Leaving Alabama and Saying Goodbye to Huntsville!

What am I doing?

Oh, in this picture, I'm eating my vegetables. Actually, this is a wall outside of a store in Huntsville called Anthropology. This picture was taken almost 2 years ago. Now the wall is brown with dead plants and soil falling out. It's a metaphor for Huntsville: Businesses open and then 1 to 2 years later are dead and falling out.

Aside from that darling hat, you might be wondering a couple things: First, Mike doesn't get enough fiber? Also, Huntsville has an Anthropology? Isn't that a store found in BIG sophisticated cities like New York and San Francisco?

Yes! That's what I thought, too! It opened shortly after I arrived here, so I was feeling optimistic about picking Huntsville to live in: Even though the ACTUAL job was located 45 miles to the west in Athens, yet I was told this was a Huntville job (and this was supposed to be a Huntsville radio station servicing Huntsville--from 45 miles away?!?).

Let's just say a LOT of false pretenses came into play when I took this job. My wife and I did all the research we could, and some of it was right: Houses ARE less expensive. It is VERY humid. There are LOTS and LOTS of engineers and phd's here. However, my general manager NEGLECTED to fill me in about important logistical truths: That the transmitter for the radio station DIDN'T EVEN EXIST yet. That I would be required to drive a HUGE TRUCK all over the territory sometimes covering hundreds of miles in ONE day (Huntsville and its surrounding cities are completely spread out). That I would have virtually NO SAY in who I could hire for my staff. That he, the general manager who should be focused on selling advertising, dictated to me how the station should sound even telling me HOW I SHOULD SOUND.

Today's one minute WHAT THE HECK?...What Am I Doing?

I am GETTING THE HECK OUT OF HERE! And by "heck" I definitely mean HELL!

This town is far too hot, too conservative, and too interested in church for me to stay here. A study of people who voted for Obama found that 67 percent said they don't go to church. That compares to 64 percent who voted for Bush in 2004 who said they went to church MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK! I guarantee that ENTIRE 64 percent came from Alabama, home of the biggest gaudiest churches in the south...or maybe not, since I hear Texas wins that award. And I have done some church research: I found people who go are either looking for a love interest or are frustrated American Idol wannabees who want to go to a "rock concert" every Sunday. Then there are those who are replacing a crutch: drugs, drinking, smoking. Or there are those trying to bury their homosexual feelings: If I go to church with my (husband/wife) and am seen in public with them and my kids then I MUST BE HETERO! And Jesus said homosexuality is an abomination (that verse still missing from the original text).

And people love their Rick and Bubba morning radio show here (see one of the previous blogs for a full explanation of their show). And I am so sick of the word "Bubba." Yes, Alabamans are proud of this word because they invented it, but it's just a variation on the word "Baby." Just say "baby" over and over again real fast until it devolves into "bubba." Very innovative, AL! And I am tired of all the fast food and no nice bike paths and no public transportation and the spoiled unruly kids and all the stupid red t-shirts promoting the state's college football team and the never ending hype of college football and the good ole boys club and the golfing and the non-descript southern accent that sounds like a mix of Texas and Georgia and the long lines to new restaurants that are owned by national chains and the blank stare you get when you tell people you're moving back to California "AND I CAN'T FREAKIN' WAIT!!!"

I know somewhere someone is reading this and saying, "Don't let the AL door hit you on the way out!" Well, thank you. I tried loving your state. I tried loving your relaxed cholesterol heavy way of life. I tried getting into saying roll tide or war eagle and I tried liking your culture. BUT ALL I GOT WAS A PINK SLIP IN RETURN! All I got was HIGH CHOLESTEROL! All I got was BUG BITES BUG BITES BUG BITES! And all I got was extremely jaded.

I tried. When I get back to the state of the continuous sunshine and traffic jams, and am finally able to wear shorts without gallons of Off sprayed on them, I will tell folks the south is a wonderful place to live. And I'll say move there now!

And when they leave I'll think about how they're setting out upon a fantastic adventure...and how I'll be able to get their parking spot.

I Love "Saturday Night Live"...On Hulu!

"Saturday Night Live" has been busting me up lately. I will never watch it on TV, though. I love watching it on Hulu, where they strip it down to just the main skits.

Kristin Wiig is the reason for the resurgence. She is the most talented comedy actor I have seen in a long while, and she is brilliant with her observations of how certain types of people act. Her impression of a crazy, older Target cashier is amazing! She does a fantastic Nancy Pelosi. If a skit is lagging, she immediately jump starts it with her presence.

The rest of the cast is fantastic and the return of Jimmy Fallon once in a while for the "Barry Gibb Talk Show" with Justin Timberlake is strange and hilarious. Of course, Andy Samberg is doing a tremendous job, too.

