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May 25, 2006

The Road Warrior: RIP Joe Hansen

Someone left a comment today, and I finally confirmed it: Joe Hanson has passed away. I don't know any of the details yet, but I can certainly guess.

We'll come back to that, maybe, later.

I worked with Joe twice - at KDWB-AM, back in 1990-92, and again for the first year when he was the engineer/producer for the Northern Alliance. He's most familiar to people in the Twins, of course, as Tom Mischke's producer "The Jackal", and especially as Jason Lewis' longtime producer and foil.

Joe was an anachronism in so many ways. I hesitate to write that; it's a whack upside the head to think someone who's roughly your own age could be an "anachronism" of any sort. But that was Joe. We started in radio at more or less the same time - and by "time", I mean "Geological epoch", a time when radio stations by law required someone in the studio every moment they were on the air, even if only to watch the needle bob while Larry King's show droned on, and to fire off commercials in the era before computers became (putatively) reliable enough to do the job. An epoch where bright-eyed kids just out of Brown Institute with their freshly-ironed First Class licenses would mingle at innumerable small-town stations with guys who'd been in the racket for, I dunno, 15 or 20 years; guys who'd started in similar stations a decade or two earlier; guys whose early talent and drive took them a ways up the food chain, from places like Blue Earth Minnesota and Cody Wyoming and Virginia Minnesota and Rapid City South Dakota to places like Duluth or Sioux City or Billings, and then maybe for a glorious, overextended, overheated year or six months or six weeks maybe to Phoenix or Columbus or the Twin Cities. There, a stint on evenings or graveyards would shine in their memories like a long-lost love, a brief interlude in their lives where they'd step out of a studio into the city lights, look at the skyline in the distance (or around them), light up a Lucky and drive to the bar and feel for a brief stretch of their lives like they were on the brink of making "it" in the big show.

The stories usually continued the same way; a change in program directors (or, sometimes, just a badly-timed bender or fight or on-air blooper) led to an abrupt firing, a few weeks of tending bar or working at a gas station while frantically calling old colleagues, finally rustling up a job working evenings in Duluth or Lincoln, Nebraska or Bismark, and thence to Butte Montana or Aberdeen South Dakota, and then...to the stool next to yours, soaking up the hard stuff, puffing on the Luckies.

You don't see many guys like that in the business anymore; satellite programming and "voice tracking" (hiring a big-market voice talent to do the interstitial bits between songs, which are then spliced together by computer) gutted the market for low and mid-level disk jockeys; changing FCC regulations and ubiquitous computers removed the need to have a "board op" on the premises (indeed today some stations are completely unmanned, 24/7).

Joe had already been a "road warrior" when we met at KDWB-AM in 1990; he'd worked all over Minnesota. Contacts had gotten him a job as a board operator at KDWB-AM - a miserable,slumming gig, watching the needle bob and playing commercials during satellite-fed oldies programming from LA. It kept Joe in the smokes and drinks, barely. He was irrepressible, of course - the guy could drink Atomizer under the table and have room left over for another Frater of your choice - but he was a happy (if extremely boisterous) drunk, as I remember (and having been to a couple of KDWB Christmas parties, I do remember).

But it was there that Joe met Steve Konrad, program director at KSTP from 1991 to today (with a six-odd-year break in the middle). Joe was nothing if not a solid journeyman board operator, something KSTP hadn't had many of in years of hiring twinks just out of Brown Institute. Joe got Mischke started, and then moved over to any journeyman board jock's dream gig; producing Jason Lewis. The relationship was reportedly one of those that you dream about when you're plugging away at crap jobs like KDWB-AM - Joe had a solid role in the show's success, he was rewarded (by producer/engineer standards) well for it, and he developed a solid personal relationship with Lewis himself, truly a rare thing in the back-biting world of talk radio.

I met Joe the night I filled in for Bob Davis in 2003. It had to have been a personal peak; the money - for once in the straitened career of a road warrior - was mighty good, and the Lewis show was in peak form. Like all things in radio, it could not last.

I was privileged to work with Joe again, at the Patriot, for the first 12-odd months of the NARN. But I was worried, too; you could tell all was not well. He was working as a telemarketer for the State GOP. Joe's drinking hadn't slacked off at all. He started calling in late for shifts, and finally missed one entirely. Like all radio gigs, it ended with a telephoned pink slip.

Rumor (unconfirmed) had it that he lasted about a day at KTLK, for about the same reasons.

Sic transit gloria radio.

Radio is different these days; pasty computer programmers have replaced the board operators; talk show "producers" are mostly rank greenhorns (and they don't "produce" jack, or if they do they do it in the haphazard way of people trying to practice a craft they've never been properly taught - a role that people like Joe used to have at stations like...

...well, all of them.

All the best, Joe.

Posted by Mitch at May 25, 2006 02:53 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Another terrific story, and salute.

(And pasty computer programmers? I resemble that remark...)

Posted by: Jeff at May 25, 2006 03:41 PM

Whoa.

Nice job, Mitch: if I could add one detail: the voice, which could red-line a meter from across the room. The man could PROJECT. And the timbre of his voice was the same regardless of the dbs he was pushing. Remarkable.

Damn good board man, and an unsung part of local radio history. Thanks for giving him his due.

Posted by: Lileks at May 25, 2006 06:08 PM

If he's the radio producer I'm thinking of, he had a great dry humor, very dry, but you could also hear every cigarette he ever smoked in his voice. I always worried about him, just for that reason. RIP Joe.

Posted by: RBMN at May 25, 2006 07:37 PM

Wonderful story, Mitch.

