Hall of Famer Ed LaComb, from the Class of 1985, has been involved with the station for years. He started his own imaging company, Digital Sound and Video, in 1998. He's spent most of the time since then working with the Program Directors of WJPZ to help refine the station's sound.
Ed was also at Syracuse when WJPZ moved to FM. He walks us through his time playing records overnight on carrier current to then the station moving to FM and some real "wow" moments in that process.
We also go through Ed's career, bouncing between snowy upstate New York and sunny Daytona Beach, Florida, where he started his company. He shares his advice for both aspiring business owners and audio producers, including his current thoughts on the radio industry today. Spoiler: he's not a fan of stations being bought by the same company and cross-promoting each other.
We wrap up with a Rick Wright story. Always the station's best ally, we hear about how Dr. Rick gave an impassioned speech to the Student Government Association when the station was trying to secure funding for the move to FM.
Join Us in Syracuse for The Banquet on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay, very excited for today's guest. He is a WJPZ Hall of Famer. He has helped with the imaging of this very podcast, and he has been a tremendous asset to the station, both as a student and as an alum. Mr. Ed Lacomb, welcome to the show.
Ed: Thanks, JAG. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
JAG: So I actually ran into you at Podcast Movement a couple years ago, I believe.
Ed: Yeah, that was a nice surprise. I was like, oh, check it out.
JAG: Yeah. I'm like, this is the guy who's done the imaging for the station for years, and I'm surprised that he recognized me, but it was great to reconnect with you.
Ed: Well, that's the beauty of Facebook. I'm very much a voyeur when it comes to Facebook. I don't typically do a whole lot of posting and stuff, but I do read through it a lot just to see what friends and family are doing. And, I've been kind of following you along, so it was weird when I saw you. I had literally seen you the day before, and we just got picked up and had a great conversation from there. And that's, I suppose, one of the great things about social media, right?
JAG: My wife would tell you that I post too much on Facebook, but I guess there's some advantages to it.
Ed: Well, that's right. So I know what's going on.
JAG: Right, exactly. How have you been? I don't have to ask you. I've seen it on your Facebook page. So tell me about how you first came to the station, how you got involved with the station, and what you did at the station as a student. Before we get into all the stuff you've done as an alum.
Ed: Sure. Yeah. So, the radio bug bit me super early in my life.
I was actually in high school at the time and was able to work at a local radio station when I was in 10th grade in high school. I had a Saturday night radio show, so you know, the bug bit me and I remember having a very interesting conversation with the station general manager one day about a possible career in radio because up to that point, my career path was going to take me into the Air Force.
That was kind of what I was thinking. And that's where my mindset was. And then I found this neat little thing called radio and really, really loved it. And he said, yeah, there are some people who do quite well with it, understanding it's a small percentage that are making super big bucks.
But yeah, people, make a career out of it. And that's when I started looking at, well,what schools are great radio schools, and Syracuse was certainly at the top of the list. So, long story short applied to and got accepted to Syracuse at the Newhouse School. And freshman year in, I wanted to get involved and, of course there was WAER, which was the university station, and that was kind of the one you hear about.
And I went in and I checked it out. And it just was a different vibe. It didn't, it was a vibe that didn't really kind of match where I was. And then I heard about this little carrier current AM station over in the Spectrum records building called WJPZ. And I went in there and this place was like the animal house of radio stations, at the time.
It was so gritty and so just like radio people doing radio stuff. And I remember seeing Dr. Phil LoCascio, who was the music director at the time, and Mike Verity, who was Mike Richards on the air, who was the program director. And Phil's sitting in the corner at his desk just holding a 45 kind of to his head.
Like, Carnac the Magnificent, like Johnny Carson used to do Verity's looking over it. I'm going, what are you doing? And he goes, I'm timing intros. He's like, no, no, no. You need a stopwatch for that. And he says, Test me, and sure enough, if Dr. Phil LoCascio wasn't as accurate as to the second on the intros on these records, it was just one of those funny moments.
