Living On Air (9 page)

This might be a good time to talk about those accidental, serendipitous moments most of us call luck. It’s happened to me quite a few times in my life. Like when a nine-year-old kid, on a random field trip, saw a couple of grownups clowning around at work on the radio, or when a young teenage boy called a radio station to talk to the deejay and he turned out to be a nice guy, or when a happy-go-lucky fella bumped into the right girl at the right time in an empty hallway. I am always looking for luck.

Sometimes luck can hit you so hard it knocks you down like a landslide, impossible to miss. Other times, it can be as soft as a whisper, floating by unnoticed. The trick is to pay attention. You have to be ready to jump on those opportunities. The chance of a lifetime could be right in front of you, but unless you’re prepared to meet it halfway, it might just slide by. I try to always keep working on my skills so I’m ready to take advantage of those special moments. I think of it almost like striking a matchstick. You need to ignite that spark so it catches fire. I even believe there are certain times of the year that are luckier for me than other times. Unfortunately there are also those days that have traditionally been unlucky. I look forward with anticipation for
the good days, and hunker down for the bad. If I can get through the crappy days without incident, I always breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I will never forget some advice I got from an acting teacher here in Los Angeles. His name was Wayne Dvorak. He said people always ask him why some actors make it, and others don’t. His answer was beautiful. He believed when you work towards your dream, a little red light glows on top of your head. When you stop working, or get distracted, that light dims, or goes off completely. He said it’s important to keep that light glowing because the Gods of Making Dreams Come True are sitting up in the cosmos looking for those bright lights. They want to help make your dream come true. You’ve got to keep working at it, keep looking for luck, so it can find you to help you reach your goal.

Now there I was, on a Saturday night, saying, “K-H-T-Z…K-HITS-97,” when the hot line rang, and a job fell into my lap. Remember, this was 1983, before cell phones. I picked it up, “Yello?”

“Dave?”

“Yeah, it’s Dave. Who is this?” I didn’t recognize the voice but figured it must be someone from Connecticut since he didn’t call me Joe.

“Dave, it’s Ed Scarborough, you might remember me as Ed Mitchell at WDRC in Hartford.”

DRC is where I used the name Dave Donovan.

“Ed, wow…how the heck are you doing, we haven’t talked in eight years.”

“Yeah, I know, but I think you’ll be happy to hear from me.”

I laughed and said, “Of course I’m happy to hear from you.”

He said, “You don’t know the half of it. Dave, I’m programming KHTR in St. Louis.”

St. Louis? I didn’t like where this was going.

“But I’m leaving the station and I’m coming to Los Angeles. I’m the new program director of the CBS FM station there. It’s called KNX-FM.”

I was familiar with KNX. It was a soft album station.

“Dave, we’re changing it to KKHR HIT RADIO 93. We’re going to be a high-energy Hot Hits station and I’m wondering if you might be interested in a job.”

I tried not to gush, but I think I blurted out, “Hell yeah.”

“Great, but listen, couple of incidentals, send me an aircheck I can play for my bosses.”

“No problem.”

“Oh, and would you mind using the name Dave Donovan again? I loved that name when you were at WDRC and would really like you to use it again.”

Dave, Joe, Tommy? I didn’t care. He could have called me anything he wanted to, it would have been fine with me. Just as Doug Limerick, Al Brady Law, and so many others saved my radio life in D.C., Ed Scarborough dug me out of the ground here in L.A. He put together a solid team. Lou Simon did the morning show, I was hired for early middays, nine a.m. to noon,
followed by Chris Lance, Todd Parker in afternoons, and Dancin’ Mark Hanson from six to midnight. It was a formulaic format that worked on several CBS FM stations around the country, extremely high energy, with reverb on the microphone and a tight Hot Hit rotation of 30 songs. It was going to be the next big thing to take over Los Angeles, except it wasn’t.

