Tommy Giarrosso, was one of the innovators behind the Crazy Morning Crew when WJPZ moved to the FM Dial.
We start with this Syracuse native's journey to the Hill, and his involvement with UUTV and WAER. He was there when the latter was taken over by the University and its new administrator, David Anderson. He talks about the conflict between the students, led by Sean McDonough, and the new brass. And while SU may have won the war, changing WAER to an NPR affiliate, Tommy talks about some great battles won in the interim. This included trolling Anderson with a Star Wars spoof "Darth Vaderson," and an epic prank where the WAER and WJPZ students teamed up to forward all incoming dorm calls....straight to Anderson's office.
Soon, Tommy brought his comedy and production talents to WJPZ, where he found passionate staff and listeners before the station even moved to the FM dial. He talked about "hanging out with Eric Fitch" as the new equipment went into Watson. When the inaugural Crazy Morning Crew was formed, Tommy was part of the production team that would work through the night on reel to reel machines producing bits for the next morning's show.
Wouldn't you know that shortly after the Crazy Morning Crew started, top dog Y94 adopted a similar format. You'll hear the audio of Danny the K and the WJPZ show pranking WYYY's host Big Mike live on the air, and his very NSFW reaction.
Following his time at WJPZ, Tom and his fellow "Boffo Yux Dudes" continued to write comedy bits and sell them to radio syndicators across the country. While this went on, he worked at a number of radio and television stations across New England.
Currently, he works at a station in Salem, New Hampshire, and judges original content for SpinTunes. He believes he's co-written over 100 parody songs.
We close with the shared experience of WJPZ. Tom talks about how the station provided a creative outlet for him during the passing of his father, but also the family of those who have done mornings of WJPZ. He'd like to create a group for that subset of alumni.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. My guest today from the class of 84, Tom Giarrosso, Tommy G, welcome to the podcast.
Tommy: Thank you very much.
JAG: This is gonna be a lot of fun. I know you've got a lot of stuff to talk about of your time at the station, being there at an early pivotal time, and being one of the original guys in the crazy morning crew on FM, which we'll circle back around to in a little bit.
But first, tell me how you got to Syracuse and how you got involved in radio on the Hill.
Tommy: Oh gosh. I was born and bred in Syracuse. Going to high school. I used to listen to WAER all the time cuz I could get that at home. And they had a thing called the Orange Crush Half Hour Power Hour or something like that.
And they did a comedy show. It was kinda like National Lampoon was doing a comedy show. And I said, I wanna do that when I get to SU. So I ended up going to SU. I think I lived four miles south of the campus. I went to AER and then ended up over JPZ. And that's how I got started.
JAG: So you went to AER first, or J PZ first?
Tommy: Actually, I was at UUTV first. My freshman year friends on in Shaw dorm were actually the cable casters and the engineers for UUTV and I got dragged in because there was a comedy show called Newswatch on UUTV. If you took Weekend Update and made it a half an hour with people doing skits and things, that's what it was.
But it was like a live half hour show that they would do once a week.
JAG: Oh wow. Okay.
Tommy: And I poked my nose in and after the first semester I said, yeah, I wanna do this. So I became a writer, and then the next year I got asked to be head writer. So I did that for three years. While I was there, we did 60 or 70 half hour live or live to tape shows.
And I met so many people in there. And then from there, I think it was the second year in there, I said I always wanted to get back to doing that radio thing. So I went to WAER and said, I wanna do a radio show. They said, you're crazy. No. And I said, alright, how about this? Can we just do segments for the morning show?
Oh yeah. Nobody's ever asked to do that. So we created a group called Purely Coincidental. It was made from people outta the News Watch troupe. And we would alternate writing these five-minute comedy bits and segments and whatever, and we did that for two years until the station got taken over.
A lot of people wonder about how AER and JPZ happened, and was there, oh, everybody moved over? I would say a handful of people moved over once AER was taken over by the University. There was a lot of struggle in those years, and in fact, there's a Facebook group for those of you for recovering WAER, people that still have an ax to grind against the University for taking away their toy.
JAG: Let me take a quick detour here, Tommy, because it just so happens we're recording this interview on the day that we released the episode with four of your classmates about getting the station on FM. Tell me about your perspective from inside AER. I know it's a JPZ podcast, but just for some color here.
Tell me how about what it was like at AER when the university said, ah yeah, we're gonna come in and be an NPR affiliate, and it's not really a student radio station anymore.