Posted by: Gary M. Miller at May 25, 2006 07:59 PM


A few of us attended the wake tonight. Joe's family said he passed from Kidney and Liver failure. he had been in a care facility for a couple of months from what I understand.

I met Joe when I started in March of 2001 and I never got the chance to know him as well as I wanted to. He was a big wrestling fan like I am, and I always wanted to have more time to talk with him about it. But I rarely saw him unless I was filling in on GL, but he was always friendly in a ultra-competetive environment.

Joe was a better board op then I could ever hope to be. He was also a tremendous producer, and he always got Jason the best guests.

Joe was also fixture of my childhood too as Smokin' Joe, the guy who ran Dr. Demento on 104.1, whatever they called themselves that week.

God Bless you Joe, you will really be missed.

Posted by: CCK at May 25, 2006 09:00 PM

I made it to the wake for a bit - from the guest book, it looked most of the radio people took off before I got there.

What everyone said. Joe was a great technician, and just exuded radio the way an old sailor oozes sea lore. It was hard to imagine him doing anything else.

God Bless you, Joe, indeed.

Posted by: mitch at May 25, 2006 09:05 PM

And yep, James, there was no mistaking the voice. Not your classic radio voice, but as distinctive as it got.

Posted by: mitch at May 25, 2006 09:07 PM

Alas, by the time he was our producer on the Patriot, "smoke'n Joe" Hanson was only a shadow of his former self, although I'm sure he enjoyed working with the NARN. I do remember sitting with him in the booth when he was doing Jason's show (and David was a guest)on KSTP and he was at the top of his game. I am surprised he was 50. He looked like he was born with a cigarette in his mouth, one of those ageless types.

Posted by: Margaret at May 26, 2006 12:12 AM

Jason Lewis always referred to him by both first and last names. Up until this post I always thought his name was Johansson.

Posted by: Kermit at May 26, 2006 07:45 AM

"Pasty Computer Programmers" HEY... Is that a shot at me?

I remember how hard it was to see Joe slipping... Truthfully, I gave him a LOT more latitude than I would have given some Brown greenhorn. You could really tell something was up when a guy who cared so much about radio wasn't able to get to a shift on time.

The thing I'll always remember the most about Joe is his unique "charm" in screening phone calls. I could have used more of that kind of personality when I was still running the ship at the Patriot.

God Bless Joe... I just hope there's a producer gig in heaven.

Posted by: PC at May 26, 2006 08:29 AM

As a 45 yr old lifelong jock, veteran of nights and mornings in markets big and small, I have known my share of Joes.. Camel-voiced gray-templed veterans in whose presence I felt talentless and dumb... men who made me like them and admire them and wish and hope and pray their personal lives would one day be what in my view these men deserved... (I've always wondered why a rough personal life has seemed to be almost a requirement of a long career in radio, or at least it used to be.)

Your writing about Joe made me realize I've been taking for granted the handful of Joes who are still in my life.. so thanks for waking me up.. I'm off to share a cup of coffee with the one I say hi to every morning here running the board on a venerable AM station in a big city in Texas...

Dave
Production Guy

Posted by: Dave at May 26, 2006 09:41 AM

As a 45 yr old lifelong jock, veteran of nights and mornings in markets big and small, I have known my share of Joes.. Camel-voiced gray-templed veterans in whose presence I felt talentless and dumb... men who made me like them and admire them and wish and hope and pray their personal lives would one day be what in my view these men deserved... (I've always wondered why a rough personal life has seemed to be almost a requirement of a long career in radio, or at least it used to be.)

Your writing about Joe made me realize I've been taking for granted the handful of Joes who are still in my life.. so thanks for waking me up.. I'm off to share a cup of coffee with the one I say hi to every morning here running the board on a venerable AM station in a big city in Texas...

Dave
Production Guy

Posted by: Dave at May 26, 2006 09:41 AM

As a 45 yr old lifelong jock, veteran of nights and mornings in markets big and small, I have known my share of Joes.. Camel-voiced gray-templed veterans in whose presence I felt talentless and dumb... men who made me like them and admire them and wish and hope and pray their personal lives would one day be what in my view these men deserved... (I've always wondered why a rough personal life has seemed to be almost a requirement of a long career in radio, or at least it used to be.)

Your writing about Joe made me realize I've been taking for granted the handful of Joes who are still in my life.. so thanks for waking me up.. I'm off to share a cup of coffee with the one I say hi to every morning here running the board on a venerable AM station in a big city in Texas...

Dave
Production Guy

Posted by: Dave at May 26, 2006 09:41 AM

I swear, guys, I only hit the Post button once.

sheesh. :-)

Posted by: Dave at May 26, 2006 09:43 AM

It was a good comment. I don't mind having it in twice...

Posted by: mitch at May 26, 2006 10:23 AM

I never reached "Joe" status in my radio career, as it only lasted 10 years, but I've known Joes. The good ones seem to be able to 'read' the on-air talent's mind as to what they want, when they want it, and how they want it done.

I learned tricks from Joes down the years at seven stations in three states, and while I don't claim to have been as skilled at the board as Joe was, it's people like him that taught me the craft that is now largely obsolete in radio. Tricks like how to fix a broken reel-to-reel tape using a razor blade and splice tape; how to tightly sync a cart; how to judge a record's grooves to best know how far to back-cue it up... and to do it all on the fly.

I didn't know Joe, never heard him or saw him work, but it's people like him (Dewey, dead in a car crash, and Chuck, and Sky, and Carla, and "Bat") that gave a (then) 18 year old with a fascination for radio a chance to do what they'd done.

Godspeed, Joe.

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