But I was instantly enamored with the whole thing. So, so started doing WJPZ when it was the little carrier current AM station with a really crappy board in a, in literally a corner closet of the Spectrum records building. And I was happy to do overnights at that time. Not even knowing who was listening.
And I remembered one time making that comment of like, wow, there's probably nobody listening. And sure enough, if the program director was listening, he called me up and said, never say that again.
JAG: We've all been there on the radio. Yes.
Ed: Yeah. I got hotlined in my first week on the radio, so it was fun. But that's how I got involved with WJPZ.
JAG: So were you there for the transition over to FM or was that after you had graduated?
Ed: Yeah, so that was one of the things I was definitely very much a part of. I became the business manager of the radio station. And that in itself is kind of a funny story because it literally, we were all kind of sitting around figuring out who's gonna do what and someone said, does anyone have a computer?
And at that time, I'm really dating myself here. I had a Radio Shack Tandy, TRS80, model three. And I said, yeah, I got a computer. And they're like, well, you wanna be the business manager cuz we need to have all of our records. I was like, you know what, sure I'll do it. And then at that point, It was a pretty easy, easy thing cuz there wasn't a whole lot going on.
But as we eventually got involved with the SGA, the Student Government Association to have them fund a real FM radio station and as that process became more formal, I was very involved with the Application to the FCC. I was involved. I remember one time Eric Fitch, who was the engineer at the time, and I ended up running up to the Syracuse Airport on the private aviation side of the airport to pick up an engineer from Thompson Transmitter who was there to help us install the transmitter up at Mount Olympus and the weather that we picked this guy up in, he flew in his probably a Cessna. I don't remember what his plane was, but he flew in a private plane from somewhere in the Midwest, and he was a French guy who was living in the United States, and we ended up taking him. I picked him up in my car and Eric and I took him up to the transmitter site and we were doing everything and finally, got him back out and he took off in a blizzard from Syracuse.
But yeah, so that was, one of those moments that I'll always remember is installing the transmitter in Mount Olympus and then the day that we turned it on. At that time I was living in an apartment in Liverpool. I was a senior. And the transmitter went on and someone, I don't remember who it was from the station called me and said, can you hear it in Liverpool?
I'm like, yeah, it's banging in Liverpool. And they're like, cool, I wonder how far it'll go. I said, well, let me jump in my car and drive. So I jumped in and I drove North and I think I must have gotten a good 20, 25 miles out of town before it got to the point where it's just picket fencing so much. It wasn't listenable. But everybody was surprised that it had that much range. And then I think we realized that we had discovered fire that morning.
JAG: That is an incredible start. So you started off on air, you got bitten by the bug, and then you became the business manager. And in the time since, you've really built this amazing imaging company. I remember you helping us with the imaging when I was a student from 98 to 02 and before and since. Tell me a little bit about your professional career path after the station, Ed.
Ed: Sure. Just, before I jump into that, I mean, we've been working with the radio station for the last, oh my goodness, I wanna say at least 15 years, probably longer doing the imaging for the station.
Got together with Harry Wareing at the time and we worked out a deal and it just kind of was, it was a natural fit for everybody. So, I still feel very much, I mean, a lot of alumni from Z89 feel connected to the station. I think I feel perhaps even more, even though I'm not a very regular banquet visitor.
For some reason it always occurs in the middle of the winter. And I'm a southern guy now, and that's just, going north of the Mason Dixon line that this just doesn't happen. It's just not a thing I can do often. But it was one of those things where I just stayed in touch with the radio station and I don't feel like I've ever not been part of it, if that makes sense.
JAG: Yeah.
Ed: But anyway, to answer your question, where has my career gone since? I was also fortunate at the same time working at JPZ that Steve Simpson, who was another alum there. Was working at WHEN in town at the time and he said, Hey, we're looking for a part-time jock to do weekends and stuff.