Tommy: I came in towards the tail end of that. There was a lot of jockeying for position. The University kept putting in people to take over the station so that it will make money for NPR.
The students fought back and were very smart in a lot of the ways they did, but they had to give up ground each time they did it, and finally they got somebody in that just literally locked the doors on 'em. And we tortured him something awesome. It was just, so everyone has a David Anderson story and also David Anderson and a bunch of people that were on UUTV actually, we did stuff talking about what was happening and Purely Coincidental did some active stuff.
We actually did advertising and we did a whole thing with behind the scenes. I think we did some Star Wars parodies of the whole thing.
JAG: Tell me you made him Darth Vader.
Tommy: Yes. He was Darth Vader, of course, but we did three episodes. The first episode actually aired. We finished the third episode.
But we'd been taken off the air. So we got the third episode played at Walnut Park at the concert because we didn't have an air channel anymore. So we told the guys at the booth, you need to play this. And it was, I think the Empire strikes back and somehow the university was. Giving WAER the shaft.
So Darth Vaderson pushed the Luke down the elevator shaft, and we left it as a cliffhanger because it's like yeah, we're basically screwed. We're not getting the station back. And we never did.
JAG: But so that, so the parody pieces, they were done for UUTV are done as just audio for AER, and you weren't able to air it on AER?
Tommy: They were audio for AER for probably about a year. We did three to five minute segments that would air twice a morning, like twice a week during the morning. Yeah. So that was like a comedy troupe that we were with.
JAG: But the Star Wars spoof, that was audio only. And so you played it at the concert?
Tommy: They're all audio only.
JAG: Okay. And were you able to skewer them on tv?
Tommy: No, the UUTV stuff was actually was a press conference that we had between, I think, between Sean and Dave and they actually talked and I think Faith Webber did an interview with them. It was like one of the SU news shows. And the funny thing was they got them both to come, but nobody told the other that the other would be there. They thought they're doing individual interviews, so they actually had a face-to-face interview at the time.
JAG: I'm just wanna keep my facts straight here. Who had a face-to-face interview?
Tommy: The station got, Dave Anderson.
JAG: He was the admin that the university brought in. Okay.
Tommy: And Sean McDonough, who was a sportscaster, who was actually the voice of WAER at the time, and they basically had an interview together on what was going on. They each viewed each other things.
JAG: And was it contentious or respectful, or how did that go?
Tommy: It was respectful. It was respectful. Given the perspective. Now the chancellor was gonna get whatever he wanted. That's where the money was. And I think he didn't like what the kids were doing with the station, and he wanted to turn it into a showpiece, but it got a little hairy and the students had some fun with it and created negative press for the university, which they hated. So he waited them out. They graduated. The people coming in tried to do what they could, but there's a knowledge base there and he basically ended up getting his way, which it is what it is.
But there's still a lot of people. The way it was done. I was in the hallway of Newhouse on the top floor with my high-speed cassette deck to do mastering while David Anderson came in and literally locked the doors so people couldn't come in and out. And that was the day that they were supposed to be doing a Syracuse Chiefs game.
So Bill Darren had come in. He was the guy who was doing the board op for it, the people there in MacArthur Stadium had no clue what's going on and they were legally obligated to play the game. So literally he shut the station down, but let the station be up for the games, cuz otherwise they'd get sued for not having the baseball games on.
JAG: Wow. And then that representative, the student, some kid named Sean McDonough, never heard of him.
Tommy: I hope he does well.
JAG: Seemed like a promising young broadcaster at the time. Okay, so WAER may have lost the war with David Anderson, but you teamed up with some JPZ folks to win a great battle.
Tommy: We tortured David Anderson mercilessly. As much as we could. And one of the JPZ friends figured out that the school system of phones could call forward. So there is a bank of about 60 phones in all the dorms, and we went to every single. Not me. We'll say me. We'll say me.
JAG: Fall on that sword, okay.
Tommy: Okay. Went to every single phone. In the dorms and forwarded them to David Anderson's office. No incoming calls could come in, but anyone who did an outcoming call to that payphone slash local phone would automatically be forwarded to his office. And David at the time was going through press and all these other things that were going on, and his secretary was not very happy to him either.
So he was basically all alone and he had answered the phone every time. And all these people have no idea. They're trying to call the hall and get him. So he picks up the phone, says, hi, WAER, David Anderson here, and the people on the other end are going, no, it's not. I'm trying to call Shaw Dorm 2 East, or I'm trying to get this person because you'd have to call somebody.
