My CJMQ Radio Experience

I was early-twenty-something when I had the chance to try out my dj skills at CJMQ, the local public radio station being run out of the basement of Bishop’s University. It was a great opportunity to showcase the music collection I had. Anything from Heavy Rock to Pop rock to good ol’ country. Every Saturday, my buddy and I would meet up and walk down to the university. We had a time slot scheduled at noontime. Upon arrival, we would pick out whichever cds from artists we would want to play that day, keeping in mind that we had to play a certain amount of Canadian content. Once the dj scheduled before us announced their final song, and said their farewells for the weekend, we would enter, cue up the first track, and then sit back and wait. At first, we only had a 1 hour spot to fill. It wasn’t a whole lot of time considering the fact that some tracks came close to the 5-minute mark. Eventually, we had managed to make a big enough impression on the radio directors that we had been asked to fill in the hour following our original scheduled time slot. 2 hours of playing music and entertaining our listeners, taking calls, getting updates on the sporting events! The calls we would get made us laugh most of the time. Sometimes, people would call just to say that they had been enjoying the show and to keep it up, others called to prank us, and then others would call to express their opinions. I remember one guy, a student from the university, called in to ask us to never play RUSH ever again. He said Geddy Lee sounds like a woman trying too hard to sing. Of course, we didn’t take that very seriously and played RUSH quite often. My experience from it all was a great experience. I was very happy to be “spending time” with the listeners, having a few laughs with our special guests, and playing music that they wanted to hear. It makes me wish that I had taken it more seriously at times though. Maybe I could have made a career out of it. But, I will always carry the memories like those who would call in and ask for a song they hadn’t heard in years, or something that reminded them of a loved one. I do plan on making these stories into podcasts so maybe I can get that feeling of being a dj back!