Are you interested? And I'm like, yeah. So I went out and met with Bob Carolyn, who's the general manager, and Karen Gallagher, who was his assistant PD basically at the time. And it was wild because I literally walked into the interview. Was hired on the spot. Hired on the spot to start working that weekend, so I think it was Friday that I had the interview. I was hired Friday. I was gonna start that night.
JAG: Wow.
Ed: That was the weekend that WHEN was converting to stereo. So AM stereo. So I remember that day one, I was learning a brand new studio, which was their main broadcast room. Day two, which was Saturday night. They had moved us into the production room while they were gutting the main control room to convert everything, the stereo, put new PRE boards and everything like that.
And I remember working in the production room and, WHE at that time, Full service AM radio station. So we had newscasts and all that while the news booth was connected to the main studio. So they were not able to do their newscast from that booth. So literally, I can remember Donna Speziali, God rest her soul.
She came in as one of the news people. And my second day on the job, I have known her for all of an hour, and she's literally sitting on my lap as I run the board and she's reading a newscast on WHEN.
JAG: Oh my God. I was thinking next to, but that's Wow. Okay.
Ed: On my lap. And we're both looking at each other like, we just gotta do this, and just get this stuff done.
Cuz there was no other microphone in that studio. And that studio was very much a u-shaped configuration. It's not like there was a spot where she could sit on the other side or anything like that. You were in this very tight U, in this Production room with an old Sparta board. I remember that thing like it was yesterday.
And then the third night, Sunday night, back to a brand new studio relearning its configuration. And that was the am stereo kickoff for WHEN. So that was kind of simultaneous to my JPZ career. And then after graduation my intention was to take the summer off and just kind of, hang at my grandparents owned a farm in northern New York, up along the St. Lawrence River.
And my cousin and I were gonna live there for the summer and just party our asses off and be happy and not do anything. Well, two weeks into that, there was a job opening at a local radio station in Massena, New York called WYBG, and they were looking for an afternoon drive guy, and someone said, oh, you should apply.
And I'm like, eh, all right. I guess I got nothing better to do. So I.did. That started my official career, career, if you will, out of college. Two weeks outta college. I got a gig and I've been working ever since. I've never been, knock on wood, never been out of a job since that time, which is something to say in radio these days.
JAG: Absolutely. Yeah.
Ed: The quick resume from there is I ended up only staying at that job in Massena, literally for three months. And the owner was one of those characters who you just either get or you don't, and I didn't. I had applied before I left college to an interesting radio station in Watertown, New York.
It was called WTNY. And it was, Watertown's a small market, but this particular station was a Nabet union shop and their facility was beautiful. I mean, it was just like an incredible facility. And I had applied for a job there, had a great meeting with the program director, George Nayer. They didn't have anything available.
So literally the day that I told WYBG, I can't do this anymore, I quit. I'll give you my two weeks. That next morning George Nayer called me and said, Hey, I got a job for you down here. It's like, I'll take it. Oh wow. I can be there in two weeks, and so I did. I was down there doing afternoons.
Actually I started doing nights, but then I went to afternoon drive. We put their FM, WTNY-FM on the air during that time, which was a lot of fun. And I actually became the shop steward at one point of the union down there. just an amazing experience. But it's Watertown, New York, and I remember at the time I was dating one of the meteorologists for the station. And she was one of those call-in meteorologists, so she was, I think, based somewhere in the Boston area.
It was weather services. I think they were based in Boston. Anyway, I convinced her to come visit me in Watertown and she did. And I remember we were driving around in the fall and she's like, why are the stop signs so high in this town? And I'm like, you are the meteorologist. You tell me, Hey, we get some snowfall here.
Ed, you're originally from upstate New York anyway, so Snow is nothing to you. Okay.
I am, but I wasn't from Watertown and if something about, well it's the lake effect, but Watertown down to like Pulaski just, yeah, just north of the thruway basically is just hell on earth when it comes to snowfall.
