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35000 Watts Podast – S3E2 – Joe Lomonaco (287 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And welcome back to 35,000 Watts, the podcast. This is the Companion podcast to the documentary Film 35,000 Watts: The Story of Card Radio.
The documentary is known about, surprisingly, college radio. It’s available right now on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Tubi, and now you can watch the whole film on YouTube. So go check it out, and in the spirit of college radio, we’ve been interviewing alumni from various college radio stations around the country, and today is no exception, so our co-host, Lisa, will take it away.
Well, hi, Joe. Thanks for coming on our podcast today for 35,000 watts, the story of college radio. Joe Lamonico comes today from WGSU, 89.3 FM from Genesee, New York. His college radio station there.
Hello there. It is an honor to be on the podcast. I’ve been so enjoying listening to the stories and to also catch up with the film.
The film was fantastic. It also made me realize that so many people not only did college radio, whether they wanted to be in radio or not, but there’s so many different reasons, I think, why people decided they wanted to be a part of it and get and get involved in it. I don’t know if my story’s going to necessarily line up with a lot of people that may have got in it because they really like the music.
I was definitely one of those people that decided radio. I was just going to do radio as a career and college radio was a necessary step, I thought, and really did, you know, kind of helped sort of do that foundational stuff for me, uh, so that I could be gainfully in this industry since the day after I graduated. I graduated on a Saturday and started my 1st job at 6 AM on a Sunday and I just clucked over 30 years at my current radio station and I’ve been in the business for a little over 31.
You have so much interesting story to tell, especially being at the same station for that long because out of all the people I’ve been talking to, a lot of them have decided like, I loved radio. I wanted to be in the broadcast industry, but I couldn’t deal with the vagabond life of like working at one station for 6 months and moving across the country and working at another station. And that kind of thing just kind of came along with radio, you know, back when we were on air.
Well, you still are on air, but I was on air in the mid 90s, just like the same time period that you started. So where are you now? Tell us about this 30 year career.
Well, 30 year career, and I haven’t really gone very far. Genesio State University is about half an hour south of Rochester, New York. So in a sense, I’ve moved 30 minutes north and I’ve never left.
And I was talking to a colleague of mine not too long ago about the longevity that people in this market seem to have. There’s a lot of people in the Rochester radio market who have 30 plus years, and we’re talking up to as many as 50 plus years. And for some reason, people get into the business in this town and they stay and they don’t want to go anywhere and they don’t feel the need to be the journeyman radio person or be the journeyman television person.
And they just want to stay here, build a career here, get to know the community, and I definitely fell into that category. I love this town. It’s what I call a big small city.
We’re under a 1000000 in population, but there’s enough that happens here that it makes it feel bigger than it is. There’s enough things to get involved in and enough things to really make you want to build a life in this community. And so I decided this was it.
I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Did you grow up in that part of the country? Was born in this town, didn’t grow up here?
I was born and when I was an infant, my parents relocated down to Binghamton, New York, which is in the southern tier of New York, just north of the Pennsylvania border, about 2.5 hours away from Rochester. So I grew up there, but came back to this area to go to college and decided never to leave. And when did you decide that you needed to do radio?
When were you bitten by the radio bug? Oh, probably when I was 10 or earlier than that. See, radio guys to me, radio people in the small town that I grew up in were they were local heroes and celebrities and I always enjoyed playing with my voice.
I didn’t know what a voice actor was. So maybe if I’d have known at that point, maybe I would have gone in a different direction, but radio broadcasters, DJs were locals, heroes, and celebrities. And I think I felt most drawn to.
I want to be the person that someone listens to. I want to be the one there other people are having conversations about things that I’m talking about because they listened to me. So I think that was one of the initial draws for that.
So it was a straight line. There was never any deviation was, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do everything that I can to move in that direction, and then going to college was specifically, I want to go to a place where it has a robust communications department. It has a campus radio station.
I can get involved with because these are all just steps I think I need to take. So this is definitely a different story than what we usually hear. And even in the film we cover this, like people stumble into the station, either through a mutual friend, or they just love music and they happen to hang out there a lot and get offered a position.
I mean, I stumbled into it because I was writing for a local newspaper in my hometown and had to talk to the DJ and promotion people at the local station playing the music that we were featuring in the local entertainment guide. So it became the symbiotic relationship. Um, but it sounds like you knew from the very get go exactly what you wanted to do and how you were gonna get there.
So what made you choose the university you ended up at? Money. There were 3 universities that, and they’re all in New York that I thought I wanted to go with.
One was St. John Fisher University, which is also in Rochester has a great communications program. The other was, say, Bonaventure University down in Olean, New York, which is sort of in the southwestern corner over towards Ohio.
And Genesio was my backup school. I got into all three, but at the time, in the late 80s, affordability of a state university in New York, if you’re a New York state resident, was far better. It was about half the price.
So when it came down to it, it’s like, yeah, sure, I’d love to be at Bonaventure because Bonaventure sort has a storied communications department and, you know, they’ve got a pretty big basketball team. So, you know, coverage of that basketball team was big deal, but just couldn’t, just couldn’t crack the nut. So I wound up at Genesillo.
And for about a half a second, I was like, I’m disappointed. I got to go to Genesee. It was my 3rd it was my 3rd choice school.
But after getting there, that completely changed. And so it was finding the community of my fellow communications majors and those who were working for the radio station. I split my time between the theater department and I have a lot of great friends in the theater department and the communications department.
So there was 2 things that I love to do, you know, to be performing and to say, well, I can’t be an actor because I need a regular job. I can’t be I can’t be just auditioning for work all the time. So I have to have a real job.
Well, radio is where I could do both. I could be the performer and I could also have a steady paycheck. And so that’s that kind of that kind of helped my brain, uh, to say, yeah, this is okay.
You can pursue this. And and then go for it. So what years were you there?
1989? I was there in 1989 to 1993. And, oh gosh, so coming into the late 80s, I knew nothing about the music.