Today's WHAT THE HECK has to do with why I won't watch the show on TV...too many commercials! On Hulu or if you go directly to NBC's website you can watch the main skits of the show with maybe a one minute commercial at the most. Why do people even watch TV anymore? I heard Brian Williams talking in his whiny voice during Jay Leno's last week (also online) that "guys like us" are into the way things used to be. We don't want change. Let's look at the benefits of watching shows online: very few commercials (something that Brian's show is full of, he admitted as much on Jay's show) and I HAVE CONTROL (except for when the TV network decides to pull a show). I have not had my TV on in over a year and you know what? I don't have to. All you need is a nice big computer screen and you're set (what once was a "monitor" is now a canvas).

Oh, 2 more WHAT THE HECK's. As you've read right here on this blog, it is this blogger's opinion that at some point in the not s0 distant future that there will come to fruition the GREAT RADIO UNIFICATION THEORY. This is where all radio stations will just rebroadcast feed from one of what I see is 5 main sources. I'm not sure what these sources are, but there will be NO local radio dj's to broadcast their shows. It will all come from these "networks" similar to the way TV works now with the 4 major networks. I see this happening due to the shrinking advertising income radio stations are getting today and how people have so many better choices for media at their disposal.

This theory took a step closer to coming true this week when one of the mainstays of the radio business, the newspaper where all dj's looked for the latest news and jobs, Radio & Records, folded (or will fold tomorrow). All those die-hard conservative old fogies who populate the dial today are shaking in their record-company-bought boots for what this means. All these guys had this paper on their desk, whether they read it or not. Now it's gone. I'm serious, this is like we as Americans waking up one day and finding the Lincoln Memorial gone. An integral part of what it means to be an American would be lost. Radio is going through something like this now.

However, radio NEEDS TO CHANGE. Earlier this week, from out of nowhere, a weather microburst hit my house. Rain, hail, lightning, the wind swirling like a tornado taking shape, and the local media SAID NOTHING. We tuned to all the local radio stations...nothing. We checked out the local TV stations...nothing. We looked at all the websites that belong to the local media...nothing. The only way I had to find out about this disastrous weather was by accessing a local doplar radar. As I have said in past blogs, the Internet is the fastest, easiest way to get information in time of need. You don't have to wait to hear what's going on, you get it instantly. Of course, that assumes your power and your Internet connection stay on. A perfect situation would be radio giving us information, but since it's busy running a computer program with no dj's in the studio, we must rely on the Internet. Radio and TV have taken away the last important reason (and, in reality, the foremost reason) for their existence.

Wow, from Kristin Wiig to the death of all known media. This blog covered a gamut.

Don't forget that you live in the digital age! You can get information and entertainment whenever YOU want! Get familiar with your computer and your search engine, and speaking of which, a new search engine just launched so now you have even MORE ways to find what you want. If you don't know how, your next search should be this topic..."HOW TO SEARCH ON THE INTERNET!"

A Sign of Being Old and Being "Over It"

I am going to get around to doing a podcast at michaelmatthews.podomatic.com, but first I must blog.

My WHAT THE HECK?!? My BACK! This week I was hit with a pain right in that small back region. I think part of the cause was lifting something rather heavy in the garage without using my legs and the growing stress upon the realization that my wife and I are REALLY MOVING!

It just makes sense...or it makes no sense. We are moving back to a state whose houses are now at a price we haven't seen in years, yet we're leaving a state and a city that is the best area to find a job according to a new study. We've got a real estate agent now, so we've jumped out of the plane, now we've got to pull the rip chord.

Maybe that's a little dramatic. We could take the house off the market and stay if we want. But do we? Yeah, jobs are abundant here in Huntsville, Alabama, but who enjoys working for a "good ol' boys" club? Maybe you like it: the smoking cigars on a golf course while cheering Cheney on finally making his PUNXSUTAWNEY GROUND HOG MOMENT to try to prove he was a good dad to us after all. "Everything I did, I DID IT FOR YOU! You have NO IDEA WHAT I WENT THROUGH to keep this country safe! You may be all smitten with this new president guy, BUT HE HAS NO RIGHT TO CRITICIZE WHAT I DID TO KEEP YOU SAFE! Now I'm going back underground to breathe my secret life-extending gas and I'll come back out when you REALIZE WHAT A GOD I AM!"

It'll be nice to leave an area that is so gaga over such a ridiculous Rush-Sean-wannabe radio show as "Rick and Bubba." In California they have that show absolutely NO WHERE! I will tell people about it there and they will laugh at me! Really? They have a show like that? Well I guess that's the South for you! I moved to this part of the country with AN OPEN MIND. I thought people here weren't the stereotype. I was willing and ready to be proven wrong! Yep, I was wrong.

