50 years on the air

ALBANY — Asking Rodney Rouse, best known in southwest Georgia as radio/TV personality Jaxon Riley, to come up with some key moments from his career is a bigger ask than you might think.

See, this year marks Rouse/Riley’s 50th year in the business he got into when his best friend in the industry offered this take on the benefits of radio broadcasting: “It’s nothing but wine, women and weed.”

Still, you have to respect a man who’s ridden the ups and downs of a fickle industry through years of changing formats, increasingly dynamic technology and the growing belief industrywide that live radio — people actually broadcasting on the air — is a thing of the past.

“There was a period during the time that I worked in radio that being on the air made you a king,” said Rouse/Riley, who now runs the boards mornings for First Media Service’s five stations and airs a live interview show (“Albany Today”) weekdays on WALG. Rouse/Riley made the observation as he looked back on a half-century career that landed him a nomination for the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame. “It’s kind of ironic that I’m back on ALG, where I started 50 years ago. But I don’t think most people realize how big an impact radio still has.

“People say ‘Radio is not what it used to be,’ but Nielsen’s numbers tell a very different story. Social media impacts 179 million people a month. AM and FM radio combined reach 243 million people a week. Radio easily reaches way more listeners than Facebook, other social media and TV.”

After landing the gig with WALG AM in 1973, working the midnight-to-6 a.m. shift as “Rockin’ Rodney,” Rouse/Riley went on to work at just about every radio station (and a handful of TV stations) in Albany.

Minus the few months he spent as a member of the short-lived Eden Band, and “the best summer I ever spent” drawing unemployment after being fired for one of his greatest successes in the radio industry, Rouse/Riley has been a mainstay on southwest Georgia airwaves. He’s worked for WQDE, WJAD, WJAZ, WKAK, 92 WAZE, MIX 107 and Y-100 … and a few others whose call letters escape him. He even worked at urban giant WJIZ for a short period.

“I interviewed with (Radio Hall of Famer) Doc Suttles, and he flat told me the station would never put a white guy on the air,” Riley recalls. “I actually went home thinking about a lawsuit, and evidently their management had the same idea. They called me the next day and offered me a job as a salesman.

“I worked with JIZ one spring and summer, but I had to drive to make sales calls, and my car didn’t have an air conditioner. That pretty much ended my sales career. If I’d had AC, I might be rich today.”

Rouse/Riley’s only serious gig outside Albany and southwest Georgia was a brief stint at WKXY AM in Sarasota, Fla.

When investors brought a new FOX-TV affiliate to town and sought out a “local celebrity” to serve as a spokesperson, Riley/Rouse was recommended. He started off doing promotional material, then started doing weather and news updates. When the station’s brass decided to do a full-on news broadcast, Rouse/Riley found himself in a new career, as a weatherman, a job he held for a decade.

He would later work as a creative consultant for a local NBC-TV affiliate and as a director/producer of Albany State University TV/radio.

Now, though, he’s back where he started, at WALG.

“I look back over the 50 years, and there are lots of good memories,” Riley/Rouse said. “I didn’t get rich, but I’m happy.”

Riley/Rouse shares some of those memories over the course of a morning conversation in the WALG studio of First Media Services:

— “It was probably best working at WJAZ AM country. We were one of the Billboard report stations, which determined the magazine’s top songs. All the stars wanted to be our friends, and we got invited to all the shows. We actually had a lot of power. When Conway Twitty performed at the (Albany) Civic Center, he gave us the cold shoulder. We held back our support for his next song, which never made it to No.1.”

— “When I dropped out of radio to tour with the Eden Band, we were playing a show at a bar in Augusta. We had our pay, $1,000, sitting on the bar when a 62-year-old lady with a pistol came in and raked the money into her pocketbook. The owner had left, telling us to lock up, so the other members of the band decided they’d get their $1,000 by taking that much liquor. That ended my career in the band.”

— Riley’s radio name was a combination of the two most popular on-air names in the industry: O’Riley and Jackson. “I got the unusual spelling of my name from some kids who made and brought me a T-shirt,” Rouse/Riley said. “I told them it was really cool that they spelled my surname phonetically, with an ‘X’. They told me, ‘No, it cost 45 cents a letter to put your name on the shirt. This was was cheaper.'”

Riley the DJ reached what was probably the height of his career arc when he DJ’d live from local clubs like the Library Lounge, the Sand Trap, the P-2 Club and Gerald’s Lounge. Plus, of course, the Monkey Palace, whose biggest claim to fame was the pair of live monkeys that were encaged at the notorious watering hole.

“Yeah, the old ‘Baboon Saloon,'” Riley said of the infamous venue. “PETA showed up during the glory days of the club, saying the monkeys were being mistreated. They came out with folks from DNR, a local vet and the curator from Chehaw (Park and Zoo). After everyone looked at the medical records, the charges against the bar were dropped.

“In fact, Chehaw donated two female monkeys to the club, and two years later one of them gave birth. A rhesus monkey birth in captivity was a rare thing then.”

The memories flow like water from a sieve as Rouse/Riley’s reflection continues:

— “I got my introduction to the LGBTQ crowd when, one night, an attractive lady was wowing everyone on the dance floor (at a popular club where he was DJing). She was gorgeous. She came over to me and, in as deep a voice as you can imagine, said, ‘Should I lift up my skirt and give everyone a surprise?’ That was the first (of many) experience with the trans community. We also had a gorgeous ‘Madonna’ who would grab everyone’s attention … except on the days ‘she’ needed to shave.”

— “I was at a remote, and I asked this 5-year-old kid who said he loved dinosaurs which dinosaur he would want if he could have one as a pet. This kid paused for a second, kind of stepped back a step, looked up at me and said, ‘Mister, I don’t know if you’re aware, but dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years.'” 

Riley learned the realities of the radio industry when he was hired on to serve as station manager of Y-100, a Top 40 Tifton station. The station was wallowing in the area ratings with a “1” share. Riley rashly told management he could get the ratings “in the teens,” vowing a “13” rating if they’d give him two years.

“When the ratings came out two years later, we were at 12.7,” Riley said. “I was expecting a bonus. Instead, they called me in and told me I was fired because I didn’t get the ratings to 13.”

Still, through all the firings, the ratings wars, the far-out remotes, the oddball listeners who assumed on-air personalities really were their friends, Rouse/Riley has endured, remaining relevant for half a century on the medium he loves. Still a rock and roller at heart, Riley has played every genre of music under the sun, adding a little fun and entertainment as, in the words of Harry Chapin, “the bright good-morning voice who’s heard but never seen.”

“Nah, I don’t regret any of it,” Rouse/Riley said. “Despite the ups and downs of 50 years on the air, it’s always been fun.”

And not even a 5-year-old dinosaur expert or a snobby country superstar can diminish that.

Staff Photo: Carlton FletcherStaff Photo: Carlton Fletcher

Staff Photo: Carlton Fletcher