So he literally had 50, 60 people calling him every day that had no idea they were getting him. And that would get pissed at him because he's the wrong number, though they dialed him.
JAG: They didn't know they dialed him, but they thought they dialed the dorm. That's brilliant.
Tommy: Correct. It took three days and they couldn't figure it out. Campus security had to basically dump the phone lines to clear the call forwarding. So for three days he got nothing but angry calls constantly, and just for going to each one of these phones and forwarding. So I don't know if he ever knew who had done that or how that had worked out, but we'll say it with some JPZ friends who were friends of AER folks that managed to...
JAG: See? There were moments where JPZ and AER got along just fine.
Tommy: Oh, yes we did. We were compadres there.
JAG: Okay. Now that we're transitioning over to JPZ, tell me how you transitioned over to JPZ.
Tommy: I was doing stuff with Dave Walzer and he goes, hey, you gotta check out this station. And I'm going, what station?
Because I'd heard of JPZ because when I was working at UUTV, I was a program director and we played JPZ on our channel whenever we weren't doing anything. So if it was just bulletin board up so I could hear them, so they would actually just go into the dorms. So all the dorms had, there's maybe 40 TVs on campus. Just to give people perspective from back then, nobody had a tv. If you had cable, you were rich beyond. Nobody had a phone in their rooms. You could buy one, but it was expensive. You mainly used the hall phones to do anything.
JAG: The TV's in the lounges and payphone probably.
Tommy: That's it. Yeah. That's the only way you can get in touch with anybody. Dave takes me to this hole in the wall. It ended up being the third floor of Spectrum.
JAG: Yep. Where the Sheraton is now.
Tommy: Where the Sheraton is now. In fact where the banquets were held. Literally about the same airspace cuz it was about the same height where the banquet hall is.
I look in and I go, what is this place? It is literally terrible. Not I can't say terrible equipment. It's not hand me down. Calling it hand-me-down equipment was generous. It was fifties leftover dumpster stuff, which was great. And then the music is literally 45's that have been played so often that they're just scratched up.
And a few carts and stuff. I sit down and the guy ahead of us is like totally excited, upbeat, and I look at the sheet on a schedule and it's there's no empty spots for any of the slots. There's a hundred names on here. I hung out with him and I met a bunch of people there and said, all right, this is neat.
I'd be into this. I did a few shifts, but I couldn't get in cuz it was just, it was too busy. But phones would ring off the hook.
JAG: Wow.
Tommy: It's like you're not even broadcasting, you're just on a blank cable channel in Syracuse. How are you getting, like your phones are not stopping? And it's because all the high school kids realized they could call in and they would actually get their request plate and they would play us for all the parties and stuff.
So yeah, I'm sure somewhere in Syracuse it's like their parents are going, why do you have the TV on with this blank screen and you're all dancing and singing in your rooms? But that was my start of JPZ. Okay. So the next step is I had heard about the FM licensing happening. I have to say very minor part. I just basically hung out with Eric Fitch. That was my thing. And they moved over into Watson before they actually went up on FM. That summer, in that fall I was there and Eric was basically building everything. He was building the studio; he was getting the transmitters in and all the pieces. So it's every once in a while he needs somebody, oh, can you just move this with me, or whatever? I said, okay, fine.
JAG: This is summer of 84?
Tommy: This is summer 84. So I brought a bunch of my stuff into the production room just because you don't have any records yet. You don't have this other stuff. So I started having fun in the production room. It was crazy that summer there was hardly anybody around, but still everybody wanted to do shifts. It was crazy that a lot of people still called, they were all excited about the station, but they go, when are you go on FM? So we'd have gotten out to like the listeners that this was happening. It was a big thing in town that they knew that was happening.
And obviously they actually got it live on the air when they did the open, they did a live TV remote for, I think Channel 3 came in and covered them with a truck and I'm going, that was a huge deal to have everybody around. It's like hundreds of people in Watson Theater. I might have been in one of the hallways somewhere with their panning cameras. And they were all excited because the, even the anchors were in the back room pretending they were DJs and that type of thing.
JAG: It's funny, whenever you work in radio professional, like getting TV coverage is like the holy grail. And so this is obviously a big deal. And it was a big deal because it was a major radio station in the market at that point.
Tommy: There's no social media. You forget. The DO was the way you got your information. There was no other way to get it cuz none of the Syracuse media are gonna cover anything. So most of the backdoor way of getting stuff was either the Syracuse New Times, which is the weekly that was there at the time.
