Melody Emm and James "Baymes" Grundy are the most recent WJPZ couple in our history, and today we learn about their significant contributions to the radio station. Baymes, a New Jersey native, toured SU on the recommendation of his high school English teacher, and fell in love with the campus the moment he arrived.
Melody has a unique origin story in the radio station's history. Her Mom, while in high school, was a frequent WJPZ contributor, though never in an official capacity. Folks like JD Redman and Mark Zimmerman would utilize her for bits and jingles and more. She joined Z the moment she got to campus, and it wasn't until she and Baymes started dating that she recruited him to join.
Today, you'll hear the cringe-worthy story of their disastrous first date, and how Fate brought the two of them back together later.
Their tenure at Z involved some significant moments in the station's history. Melody was on staff when the signal was upgraded to 1,000 watts. She then became VP of Programming and General Manager. She had to hand-schedule music for 10 months due to a G-Selector issue, and was GM in 2020 when COVID hit. She had to hand the reigns to Kyle Leff and work out a succession plan in those "unprecedented times." And unfortunately, for so many in the Class of 2020, this meant being robbed of their final shows on Z89.
Baymes spent quite a bit of time on-air with Z Morning Zoos. But he really found a passion for production and more "behind-the-scenes" work. You'll hear some samples of that work in today's episode. In fact, when he was looking at options after graduating, he decided to pursue a masters from SU. And honestly, additional years of "eligibility" at WJPZ may have played into that decision. His production chops have made him quite a help in the production of the WJPZ podcast, having collaborated with JAG on both this show and various client work.
Throughout today's episode, you'll hear some themes that have been recurring over the last half-century, including the passion to pay it forward, and what a family WJPZ is.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
Sign up for email alerts whenever we release a new episode here: jagindetroit.com/WJPZat50
Want to be a guest on the pod or know someone else who would? Email Jag: jag@jagindetroit.com.
Want to stay in the loop with WJPZ Alumni events? Subscribe to our newsletter on the right hand side of the page at http://wjpzalumni.org/
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. I feel like at least once a decade, if not more, we have a couple that gets together because of JPZ. We've had couples do it from the seventies, eighties, nineties, two thousands, 2010s, and now this decade. Today we are joined by Melody Emm, who got her undergrad in 2020, and her fiance, James "Baymes" Grundy, who got his undergrad in 18 and his masters in 20.
And I'm excited to hear their story of how they met. Side note, James "Baymes" Grundy has been an incredible help to me editing many of these podcasts, so I will thank him for his service and welcome you both to the show.
Melody: It's great to be here.
Baymes: Happy to be here and happy to help too.
JAG: So let's start from the beginning.
Let's start with you Baymes. How did you end up getting to Syracuse? You're a New Jersey guy, right?
Baymes: Yeah, so it all starts as, all great stories do, with my English teacher in high school. She was one of my favorite teachers and she actually went to Syracuse and she was telling me all about how much she loved it there, Go Orange, all that kind of stuff.
And so it was one of four schools I applied to and I got in and. I initially went for forensic science. Because the CSI bug caught me, and Syracuse was one of the only schools that I wanted to go to that had a forensic science program specifically. And I set foot on campus right outside of BBB.
Cause that's where the tour bus let off. And my first thought is, No, this is the place.
JAG: Wow. And so Melody, you have a really interesting story because you are a 315 native and you probably knew about Syracuse from the womb.
Melody: I absolutely did. My family bleeds orange and it actually killed them when I told them that Syracuse was my safety school because I was applying to all Ivy Leagues besides Syracuse.
Needless to say, I picked Syracuse and I wouldn't trade that decision for anything. I did pick at the very last day that you could decide. I had it and another college pulled up and essentially the website for the other college failed. And I was like, all right, I guess I'm going to SU. This is fate.
JAG: Wow. And you ended up in your own backyard? And you knew about the station because your mom listened back in the day? I love this story.
Melody: Yes. My mom was in illegally. She was in, in a way that she didn't attend SU but she was on the radio station when she was in high school. And she mentions that JD Redman and Mark Zimmerman are the two names that I've heard her mention a couple times.