Nothing. I was a pop kid, I listened to my friends and I, when I was growing up, we were 60s music, like the Beatles and the Stones and Zeppelin and the Who and things like that. So I was a classic rock kid, but I also had pop music that I liked.
So I come into college radio and I don’t know squat. Not a thing. My 1st shift, though.
I played classical music. That was the gig. It was freshman 1st semester.
I was lucky enough to get an airshift, so they stuck me at 7 AM on a Sunday. You’re the one who turns the transmitter on, and you’ll be playing 2 hours of classical music because we are a broadcast FM station. So we have some community service needs that we sort of have to do.
So that’s it. And Sundays were the specialty shows. So that’s what I got it.
So, of course, I treated it like a pop kid. I’m a pop kid playing classical music and I don’t know anything about the music either. So over time, though, got out of that shift, got into sort of the main shift.
So I’m learning about all of the acts that were big in the late 80s and early 90s. Like, I had no idea who Susie and the banshees were. I have no idea who the Sundays were.
I have no idea who the innocence mission are. I have no idea who Echo and the Bunny men are. And then I’m learning about all of this stuff.
All of the things that have now become my favorite music and the stuff that I go back to. Um, but at this point in time, I’m, and the internet doesn’t exist. So you can’t really do a whole lot of research about these bands unless you happen to know about them or you had some experience with them.
So I was kind of just trying to listen to as much as I can and turn off my pop sensibility and say, well, what else is there? And what else should I be playing? Um, and trying to learn, but also stay true to the sort of the format of the station at the same time.
So did you did all 4 years there at your station? I’m sure you’ve probably eventually got maybe a student leadership type role. No, never wanted one.
Always just want, always just wanted to be the jock. I just wanted to be the guy that had the show. Never been interested in management.
Now, granted, I’ve been in management for the last 20 years. But I had to grow up into that. I was in no way the person who thought that that was something I was going to be interested in doing or even wanted to do.
I still wanted to be famous on the radio. That was still the goal. It was still like, well, I’m going to be the morning, man, because haven’t you heard me?
I’m fabulous. So you should want to listen to me. I don’t have time to deal with sort of the behind the scenes stuff.
I have to be in the microphone giving the people what they want. Yeah, sure. And so I was just lucky enough to be able to continue to just do that and didn’t get.
Yeah, I didn’t get pulled into, you know, sort of the management side of things. Did you have a specialty show yourself? Well, after the classical show, I wound up doing, and this is another thing that I think is a theme that happens with more people, is you wind up making connections with people on the radio station that last for your entire life.
I’m married to my co-host, who we did a show together. We wound up meeting by sheer coincidence because she filled in on the shift on a Sunday morning that happened after my regular shift. So I met her and we didn’t hit it off initially, but over time, we started to spend more time together and we wound up doing a show together, probably of like my junior year, our junior year.
And then we did a show together for 2 years. And we’ve been dating and, well, we’ve been married for, you know, gosh, 20 plus years and together for over 30. Um, as a result of the fact that, you know, we wound up meeting each other there and she was an art student, so she was in the arts building when I was there with my theater friends.
So it all sorts in the Venn diagram of our lives. was the radio station was the crossover point. It makes perfect sense. Yeah.
Well, I’ve heard that a lot. And we’re going to do an episode someday on college radio love story, so I’ll have to invite you back for that one. Absolutely.
Maybe your wife can be on too. Absolutely. Oh, she’d love to tell stories about the nerd that I was.
Absolute. Oh, God. God, absolutely.
Talk about opposites, but yeah, that was definitely us. And I credit her with opening my mind to all of the music. She knew about the artists in the music far more than I did.
And I was the one that kept trying to be like, you know, well, well, hey, we got to play this Tears for Fears record because that’s what I know. And she was like, no, idiot, this. listen to this, listen to this, listen to this. And because of that, it expanded my musical vocabulary.
So I’m very grateful for that because I wouldn’t have I wouldn’t have spent as much time listening to her to paying attention to it. So let’s go back to 1989. You’re a freshman.
You’ve grown up on classic rock and pop of the day. So, you know, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, you know, Phil Collins. Um, as we say in the film, Journey in Boston.
Yeah, exactly. And I know the level and I know level of nose holding that goes along with that too. Right, right.
You do your 4 years. Now, what are your musical tastes after your 4 years? After my 4 years, it’s still very much rooted in the stuff that I’ve always enjoyed.
So if I go back, if I listen to my, you know, go through my, like Amazon playlist right now, you know, I’m still going to see the Beatles in there. I’m still going to see, yes, I’m still going to see Howard Jones is in there. I’m still going to see, you know, all the Beatles solo stuff is going to be in there.
Yes, is in there, but not their older Prague rock. It’s, you know, like, you know, it’s, like, not a 125 is, like, I, God, I play that album so many times. Um, so it was still there.
But then other stuff started to creep in. And then I found that that music started to be stuff that I that I go back to now a bit more often. Uh, if I, if I want to put on something like today, I was just out driving around and I was like, you know what?
I’m going to put on reading, writing, and arithmetic by the Sundays, which is just a fantastic album front to back. There’s just not a track on that record that doesn’t just hit perfectly. And it was never an artist that I would have known. as just an example.
If it hadn’t been for my wife who introduced me to that music way back in the day. So now it’s expands out. So if I was doing a show today, there would be influences of like fits in the tantrums, I absolutely love their work, the head and the heart.
I love their work. Um, and I’ve kind of moved out into, into some different sounding stuff that maybe is a little bit quieter. But then you’ll throw Arctic monkeys in there too, and I really like them.
So it’s been interesting to see if you go through the playlist, like, who are you? And what do you, what do you like? I can’t I can’t pin you down because you’re kind of all over the place.
Okay, oh my god, my mind is just exploding with questions. I can’t write them down fast enough. The fact that you mentioned those 4 bands just now, fits in the tantrum, head and heart, decembris, Arctic Monkeys.