Or the DO, which is great. Frighteningly it's all the connections that I was able to make through JPZ and other groups. But it's like when I was living in Shaw, I was in the media section of Shaw. They did groups together. And at that time, I think it was the head of the DO. The head of a bunch of the magazines, the TV station folks were all there, the radio stations, both channels were there.
And it's these 40 people were all clustered in one spot. So we literally, if something was going on, you could just say, hey, this is coming up. Can you do that? Oh, and we talked to the DO. It's, wait a minute, how do we get this story on? Oh yeah, Kevin, can you do something in tomorrow's paper for this? Cuz we're doing this.
So it's unbelievable networking in that small cluster of people, because you'd be able to get the word out.
JAG: Yeah. One thing I wanna ask you about is the Crazy Morning Crew. You were one of the OGs when going on FM, one of the original morning show guys, right?
Tommy: Yes, I was. I gotta say Dave Levin. I'm not sure what his title was, but basically he found all the people that were creative and just threw 'em all into the morning show.
JAG: Love it.
Tommy: I'm gonna call it the Crazy Morning Crew. And the original crew was, see if I can remember it. It was Mary Mancini and Mark Humble. Dave Bosco,
Danny The K Klass and Happy Dave Dwyer were another group. And then it was Sonic Suki Sookman, who is Scott Mercer and myself were producers. So if you think about it this way, there was two producers, five DJs, three sports guys, and three news guys all crammed into Watson doing a morning show.
JAG: Love it. You must have some incredible stories from those days of doing the morning shows like that.
You've done the UUTV thing, you've done AER, but here you are, you're now on FM doing a morning show on, what was the time that very big-time radio station.
Tommy: Yeah. We had too much fun.
JAG: What stories are appropriate for the podcast, Tommy?
Tommy: What is the statute of limitations up on? That's the question.
JAG: We're coming up on 40 years. I think you're clear on most of it.
Tommy: Yeah, I think I'm clear on most of it. I dunno, the Big Mike stories, Phil was so pissed at us. We got in such trouble, but one morning, it must have been a couple of months in to the crazy morning crew. May it a month in, cuz we've been doing, I mean you've got all these people, all this banter, this laughing and stuff going on in the background and Y 94 is the number one station.
And Phil was running it. And Phil came from JPZ and he'd always help out JPZ the best he could, and their morning show changed to a Z Morning Zoo overnight. Suddenly they're all talking, they're all chatting, they're all happy back going back and forth and it's like we scratched our heads.
And I said, wait a minute. We've been doing this for a month, and suddenly the number one channel changes over to our format. So we had to have a little fun with it. Yeah. Danny calls up the station, and then I hear a little click, click and we're recording on our end obviously, and they're recording on their end. Cuz I hear this little click. I'm gonna, all right. They're starting to roll the reel's rolling. Okay. Yeah. Real reel's rolling on both sides.
We hit a nerve and we have no idea what the hell happened. We literally just calling him up and I guess there was stuff behind the scenes that were happening because then later that day, Phil calls up all of the senior staff people pissed at us. For something and it's like we're going, all we did is call him white bread and mayonnaise. What the hell's going on?
And I guess in the background, there was other things going on in his life, and I have the feeling he thought we were more involved in whatever was going on behind the scenes that actually was okay. And we got pointed at it. But I'm going, so we're just sitting here going, wait a minute, we got attacked.
It was all on our head because I don't think they're actually listening to us, but. They had changed formats. We brought their attention and then suddenly all this came down and it was pretty funny that it's we just, we didn't care. We were just, fat, dumb and happy. Just went on with our own stuff.
JAG: It's funny how a little bit of radio warfare can get under your skin because a lot of radio folks are just really thin skin because we hide behind a microphone and all that. I remember my very first paid full-time gig in Burlington, Vermont. I screwed something up and the station was off the air for 30 or 60 seconds.
I had screwed up the computer or something like that. Yeah. Program director across town who I would later work for calls me. Hey man, is this Jag? Yeah. You get some dead air. Oh yeah, man. I know. I took care of it. He goes, man. Hope you haven't unpacked yet!
Tommy: I'll give you another story. How things worked for production. So Scott and I would get in 11 o'clock at night. And we would try to get like the UUTV friends or whoever was around, bring them in for an hour, have 'em do bits and skits and things like that. And we would work all night. Produce bits for six in the morning.
We would stay for the show, stick around for the first couple hours and be like behind the scenes helping 'em out and say, here's what we've got. So they had all the prep they would need for the show. Wow. Okay. And it'd be either two or three people depending on what was going on. And then they had all their own skits and stuff that were going on.