Mark less so. JD was the main person that she remembers and they would let her in and let her come on every once in a while and do jingles for them to go and just come in and mess around in the station. And she would come in all the time. Because she was at Upstate getting treatment done.
JAG: So she wasn't like official summer staff. She was just like, would pop in from time to time and do stuff.
Melody: She would just come in all the time and they would just let her. They would just let her on. It was a one entire summer that she was just in there all the time. So she was our illegal alumni.
JAG: That's great.
Melody: And she always tells me that it doesn't count, but I told her, I was like, you were in there for a good enough amount of time that I think it should.
JAG: Absolutely. So you knew about the station, obviously as soon as you got to campus. Did you get involved with the station right when you got there, or was it a little bit later on?
Melody: Yes. I got involved my first semester of my freshman year. It was actually the only club I joined.
JAG: There you go. And Baymes, how long was it after you got to Syracuse, you found out about the radio station?
Baymes: It was in the second half of my junior year of undergrad. And I found out about it because of Melody. It was about four months after we started dating. You had been mentioning Z the whole time, and then the new season of recruitment came up and you encouraged me to join cuz I've been in the station just oh, this seems fun. This seems like a good group of people.
JAG: So that's interesting. I had assumed incorrectly like many of our other couples, that the two of you had met at the station, you started dating and then you brought Baymes in. So how did you meet and how'd you start dating?
Melody: Actually, we originally met over Tinder. Okay. And then we had the world's worst first date.
JAG: Oh, he was horrible.
Melody: I told him that I did not wanna see him again. And a few months later I ended up needing a chemistry tutor and look who gets assigned to me.
JAG: No way.
Melody: Yeah, and it needless to say, the second time that we met was way better than the first.
He didn't hit me with the door that time. It went a lot better.
JAG: Okay. So Baymes, what happened on the first date that made it so bad?
Baymes: I don't have a lot of baiting experience. And that was very apparent. We meet at Melody's dining hall and I'm just sitting there in the lobby, just drawing in my sketchbook.
And I don't hear my phone going off in my pocket. And it's Melody texting me, saying, where are you? I'm right here. And she looks over and just sees some, I have my hat on, so someone vaguely matching my description and walks up to me is Hey, are you, James?
Melody: To paint this picture a little clearer, I walk into the area before the dining hall of Sadler.
And he's, there's just a man sitting in a trench coat with darkened glasses on and a hat. Drawing by himself, and I think I've walked into potentially my last day on Earth.
JAG: Oh my G-d.
Melody: I was so worried that he was going to be a sociopath. And I'm like, is this you? I'm texting him and he's not writing back, and this guy isn't looking at his phone and I'm like, oh no, I'm just sitting by a stranger. This isn't him. Finally, about five minutes goes by and he looks up and he goes, oh, Hi,
JAG: (Laughing) To be clear, James, you were wearing clothes under that trench coat, correct?
Baymes: Confirmed.
JAG: Okay.
Melody: Debatable. We then we go to walk into the dining hall and I reach for the door and he reaches for the door. And instead of just one of us letting go, he decides to reach for the door faster and opens the door and hits me right in the face with it.
JAG: And for anybody who hasn't met Baymes, he's a large man. That had to be quite unpleasant.
Melody: Yeah. Baymes is six foot eight. I'm five two for reference. He's a good foot and a half taller than me. And so I had essentially the weight of the Hulk ripping a door and hitting me in the face, and I'm like, all right, cool.
What a great way to start a date, with a concussion. And we go inside and I go to get my food. He goes to get his. He sits down with a plate of just french fries like a normal human being does, and eats them with a fork.
JAG: Okay, so you've gone from stranger psychopath in the lobby to concussion and now you're back to questioning your life choices at this point, Melody?
Melody: Yeah. Needless to say, you can see why the first date didn't go great, but after we met for chemistry, we surprisingly had chemistry! And we got together and after a while I bugged him enough that I was like, you have to join Z. It's my favorite part of being at SU.
JAG: Now that you've brought it back to the station, Melody, what did you do at the radio station? Take me through your career there.
