Most people listen to radio of some sort, whether it be for musical pleasure or informational, but a lot of people don’t think about how or who it is that makes it all come together.
The radio disc jockey is the person whose voice you hear over the airwaves as well as part of the team that creates content and plans what goes on the air. Bakersfield’s Groove 99.3 is a local oldies radio station hosted by a small but exceptional team ran by Louie Cruz, the Program Director and weekday DJ.
Cruz has been a part of Groove 99.3 for the last five-and-a-half-years and has brought with him an almost uncanny sense for old school music with 20 years of radio experience. But Cruz is more than just a DJ, too, he grew up on his parent’s music listening to Motown artists and hanging with his friends jamming to low-rider oldies. Cruz is originally from Northern California and was given the opportunity at the age of 16 to attend the Columbia School of Broadcast.
But Cruz’s real spark of interest in radio started when he was 10 years old. He used to watch a show called WKARP with Dr. Don Rose, which Cruz credits to how he got into radio. Once Cruz began attending college, he interned with KSFM radio in Sacramento for about three months in which he had to commute from San Francisco to Sacramento. He was hired permanently as a mixer for the station where he had interned and worked for five years. As Cruz climbed the ladder, he worked his job to the point where he had his own full time show before he left.
Around 1999, Cruz was contacted by a station in Portland, Oregon about a new position with a start-up radio station, and was offered a job at KXJM to work full time. Cruz looks up to the ceiling as he reminisces on the job he took outside of California.
“I got a job in Portland, Oregon as a DJ at the only station in town at that time, and I was playing Hip-Hop and these guys had never heard West Coast Rappers like Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg yet, so it was unique to them. I used an innovative approach,” Cruz said.
Cruz spent a large amount of time in Portland until he was contacted by someone in Bakersfield regarding a new radio station coming to town. He began telling his true reason for this career move to Bakersfield in 2005.
“I was contacted by somebody here and they had just put on this new radio station, The Groove, which was old school, and I had been doing old school already a few years up North for Clear Channel [Radio]. So, by the time they called me here, I just had a baby, she was brand new and I was ready to concrete things. They gave me complete control here, which I didn’t have before, I had like 85% and I wanted total control.”
Although Cruz is a DJ, he says that there’s way more to it than what meets the eye. He explained how the shows have to be prepped, which each DJ is responsible for presenting.
“I program the show and let them know what the overall focus is going to be,” he said.
Cruz explains that, “Sometimes, people think that continuously talking is hard, which it is, if you’re not prepared. You never want it to get quiet. I write liners, you know like talking points to give them something to go on.”
Another thing he said that people misconceive is the money that radio disc jockey’s make.
“It’s way less than what people think,” Cruz said with a smile.
Contrary to what listeners may believe, being a DJ is not in the field of journalism and people interested in music or engineering can become one. Cruz is technically a recording engineer by trade but he is mostly known as a local radio disk jockey in Bakersfield.