Charlie and I met in Mrs. Parker's keyboard class. We were most definitely polar opposites with very little in common other than not being popular kids in school. I was introverted and he was a total extrovert. We had a degree of chemistry that I have never been able to recreate with anyone else. Charlie’s favorite movie at the time was Pump Up the Volume and never could I have imagined what I was walking into when I spent the night with him the very first time.
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| Pump Up The Volume movie poster |
Charlie's younger brother was in a grade lower than us, good looking and sort of muscular and couldn't stand me and given the circumstance, the feeling was mutual. Charlie, on the other hand, was skinny, had unfortunate unmanageable hair and was a bit of a nerdy guy or in the words of my sister, a geek. Charlie seemed to find joy in making people laugh and also enjoyed the attention even if it was at his own expense and I admired that in him. Charlie's parents didn’t seem judgmental as mine were. His dad was American and his mom was Japanese. Charlie's mom was an absolute sweetheart and quite the cook. The first time I had dinner with them, she served the best fried chicken that had some sort of breading I’d never seen before and tasted unlike anything I had ever had up to that point in my life. It was basically what I would discover later on as chicken tempura. She also served steamed white rice, dried seaweed which I thought was weird but super tasty and a main staple with every meal was canned biscuits. I couldn't understand a lot of her English because of her strong accent but she spoke with unconditional love and I liked her the moment I met her. She allowed me to tag along with her and Charlie when she would attend what Charlie called "Buddhist Meetings" and I have to say, while I'm not a religious person, the concept appealed to me more that church ever did.
People assumed that Charlie and I were hooking up, I know my family as well as his brother believed we were but just for the record, Charlie and I were never interested in each other nor have we ever hooked up. I do have some fun stories about helping him fulfill some of his fantasies at school with unsuspecting girls. If you ever saw him sitting in the hallway with his hand stretched out on the floor, there was a very good reason for it. If you were one of the girls who stepped on his fingers or hands, you made his day, week, month or year. A totally different story that I will go no further about and let me just say no judgment here.
So after dinner Charlie took me to his bedroom where he had a table with some electronics set up including an old TV set without a screen, sides or back with some wires soldered to various parts leading to some sort of wireless microphone, a walkie talkie that suspiciously looked like the ones our school administration used and wires snaking through his window. Unrelated yet related to this story, one of the school walkie talkies was missing and though it couldn't be proven, Charlie was the prime suspect. No witnesses, no admission and no evidence on his person made our school's resource officer's blood boil knowing he couldn't close the case of the missing walkie talkie in spite of knowing who took it. The contraption looked like a weird kid’s science project based off of the Science Fair Electronic Lab Kits Radio Shack marketed towards kids. Most of Charlie's electronics were almost all Radio Shack branded with Realistic, Archer and if memory serves me right, Optimus. A black Realistic Mixer with 2 mismatched microphones sitting on the table as well as 2 dual cassette tape decks, an old turntable that needed a needle and a portable CD player were all wired up to his mixer.
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| Learn how to wire up electronics with Radio Shack's Science Fair Kits |
He asked if I ever saw the movie “Pump Up the Volume” with Christian Slater, I said no, and apparently that was the wrong answer. He proceeds to tell me the entire plot of the movie and to this day I have never watched it. He told me that on the weekends and some weekdays when he feels like it he runs a pirate radio station which sounded like a total load of bullshit and kind of weird to me because I've never heard him on the radio. Then again, I didn’t usually turn my dial from Q-100 or W.A.B.B. when I’m not listening to my own records, tapes and after I got my CD player, CDs.
Charlie told me he needed to set up the antenna, which looked sort of like a crossbow, set up on a tall pole between his and his neighbor’s house. He said his neighbor ran a ham radio station during the day and didn't mind that he was using his antenna. It took a couple of minutes of switching the neighbor's wires with the ones leading to Charlie's bedroom window.
Charlie went to the bathroom and said I should do the same because it's gonna be a long night, we go on the air in 45 minutes and I'm all like what the fuck??? His answer was we are doing a radio show like John Garabedian’s Open House Party. I've actually listened to Open House Party on the weekends since the late '80s and hearing Charlie say we are going to do a show like that I was confused because how do two people create their own house party without a crowd?
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| The Realistic Mixer we used from 1990-1994 |
| A Realistic SCT-74 Dual Cassette Deck like we used to play music |
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| The 2 microphones we used were may have been the one priced at $35.95 and the other at $23.95 |
Charlie warned me that we could not use our real names while on the air, he used Chuck, though everyone knows that’s another name used by people named Charles. The only name I could think of was Mike but I have an uncle named Mike so I decided it would be better and also look cooler to spell it M Y K, not that anyone would see it spelled out. From that weekend going forward Weekends With Chuck & Myk was born and believe you me I had no idea what I was doing, I was flying by the seat of my pants and every minute that I was speaking, I was nervous and scared and excited at the same time.