Melody: My freshman year I was on a Z Morning Zoo. I was also human resources director. During my second semester, my sophomore year, I continued with the Zoos, but it took a step back from, exec for a little bit. And then going forward, I was actually at Syracuse for five years because of just the program that I was in.
So my third year I was VP of programming. My fourth year I was VP of programming, and my fifth year I was VP of programming. And then, GM, finally.
JAG: And Baymes, what were your roles at the station? What did you work with?
Baymes: So my first semester I was an associate producer on two shows and essentially a substitute AP on a Zoo whenever their AP couldn't make it.
After that, I became production director for two full years, and in the second half of that last year, I was also sponsorship director. Okay. And along the way I was the lead host and host on Zoos every semester after my second one there. AP on shows all throughout.
JAG: I'll ask you for funny stories later, but in the meantime, what significant stories stick out to either one of you of really milestone moments you remember for your time at the station, especially Melody, having been PD and GM?
Melody: One big thing was I was there during the transition to 1,000 watts, so that was obviously a huge part of it. It was not while I was on exec, but I was at the station at the time and there for the electricity of the entire event and just how excited everyone was. But going forward from that, the year after we had our first April Fools, that went disastrously.
Oh. The theme was your middle school angst station, young punks. And the problem was during this time we had lost the G selector computer for 10 months.
JAG: Oh no.
Melody: So everything that I programmed was by hand every hour of every day for 10 months.
JAG: Directly into NexGen? That's how you had to do it, or?
Melody: Yes. It was not enjoyable.
I hate to say the least, but one of the first times that it started to glitch was the night before April Fools, and we realized at 1130pm, that the whole day, for April Fools, had not loaded. So Rebecca, Kerri, and I all began loading the day manually one song at a time in this opposite format, hoping that we could get it together in time.
JAG: Geez. And so you became the punk station for a day on April 1st?
Melody: Yes. And the following year we were your Yeehaw station.
JAG: Now I'm guessing that's a country flip and you called it the Yeehaw Station?
Melody: Yes, we did.
Baymes: Those were my favorites.
JAG: What did you play? That's amazing.
Melody: We played country music the whole day because a running joke was that everyone kept asking me as VP programming to add a country show.
And I kept telling them, I was like, look, wit B104 we are never gonna compete with country. It's not an option and it's just really not Z as a whole to be country. And so for April Fools that year, we went full country and it was right around the time that Old Town Road by Lil Nas X came out. It mashed perfectly.
JAG: So you would've played that on April Fool's Day, but then you would've kept it after that, cuz that was a number one hit forever.
Melody: Yes. We actually, thanks to Jordan Capozzi, we played Old Town Road before its remix came out the first week it was released on new music Monday.
JAG: Oh wow. That's impressive. Okay, so what other songs you remember playing from Yeehaw 89 or whatever you called it? Or can you gimme an example of what a break would've sounded like?
Melody: We recorded the breaks ridiculously, they literally would've been like, Howdy partners here on your Yeehaw station. You know that you (laughing)sorry.
JAG: Just keep going! This is great!
Melody: Don't be square! Make sure that you're around all day and make sure you're doing a hootenanny and join us here on your Yeehaw station 89.1!
Baymes: A lot of the in-house liners for that whole event, I made them with the voice talent of Cole Weinstein and Jordan Capozzi
JAG: .And they were just country guys and the, and that imaging. Oh my god, that's great. That's great. Any significant milestones? So you mentioned the thousand watts, Melody. Anything else that comes to mind from your tenure there?
Melody: There's the thousand watts, the. 10 months of darkness. I was also GM right at the beginning of when Covid hit, so the banquet, "the last banquet" was my GM banquet.
And then a week later the school got closed down and I was there for the very beginning of transitioning into Covid. So that was a pretty significant event.
JAG: If you haven't heard the episode with Kyle Leff, he gives Melody and her team a lot of credit as she handed the GM off to him as he took the station through Covid.