So that was like the basis of how it worked. And then we tried to bring the news and the sports people in some of 'em were game to help and play with what was going on. And some of 'em just did not want to keep the Seriousness of what they were doing straight, which I give them for.
JAG: That's true throughout the generations. You had the sports and news people that would mess around with you and then the people, no. I'm here to do a newscast or a sportscast.
Tommy: Yes, exactly. But we had a lot of fun with all these people. It was a camaraderie of all these different people. And it was three rooms of people coming in and out all at the same time. And it's oh, hang on, shut up. mic's on. Then cue the other mic. And then whoever's doing the interactive, they do stuff with that live. And then we have phoners and things like that. Early on I kept asking Eric, Hey Eric, we need to have a way to get listeners on the air.
And he said, no, we can't do that. I said, yes we can. He said no. And then my problem is, I know just enough. Just enough to be trouble. I said, we can do this. And it's no, you can't. So he wasn't there one day and I went to Radio Shack, grabbed one of those suction cup things to put on a phone.
Literally ripped the end off. Connected something else tied a quarter inch plug to it, jammed it into one of the channels of the reel to reel.
JAG: Oh my G-d.
Tommy: It was a terrible, nothing but buzz coming through, but you could hear somebody on the other end and I said, that's what we're gonna do. So I said, hey, do you like that? And it's just like the worst sounding thing on the air. But we got listeners and that second, the listeners could hear themselves, forget it. It was crazy. And then we would take the listeners and we'd cut 'em into promos. Cuz back then it was all tape and razor blades.
JAG: Sure.
Tommy: Old school. I had my record library there on purpose so that I could track this stuff down. So we would do montages. So we did a crazy montage with 20 different cuts of crazy from different music or people or sound effects or comedy albums or whatever. And just so you hear like that, going around with a music bed and that's what we play for like the top of the hour or oh my god a morning with all these Al Jolson singing in the morning and all these Beatles singing in the morning and chop them all.
And they were all literally a razor blade, half inch piece of tape. 50 of them in a row that we would spend and do overnight. That was one of my favorite things to do for years, and actually when I went up to New Hampshire when I got my first gig, that was one of the things I did, is I just spent way too much time in the production studio chopping all these production bits together with all these high-end things.
JAG: Because you're used to going in at 11:00 PM and working straight through the night. Look, that's actually a great transition. Tommy, tell me about your career post Syracuse.
Tommy: There was a lot of levels. My first radio gig, which wasn't the radio gig was we took the bits we got from the crazy morning crew and sold them to American Comedy Network.
JAG: Oh wow.
Tommy: While we were still working at JPZ, we sold scripts and voices and clips and bits to them, which went out on their network. So they would hit all the morning shows across the country and we ended up doing syndicated radio for eight or nine years.
JAG: Oh my G-d, that's amazing.
Tommy: So that was the first group we were in and which was nice. Scott and I used to love to drive places and check things out. We would think over the summer why don't we go to other radio stations? So we literally would look them up, show up and knock on their door and say, we're from Syracuse and JPZ. Can you show us your, give us a tour? We went to Rensselaer, we'd go to Albany, we'd go to Boston, we'd go to wherever there was a radio station. We would go and just try to hook up and see what was going on with it for those type of things.
JAG: All kindred spirits through 50 years of the radio station. There are so many people nodding and smiling right now.
Tommy: It was so much fun and we used to do that. We used to go with Eric. Eric would overnight go to the same thing for radio engineering. Head ends. Antennas. And he said, oh it's two o'clock in the morning, let's go. I think this engineer is working cuz all the engineers would be working overnight because that's when you can work on the transmitter and do your maintenance. Yeah. It would be nothing like, all right, we're driving to Canastota. I think somebody's there. So it's Eric, why are we here? It's because I wanna talk to the engineer. Okay, we'll hang out.
JAG: Oh my G-d, that's amazing.
Tommy: And it was amazing to see. It's wait a minute, we're like in the back. We're in the bowels and the antenna's in the back. And you look up and there's that's that 500-foot antenna that we always drive by. Wait a minute, we're right here and, oh yeah, don't touch that by the way. That's a hundred thousand watts or whatever. We're staying away from that, but that was so much. I told you I ramble.
JAG: No, that's fine. All right, so tell me career-wise, post Syracuse.
Tommy: Yep. So the syndication is part of the levels.