In my opinion, CBS announced its plan way too soon, two months before the changeover. KIIS-FM was already playing a Top 40 format in Los Angeles, with a talented morning man, but the station was floundering around the middle of the ratings pile, when its Program Director Gerry DeFrancesco heard what CBS was up to. He decided he’d beat us to the punch. It was a brilliant move. He made a deal with Mike Joseph, who had once tried to hire me in Providence, Rhode Island. Joseph owned the rights to the slogan “Hot Hits,” and KIIS-FM licensed it before CBS had locked it up. Then KIIS handed the morning show keys and carte blanche to their talented morning man named Rick Dees and cranked up the volume. That was bad enough for KKHR, but on top of that, going against all expectations, for some reason CBS wouldn’t put any money into promoting our station. When we went on the air that summer in 1983, we were like lambs led to the slaughter.

KKHR’s sound was exciting, energetic, and fun but nobody heard us. We gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving. Yes, dead, frozen turkeys. KIIS-FM gave away a Porsche 911. Not just one, but they gave away one Porsche every week. Oh, and they stuffed ten $100 bills in the glove box of each car. That’s what we were up against.

Against those odds, I still had a great time. Personally, my life couldn’t have been better. Ann and I had bought our first home
in the Palisades. It was barely 900 square feet and cost almost $200,000. We could walk one way down the street into town, or turn the other way and walk to the ocean. And we were about to become one of those parents pushing a stroller down the sidewalk. Ann was pregnant for the first time. Our daughter Dayna was born while I worked at KKHR.

As far as work was concerned, I gave KKHR my best shot, we all did, but it didn’t last long. [
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] When the ratings came out, KIIS went into double digits with a ten share, and we had a four. Ed Scarborough was under terrible pressure to make something happen. Amazingly, we kept it going for about two years, but CBS wasn’t happy with the ratings. I soon found out the executives back east weren’t happy with the nine to noon guy either. That was me. One of the programming vice presidents at CBS Black Rock in New York just hated my voice. He repeatedly told Ed to get rid of me until finally in June of 1985, Ed had to let me go. [
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] I guess I knew it was coming but it still hurt. Fired for the second time in my life, only now I had a wife, and baby. Without even thinking twice about it, I walked out of that meeting, down the hall to the jock lounge, picked up the phone and called Gerry DeFrancesco at KIIS.

“Gerry, KKHR is letting me go. Do you have anything for me, even weekends?”

Gerry said, “Joe, I love what you do, love your voice, you belong over here. I’ve got something on the AM station. It’s not KIIS-FM but it pays the same, probably more than you’re making at KKHR.”

“When can I start?”

“C’mon over tomorrow. We’ll get you set up and I’ll introduce you to everybody. I’ll put you on the overnight shift so you can get started, then move you to the ten p.m. spot.”

Earlier that day, Dave Donovan went on the air at KKHR. Tomorrow Joe Cipriano would come back to life, this time on KIIS-AM. How strange.

KIIS AM & FM

The biggest, big-time station I have ever worked at was KIIS radio. Number one in Los Angeles. It was huge! The FM that is, not exactly where I was going. The AM was number 25 in the ratings. At that time, there was a rule by the FCC that prohibited major market stations from simulcasting on both AM and FM. We played the same music as the FM, the same commercials, even the same jingles, but we had a completely different on-air staff. And when I say we played the same music, I mean we played the exact same song at the exact same time. KIIS was allowed to simulcast Rick Dees from six in the morning until ten, after that the two stations parted ways. On the AM, Steve Lehman did middays, Larry Morgan afternoons, Benny Martinez was on from six to ten at night, then I came on from ten to two in the morning, followed by Tom Murphy on the overnight shift.

Listen, it was a job and it paid good money, but if I thought we didn’t have a big audience on KKHR, we had next to no one listening on KIIS-AM. I hadn’t worked on an AM station since WWCO, and that was ten years ago. KIIS-AM had a point one share. Not a one share, a POINT one. I would do a contest to give away an album or concert tickets, to the twentieth caller, and it turned out the winner had also been the fifth caller, and the eleventh, and the fifteenth, before we both finally hit number 20. Sometimes it seemed there were more people listening to the station in our building than there were out in the entire city.