I'd encourage you to go back and listen to that episode as well. He talked in his episode a lot about the teamwork, the outgoing and incoming staff. How they had to work together to, just as the rest of us were doing in the world, to put your heads together as to how to figure everything out.
Melody: Yeah. At the time we just, like everyone else, were told it was going to be two weeks and everyone was like, all right, it's fine. We'll just go and cancel shows this week and we'll be back in just a little while. And little did we know that I would be sending seniors home that would never get final shows, that would never get to say goodbye to their friends and would never get to have that last moment on air. It was heartbreaking.
JAG: I think about how I could still remember clear as a bell, my last show as a student, and to be able to not have that opportunity. And here I am thinking, watching this from afar, thinking, oh man, they can't go to Faegan's every Sunday for senior Sundays and all this stuff, but have that moment taken away from you to have your last show on Z? Oh, awful.
Melody: It was, honestly, it was horrible. And it was also my senior year as well, so I was there feeling it with them. And we were the Friday Zoo that semester and we had canceled our Friday Zoo before Banquet in order to go to Friday conference. And little did we know that would've been our last zoo together.
JAG: Wow.
Baymes. Let me turn back over to you here. Any significant memories and stories you can think of from your time at the station?
Baymes: Even though I was a host on a lot of shows, the most significant moments for me were always behind the scenes. Because that's where I found my love for radio. I'm not too much of a, on the mic in your face kind of person.
I prefer to be in the background, making sure that the job gets done, making sure that everyone sounds good, helping to make good content where I can, which is surprising to a lot of people given my voice and tone.
JAG: You do have a great voice.
Baymes: But the things that stand out to me the most are when I was in the studio with Jordan Capozzi and Cole Weinstein. Writing up the cowboy liners. It was a great time. I still have those liners on file, actually. They're great.
JAG: Send me one or two, I'll drop 'em into the podcast when I produce it.
Baymes: For Melody's Zoo one year, even though I wasn't the AP for it, I made them a Halloween bed by combining a whole bunch of different, like spooky and horror sounds.
And. I called it the Tuesday Spook-a-Duke. And they used that for their Halloween Zoo Show.
JAG: Baymes your love for production kind of transitions me into this story, which is that at Banquet 2022, I hadn't met you previously. Or if I had, it had been briefly, but I'd known Melody, met her a couple of times, and Melody came up to me at the banquet last year.
And she's JAG, my fiancé really wants to get into podcast production. He wants to come talk to you, I said yeah, let me go seek him out. So Baymes and I had a conversation. And in that time, full disclosure, Baymes has helped me with some client work, editing some podcasts from my clients, and he has helped me with over a dozen of these JPZ podcasts where I'll record the interviews. I'll send it off to him, and he'll do the production work and the editing for me, which has saved me an immense amount of time because of the sheer number of these.
Baymes, what's it been like for you hearing some of these stories of the JPZ podcast and getting to learn more about the station?
Baymes: It's an incredible sense of nostalgia. For times that I never was.
JAG: I like that.
Baymes: For example, Kendall B's podcast. Every single story that he told in that podcast, I felt like I was there because I experienced something similar.
Just the stuff when he was talking about how he feels when he's with his crew mates, the feeling of walking into Z. Just the little things that you don't notice when they're happening, but when you look back five, six years later, you're like, wow, that was formative. And it's things like that make me realize that Z is a family. It's a family of shared experiences and shared passions.
JAG: Couldn't have said it any better myself. Any lessons that you have learned either one of you at the radio station that have served you well in your time since getting outta school?
Melody: Just a lesson I learned in general is that you can get from Lawrinson all the way to Watson in eight minutes if you run.
JAG: Oh my G-d.
Melody: Oh, and I feel like that's useful for any current students to know just in case of an emergency eight minutes.
JAG: That's all uphill too.
Melody: It is all uphill. And when I did it, it was one in the morning.
JAG: Why? Why did you have to run to the station at one in the morning?
Melody: The station had gone down. One of the normal problems that just happens. And I wasn't even PD at the time, I was HR director, but one of my recently graduated trainees was on during that time. So I felt responsible to fix it, and instead of calling the PD, Matt Gehring, I was like, I can do this. And I got from Lawrinson to Watson, I put us back on air and then I was like, whatever you do, don't ever do that again.