I’ve always felt like they were like the modern day equivalent of the music we were playing when we were in college radio. I was on air from 93 to 96, so about the same time as you. Um, you know, you came into radio during the grunge movement, and I did too, and then we had the, The blink what I did too, and corn and Limp Bizkit era, but personal taste.
Um, so, My question next to you would be, um, what is your coming of age album? Like, if you had to name one coming of age album? What would it be?
Yikes. Oh boy. Because there’s there’s different eras for that, I think.
As I’m coming into maybe like my 13 to 15 year old self, it would have it would have been different. It would have been everything Beatles related. Okay.
So it would have been, but Sergeant Pepper wouldn’t have been my intro point. It would have been some of their earlier work because my parents are older. And my parents would have, you know, listen, they were coming out of the folk movement and into the early British invasion.
So that kind of stuff played in my house. So, like, you know, that early 60s, you know, what was pop rock and what the Beatles kind of did then was sort of my entry point. And then I moved through all of that stuff.
As I went into the 80s, then you’ll start to see influences like, oh, God. Well, the Tears for Fears was in there in the 80s. Things like men without hats were in there as well.
Um, anything that was like a big pop single. I’m gonna I’m gonna gravitate towards that. And then as you go ladder into high school and into college, Then some of the, I think what college radio had going for it musically is that it had a lot of female driven artists or bands that were led by female vocalists.
And I think that intrigued me because I hadn’t really spent much time with that. It was all men, men, men, men, men, men in the early, in the early days. And then I get into college and it’s like, wow, there’s there’s a lot of stuff there, like indigo girls start to come in and Susie and the banshees comes in.
And I’m like, wow, there’s a lot of great vocalists out there. And Tori Amos was part of that as she came as she came in as well. And so that kind of expanded it.
So about every 5 years or so, for a certain point in time, my music horizon just started to not, I didn’t get rid of anything, but I started to look in a different direction. If I’m looking north, then, okay, well, let’s look east and see what’s over there, you know, and to see, um, while there’s these, there’s these great songs and great songwriters and great vocalists that are there, and I just, you know, I would just go and consume as much of it as humanly possible. Yeah, my question my answer to that question is always Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins.
I just have so many great memories to that and not only just from being, you know, playing it at the radio station, but just like life in general. So I was curious because you do seem to have a very wide, diverse history with music. I’ll tell you what I used to do though, because I didn’t know much about it.
I would pick up Rolling Stone magazine. And I would look at whatever they would give 5 stars to. And I would go, all right, well, I’m going to go get that record.
And even if I didn’t know the artist, I would still go and get the record. just because they gave it 5 stars. And I didn’t know much about, you know, what reviewers to listen to or who was doing what. But that was at least a decent entry point for me.
So I would go and grab like, oh, they gave Joe Jackson’s Blaze of Glory 5 stars. Well, I kind of know a little bit about Joe Jackson, but I you know, and he’s become one of my favorite artists. Love all the entire catalog.
Didn’t know much about Elvis Costello, but Spike got 5 stars. Okay, gonna go get spikes. Well, now I’m going to learn about Elvis Costello and the attractions.
Now I’m gonna learn about, you know, some, you know, some of this other stuff. And so I have these random albums that kind of show up in my collection of like this doesn’t go with anything else, but it’s there because Rolling Stone gave it 5 stars, so I thought I had to give it a listen. Yeah, you had mentioned the female artist as well.
I think in one of the 1st 2 episodes that Mike and I did for the podcast. We talked about the female artist trend being one of those characteristics of what makes college radio college radio. So that’s great that you recognize that as well, for sure.
Okay, so you had mentioned earlier that the day after you graduated college, you walked into your 1st professional radio job. So start now let’s like start there and tell me what happened after that. So I, it took me until very recently, up until maybe a couple of years ago, when I did a podcast series of my own, for my current stations 100th anniversary, the station went on the air in 1922.
So I did a podcast series for the station. And it really forced me to think about, well, why do you do this? What is it, what did you want to do?
And now compared to what you do do, how different might it be? So I don’t necessarily think I had a plan other than, I want to work in radio, and I think that’s as far as it got. I don’t think it was any more specific than that.
It’s not like I want to be the morning zoo jock. I want to be the music director, program director. whatever. I think it was just, I want to have a job in the industry.
And I was able to get it. But I never considered the AM band nor news and talk. That was never something that was on my horizon.
I have spent 31 years on the AM band in news and talk. I’ve never gone anywhere because that was something that it gave me a direction. And it showed me, number one, that I had a deficiency in being the personality jock.
I don’t have an aptitude for that. I thought I did, but I don’t. What I do have an aptitude to be is a writer.
And I have an aptitude for doing production work. And it doesn’t matter where that is, whether that’s running a board for a talk show, whether that’s putting a commercial together. I found that I had some aptitude for that.
And I’ve been fortunate enough that the small station I started with, which was just over the hill from Genesille in a little town called Avon, New York. Station is still there, WYSL. It’s now on 1040 on the AM dial.
It was 1030 on the AM dial when I started. And we were a day timer. So we would go in the morning and at certain times of the day, you’d turn the transmitter on at 7.30 when the sun came up, you’d turn it off at 4.30 in the afternoon when the sun went down. because we were at 1030 on the AM band, we were on the same frequency as WBZ in Boston, which is at 1030 on the AM dial, and they’re a powerhouse 50,000 watt station.
You’re going to get blotted out at at certain times a day. So you just can’t do it. So I learned how to be a news person and how to be a talk show producer and my little 22 year old self or, you know, 23 year old self.
And I was fortunate enough that up the highway in Rochester was a heritage AM radio station, WHAM, which is the station that I landed at. And that station had been a music AM radio station, doing a little talk and a little music, kind of a weird hybrid, but we had a an ice storm in the northeast in March of 1991. It crippled the entire city.
It shut power down. It, it sort of upended life as we knew it for for a long time. This was in 1991.
The WHAAM changed from being a music station. They dropped. All the music went straight news and talk.