I've had a billion jobs, syndicated radio was nice and that built up, I moved out to the Boston area. My first gig on the radio was WCEA. Your station at the sea. My sister was out here and I was living at her house and we were trying to get gigs on this AM station. They didn't have any slots specifically, but they did have a live assist for the Red Sox game.
So I took that for a few weeks. And I met a lot of station people there. And then while I was hitting every station up in the area to say, wanna, I wanna do production, I wanna do DJ, I wanna do ultimately wanna do a morning show or work on a morning show. Ended up getting a gig up at WHEB F M in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
I had the weekend board assist to cover all the Westwood one stuff. So I would play on the record, I'd play Dr. Demento, I'd play all of those things and whatever the programming was, then their spots, and then you'd have to play the local spots on top of it. And then you do a top of the hour and talk and then get back out.
So you're barely on the air at all. But you're just running the board and through that, I ended up meeting the morning show guy, Jim Rising. So I ended up producing some bits for his show before he moved on, off and on between three or four DJs. I was up there for five or six years probably.
Which was great. And the second time around was Rising with Fran, I think. And that was like primo fun game because it was myself and the other Boffo Yux dudes, Pat Loughlan slash Murphy slash Montello. He goes by different people.
JAG: I know your email is Boffo Yux. What's the origin of the name? Boffo Yux.
Tommy: In 85, Scott. Pat and I started a group called the Boffo Yux Dudes, because once we had sold ACN stuff, we said, we can do this. This is easy. It's like you're idiots. You don't know how hard this. We can start a comedy group and we'll send we'll send these things out to all these morning shows and we'll do our own syndication.
So we did a demo for the syndication. One of the things that we had decided was Scott had put a thing in the liners of the stuff, Big Boffo Yux dude is like the head, head guy of the thing and said, all right, we gotta use that somewhere.
JAG: Got it. Okay.
Tommy: So Boffo Yux dudes came from that, and the problem is we used that name when we sent stuff to Dr. Demento, cuz we had a whole bunch of stuff on there. And then, now that it's out with a name, we're stuck with it. That works when you're in your twenties, but when you get a little older, the, it doesn't flow off the tongue as well. I guess the respect level is not necessarily way up there with a name like that. But that's actually, now it's ironic. So I let it go cuz it's 35, 40 years later.
JAG: All right. Fair enough. What was after New Hampshire? What was after Portsmouth, New Hampshire?
Tommy: While New Hampshire was going on, Dave Walzer, who was Davy Dave, ended up working in cable down in Needham, Mass, and I ended up getting a gig shooting and editing TV news for a local public access station.
So I do two days a week down there. One day would be shooting and editing news and the other one would be producing a live newscast. Did that for 10 years. So it's two days a week there, four days a week up doing morning radio off and on. And then on the weekends I do I did cashier at Building 19, and then while that's going on, it's all about my favorite mantra. It's all about the keys.
JAG: Okay.
Tommy: I had keys to a TV station. I had keys to a radio station. Which means I can spend all the time I want in their production room whenever it's not being used, and no one's gonna complain. And I spent years in production studios creating bits, so we ended up doing, Pat and I did a comedy video show, which ended getting a nice ACE award actually for basically just following us around doing all the comedy stuff that we did and bits and things because we had graduated from doing ACN to Olympia networks and then Rick Dees Networks, and then all these other networks that we would like, oh, let's try this.
And while we were doing stupid stuff like that, like Scott also was working at Z100 as an intern and doing their morning show with Scott Shannon. I remember one night, like we would hit radio stations. You got keys? Can we go in? Okay. Pat and I would go down to New Jersey, broke into the station cuz he had keys to get in.
Went into their production studio and spent a night doing A whole reel or two of all these new original bits.
JAG: At Z100.
Tommy: At Z100. In the building. And while we're doing that, Elvis Duran is doing overnights. It's like his first, one of his first shifts. We didn't know who he was. So we're just hanging out and he's like poking his nose. What the hell are you doing? It's hi, we're doing bits for the morning show. Oh, all right. That's fine. But it's we'll try to keep it down, but we're excited cuz we're doing all these. So we left a reel and the nice thing was we would do all our stuff. We'd have 'em playing up in New Hampshire.
Scott would take the reels, he would take 'em, they'd up on Z100. I think some of the stuff made it onto their album. They have best of albums and stuff, so I'm sure some of those bits ended up over there. And we didn't know any better. He says let's do that. And then stuff would end up on Demento and they know you never knew where anything was because you're continually doing drops and liners for people and stuff.