JAG: Oh my God. I'm winded just thinking about running from Lawrinson to Watson.
Melody: I probably put the fear of Melody in so many younger students and I feel so bad, but also like proud about it. But there's so many people that would be like, oh no, you can't do that. Melody will kill you.
JAG: I feel like every generation had a Melody though. I feel like every one of us had that one person that was, that's the one you don't wanna cross.
Melody: Yeah. That's fair. A hundred percent. It got to the point that I was always running around and fixing things so often that this is something that I've carried on into my work life is every time I receive a phone call, I answer the phone, "What's wrong?"
I can't get out of it. I can't get out of the habit. I was so used to doing it for Z that I do it now in person and people make fun of me at work for it all the time. I one time had one of my bosses call me and. I answer and I was like, what's wrong? And I hear a bunch of people laugh and he goes, oh, we had a bet on whether or not you would answer the phone with "what's wrong?"
Baymes: Okay. But to be fair, how often. Is something actually wrong?
Melody: 98% of the time.
JAG: Baymes. Is that how she answers the phone when you call?
Baymes: Yes.
JAG: Not, hi honey, not how is your day? "What's wrong?"
Melody: What's wrong? Just like that.
JAG: This also transitions well too. Melody, tell me about your career since graduation, what you've done and where you're working now.
Melody: Obviously I graduated during Covid, so we had a year of essentially nothing when there was no new radio happening anywhere. And I then applied for a couple jobs around, and then I got a call from a man named Joe, Belladonna, and he said, I've heard a lot about you and I have a position open at a radio station in Rochester.
It's for a news talk program, and I know you don't have any experience in news. But I feel like your experience that you do have with the radio station and with the work that you did at Galaxy will translate and we can teach you anything else you need to know on the spot. And I received the job on a Monday and by Wednesday we were moved in.
JAG: Wow. What did you do at Galaxy in the interim in between that put you on his radar?
Melody: I had an internship with their Alt Rock Station, 95.1 for their morning show, "The Show." And I was their intern for an entire summer and I worked with Josh and Cody on that show in Syracuse.
JAG: Okay. So you spent a summer in Syracuse and then they gave your name to iHeart in Rochester, and that's where you are now?
Melody: I don't think they gave my name. I think it was actually Josh Wolff.
JAG: Oh, of course it's Josh Wolff because Josh Wolff has cooked me up with every radio gig I've ever had. He is like the master connector of everybody.
Melody: He is. He's an absolute blessing and he just wants to help everyone he possibly can. He is one of my biggest mentors and some of my fondest memories at Z are him explaining programming things to me.
And when I received my job in Rochester, I was like, I've never done news before. This is gonna be an absolute mess. Spoiler alert. It was, I found out I hate news, but I can do it.
JAG: Are you comfortable saying that on the podcast you hate the format you're in?
Melody: I'm no longer in that format.
JAG: Okay. What are you doing now?
Melody: I am now at a sister station. I work at WAIO 95.1 in Rochester. It is a talk station, not a news station, and I work on Radio Hall of Famer Brother Wease's Morning show.
JAG: As a producer, or?
Melody: I am the producer, board operator, sometimes host and local weirdo is my specified role.
JAG: Local weirdo. It seems like you wear that as a badge of honor.
Melody: I absolutely do. A large part of our show has become either let's make fun of what Melody is wearing or let's make fun of Melody's existence and I will sit here and I will be the class clown. You can throw all your jokes at me cuz guess what?
Honk Honk, mother effers. I'm here for it.
JAG: Tough act to follow, but Baymes you decided to go back and get your master's degree. What went into that decision?
Baymes: So I got my undergrad degree in anthropology and religion. The internalized reason was I want to know what makes people tick. And as groups, I don't think anything motivates people more than culture at anthropology and religion or faith.
So I made those two my majors and the biggest thing in those fields is. How do you make money off of this? And one of the ways is through essentially social education, things like museums. And I was going back and forth on whether or not I wanted to do that or just gonna a regular job in archeology because that's what I was trained in.