I grew up in Ogdensburg, New York, which is literally in the Thousand Islands, right on the St. Lawrence River. So we got a lot of cold. And we got snow, but nothing like they got, down in that Lake Effect band. So I had enough lake effect to last me a lifetime. At that point. I had spent two years in Watertown and was kind of over it, and I ended up getting a job as a sales rep at I100 in Daytona Beach, Florida, which at that time was just a monster CHR.
It was one of those CHRs that just defined the format, defined Beach station. MTV was huge in Daytona Beach at that time. I mean, literally by Christmastime, my entire first and second quarters were sold out. So as a sales rep, all I would do is go work the promotions for all of these companies that I had, like Sea and Ski, Trojan, Nair, Hawaiian Tropic, and then the money in Daytona beach went from the beach side, spring break time, which you're making all this big loot, with these big corporations. And then in the fall, everything switches over to what they call the mainland side of town. And you're dealing with mom and pop shops who have like a $300 annual budget for their advertising. And it just, you could fire a cannon down A1A, which is our main beach highway here, and not hit anybody at that time.
So it was one of those things where I figured out the feast and famine aspect of sales very quickly. At that point they had a production director opening at the station,and I went to the GM, Jim Davis, who is, big Jim Edwards, CKLW days. He'd have buddies like Casey Kasem walk through the station.
It was just crazy to be there at that time. He ended up saying, why do you wanna leave sales? That's where all the money is, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I talked him in to let me be the production director. That's kind of where my production career started.
JAG: So what year is this? You were in Daytona Beach?
Ed: So I was in Daytona Beach from 87 and 88. Spring break, 87. Spring break, 88. And at that point I got a job. My girlfriend at the time who was soon to become my wife wanted to go back to New York. So I found this job at 1047 Kix FM in Syracuse, New York. and I interviewed for it and I remember walking into the facility and it was in an old fire station in Solvay.
I just was like, this is maybe a five month gig. Five years later I'm still there and I made a lot of great friends at that radio station and had a lot of wonderful interns from Z89. Made a lot of great connections, and it's everything. A cog in the wheel kind of builds you as a person.
And that was one of those experiences where, although it was nothing I ever would've anticipated, I would've been there that long. It turned out to be a great experience. And then of course at that point, New City bought the station. I talked to the folks at New City, they wanted to hire me.
They didn't have anything available at that time. So I picked up the phone and talked to my buddy down in Daytona Beach who was the general manager and he said, "Well, why don't you come on back down here? We need program directors." So, came back down to I100 and did that for a while and then ended up at Real Radio 104.1 in Orlando which was a talk station, Talk FM.
Had a blast there. It was basically rock radio without the records. And from there I had a marketing position come open back at New City and Syracuse, Y 94. So I ended up going back as the marketing director, and this would've been 94. 94 for Y 94. Then when we bought 107.9 from the Park company, I became the first program director at Hot 107.9.
We launched the station, had great success right out the door. Had an amazing team of people. . And then, a couple years into it, people come in and they decide they want to do things differently. And the old adage is never, forget it's their radio station and it just didn't feel right.
So I said, you know what, it's not right for me anymore. It just can't do it. And I remember, the GM at the time saying, well, is there anything else you'd want to do here? And I'm like, well, like what? And they're like, production. I go, no. I said, and this is where I had the idea to have my own company, I said, no.
I said, I don't wanna do production, but I said, I would love to have you guys as my first client, and here's what I'm doing. They were interested. They weren't my first client, but they were about my fifth client. But there were other New City stations that started off as my first client, and it just kind of started from there.
Literally like a Steve Jobs story. It was in the garage of my townhouse in Liverpool. Within six months I had to hire a guy to help me. That was Rob Fiorinoo, who is my VP, who is still with me today. And moved down here to Florida. We decided to move down to Florida. But anyway, there's a whole lot of details in between the lines there, but that's the Cliff's Notes version, if you can believe it or not.