Maybe the pain in my back is a little voodoo on me for being negative about all this. But at this point, I'm no longer negative. I'm feeling more positive every day.

Now I positively need some Motrin.

The Great Americana Radio Format and Why It's Gone

The high point of my radio career was somewhere around 2002. The corporation that owned us happened upon their one good idea...to let me be more creative and have more control of my radio show. They also decided that on Sunday evenings they would play 2 hours of "Americana" music.

Americana falls somewhere between the triangle of folk, rock, and country. It would be an awesome format to work for if radio was indeed experimental in that way anymore, which it is not. You literally play the cleverest lyricists, the best musicians, and sometimes the deepest music. I know there's KPIG in Monterey, but that is the exception to the rule. They have done a fantastic job staking a claim in the world of Internet radio before anyone else did. They play new music by Americana artists and throw in some classic rock songs. You really can not predict what you're going to hear.

When we did this format, I was fortunate enough to get a lot of the Cd's that were sent to us. I still have them, and still listen and party like it's...well, 2002.

Here's my WHAT THE HECK!?!...Some time in 2004, idiots in corporate decided to clamp down. Actually, the guy they put in the position to do it at the local level ended up being pretty cool, and he was successful in explaining to me his reasoning for executing corporate's wishes. Clutter and consistency were the main words he used. My question in hindsight though is what did we sacrifice creatively by making those changes? The actions we took ended up making radio more repetitive and less unpredictable.

"Well, listeners like predictability. Radio should be an appliance. When you flip a light switch, you expect to see light." The day radio was explained to me as an appliance was the day I should have bailed. That was NOT what I signed up for. I like radio because of its potential: you could paint a million pictures and stretch the imagination from your words and by playing with sounds. Some DJ's used the music itself to paint a picture or make a comment. Those days are gone.

By the way, KPIG is the perfect example of what I talked about in a previous blog: how radio stations will die and be taken over by one main station...the "Radio Unification Theory," if you will. KPIG started out on just one frequency in Monterey at 107.5FM. Now it can be heard on 4 more frequencies throughout California including 94.9FM in San Luis Obispo and 1510AM in San Francisco; basically covering most of California's coast. The last "group-thunk idiot company" I worked for would never take a chance on a station like this. I have heard people that worked at the corporate level that said "that format doesn't work" and they should have long since given up the ship. Yet this format has now grown to 4 more frequencies and has built a business model that only shows it can spread to MORE stations. Looking at my ex-employers and how they've forced mandatory furloughs on their employees showing how their ship is in its final mount before the whole thing goes underwater at the foot of the iceberg, I would say they were wrong yet again! Corporate radio has no incite in matters like this, and thus its current down spin.

Look up Americana on the Internet. I'm sure you'll find a group worth listening to. The cool thing is a lot of these artists tour frequently and EVERYWHERE so you're bound to see them in your local (or somewhat local) venue soon. Till then, I'll be pulling out The Gourds or the Old 97's out of my CD rack and giving them a little listen...probably ripping them to my computer so they'll come up in my Windows Media Player. At least my WMP has good taste in music.

Here's Some Folks that REALLY Don't Know What They're Doing!

I was speaking to a former coworker whom I had not spoken to in almost ten years. We were recently reunited through Facebook. I would like to thank that free social network for aiding in an online conversation. We were talking about the amount of money that was thrown at certain things back in the day.

In this situation, the guy I used to work with was hired by the radio station to "wrap" a van. This involves sticking various vinyl and I don't know what to the outside to create the logo that's "bigger than life" on the vehicle.

He was telling me how the name the radio station picked, "kiss", was already used by a prominent station in nearby Los Angeles. The evil empire Clear Channel owned the rights to the name and had some legal stipulation that nobody in a 100 mile radius or something couldn't use the name. Now my friend claims he kinda knew this was the case, but since he was paid by our ignorant radio station to wrap the van, he did it.

A week later they got a "cease and desist" and my friend was told he had to re wrap the van with the name "hits." Yes, hits and kiss sound very similar. Hits was a better name, actually, because that's what the station was really playing and since it was new it works to be very clear as to what you are.

A few months later, evil empire, who had bought many stations in this town, changed a radio station to the name "kiss" and directly competed against "hits."

Here's my WHAT THE HECK...aside from my friend getting paid twice, in today's world, in today's radio, HE WOULD HAVE ONLY BEEN PAID ONCE. I guarantee it! Then he would have been told to take a one week furlough, even though he works independently.