And the goal would be, we gotta write a bit. We'd write a bit, we'd put it on a reel, we'd send it out FedEx to the syndicator. It would be on, they'd press it onto a CD, it would go out to 400 radio stations with an interactive. So it's like we would do. Elvis traffic. We love doing Elvis. So it's so we would do all the funny parts and then the DJ would have the interactive part.
JAG: Oh G-d, I remember some of that stuff.
Tommy: If anybody ever heard Elvis weather where we sang all these different weathers to have the DJ, would do all the local stuff and they were set up. So we did rainy, a cloudy, a snowy, a windy, and we sang them all out and the DJ, left the hole for him, to actually do the temperature and stuff.
We did a great Pretender weather. Where you going? Whatever DJs could use. It would be interesting that we all learned at JPZ. All those sections. We just mined them and tried to get 'em out to help other DJs and all that stuff. Started at JPZ. It was crazy.
JAG: And you guys were getting paid to send these gigs out to stations or just paid in exposure?
Tommy: We were paid. The hardest part, this is what we've learned from ACN. The first one we did, we would spend three weeks writing stuff. We'd write. We'd get a reel together, send out like a 20, 30-minute reel, all different bits, and they'd pick one. And I'm going, this is not efficient.
So ACN bought Frank and Al's, The Frank and Al series, which we started on JPZ. We probably did. 30 or 40 of them. There were five or six basically. Hi, I'm Frank. You never hear Al. And he basically does a string of puns. Okay. You can probably listen to some of the clips.
It's like a 30, 42nd. It's like Frank and Al's, vegetable Boutique, Frank and Al's Surf Shop. And then it's just an excuse for all these puns with a music drop. Got it. But they're really bad puns.
All these. So the ACN liked it, but they didn't like our voice. So they just bought the scripts. And I think they bought the scripts for 50 bucks or 75 bucks a time. And when you're a starving kid, it's holy crap, I'm getting 50 bucks for one sheet of paper. We were probably worth a lot more than that at the time, but we were making some money.
We're actually paying the bills with it. So we learned instead to change from doing 20 bits and only them taking two, trying to sell a format. That we can do dozens of and then don't have to redo it. So we ended up coming with a bunch of those with the other syndicators. So we did woman talks, which is definitely not PC anymore, which is three guys this show about women, for women, by men, and the men get it all wrong.
JAG: Okay. I mean there's, yeah, okay.
Tommy: You right now red lights are going off.
JAG: We won't play a clip of that, but I get your drift. Yes.
Tommy: Times have changed. We'll put it that way, but we tried to be respectful and we tried to punch upward whenever we're doing anything.
JAG: So what else have you done career-wise beyond everything you've described so far?
Tommy: For a while I worked at New England Cable News. I was in master control there. That was, I think, in between a couple of the cable gigs. So when I stopped doing the news gig, I ended up going to regional news instead.
And then after that I ended up getting into an operations manager position in Lawrence at the local cable station. And then that kind of went away after about a few years, I made it through five cable TV mergers.
JAG: Wow. That's impressive.
Tommy: Which I was proud of, but the last one got me. But I was producing different shows and stuff and then took a little break and then I ended up in the current job I'm in now, probably in 2003 or 2004.
Which is running a paid access station in Salem, New Hampshire. It's a different level, but it's actually very satisfying and a lot of different things. I'm inside the high school. I get to teach kids. I get to have fun with that, but I'm not directly teaching the kids. But we have a film club, so we're located in the high school and we utilize them as volunteers for different productions and things that we do. And we also produce the municipal meetings and things, all that nature. And while I've been doing that, as a sideline, which is not paid, is I hadn't been doing comedy for a long time or bits or anything. So my latest one was I started hooking up with Al Morgan, who used to be in one of the comedy things done at Syracuse.
Probably about 10, 12 years ago because I had wanted to do some music. So we did songs and things like that for this contest, and I ended up hooking up with all these internet music producers. So I can't say I founded it, but I was definitely a part of all these different ways. Basically, a group of people get together.
And they're given a prompt or a challenge. And they have X amount of time, like a week, to write a song using that, either the song title or that challenge. And then all those songs get gathered together after a week. And what I've been doing is I'm actually the guy who's been hosting it and play them.
And then it goes out that way, and then I host it live and then people get into the chat room and they can all say they like it or they don't like it and they're different contests. So I've been doing Spin Tunes for 10 years. I've been doing Song Fight for probably that for a while. And it's all these different internet groups that basically people in their basement or could be a full band.