As a result of that, being, you know, we there was no other real way to communicate. TV stations couldn’t be on the air. Yeah, it was the way that it was the way that radio station served the community, but it completely changed how that station was going to be.
There were going to be a news talk radio station. So fortunately, by the time I get out of school, I spent about 18 months at WISL. An opportunity comes at WHAAM.
It’s a natural step up to go to the big player, 50,000 watt heritage AM radio station that is a ratings powerhouse. It’s number one with a bullet across the board, and it was, it was really, it held that that position for quite a long time. So I come in and then I start to get sort of knocked from department to department.
I come in, I’m working overnights. I’m running the board, producing talk shows, doing cop calls, writing stories. Eventually, that leads to, okay, well, now you’re going to be, um, a reporter.
All right? Now you got to go out and cover stories in the field. Okay, well now you’re going to be an anchor person.
You’re going to be in the building. You’re going to be anchoring newscast every 30 minutes. You’re going to be writing your own newscast.
Oh, now we think you have an aptitude to be promotions director. Okay, well we’re going to kick you off the air and we’re going to, you know, we’re going to go over there. Oh, our afternoon news anchor is leaving.
Would you like to come back and host the 5 to 6 PM news block, which I did for 25 years? Then it was, hey, we’re losing our production director. Would you like to be the commercial production director?
And I’m like, okay, again, remember, back to my early story. I had no direction. I wanted to be in radio.
As long as I was in radio, I didn’t care what I was doing. So I kept getting keys to different offices. And on September 11th, 2001.
How about that for a 1st day of work, I was given the keys to the production department. So I’ll never forget that day. Uh, and because we didn’t do an ounce of commercials.
We didn’t run commercials for a week and a half after that. When you talk about serving the community, That’s precisely what we did. We dumped the format, dumped the commercials and we went wall-to-wall coverage of that event.
Wow. And that’s when I transitioned into commercial production, still staying on the air, but doing commercial production, and then over the 20 plus years, moving less into being on the air, saying, you know what, I’ve done that. I don’t need to do that anymore.
Now I can spend all of my time just being the commercial production person. And that gave me direction. That gave me something that I wanted to work towards, instead of just being in radio, I want to be the best writer producer working with clients director audio engineer, that tickled me in a way that other things didn’t.
So over time, it’s really solidified into this is my primary thing. This is what I do within the industry. So I’ve built everything over 30 years.
But now, for the last 20, it’s been being studio rat. And I love being a studio rat. I can totally relate.
Um, I had intentions of being, you know, a big market jock, um, same time frame as you. My ultimate goal was to be a morning jock in Las Vegas. Um, my family’s from Las Vegas.
My dad was born and raised there. I spent every summer of my life there. And so my intention was to get back to Las Vegas and then maybe LA.
And I’m like, you know, overnight country radio station jock in Lubbock, Texas of all places. Um, so I worked really hard to keep improving myself and getting better and better roles with better stations in our market. And I knew at some point I was going to have to move to Dallas and I wasn’t quite ready to do that.
And then at some point I just kind of woke up one day and was like, I don’t have the ego for this. You know, um, you had mentioned aptitude and I called it ego. I just didn’t have the ego for it.
And I too decided at that point that I was just going to focus on production, and I enjoyed the storytelling, the writing, the creative side of that, you know, that part of it. And so at that point, I also had switched to TV. So I left radio to do TV and TV, I wrote commercials, and I shot video and produced local TV commercials.
I learned on Photoshop 3.0. You know? Um, and so I did that for a while and then the internet was just coming around.
So in 1999, I thought this internet thing was going to be the next hot thing and I need to figure out what this internet thing is. Um, this is also 1996. The Telecom Act had just passed.
Our station purchased another station, and now I’m doing writing a production of local TV commercials for 2 TV stations, not getting any pay raise, not getting any help. And at that point, I was like, I think I’m done, and I’m just going to go work on the internet. And I’ve been a digital marketer pretty much ever since then.
I did go back to TV for a few years and did commercial production. And um, the TV station that I worked at here in Denver, 9 news. Has a one hour live advertorial.
So I was a producer for that as well. It’s basically an hour long infomercial, broken up into 4 different segments, you know. But yeah, it’s great.
I really love that creative side of it and, um, I can totally relate to that. So good for you for finding your path and finding what tickles you in the right kind of way. I appreciate that.
Yeah, I mean, if you just hang around long enough. Yeah, if you’re, if you are an aimless person such as myself, you’ll, you, something, something just fortunately came in front of it. And it hit all the buttons.
I know, I can do the voice stuff, which I’ve loved since I was a kid and playing with a tape recorder, which is one of my 1st toys and making radio shows for fun. Um, it gives me the writing outlet. It gives me the directing outlet.
It gives me sort of the technical side of it, and I love the jigsaw puzzle aspect of putting together in, you know, seeing like, oh, I know all the different pieces that are in there. And it’s important to me. I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to be important to somebody as they hear it, but as long as it moves the needle for our client.
And our client likes it and it’s working for them, then I did my job. And on any given day, you can do so many different things in so many different styles. It is, it is quite, um, it’s quite a wonderful place to be so that you can exercise all of that stuff and and do it in sort of the guise of having one job.
So in 1993, you started your 1st role. And you eventually moved up to the bigger market, not really maybe bigger market, but the bigger station. And then Whamo, the 1996 Telecom Act happened.
So what happened? How did you navigate that and explain it? explain what it is in your terms.
Here’s it was ownership roulette. And and this is coming from the standpoint of, remember, I never left. I have had the same call letters throughout all of it.
So what happened was is that there was a local ownership group that had a duopoly. There were 2 radio stations, and they were both big. They were both sort of ratings winners and revenue winners, and they’ve been together under the same roof for a few years.
And there was some talk at one point that even though deregulation had happened, the local ownership still wanted to keep it. They didn’t want to get rid of it. They wanted to still have their local control.
But of course, the writing was pretty much on the wall. It was going to happen anyways. So then we see, again, I’m not moving.