And why didn't the company that owned "hits," I believe it was Cumulus, not do any legal research to see if there was any problem using that name in the first place? I mean, it would be so obvious to any large radio corporation that this was an infringement.

This basically shows what I mentioned in the last blog, that radio today has NO IDEA WHAT IT'S DOING. It says it bases everything on research, but honestly, that research doesn't exist in reality. Most research that I saw done was calling people on their landlines, and who today really still uses that? Everyone under 40 is using cellphones. Why use a land line unless you're a business, and the researchers weren't allowed to contact businesses, only private residences. Everything is dictated to each individual radio station from a huge corporation (and by dictated, I mean in the most condescending way possible--you should have heard some of the conference calls I was on! I was treated like a delinquent child!). These choices are made on faulty research.

Oh, and these radio stations love pushing to the top conservative extremists like you hear all over the AM. Thank goodness they or their employers aren't running the country right now! People complain about the stimulus package and the amount spent. You can bet with a conservative party IT WOULD BE TWICE AS MUCH! The conservatives are taking the other side now because that seems to be the popular view...do nothing and just suffer. Why change, nothings wrong. My head is perfectly fine buried in sand!

It's a different age. We need to behave differently. Radio, however, will continue to keep its head buried.

Why American Radio is Failing

The land of FM AM is about to transform completely from what it was. The "good old days" of radio are long gone. The economic structure and the media landscape has changed so much from what it was twenty, ten, even five years ago.

As I traveled through Germany, I saw how possibly the radio world would change. Across the country, Germany has radio stations that deliver the same feed on multiple signals. It would be like hearing one of the channels on Sirius throughout the entire country, but every time the signal would fade or disappear, your radio would know what the next frequency was that carried that signal. That was how are rented car's radio worked. When switching from one frequency to the next to keep the station, you could hardly hear the difference. You hear a moment of static and suddenly the static disappears. The radio knows where to switch to.

American radio is basically doing the same thing now. So many stations carry the same syndicated morning show, the same syndicated evening and overnight shows. Many stations also carry syndicated afternoon shows now. So what's the difference between that and Germany? American radio stations try to sell the "local" angle of their stations, even when their play lists are dictated from their corporate owners. Most DJ's are reading "national" news and avoiding the local angle since it's more work. Most DJ's are prerecorded or "voice tracked." There is no "live" anymore. There is no "local" anymore...so why are our American stations lying to us?

My WHAT THE HECK is for radio. You already are forcing your employees to take mandatory work furloughs (a la Arnold in California) or laying off entire staffs reducing all radio stations to just one working "air talent" and the rest syndication (or non-DJ jukebox stations). You already give no stations their own choice for what they play; it ALL comes down from "on high." You are fighting against what you used to call "non-threatening media" like Internet radio and pod casts. Soon, Internet radio will be in every one's cars and they'll be much more choice than between AM, FM, or XM.

Radio, you are done!

Just pack it in, do what Germany's doing, quit lying to the public, QUIT LYING TO HARD WORKING RADIO EMPLOYEES! Here's what sucks about radio...the lying! I was once told by a radio manager that "perception is reality." If I say I have a chance for you to win a million dollars, that sounds big. What I don't tell you is you're competing against other stations and against unfathomable odds. Radio sucks because it's run by OLD OLD MEN that are still living in some glorified past that has LONG SINCE GONE! These old men, this good ol' boys club, stays in power due to RADIO'S CONSERVATIVE NATURE and no one dares unseat them.

I guess the "all mighty dollar" will finally have to do it for them.

Mike M Goes to Washington...and Across the Pond

Well it's been about a month since I last wrote. I have had a lot of travels and incites into this world we live in. I went to Germany and Washington DC. One place had me learn a completely different language and the other showed me what this country's all about. Eye opening on both accounts.

First, my one and only WHAT THE HECK for the moment is when in DC and getting food from one of the snack bars around the parks there, you do NOT get free refills. Oh, and that's the case in Germany, too, for the most part. Yes, I know practically ALL the museums in DC are free, but come on, making me pay for a WHOLE 'NOTHER DRINK when you're just going to put the soda in the same cup? Wake up, it's 2009!

There are so many WHAT THE HECK's I wanted to write but didn't have Internet access so I'll have to do my best to remember all of them. The picture you see is of me in front of the first historic monument I saw on my DC trip. What a heart-pounding moment when I first saw the Washington Monument, then the Capitol across the massive park they call the Mall. I'm glad that at least the leaders of this country see these landmarks everyday while running the place so at least they're reminded of who and what they're serving.

Ooo! I'm thinking of some juicy WHAT THE HECK's so check back soon!