True Story: I'm a Radio DJ

Wednesday, 07 December 2011 14:57

“I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll—but I like it” are not only lyrics in a hit song by the Rolling Stones, but they sum up the life philosophy of Rock104.com’s Program Director Glenn Richards.

It also explains why he has remained in an industry that some think has lost its profitability.
Dressed in a Beatles “Let it Be” T-shirt, Glenn, 48, tucks his long salt and pepper hair behind his ears and pops on his University of Miami cap before enthusiastically sharing his love of music.

By Greg Allard

Glenn started in radio at the University of Miami just two days after he graduated high school. Friends always told him he had a good radio voice and his mom told him the same thing. So, he went for it and soon started to discover new bands.

“College radio was just coming into its own as a format and we were on the cutting edge of discovering new bands like U2 and REM,” he says. “We played U2 for three years before they broke out and when REM first played on campus as a new band, we knew they were going to be big. It was cool to know something good was happening there.”

One perk of the position was getting to meet and sometimes interview music personalities. In those early years, starting in 1980 with the college station at the UM, Glenn met REM, Peter Frampton, Tom Petty, the English Beat, the Police and Elvis Costello.

Glenn also played a part in discovering a future giant national act. He had been a struggling weekend  overnight DJ until he was fortunate enough to do a local music show. “It kind of fell in my lap,” Glenn says. “Then a friend of mine ended up managing Marilyn Manson and I was the first to play them on
commercial radio.

“I found one song that I thought would be palatable for our rock audience and the phones lit up,” he says.

After some time, Glenn was in the center of so many exciting things, he started to take them for granted.

“I got a chance to meet Ringo Starr but I passed it up because I had work to do,” he says. “What an idiot I was.”

One of the things he makes time for these days is school; he’s working on his master’s in telecommunications at the University of Florida. Glenn struggles to find time to write his thesis while being flooded with work that doesn’t pay very much. He’s limited to a 20-hour workweek, and if he goes over that time, he has to wait to get paid later.

But if he was in it for the money, he would have gotten out a long time ago.

“On career day, the counselor said you could go get a good-paying job that’s boring as hell or find something that you like doing anyway and get paid for it,” he told us. “I thought, ‘How could I get paid listening to music?—be a DJ.’ Then I learned that’s not what radio is about.”

What radio is about, he soon found out, is advertising dollars.

Although rock stations may have a more loyal audience, their demographic is male-dominated and not as large and mass-appealing as country. Country stations are more desirable to advertisers because they have a larger female audience than rock stations, and women are the cornerstone for advertising in radio, Glenn explains.

Even for the college radio station 103.7 FM at the University of Florida, the decision to switch to a contemporary country format from its former identity as “the rock station” was purely a financial one.

“It’s like selling rhubarb pie compared to apple pie,” Glenn says. “You may corner the market on rhubarb pie, but just a piece of the market on apple pie is more profitable.”

Over the course of 30 years, Glenn has worked a number of jobs in radio. First he did college radio at the University of Miami. He left UM without graduating in 1983 but
returned in 1994, getting his bachelor’s degree in communication in 1996. He did stints at
stations in Fort Lauderdale as a DJ and on-air personality.

Between radio jobs, Glenn worked as a talent scout for MCA records and as the tour merchandiser for the Atlantic Records’ band Saigon Kick in 1993. Although he had fun going on tour with the band, he was too busy to take
advantage of the groupie spillover.

“I was stuck behind a table selling T-shirts,” he told us. “When I was done, everyone was gone and the buses were pulling out. I could only have a beer with the techs in the band.”

Still, one of the perks of being in radio was meeting girls, and Glenn got to meet a lot of them in his career. But his marriage only lasted a year. He decided to go back to school at UF, and she didn’t want to move to

Gainesville.

“She wanted to travel—she had wanderlust and Ft. Lauderdale had been the longest place she had lived,” Glenn said.

Glenn has worked as an adjunct professor in broadcasting at the University of Miami and more recently at UF teaching Rock ‘n’ Roll and American Society. He now feels he has come full circle and is back where he started: At college radio. His fantasy job includes getting hired at UF (or any college), running the radio station and teaching a rock class.

“Glenn is a really cool guy,” says Glenn’s broadcasting student Andrew Sailor, 17. “He knows a lot about rock ‘n’ roll—and I thought I knew a lot.”

After being an on-air personality for 103.7 FM in Gainesville from 2006 to 2010, Glenn became enthusiasitc when the station was put online as Rock104.com, and the Program Director reins fell in his lap.

It is now his intention to work on putting the rock format back on the air in the future.

Although Glenn doesn’t know if he will ever make good money at his chosen profession, he said he still loves what he does, and doesn’t regret that he listened to his counselor and sacrificed his life on the rock altar.

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