JAG: What would your pieces of advice be? I'm gonna ask you a sort of a double question here. Your advice be to someone starting their own business, and then also what advice would you give to a budding producer imaging person that you see a lot of people making mistakes with at this point?
Ed: Well, as far as starting a business it is harder to do today than it used to be. So I had the advantage of when I started my production company, there were a couple of people and maybe a company Vanilla Gorilla comes to mind who were doing what I was doing. So it was kind of new. The hard pitch for a radio station back then is they couldn't get that image of not having a body in house out of their mind.
But as soon as they figured out the brilliance of that my business took off. And in fact, it was probably that fifth or sixth client I had connected with Val Garris at Cumulus. And he was working with a producer, an independent producer out of Miami, whose name was Chris Hudspeth at the time.
And Val was looking for some additional help and I did some stuff and he was blown away and suddenly I just started getting a lot of Cumulus stuff and we got to the point where we were doing all of their national production and everything. Once Jan Jeffries came on board and all of that. So it was easy to build and it amazed me literally every quarter to half year our business was doubling and just growing.
And it got to the point where you can't be a home based business anymore. So we ended up getting an office park, having five studios and five producers and then it would grow more from there. So it was easy to do back then. So if you wanted to do that today there's a whole lot of things that are different.
I mean, consolidation of course. And now, radio stations are going on shells of their former budgets for just about everything. It's now down to the point. We have a number of clients who work with us on barter because they simply don't have the cash or they have the inventory and figure why not?
But we also have a fair number of cash people, but I would hate to have to start my business now in the environment we're in. Because there's more competition out there too. Since we started, companies have popped up like Benztown and Chachi's done a great job with that.
He's connected with some guys in Europe, Andy and whatnot, and they're making a good global footprint. Jason Gar down at Mix Group in Miami. They've also popped up and he was a former production guy too. I think he was with Beasley. We're all out there kind of, going after the same pie, so it's tougher, it's a tougher thing.
Our growth is no longer 20 to 30% a year. Our growth is now in single digits. We're happy with that. We are much more of a boutique sort of production thing versus wanting a lot of tonnage. We don't farm out all of our imaging like a lot of other guys do. All of our stuff is done in-house by our own producers.
And then to answer the other part of your question is, so if you're a producer in all of this, what do you do? You hone your craft. You have to be very good at the basics. And by that I mean, literally the basics. Clean audio, clean starts, clean ending. Don't get so buried in the sound effects.
Get into the message and I will always say 90% of a great promo starts at the typewriter or word processor, or cocktail napkin, whatever it is you're putting that idea down on. That's where 90% of a great promo is gonna lie. The editor's job is to bring that thought to life in a way that sticks in the mind, if you will.
And that's what we look for when we have our producers here is like, how do you take this copy, which is either great or sometimes it's not so great. It's just kind of, what we call utility copy. How do you take that and make that something compelling enough for someone to listen to and not want to change the channel?
That's really our job here. So that's the advice I would give to an up and coming producer: get very good at the basics, but then figure out what you're gonna do, without just making a wall of sound to capture and retain your listener's attention.
JAG: There was a TikTok video that went viral, I think last week. It was why Gen Z doesn't listen to the radio when it was a girl sitting in her car and it was all this big radio station come and get it.
Ed: I did see that and Fred Jacobs had posted that up.
JAG: That's where I saw it was Fred Jacobs. Yes.
Ed: Yeah. Yeah. Rob and I were looking at that, and if you dissect that video, you realize very quickly that it's not a single piece of production. It's actually three, possibly even four pieces that were strung together and would never happen in real life on a radio station. But the point is made that, yeah, it's a little bit like Dingo and The Baby with Family Guy. And you can definitely get over the top with all of the noise and lose the message in there.
