Greg Michaels: My Professional Radio Start Was Close to 20 years Ago Today

Wow. Tonight it crossed my mind; not on this day but not too far off that I got my first paycheck in radio 20 years ago. I think because of other things going on in my life at the time, I started professionally probably in March of 1994 but it’s either amazing or crazy that I’ve remained in this profession pretty much non-stop in some capacity for two decades.

My very first gig was at an easy listening-light rocker, CIEZ, ’96.5 Sun FM’ in Bedford, Nova Scotia a suburb of Halifax (HRM). I did Sunday morning, what we call syndication, which is “shop talk” for running shows that are from away, like American Top 40.

If you can believe it, we used VHS tapes with seven and a half to eight hours of recorded music to run from 10 pm to 5:30. At that station every few months we’d have to update the music tapes so to not to sound stale and guess who that job fell upon, me.

We were on the top floor of an 8-10 story building and the view was amazing. You could see people shopping at two adjacent malls and, you always had fair warning if the boss was coming up to the station.

They since have renamed the station and moved it in with stations as part of an LMA deal but I’ll always remember my first Program Director Lisa Akizuki (PD) who took a chance on me. A 22 year old goofball who basically showed up to do the job but often overnight on my own time would use the production studio to record demos and mail them out.

I’ll also always remember this, getting a call from the PD, asking me if I had taken the CDs out of one of the jukebox cases (a sort of automatic CD organizer rack thing) because I had placed a CD or two back in the wrong slots. Who knows what was played after that error. Most of what we aired in those jukeboxes was off of TM Century Hit Discs (all hit samplers) so it wasn't a huge disaster but all the same, it was my first "words" from a radio boss.  Anyway, after that I was much more careful.

While I was there I was paid $7 an hour and met a few talented folks. Twenty years ago, I started professionally.