I’m not changing my job. I’m not doing anything differently, but behind the scenes. So we went from an organization called the Lincoln group that was our local ownership.
Then you bring in, I think, the next one was AMFM. So AMFM comes in. They’re the ownership group for like a hot minute.
Then we are CBS radio. So we’re spun off to CBS radio. Then CBS takes stations and they move out, and the 1st big player comes in, which is J Corps.
So anybody who’s in the industry kind of knows that player, Cincinnati base, they start buying up properties like they’re going out of style. They start buying and buying and buying and buying. Now, adjacent to them is another big organization called Clear Channel communications.
They’re based in Texas, and they are also doing exactly the same thing. So essentially it’s a race between the 2 of them to see who’s basically going to have the most capital and who’s going to come out on top. Eventually, clear channel becomes the outright winner.
J Corps becomes assumed into or is bought out by clear channel. Clear Channel becomes the dominant player, um, and where at a certain point in time, you have a lot of other groups that were sort of keeping pace with them like cumulus communications and cocks and what was intercom, now Odyssey, we’re all kind of the same. But then that big assumption happened and Clear Channel just goes bananas, but they don’t stop.
They just keep buying and buying and buying. And they go into, oh, they bought television stations. They bought arenas, they’re buying tours, they’re doing theatrical, they’re doing all sorts of stuff.
They become immensely huge. And that backfired. Not economically, things kind of just didn’t work out.
I should say it that way. That is where iHeart comes in as an entity. And then iHeartRadio comes in.
And it’s not an outside force. It’s an internal force. And the internal force says, look, we’re going to be moving more into not a radio company.
We are an events and entertainment company, and the digital side starts to come in a little bit more. So iHeart kind of takes over part of it. The clear channel name gets moved to just the outdoor part.
That’s still it’s still around, but it’s it’s not part of the broadcast anymore. The TV stations go away. So meanwhile, all of us that are still working there, we’re just sitting there watching this all happen.
And it’s like owner after owner after owner after owner. So I’ve had five, I think, but never had to change jobs and never got downsized or laid off. So that was also very good.
I know, really. So many of my colleagues have had that experience where because of the ownership changes, and especially when deregulation happened. The industry kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and from the inside, you could look at it and say, oh, it’s getting more robust because now it’s publicly traded, and now there’s more, you know, there’s more capital.
So now it should be more secure, but it turned out it was actually a little less so. Those who us who are in it just had to keep our heads up and just keep trying to to do the what we were able to do and let the business side be the business side. And it didn’t take away from or change what we were supposed to do is serve the communities that we’re in and serve our advertisers and our clients.
So as long as we were able to do that, then, you know, now we have to do it with far fewer people. know, the mission hasn’t changed. We just do it differently and on different platforms. Okay, so we’ve covered those seismic shifts in radio.
Let’s go back to your time in college radio at WGSU. So after you did your 4 years, how did you feel leaving the station and what was your biggest takeaway? What did you learn there?
Oh, well, I wish I had learned that I was not going to be in music radio. I would have spent more time writing. I would have spent more time doing.
I think one of the things that I could have taken advantage of, but didn’t, is the fact that we were kind of given a little bit of free reign, when it came to how we were putting shows together and what we were doing. Now, granted, we had a format, finger quotes, sort of, um, but there really wasn’t a lot of hard program, direction and music, direction with our with our station. And I’m not 100% sure in listening to on the film and how some people approached or how their stations approached it.
It was a lot more regimented. They kind of had a thing where they were, okay, we’re we’re serving the community. We’re providing a service.
We are, I think one person called, like, we’re in college, but we’re trend setters. We are the ones who are exposing people to music and getting them involved with the stuff that they were listening to. I don’t know whether we ever thought of ourselves that way because Rochester was such an overpowering radio market that we didn’t think that we could play like that, but it was just about whatever we want to play.
But if I had to do it again, would I do more deliberate writing, more crafting of scripted shows or things, maybe even more news, being more involved in that? I would probably move in that direction, knowing what I know now. Back in the day, it was, I was a lot of us were just trying to figure it out.
We were just trying to figure out, well, well, what do we do with this? The only exposure we’ve had to how to be on the radio was listening to other people and trying to reverse engineer it. So we were trying to reverse engineer it and failing a lot more than we were succeeding, but having fun at the same time.
So I suppose if it taught me anything, it was how to have fun and failure. Because you can. Not everything’s going to work.
Not everything’s going to be the best possible. You’re going to get told to do things differently by bosses eventually, but if you have fun in failure, then it doesn’t make it seem like it was such a bad idea in the 1st place. Okay, so often in college radio, there’s always this crux.
There is a nexus of serving the community versus serving the students as an educational place versus being a representative of the university. So there’s an academic interest, there’s an educational interest, there’s a community interest. So when you were at your station, did you ever run into any issues where those might have conflicted with each other?
I mean, you mentioned that it was kind of a free loose format. Some stations were very regimented, very formatted, some were not. That’s always an issue.
But were there any like academic, you know, administration type issues that came up or the community loved or hated you or had anything like that going on? don’t think so. I think the administration, because we were contained within the Department of Communications.
So that’s where the radio station was instead of it being a club or somewhere outside of an academic discipline. So it had an advisor, it still does to this day, who was within the Department of Communications, but they kind of left us alone. And they kind of left us up to the students and to how they were going to run it, and they were going to police themselves.
And if there was a major issue, certainly we could bring it up to the chair of the department or to the, you know, advisor who was handling the radio station, but by and large, as I remember it, we were pretty much given the keys to the candy store and nobody told us to do anything otherwise. The only thing that they told us is that, look, we are an FCC regulated broadcast station. We are low powered, but we are an FCC regulated station.
So there’s a couple of things you can’t say. Okay? So don’t say F on the radio.
Don’t play a song with F in it on the radio because you can’t, okay? So preview everything. And if the, and if the little sticker.
That’s the other thing that’s part of the stickers and the notes on the front eye Alton jackets. Yeah, we did that too. we would pass notes to each other that way. And look, if somebody said, look, track 2 has an F 56 seconds in.