And yeah, gen Z. They've got a different angle on radio. A lot of 'em don't even listen to it, which is sad, but I think that if you can make a product compelling enough, you'll get 'em back. You just gotta be willing to take a chance and do something different.
JAG: Ed, you've been in the industry a really long time. How do we bring radio back from corporate consolidation? Is it big corporations selling off to smaller owners that can put more resources into their radio stations and staff them up? What do you see in the next five or so years in radio?
Ed: Well, I wish I had a very clear crystal ball on that, but I think generally if you look at the trajectory that radio is on, the large corporations obviously have to answer to stockholders.
So at the end of the day, it's always gonna come down to money. If you can find ways to spend less of it, they're happy to do so. Everybody, I think, on the corporate level is trying to kind of conform a little bit so that they're not terrible, but they're not great either, and they're just still doing well and making money.
I always hated the idea of consolidation that allowed a single market to have multiple signals. Not so much because they have multiple signals, but because suddenly now there was this compelling desire to cross promote between the stations. And I felt the brands were getting watered down by doing that.
I remember when I started at New City, we had three radio stations. We had WSYR-AM. We had Y 94 and we had WBBS-FM and those three stations when I started there as a marketing director, were all treated very much like individual competitors. Nothing ever crossed the hallway from one to the other.
There was a friendly spirit of competition in the hallway. When the ideas started flowing through, let's run a promo on WBBS for Y94's easter egg hunt. It's like, well, wait a minute. Well, what are we doing here? We're really starting to damage the brands, and I still believe that a great amount of brand damage and its devaluation of the signals itself has occurred because of that over the years.
But having said that, you have to marry that against reality. You do have big corporations that own these. They do have to answer to a stockholder. You have to have an economy of scale, and that's what I think you have seen radio become. But in the process of that, at the expense, I think of programming and I would like to see big companies get back to the spirit of breaking those brands up and making them stand or sink on their own versus kind of a hodgepodge collage of different ideas on the same station. You know what I mean?
JAG: Fair enough. Ed, you've been involved with the station for so long. Talk to me about some relationships that you've formed with people who've worked at the station over the years.
Ed: There are people I do stay in touch with from the early days of Z89. Again, having worked with the station consistently for the last 15 years or so every time a new program director comes through, you get to know them and you stay in touch with them. Jeff Wade comes to mind, Harry Wareing comes to mind.
Guys like that, who you connect with and work with on a, if not daily, at least weekly basis. And it's nice to see their careers. Jeff just had a great career boost lately. It's nice to see their careers doing well along the way. You almost feel a little bit of, I don't know. Paternal pride, when some of the newer guys are getting out there and doing really well with it.
JAG: Before I let you go, Ed,, I don't wanna forget this key story. You started to tell me before we began recording here. You were telling me that there was a moment that was really pivotal to get the station on FM and it involves Rick Wright.
Ed: Man, I'll tell you, I remember that night like it was yesterday.
Student government was filled with a lot of PolySci guys who loved to play the political game, and I get it, that's their gig, that's what they get high on. But we were trying to get a radio station on the air and they were getting bogged down in what the programming was gonna be. If we fund this radio station, are you gonna do this?
Are you gonna do that? Are you, so on and so forth. And Rick, in, I think a five minute speech, boiled it down in language that was so concise and so clear and made perfect sense. And he said, look, he said, don't worry about what you're gonna put on the radio station. Let's vote today to get the thing on the air.
And it was like the period at the end of that sentence. It was palpable. You could feel it through the room where people were like, yeah, all right, let's stop with the crap. Let's go ahead and get this thing on the air and let's vote to fund it. And sure enough, that was the night that the funding was approved for WJPZ.
JAG: Well Ed, on behalf of all the alumni, we thank you for your contributions again, both as a student and after. And you're helping craft the image of the station for so long and being such a great part of it. Hall of Famer and deservedly so. And I wanna thank you for your time today.
Ed: Thanks for having me on Jag, I appreciate it.