old Radio Dogs. I am not going to go to other sites to make wholesale downloads of airchecks just so I can say I have everything.

3. I generally avoid photos or scans from outside sources. Exceptions can be made, but I am trying to avoid having people send wholesale materials, both audio and visual, with the expectation that I will organize it all into a coherent presentation.

When people send recordings, some of them take up more of my time than others. The airchecks I most like to receive are the ones that are the most trouble and the ones that are the least trouble. Here are the categories:

Reel to reel tapes or audio cassettes containing original airchecks that have never been digitized or widely heard. Those airchecks are the most trouble for me, but they also offer the most rewarding results.
Digital recordings that are already in mp3. Those are the easy ones I like. I figure that if someone has sent me something, and it is ready to go on line, I should try to use it.

I have to keep things simple, and mp3 is the only acceptable digital format for this site. However, I do have the ability to convert from windows media and a few other odd file types.

"Is this a a radio fan site?"

Please see the essay, "O.J. Gypped," in the column far to the right.

"What's with all the photography on this site? I thought this was an audio collection!"

The Vasthead web site came on line five years before I added any audio files. I always intended to make my photography an important part of the site.

For more specific information about the photography on this site, please see the essay in the lower center column.

The main emphasis is on my own photography, not material from outside contributors. I especially discourage stylized, glamorized head shots of jocks.

Integrating photos into the site is more involved than simply inserting an email message, and it is hard for me to even find time to add my own photos. Please be very selective in sending photos and observe these guidelines:

1. Only send photos for which you own the copyright.

2. Identify each person in a photo in the proper order from left to right.

3. Have images in the jpg format.

4. Don't send more than one image at a time. Be sure that a photo depicts some specific event in progress. Absolutely, positively no glamour boy poses.

5. I generally discourage scans of commercial fanfare such as survey sheets, bumper stickers, and station logos. I tend to look upon such items as unwelcome clutter. Send such material if you would like me to see them, but please understand that they would probably only be used for off line reference purposes.

From the very beginning -- long before any airchecks appeared -- I have made only limited use of clip art or outside visuals.

Of course, I can always make an occasional exception. My James Thomson Poetry Works page reproduces a wood engraving of London in the 19th century.

I have also put up a contributed photo of an Oilers rally on the Mainly 80's page.

I might still make an occasional exception. For example, I could use a scan of the KFMK "Wow" bumper sticker from the late 60's. Now, that was something different.

"Why don't you have an aircheck of my favorite DJ?"

The reason I don't have that aircheck is because I never recorded it. Please bear in mind is that this is just a small radio collection. It began as just a place to list my own airchecks. In fact, I kept it down to just one page for as long as possible.

I started to accept outside airchecks because my own collection was too heavily weighted with Alex Bennett talk shows and obscure DJ's.

During the 60's, I made no systematic effort to document all of the different formats and big name jocks. I either recorded something or I didn't. Looking at the material I ended up with, it almost seems like the more obscure the DJ the more likely I was to make a recording.

For example, for a long time I had no Hudson and Harrigan recording. I had never recorded any myself. When the first Harrigan joined the late Mac Hudson in 1968, I never dreamed the names would still be a major franchise 40 years later.

I started accepting outside material because I wanted a more balanced collection.

"So, why don't you have more material?"

This will be somewhat redundant of the previous question and answer. I am trying to be redundant.

However, this answer will have so many digressions that you won't even realize you are reading the same question and answer.

It is time to brush up your Shakespeare...

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Burthen Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.

— William Shakespeare
(The Tempest, 1.2.396), Ariel

Like radio, Shakespeare's character Ariel floats through the air. That is about all that this quote has to do with radio. However, this is my FAQ, and I can include whatever I want.

But here is the key point: My original aircheck collection tends to have a lot of some types of material and not enough of others.

They emphasize talk radio at the expense of the music formats. Without consciously thinking it all through, I thought that similar music formats would always be available. That has not been the case.

(The music filling the Houston airwaves has gone through a sea change but not the kind that Shakespeare envisioned. It has been a change in the other direction.)

I made no systematic effort to document the various stations. I just tended to record what I was listening to at a given time.

Then, too, how much I recorded was limited by the cost of tapes and the amount of space they consumed. By 1969, I had a six foot tall metal shelf filled with nothing but tapes.

Later, when I was starving in radio myself, half of those reels were cannibalized for mailing out my own air checks when looking for a job.

Note: The material in blue letters below is a digression from the main subject. You can skip over it if you are not interested in the web master's personal history. The main answer continues after the blue text.

A semi-technical dissertation:

I recorded airchecks of my voice over tapes that had contained nothing but music. I did not record over my library of radio recordings.

I spooled my airchecks down to 3" reels and other surplus reels that I wanted to clear out of the room.

Years earlier, back when I was 17 years old, I had bought a vast quantity of 3" reels to use in my home studio. While still in high school, I had a radio show that was never on the radio.

I put short promos and production bits onto the 3" reels, and I used them just like radio DJ's used cartridges. I played back the short recordings, dubbing them into one continuous twenty minute program.

The longer recordings formed a "radio show" which I ran over a phone line to anyone who called. The production values were about as good or bad as an amateur pod cast today.

So, if you ever received an aircheck from me on a 3" reel, now you know why it was on a reel of that size. I was just getting rid of surplus reels from my teenage years.

By the time I left radio, cassettes were the preferred format for receiving air checks.

If I could jump into a time machine, I would go back and make more recordings of the major DJ's and key music formats. It would be great if I had taped more long "night in the life of" airchecks such as my KILT material for 1980.

As things stand, however, I have to work with what I actually did record and with what people send me.

Another thing which limits the amount of material on this site is that I don't try very hard to get new airchecks. They just come to me when they do. Unless someone starts paying me for this effort, I have to make sure that this radio site doesn't take up too much of my time.

It has taken up a quite a lot of time already.

This FAQ continues at the top of the next column.