Don’t play this track. somebody would try to slip it in, but for the most, for the most part, we were trying to just be good to know, you know, that we were licensed. We were licensed by the FCC. So we all had commercial licenses.
We all got our class commercial licenses that I still have somewhere that enabled you to be on the air. So I guess we were kind of given that sort of blanket saying like, okay, well, don’t do this, don’t do this, and the rest of it, whatever, have at it. Um, and, you know, try not to break the equipment.
That’s the other big thing. Try not to break because we don’t have a budget. If it’s on the brakes, chances are it ain’t going to get replaced or it’s going to be a long time before it’s replaced.
So if you want it, you had, you had best treat it, uh, treat it well, uh, because otherwise it ain’t gonna be there no more. Okay, so why is college radio still important? And today’s streaming environment and, you know, my daughter didn’t even realize what a DJ was.
She’s 11. And so when we started working on this project, she was 9 and my son knows what a DJ is, he’s 16, but she was like, so is a DJ, like somebody that talks about the songs that you play? I was just like, I’m a horrible mother.
That’s so cute. That’s so cute. I, I, you know what?
Honestly. And thinking about it, I have I have a lot of thoughts about that. And I agree with one of your interview subjects whose name escaped me, but he was just on the podcast like a couple of weeks ago, is that his hope was that other students would have the same opportunity.
And I have that same hope. that they have the opportunity. The way we look at it, amongst my peers and amongst the people that I have been fortunate enough to call my broadcast family for the last 3 decades, is that we look at, we look at being on the eras that you’re being on stage, okay? You have, you have something to do.
And that’s not to say that the idea is, it’s all about you and the focus is just on you and how, you know, how wonderfully erudite you are or how, you know, glib you can be or how funny you are, how much you know about the music. It’s about being on stage and having the opportunity to do this live without a net. Yeah, there are podcasts.
Yeah, there are curated Spotify playlist. Yeah, there are all sorts of other outlets where you can get it. But what you can’t get is that live without a net, we’re having, we’re having a relationship, you that I can’t see and me behind a microphone, and here’s how we’re going to have this relationship.
We’re going to have it with what I’m talking about. We’re going to have it with the music that I’m sharing, and we’re going to have this conversation, and certainly it is kind of one-sided, but you’re having a community experience, and that’s what broadcast can do that digital and podcast can’t. You can have a community, sure, but you can’t have a live experience, you know, it’s kind of theatrical in its way.
And that’s one of the things that the industry still has. We are not the top of the food chain anymore. Radio used to be the top of a food chain, same as television, same as print.
If you were in communications, you had 3 places that you could ply your trade. It was one of these 3 things. But the skill set hasn’t changed.
It’s where we show up in the food chain that’s different. Now it’s audio content. That’s the top of the food chain, and we’re a distribution method.
That’s that’s all we are. But we’re still a distribution method that can do things that other people can’t. Sure, you can tell people like, hey, why don’t you, you know, join us on Facebook live or join us on this platform because we’re going to be doing our podcast and we’re going to be recording it.
You can listen to it later, but if you want to hear it live. You can get in on it. No, radio has always been the, it’s been a companion medium.
It’s been a storytelling medium. It’s been an information medium. It’s been a community engagement medium.
It’s been, um, of friendship, medium. It’s been all of those, it’s been all of those things and it still is. And hopefully, those universities that still have the testicular fortitude to invest in it.
Um, and and understand that there’s still some, there’s still some value there, that I hope it continues to provide an opportunity, whether it’s as big as it ever was before or ever will be again, the fact that it’s still there, okay? So if it’s not within a department academically, treat it as a club, give them a, you know, like does the university have the license? That bothered me when I saw that in the film that some universities are just saying, you know what, we’re just going to give up the license.
Well, that’s that’s that’s hard to get. Licenses are hard to get. Frequencies are difficult to come by, and so are call letters.
So don’t give it up if you’ve got it. You don’t necessarily have to do that which you thought you needed to do 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, but still have the opportunity that’s there for students to say, look, I want to try this thing because I either I don’t know anything about it or I think I know what’s about it. Now I’m going to get on the inside and figure it out and say, wow, this is this is really interesting.
I enjoy storytelling. Maybe I’m going to take this skill and I’m going to use it in corporate PR in the nonprofit sector, or maybe I just want to share music with people that I, because I think I know, or I have some knowledge of artists that I want to share because that’s a community and a communal experience in the sharing of music and the sharing of stories through music, that can happen. So I hope that that opportunity remains there, no matter what size it is.
Whether it’s a 10 watt, or like with, like with you guys, when you were on a year, you had, you had a massive signal. You had a massive signal. My station currently is 50,000 watts on an AM frequency.
Now, granted, it can reach a lot longer, but in the barren plains of Texas where that could just shoot for miles, you know, you had a very powerful voice that you that you had there. Now not every university has that. But certainly if they do, at least, you know, can broadcast at least a campus maybe a little bit further out.
You’ve still got an audience to serve, and you’ve still got something that you can wind up doing that’s engaging, you know, if it’s done right. Radio can still be very engaging and very much a part of people’s lives. You just have to remind them that it’s there because they have a lot more choices.
I actually been thinking a lot about this lately. In this splintered media landscape that we’re in, and in this divisive community and a divisive America that we’re in, and now we’ve got fights about what’s fake news and what’s real news, and what’s mainstream media versus non-mainstream media. And there’s just so many different places and channels to receive so many different messages and it’s hard to validate what’s true, what’s real, what’s not.
I’m beginning to think that, are we going gonna, are we going to go back to radio? Like, is radio gonna be a savior here and helping distribute and unite? I don’t know.
Just something I’ve been thinking about. So back to 35,000 watts. So when Mike was coming up with the concept of the film, He and I are both from KTXT FM, and they broadcasted 35,000 watts still to this day.