We played music from our own collections of cassettes, cassette singles or cassingles, records and CDs as well as songs copied from tapes from the library as well as from my sister's collection. I copied some of my records to tape at home on my little Emerson stereo I had since the 5th grade and we used a lot of songs recorded off the radio then edited to cut off any kind of radio bumpers or DJs talking over the beginning or end. To say we were low budget was an understatement, we had no sponsors and we offered prizes usually bought with our unused lunch money from school, so basically we were running with a negative budget. Wherever we got our music from needed to involve cheap or free, and we knew we always needed to play some new jams along with the old. If you listened to our show, you may remember commercials but they were just a smokescreen and we played the commercials to seem legit. We used commercials from an old tape I had called TeeVee Toons The Commercials which was filled with classic commercials from the 50s, 60s and 70s. We also transferred the audio of commercials from VHS tapes we recorded from mostly late night TV for things like Time-Life books, Sessions Records, various 1-900 numbers including the Crying line, New Kids on the Block and my favorite, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling hotline number, Matchmaker International, phone sex lines, other commercials running at the time and commercials from our “official unofficial sponsor” Radio Shack.
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| A random meme but many of these were a part of our playlist |
The concept or at least the basic outline of our show was usually a format copied from what we heard on Open House Party as well as a little bit of Dr. Demento thrown in. Charlie and I had similar tastes in music though leaned more into the bubble gum pop side whereas I was on the club music and pop/rock side but we did have some favorites that were in common. We both loved the New kids on the Block, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Expose and I really loved Madonna at the time. We liked playing a lot of remixes and extended mixes which he always called house music even though technically house music was its own genre by that time but it all made him happy. To see him talk on the air was a bit strange because he became a completely different person and I wanted to be that way but I just couldn't get past my nerves.
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| A modern rendering of the stickers we thought about leaving around town |
One of the elements of the show I had the most fun with was our celebrity interviews which we would boost off of Entertainment Tonight, MTV or our regular medium, radio. We would edit out the actual interviewer and record our own voices asking the same questions with real responses coming from the celebrity. I'm sure it sounded mostly phony but there were actually some real interviews on the show because Charlie, believe it or not, was friends with some of the cast members from Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated. We interviewed Renee Sands and Stacy Ferguson separately and together and were the first to know of an up and coming girl group called Wild Orchid which would actually become something that was on top 40 radio. I had no clue who Renee and Stacy were when we were speaking to them but both of them were really, really sweet ladies or rather girls at the time. Some of the Mickey Mouse Club interviews included Deedee Lynn Magno who would go on to star in the Broadway productions of Miss Saigon and Wicked, Brandy Brown who a few years later could be seen in Les Misérables as well as the soap opera Another World and a guy from Tennessee with huge aspirations named Justin Timberlake. At the time, I was unimpressed with this people because, much like me, they were kids with big dreams. Now, every time I hear the Black Eyed Peas, Fergie or JT, I can't help but smile, knowing I interviewed them when I was 14.
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| The speakerphone from Radio Shack we used for our real interviews |
We got creative to seem connected to local DJs. We would call radio stations to request songs hoping to get on the air and record ourselves on the radio then figure out how to use it for our own show. In our minds this created the perfect smokescreen to our bootleg show. We got a great recording of the first Wanda Honey, the overnight DJ saying “You're listening to Chuck and Myk with Wanda Honey your honey of the night” on the air of the real WJLQ when she let us announce a song and we used that clip to it's full potential. We tried it with the second Wanda Honey but she just couldn't live up to the original whose real name was actually Kim Flood.
We would do contests where we would call random pay phones around town, we had ridden our bikes around Pace and Milton making a list of pay phone numbers and the location. We would offer things like a free tape or CD or a gift certificate to McDonald's, Hardee's, Burger King or Radio Shack, which we would leave stashed somewhere around the winning payphone for the winner to grab because we couldn't have them come to us. If no one answered the payphone, the prize would be reused the next week. We only had that happen twice. Charlie explained to me that the FCC is very strict and the fines if we got caught running a station without a license would be about 300 or 500 dollars. I guess that would have been a good deal compared to the fines of today but even still $300 was not something I could come by so anonymity was very important.
Thinking back, the scary part of the whole radio station was the fact that he said our listening audience was within approximately a 5 mile radius depending on the weather, which meant we were within listening range of our entire school district reaching into the neighborhoods of our rival school. We had to be very careful to not mention where we actually went to school, what geographical area we were in and slightly disguise our voices. I don’t even know what frequency we were on other than on FM in the middle of the dial. He joked that if someone comes knocking at the door don't answer it and act like we're having sex, which there was never a chance of. I guess that was his plausible cover up or perhaps his way of telling me he may have been bisexual lol which I don't think he was.
Aside from playing music we presented weather reports that were usually the opposite of what we were going through at that time presenting it as weather where we are and acting like we were somewhere else and the show was being simulcasted because Charlie liked the words like satellite and simulcast. We once pretended to be in the middle of Hurricane Bob. We read news reports out of tabloids like Weekly World News, Sun, National Enquirer, Mad magazine and weird sources from the library. Sometimes we would make things up. I actually got really good at creating fake news stories which became a useful skill when I worked as a creative writer and content provider for one of the old tabloid magazines that we read from, which has long since gone out of business.