And then I went to a field school where I went to a big site and it was a great experience. But I realized I do not wanna be digging in fields for the rest of my life and living out of a tent.
JAG: Seems fair.
Baymes: And Melody and I just started doing research on what I could do next. And we realized, oh wait, Syracuse has an actually really good museum studies program and I get to be at Z two more years. Sign me up.
JAG: You got two additional years of eligibility.
Baymes: Yep. Z was a non-insignificant portion of my reasoning to get my master's.
JAG: That's tremendous.
Baymes: And here I am.
JAG: So are you looking to do more in audio or are you looking to do more in your classroom fields? You just figured it out what your next steps are gonna be?
Baymes: I'm open to both right now. Obviously working for you. It's working out a lot faster through the audio route. COVID really messed up both industries. I was tough going, trying to get started. Actually. something I didn't realize until after my dad had passed was that he was part of his high school's radio and he did production for it, and he actually won a couple of awards for his music and audio production work when he was in high school.
And now it just feels like I have that extra connection with him now that he's gone.
JAG: Wow. That's really special.
Baymes: But I will say every single time I open Adobe Audition, my mood and mental state increases dramatically.
JAG: The dopamine rush of opening Audition. Yeah. I like play with audio a lot more than I like editing transcripts, that's for sure.
Melody: I have never seen a human being that gets so excited about learning new functions on the computer, in Audition, I'll come home from work and he'll be like, look what I learned how to do, and I'm like that's neat, honey. Great. And he's I've assigned all of these little shortcuts onto the side of my mouse. And I'm like, okay, cool. And he's Jag told me it'll help me add it faster. I'm like, all right, great. Cool.
JAG: You don't have to get any more brownie points! You've already got the job. I swear!
Melody: No, he's just genuinely, he's that excited about it. I've never seen him as happy as he is when he's editing.
Honestly, it was something that he never would've known that he loved. Until I forced shoved him into Z as I did with a lot of my friends, whom I call my babies, such as Kyle, who I forced shoved into being GM.
Baymes: And look how well that worked out!
Melody: Yeah, and Kyle did great. I told Kyle the year that Covid happened, Kyle was set to that fall go abroad.
This was prior to Covid and I kept telling everyone at that Banquet, I said, Kyle left is going to be the next GM. He said, Melody, that's not possible. I'm going to be abroad. And I said, no, you're going to be the next GM. I know you are. I said the station needs somebody that really cares about the station and you really care.
And then Covid hit, Kyle couldn't go abroad and I was right. Kyle Leff did Indeed become the next GM for the next two years.
JAG: Melody, did you manifest a worldwide pandemic?
Melody: I might have. I didn't need to. And I'm very sorry, but gave us Kyle Leff.
JAG: Silver linings.
Melody: Absolutely. I think the station is better because of it. And I know that the pandemic is horrible, and obviously it's not something to joke about, but there isn't somebody that I would've rather handed it to because I trusted him. I trusted everybody. I left it to Rebecca, Michelle, everybody that was there. I knew that they could do this, and I was so proud of the incoming class of seniors.
That I wasn't worried for a second, that they would have a hard time with Covid.
JAG: I think that's a good place to leave it. We talked about so many things in this podcast and the 50 year history of the radio station and some of the stuff we talked about in the beginning, whether it was G selector crashing, going up to a thousand watts.
There were some alumni that my age and older that might not be identified with things like that, the specifics, but the general things of what you're saying here at the end, these themes have gone on for half a century of bringing your friends into the radio station and mentoring them and then feeling like they're your babies when they go and they on do great things.
That's happened since the 1970s, so it's really cool to come full circle with you both today. And I really wanna thank you both for spending a few minutes with us.
Melody: Thank you so much for having me on. Honestly, Z is one of my favorite things and the whole world. I loved growing up listening to Z. I loved getting to experience Z, and I love getting to help it as an alumni, and the fact that I get to add to this podcast just makes me so happy.
Baymes: There are a few things that are more important or more meaningful than a family, and that's what Z is.