Howard Hesseman/Dr. Johnny Fever Tribute - "The Dr. Johnny Fever Aircheck"

HEY, FELLOW BABIES!! Welcome to a Special Release from the WKRP-Cast!
In order to improve your performance as a deejay, it was important to hear yourself on the air. The process of recording yourself and listening back to your show was called doing an "air check." Usually, a Program Director would require on-air staff to air-check themselves anywhere from once a week to once a month. After a jock has air-checked their show, they would sit down with the PD and critique the content. They might discuss anything from what headlines or news bits the talent selected as talk topics to presentation to attitude to verbal tics. For instance, Johnny says "alright" an awful lot. A good PD would point something like that out and have him work on being aware of it and reducing how many times he says it.

Since an air-check is about the deejay, there was no need for a PD to sit through a lot of music. They only wanted to hear the performer's bits and intros. This is where the "skimmer" or "air check machine" came into play. A skimmer was a cassette deck in the control room taking a feed from the program 'out' of the board. Everything coming off the board went through the skimmer. The on-off switch for the skimmer was connected to the board mic switch. When the deejay turned on the mic, the skimmer started recording. Whatever was happening at the moment the mic was turned on would be captured on the skim tape. It might be the end of a song, the last few words of a spot, the final sign-off from a newscast, etc. The skimmer would then record whatever the deejay says while the mic is on.

As soon as the deejay turned the mic off, the skimmer would stop. A deejay doesn't normally turn the mic off immediately after they stop talking. This meant the skimmer might capture the first few bars of the next song or a few words of the first spot played in the next stop set. At the end of a shift, the skim tape would only contain whatever the deejay had said throughout the four or five hours of their show. A lot of deejays would keep these air-check tapes, especially when they had a good shift. Air-check tapes are not only a great tool for the Program Director to use, they are also a fantastic tool for a deejay to use to land another job.

We decided to create Dr. Johnny Fever's air-check. This is a collection of only those things Johnny has said OVER THE AIR while on WKRP. It's edited the same way an air-check or skim tape would have sounded in the 1980s, with no fades and beep tones between segments. We've pulled every Johnny talk bit from Pilot Part One all the way through to "Simple Little Wedding." Once we've completed the series, we will add any additional segments Johnny might do in Episodes 66-90.

Enjoy this WKRP-Cast Tribute to the Legendary Howard Hesseman and his incredible creation: Dr. Johnny Fever.

Hey Fellow Babies!! We talked to Gary Sandy. Don't miss our exclusive interview with Andy Travis himself, dropping on Sept. 27th, 2022.