A lot of people that we were consulting with were like, yeah, but your station was an anomaly. Not every college radio station broadcast at that frequency. You know, it’s kind of an oddball, and he stood true because he was like, well, that’s our station and it was impactful in our market and in our lives.
And the fact that it was broadcasting at 35,000 watts made a difference in our community. You know, so that’s part of the reason why we stuck with that title instead of calling it like 5000 watts because most college radio stations are broadcasting under 10,000 watts. So, but that’s where we came from, and that’s the power it took to make a difference in our lives, and, you know, inspired us to make this film.
And so many other people have loved the film. So thank you for taking the time to watch it, and I’m glad that you enjoyed it, and it obviously resonated with you as well. Oh, it was it was absolutely a blast.
And it was, it’s it’s interesting to hear how other people decided they wanted to use college radio and what it was for them. And granted, many people in the film went at it from a music perspective, because they had heard maybe in their hometowns or maybe when they got to campus to hear that station and were turned onto the music for the very 1st time or they knew about it and they wanted to be in a position where they could share it with other people because maybe in their friend group in high school, they were the only person who knew about, you know, about a group. Whatever that happens to be.
And now they get to be in a position where they can share that because that’s how music is important. College radio was the conduit, for which that young person, you know, and granted, every a, every generation, when they come into that 18 to 25 year old range, is like, you know, I’ve, I have something important to say, and I need to be, and I need you to hear me in college radio. Why not?
You got a transmitter attached to it. And now you can be on there and you can really be part of it, you know, and then maybe there were people who, like me, maybe they came in with a little different perspective. I wanted to be, you know, I wanted people to listen to me.
I wanted to be, you know, popular, famous, storyteller. And, and, but it was num, you know, the music wasn’t a part of it. The music was kind of a means to an end. all right, well, I got to be on the air. people can hear the brilliance in between the songs.
That’s where I fit in. But for, you know, but we all wound up having a place there. And for our shifts, it was 2 hours a week.
That’s what you got. So as many people could be involved, you got 2 hours a week, and we had our left of the dial show from from 10 AM till the transmitter went off at one in the morning. So that’s where the real weird stuff happened.
You know, like, if you thought college radio could be weird, that was weirder stuff, you know, and that was really, like, you had to know about the music in order to get those shifts. Those were the sort of the coveted place. But then there were, you know, people like me that came in and then we started, I started to learn about artists that I would eventually come to really like and ones that I would continue to go back to.
Uh, and to remind me of what it was like to be on the air at that station, at that time, uh, to be, you know, like, oh, the new they might be giants is out. Oh, I get to, you know, like, we’re going to play Birdhouse in your soul until we ruin the vinyl, which we did, you know, because we played the living hell out of that record. And it was and it was a big deal.
And those albums that came through that were just so incredibly popular and bands that I had no idea about like the pixies, like public image limited. And I don’t know the, you know, I didn’t know what that music was. I’m like, oh, this is odd.
This is a little noisy, but for some reason I can’t stop listening to it. Um, and and I just want to be, you know, I just want to learn more and and and get more involved in it. I’ve gone back to the station.
Recently. We had our, you know, well, gosh, we signed on the air. I think it was 1963.
The station signed on the year. We were originally at 88.one on the FM dial with a power of 10 watts. We are a 1000 watt station now at 89.3 that move came over.
In fact, our campus had 2 radio stations. We had a carrier current AM, WGBC, and we had the FM station. The FM station was looked at as fringe.
Like that was the fringe, the weirdos go there. Those of you wanted to be like the professional announcer and jock in the 60s, you went to WGBC. You went to the carrier current AM, then that became a club, and then that sort of faded away because everyone wanted to be on the broadcast side.
Everyone wanted to be on the FM side because you had the ability to go over there. So, you know, we used to have and some other places probably have the same thing. They had 2 campus radio stations.
What a great outlet that was to be able to have that many people involved in it. Um, so I’m I’m hoping that more universities are going to find a way to hang on to it. And to also, they’ve got to be able to fund it.
And they’ve got to be able to fund it, not just just pumping dollars into it for equipment. That’s not what I mean. It’s about going out and finding that right administrator or that right paraprofessional who’s going to come in and say, okay, I want to work with the students.
I don’t want to be the one that’s calling all the shots. I want to come in and say, what do we want this to be? In the landscape of audio content right now?
What do we want this place to be so that people are going to choose to make this a place they’re going to spend time? Right now, you can choose, pick and choose, and podcasts are all over the place, and audiobooks and streaming and listening to radio stations anywhere in the world pretty much. But what’s going to make us that which, not only this campus community, but maybe the community in general around the university is going to make them want to choose this as a place to spend their time and invest in this audio content.
And then work with them and have the passion for it because the passion is infectious. That’s what makes people want to continue to do it. And if you can find that right, if a university can find the right person.
And we’re out there, there’s a lot of us that are out there, and bring them in and say, okay, well now how are we going to make our, you know, are we going to be financially responsible with what we have and maintaining the equipment because it costs a lot of money to run a radio station. But how are we going to take that and find that right little X factor, that right little sweet spot that’s going to be able to have the next generation know about it and be able to do it, not just say, well, radio was, uh, I don’t like past tense. Radio is uh, but what’s the is now?
And I don’t know what the is, is for college? Um, so maybe if they can figure that out, then more stations can be like, our, like, we are blank. And what are we gonna do?
And then everything goes and services that and then you attract those people that say, oh, that’s a cool idea. I want to be on that. Yeah, I want to be on that stage.
I want to be on that stage doing that thing. Okay, so did you find the film 1st or did you find the podcast first? Found the podcast first.
Our station Facebook group shared it. And I’m like, oh, well, this is interesting. I didn’t, I, like, I kind of heard that the film was out there or was being made, but I didn’t, I didn’t really follow along with it.
And then our the former advisor to the campus radio station posted it on our Facebook group saying, hey, by the way, this is here. So I checked out the 1st couple episodes. That’s why I reached out to you guys.
I’m like, this is great. you know thank you. What a wonderful way. I look forward to hearing the stories because not only it makes me nostalgic, but it’s also nice to just, you know, catch up with people that maybe they’re still in the industry.