Since absolutely no one was paying attention to us, we tried to amuse ourselves. My friend, comedy writer Louise Palanker, who wrote the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 show, liked to work at night. With her at the station most evenings, I would utilize her comedic skills for a “joke-off” bit I did. Weeze, as I called her, would tell a joke on the air and one of our phone operators at the station would tell a joke and we let our four listeners decide who won. Weeze and I shared many late-night laughs and talks about our futures.

With my whole day free I worked even harder on jump-starting my voice-over career. I discovered that finding work in this business is a never-ending quest. Unless you’re in such demand that you actually have to turn down a job, you need to stay on top of what’s happening around you. That’s where a good agent comes into play. By this time, I had already been represented by Nina Nisenholtz at the iconic William Morris Agency. The building was one block over from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a thrill going into the office for auditions, even if I didn’t book a gig that week. Later I worked with Vanessa Gilbert at TGI and then Steve Tisherman. But I found my true home with an Italian girl, Rita Vennari. I have been with Rita at Sutton, Barth, and Vennari for over 20 years. Agents Mary Ellen Lord and Jessica Bulavsky are my right and left hands at SBV. Together Rita, Mary Ellen, and Jessica helped me reinvent myself several times over as I started to land a couple of great jobs.

After doing “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” I was booked to do some commercials and trailers for other teen movies like “Porky’s,” “Bachelor Party,” and a Tom Cruise movie called “All the Right Moves.” I started doing a few spots for a TV show called “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” and voiced the intro of the “Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show” every Saturday morning on ABC. I even booked a national on-camera commercial for Prego [
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Spaghetti Sauce. I was flown to New York, first class, for the shoot and while I was there I snuck up to Connecticut to see my family.

Even with all of that going on, it wasn’t enough to support my family. After Dayna was born, Ann went back to work at KABC-TV and ended up on a local afternoon talk show with the iconic newsman Tom Snyder. Most people remember Tom from the “Tomorrow Show,” in the seventies and eighties. Or from Dan Aykroyd’s hilarious imitation of Tom on “Saturday Night Live.” Tom was a blast, a real original. He liked to say, “I used to be coast to coast. Now I’m freeway to freeway.” It turned out to be the best time Ann ever had on a job. She worked with a wonderful group of women, Debbie Alpert, Bonnie Tiegel, Claudia Martin, and Lois Spieler. I was relieved she loved that job because we really needed her salary. One night I was at KIIS-AM, chatting with Louise, when I admitted, “Weeze, you’re catching me at the lowest point in my radio career.” Later she told me how shocked she was to hear what I had said. She thought I was the most upbeat, centered, happy person she had ever met and here I was blurting out that I was hitting bottom. Then, wouldn’t you know it, more bad luck.

About a year into my show at KIIS-AM, I was at work on the night shift when I heard the bell go off on that damn AP machine again. At least it wasn’t a bulletin this time, only a news alert. I ripped the story from the machine and realized it was worse than I thought. The FCC had just ruled to remove those restrictions against simulcasting in major markets. I blinked, then read the story again. I knew what it meant. KIIS would now be able to simulcast the AM and FM stations. The AM on-air staff would be let go immediately. That little innocuous blurb meant I was out of work, again.

We had two weeks before the changeover. I’ll never forget one particular night during that time, before my shift. I walked into the FM studio to say hello to the very talented Tim Kelly
who was on the air. I used to listen to him on Super CFL out of Chicago when I was back in Connecticut. Despite the pending disaster, I was the same guy I always was, so first I joked around with the phone operators before going into the studio. I might even have been laughing at something when I opened the door to see Tim. I can picture him right now. He looked up at me from the control board and said, “Why are you so fucking happy? You just lost your job and you’ve got another kid on the way?”

Yep, number two baby comin’ atcha. I didn’t know what to say to him. I don’t think Tim meant it to hurt as much as it did, but it hit me right in the kisser. I probably mumbled something like, “We’ll be okay. I’ve just gotta give it time.” I don’t know what I said. What could I say?