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| Charlie's preference was Supertape and Concertape by Radio Shack |
Over time, my nerves eased up but my reading skills were not that great and I preferred pre-recording most of my segments. Charlie liked announcing songs and stuff like that which I was fine with because really it was his show. During my 10th grade year, I was selected to be part of the Broadcast Club at school. I think the teacher knew of our show and Charlie freaked out when he realized I was chosen over him. A perk with the Broadcast Club, it involved a whole period working in the media room of the library as well as access to good equipment to edit our recordings as well as I had access to restricted items like old educational films that were transferred to video tape which we would use sound clips from. I would also use the library computer to create a list of songs as well as a timeline for each hour and print them out on the dot matrix printer in the library.
One of the later segments I did, involved pre recording myself reading horoscopes photocopied from the USA Today papers at school and old astrology books I found in the library. During our reboot, I would lay down tarot cards and give an imaginary person a reading. I recorded a lot of my segments in my bedroom at home and my parents thought I was absolutely bonkers because they could hear me, reading and re-reading until I got everything just right. They either thought I was honing in on my reading skills, talking to myself or pretending to be something they never knew I was actually doing.
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| I preferred to record my segments on Memorex tapes. Is it live or is it Memorex? |
Around holidays, we would present recipes I boosted from some of my mom’s cookbooks but give the wrong ingredients or cook times. Anyone who followed our directions was doomed. I also liked reading and talking about some of the really graphic parts of the romance novels my mom was reading. Johanna Lindsey may have been a bit too spicy for the airwaves but I didn’t care, we were jamming the airwaves illegally so why not go for gold? The whole operation was a violation and we had a blast doing it. Basically we weren't only violating broadcasting laws, we were using copyrighted music, reading copyrighted materials from books and magazines.
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| A Johanna Lindsey novel |
We ran together from October 1990 until May 1992 and during a brief period in the Spring of 92 when I temporarily moved over to Mobile, Charlie continued solo, playing material I had recorded that we either didn’t use or was generic enough to reuse. I'm not sure how it went without me but he had a good enough personality that I feel he made it all work until I came back before unexpectedly leaving the show when I ran away from home June 1992.
We revived the live show twice but without the longevity and energy we put into the first run. The first reboot happened in 1993 running Friday and Saturday nights. We were dead tired because we would do Karaoke on Thursday nights at a lesbian bar in Pensacola. We ended the revival in 1994 when I moved from the area to pursue an acting and singing career. During the 93 reboot, I insisted on replacing his Realistic branded Stereo Mixer with my newly acquired SSM-1200 mixer along with a sound effects generator and my own microphones, all from Radio Shack. We had access to more music than our first show, I had amassed a HUGE collection of disco, rock, pop and musical theatre CD’s and much to his disinterest, I would occasionally play showtunes because I liked them and thought our listeners could use a little culture.
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| Radio Shack SSM-1200 Mixer like the one use later used, OEM was Pyramid |
While I’m not exactly sure how our final reboot in 1996 fell into place, I do remember he was recently discharged early from the Navy, I had returned home from a couple of acting jobs and had nothing else to do. He was no longer living at home, he was renting a small little house in the middle of nowhere with no telephone and no longer had the high powered antenna we used to broadcast leaving us with a reach of maybe a mile at best. Most of his equipment was gone, either sold or given away when he went into the Navy. Aside from my mixer and microphones, which I had to lug to his house, we sat on the floor playing music with very little participation, no interaction with each other, no creative segments, no commercials and it just wasn’t the same. The fun was gone, this felt like a chore and even though we had a mixer, better music sources, nice microphones, the rest of our equipment was downgrades. We were using his Panasonic boombox, my Discman and a Walkman to play mostly club mixes. I was obsessed with cover tunes and remixes from the European dance music labels Dance Street and ZYX Music so that was our main format. At this time, I was staying with my dad, who wasn’t too fond of Charlie, so I never suggested he come over to my place to run the show. Had we used my place, it wasn’t too far from where we had originally done our show and probably would have had more of an audience though not the far distance since we were without the crossbow antenna we had previously used.
I moved to Atlanta in 1997 and we kept in touch until around the time my dad passed away. We had spoken about another reboot by creating a website and hosting some sort of an internet radio station which would have brought us into a more legal venue as well as it would have allowed us to pre-record our shows and let them run on an uninterrupted loop, I guess that’s known as streaming in today’s standards. Unfortunately, aside from talking, we could never really agree on putting anything together. Perhaps distance worked against us or possibly my own ego. Acting and singing gave me the confidence that I could be front and center and I was more interested in being the headliner, using my own material for content rather than filler and taking the lead instead of playing the role of sidekick or co-pilot.
It was fun while it lasted and I hope the listeners we had back in the 90s had a great time listening to our nonsense. Last I heard, Chuck is running his own business as a Karaoke Jock in NW Florida while I am a Book Operations Supervisor for the company that runs most of the newsstands, bookstores and retail locations in airports, train stations, cruise ships and ports. Now that we are older, smarter and both gathered more knowledge of what people look for in entertainment rather than what entertains us and fills the void of our own boredom, perhaps one day Chuck and I will be able to reconnect and once again hit the airwaves...legally.
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