Maybe they’re not. Uh, to kind of uh, to kind of share their stories and it’s been fun to listen to this stuff. I like the one Hit Wonder podcast.
You can keep doing those. And I’m going to suggest, because the rights, I know you can’t get the rights, but here’s where the social media and here’s where the other app comes in. Do curated Spotify playlists and link them over so that if you want to hear every song we talked about, go to the Spotify playlist or whatever, and then people can go through and listen to them.
I know some of the stuff you can’t find because it was never commercially available and stuff like that. But that would just be fun because and also, even at my age, I’m in my mid-50s, I may still wind up finding an artist that’s been around for 40 years that I never heard of before. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that’s a fun part of the discovery. Yeah, it’s now I can go back and I can and I can find this stuff and I’m like, oh, I remember this. And then it’s like, oh, I remember 5 other songs that I used to play.
Somewhere in my house somewhere are tapes. I know I’ve got tapes of my of my show, which I refuse to listen to because I was horrific. And this is, I’ll leave you with this.
Um, so as a result of my radio career, I’ve had the, I’ve had the option, actually the ability to meet a lot of interesting people and to do some really cool stuff. Now, when I was a kid, I used to take my tape recorder and I love listening to cartoons and doing voices and you do them into the tape recorder to make radio shows. In the late 90s, I had the opportunity on one of the stations in our cluster to do a music show.
I was basically the sidekick co-host, and I was in charge of getting guests. And one of the guests that we wound up being able to book onto the show was Seth McFarlane, the creator of the show, Family Guy. Huge Family Guy fan.
Love Family Guy since it came on the air. So I had told my co-host, I said, you know, I got to ask Seth McFarlane if I can do a voice for the show. I know nothing about how acting works.
I know nothing about how the union works. And I said, I got to ask him. But of course, I chicken out.
But my co-host, never wanting to miss a moment to see me squirm, he asks. Now McFarlane says yes. He says, yeah, sure, I think we can do something.
We finish up the interview. And he says, oh, by the way, this is when they’ve been canceled. This is like 1999.
So, like, guys, we’re not going to get picked up. But I said, well, thank you very much. It’s a fun bit.
You said I could be on the show. Ha ha, that’s great. But he gave me his phone number.
So every 6 months or so, I would just sort of call and be, this is when I could actually get through to him before he was a real famous person. I’d be like, you know, hey, you got anything you want to promote? So we’d have them back on the show.
Um, you know, about once or twice a year just to promote something. Fast forward to cartoon network, and the show is very popular, fast forward to, there’s a change in the animation division at Fox television, fast forward to 2004. They put the show back into production.
August of 2004. I get a phone call from Seth McFarland. And he said, remember what I promised you 5 years earlier.
And I said, and I said, yeah. And he said, well, we’re sending you the script. We’ve written a part for a disk jockey, and you’re going to do it.
So there’s two. So there’s 2 DJ characters on the show called Weenie in the Butt. And I have been the voice of Weenie since 2004.
Now, they’ve written the characters off the show. They will not come back, but I was fortunate enough to do one, two, three, 4 episodes. I made it to air in 3 of those 4 episodes.
So every 6 months or so, I get a little $2 residual check from the screen actors guild for my for my efforts. And I would never have gotten that had I not, you have to do everything. It’s I had to get the 1st job out of college.
I had to get the 2nd job in Rochester. We had to go through deregulation to purchase all the radio stations to get the station into our cluster where I would meet that program director, hit it off with that program director. We’d wind up doing a one day a week, Saturday morning show because we were running Howard Stern during the week and we couldn’t do anything else.
I would have to then know somebody at Fox television to get onto the press tour to get the interview to do the ask that got me to that point. So it all, but you could trace it all the way back to 89.3 FM in Genesee, New York. And that’s where it all started.
And that started the cycle of happy accidents as well as deliberate moves that have put me in a position where now, been with iHeartRadio, for the longest time, I’m part of our national production center, doing commercial work for the app and for radio stations all across the country, as part of the iHeart family. So, you know, you got to you got to start someplace and a little 1000 little 1000 water in Genesee or New York was it. Well, that is just the best story.
And I love that you’re still in the industry and you’re still making it happen and you’re still so passionate about it. And part of the reason of doing this project was to record the stories. Man, it’s just like it’s a story that needs to be told for sure.
Absolutely. And I’m grateful for you guys for doing it. It is a passion project.
It takes an awful lot of effort just to want to say, look, this is a specific part of radio history that needs to be preserved because it can be so fleeting. Um, there’s, you know, it’s, especially in the age that most people did it, unless you recorded all of your own stuff. It was through the transmitter and off to Mars.
That’s it. And then the next day somebody else came in and they did exactly the same thing. So to preserve… part of the challenge, too, was finding the assets to bring all this together.
It doesn’t really exist. You know, some people still still have it. You know, if they’re, you know, if they’re pack rats like me and they just save everything, they’ve ever done, whether they listen to it or not.
But still, it’s because of the fact that it was fleeting, the oral history of it is the best way to be able to, you know, preserve all of that, all of that lore. And to realize how common it was and sort of like all the all the experiences we shared. And yes, we had the couch too.
Yes, yes, unsavory things happened on that couch, and yes, I slept on it anyway. Well, Joe, this has been a great chat. I feel like I have a new radio friend.
Thank you for your time today. You do have a new radio pal. in touch. Thank you, Lisa, and thanks to Joe DeMonico for appearing on the podcast.
Once again, don’t forget 35,000 watts, the story of college radio is available to watch right now on Amazon Prime, Google Play, to be, and on YouTube. So be sure to check it out. Don’t forget our other podcast, 120 months, comes out every other week.
We’re doing a deep dive on MTV’s 120 minutes and all the the different college radio artists that made it to the big time to the big show and got on 120 minutes. So check that out right on this very channel. And we will see you right here next time for 35,000 Watts, the podcast.