My last night on KIIS-AM I threw a party. I was determined to have an on-air blowout. [
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] Most of the jocks had already jumped ship but I had nowhere to go. With hardly anyone left on staff, I went on the air as usual, at ten o’clock, and stayed until midnight. I invited everyone to stop by, brought in beer, and ordered a bunch of pizzas. The AM station was under the same old regulation that forced us to drop the power down to next to nothing at sundown. But tonight I said screw it. When I went on the air at ten, the first thing I did was crank that transmitter up to full power. Then I threw out the format and played whatever the hell I wanted to play. Ron Shapiro was the production genius at the station and he recorded the entire show, not only just what went out over the airwaves, but what we said in the studio too, when the microphones were turned off. We kept within the FCC rules, no cursing or swearing, but it was outrageous. Steve Lehman came by with his wife Suzie, Bruce Vidal, Bumpy Woods, Larry Morgan, Tom Murphy, Ed Mann, Benny Martinez, Louise Palanker, and Tim Kelly. I’m proud I was a part of that last show on KIIS-AM. It was by far our most entertaining show ever.

At the end of my shift, as we closed in on midnight, I loaded up every cart machine with our name jingles, for all the jocks, then played them all in a row, one after the other. “Joe Cipriano…KIIS AMmmmmmm.” It was a roll call of all the on-air staff. When the last one played, I let about ten seconds of silence go by, then flipped the switch for the FM signal to take over. That was the end of KIIS-AM.

It was 1987. I was down, but I wasn’t out, not yet. There was still a little radio life left in me. Gerry DeFran had one lonely shift left open on the FM if I wanted it, Sunday morning, the overnight, from three a.m. until nine a.m. [
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] “Gulp, how the mediocre have fallen,” I thought. Not exactly prime time but it was a job. I went from full-time to part-time, again. I was pullin’ in one hundred seventy dollars…a week. Wait a minute. That’s what I made back in Connecticut when I was 19 years old and worked at WWCO. Only this was Los Angeles! Welcome to major-market radio. Thankfully, Ann saved us again. “The Tom Snyder Show” had been canceled to make room for an unknown personality from Chicago, Oprah Winfrey. If her show didn’t make it, her boss promised to bring back Tom. I guess we know how that went. Fortunately, Ann found a gig working on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Remember Robin Leach? “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams!” She was making big bucks now as a member of the Directors Guild union, but our second child was due in June, so I had to come up with something fast, while she took maternity leave.

I kept that three in the morning shift, and little by little started to produce promos for KIIS-FM, working in the production room about four days a week. Gerry DeFran had moved on to another station and our new PD Steve Rivers liked me. He started to use me as a fill-in guy. Whenever a jock took time off, I took over that shift. A few days producing and voicing promos for KIIS-FM,
a few days of on-air fill-in and all of those bits and pieces added up to a five- or-six day work week. Soon I was back up to a full-time salary. Man, did we need that help because our son, Alex, was born two months early.

I was able to make it work at KIIS-FM for another full year. There were a couple of months where I did the night shift from ten until two in the morning, alternating with Benny Martinez. One week on, one week off while the programming geniuses tried to decide who should get the job permanently. It ended up neither one of us got the gig, they gave it to somebody else. I kept filling in here and there, plus I still produced promos and commercials for the station. Rick Dees was huge, number one in the ratings, and he always gave me encouragement. When I voiced a promo, he’d send me a note telling me how good I sounded. If I produced a promo that he voiced, he sent me another encouraging note. He didn’t have to do any of that, but he always gave me reinforcement and a little bit of hope. The bottom line was, that I was at the number one station in Los Angeles. Even if I wasn’t on the air full-time, I was part of a team of great people. It was enough to pay our mortgage and keep food on the table. I still loved my job, still tried to move forward. I had a great voice-over agent, worked on my demos, got some bookings and kept my eyes open for that elusive spark to catch fire. I was looking to get lucky. And then it happened.

I was filling in for Big Ron O’Brien on KIIS-FM, doing his afternoon shift while he was on vacation, when I got an unexpected phone call. That call would lead to a whole new opportunity. My big break. It would take me completely out of radio and into the world of promo.

My last job as a disc jockey was at KIIS-FM.

My first job as a network promo voice was at FOX television.

You can’t get much luckier than that.

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