25 Years of CFUV

The station continues on. I worked at the station from 1988 to 1990 for wages that were less than nothing but the job was cool, I put in 60 to 70 hour weeks while still pretending to go to school fulltime at UVic.

CFUV spoiled me, I could not work for commercial radio after the freedom and wild fun of the 'FUV. I had several years of defacto carte blanche to do what I wanted to.

Working for Tim Chan also made it great. Tim has some the driest humour I have ever heard. He was station manager and did not really make enough money to consider it as a career.

It was while I was with CFUV that I had my short stint doing concert promotion. Five concerts and I broke even, I quit at that point. After my last gig I had to empty my bank account to pay the musician, I realized the stress of the gigs was and the money that I could lose was more than I could take.

I loved being a DJ and having to by up on the new music. I loved interviewing bands and musicians. though I did do one major clanger and called one woman by the wrong name. I loved the constant crisis of the moment to keep a station on the air. Crisis and ADD go together well, a crisis calms me down.

One quick anecdote, in 1989 Don Ross had released his first album and was not well known at all. I had not had a chance to hear it yet. I am in the studio doing my Friday morning folk music show and someone was calling the station. I answered because I was the only in the station. A woman asked to speak with Don Ross.

I asked her who is Don Ross. She told me is was this amazing guitarist about to be interviewed at the station about his first album and she was his agent need to talk with him. Yes children, life was much harder before we all had mobile phones.

Clearly I was the one that supposed to be interviewing Don in a matter of a few minutes - no one had told. Either Magnus (the program director) or Colin( the music director) forgot to tell me that they had arranged this interview. I had to quickly find the album and the publicity material so that I might have some hope of being able to interview him.

I managed to read enough stuff, and Don is easy to interview, so it went well. It was this sort of sudden crisis that I loved. I loved things like having to fix a microphone for a DJ by soldering some leads while an LP was playing or having to drop everything where ever I was in town to race to the station if some volunteer did not show to do their show.

If I had the time I would get back into doing radio again, I have the face and body for radio.