Create a song to these prompts, and I've literally played 2,000 or 3,000 original songs that people have taken less than a week to write. Some of the stuff is magic, and probably with Al personally, we probably have written a hundred plus songs.
JAG: That's awesome.
Tommy: Maybe two or three of them are worthy of play, but we enjoy doing them and it's the process to being creative on how are you gonna answer that challenge. It's fun, but. Little crazy.
JAG: As we start to wrap up here, Tommy, any lessons that you haven't mentioned that you took with you from JPZ or relationships that you've been able to carry on throughout the years because of JPZ?
Tommy: Oh gosh. I really wish I could reach out to these people that I knew for so long at JPZ.
Some I do connect. And other people, it's like, how often do you get a chance to see 'em on Facebook? There were so many crazy people that I was able to meet and have a nice relationship with, and I appreciate them all because I learned so much from all of them. It was one of the happiest and saddest times of my life when I was at JPZ.
Specifically. during the crazy morning crew, because that was when my father was passing away.
JAG: Ah, okay.
Tommy: So he was ill in a hospital up the street and has a very nice, positive way to get, that's why I'd focused so much time and I turned it into a job and turned it into a livelihood for quite a few years. So it was very nice and everybody was so nice and welcoming and what was going on and making it happen.
But I hadn't really told most of the people, only a few knew what was going on at the time. But it was. It was good. It was. I hate to bring it down, but.
JAG: And let me say this. What you're describing is just been a common thread throughout the different episodes of this podcast is the family of JPZ.
Tommy: Oh yeah.
JAG: Whether we're laughing hysterically and we're still laughing at these stories decades later, or leaning on each other during difficult times. I go back to the 9-11 episode that we did where none of us knew what was going on, and we were just, what do we do? We find our family there at the radio station. And it sounds like that's what you were doing when you went through a really difficult time in your life.
Tommy: Oh yeah. No, I was, yeah. I didn't really pass it on too much, but everybody was supportive around me.
JAG: Last thing you said you wanna try to get a morning show reunion. You wanna get together a group of all the folks who did the morning show on JPZ.
Tommy: I would like to have the Morning JPZ club together. Cause I went to the first banquet and then I went to the 25th banquet and the first one, we were so obnoxious. Because we had barely left before. And I had dragged actually Pat to the first one because he's going, who were all these people that you're talking about?
Because Scott and I would do all these stories and it's oh, here's the thing, and he got to meet them and it's oh, hey, cool. Yeah, more friends. But when I went to the 25th, it's like all these people were coming up and they're going. They knew who I was or it's, hey I played those carts that you had left behind and stuff like that.
JAG: Wow, okay.
Tommy: And it's like, all right, that's neat. So it's slowly were realizing there was like Marty and Steve and a bunch of the other folks. It's like cousin Danny was there before I before I left. He was there as part of the thing, but there was a ton of people that came after me and a bunch that were at the reunions and the banquets that they would come up to me and I've gone, I don't know who you are, but we have a shared experience. And I get that. And it's the shared experience which gets you, cuz if, unless you've been in morning radio and know what it's like and what the pressures were, it's wait a minute, I hit the post.
You're gonna do a fist bump and everybody around you will go, what's the big deal about that? I'm going. No, he hit the posts. You don't get it. He not only hit the post, he hit three posts, waited, and then hit the fourth post, and they're going, what are you talking about?
JAG: It's a shared sickness. We all have that. When we listen to the radio and the car, we turn the music down and we turn it up as the song is starting to end.
Tommy: Exactly, and it's I couldn't tell you what the lyrics are, but I could tell you what the post is for all these songs because that's all you hear is the beginning and the end.
Cuz that's when you put the headphones on. So I would love to see either a listing o r a chat function of some way of all of us to get together and say, share that experience of what was was going on. If you did the morning show on WJPZ.
JAG: I did it for a semester, so I did it for a hot second.
Tommy: But anybody who participated, it is such a shared experience, just like we've seen with so many things in this. Podcast. I think it's a great place to leave it. Tommy G, class of 84. Thanks so much for being on with us today.
Oh, thank you. And thank you Jag, for doing this. I have not gone down this line and I was not planning to obviously say all the stuff I had said, but I'm glad I was glad able to share.
And thank you very much for doing this cuz it's neat hearing it back and now I'm getting to experience all the people that I missed in my years after I left and I'm going, we all have different stories, but they're very similar.
JAG: Exactly.
Tommy: We all have a shared experience and it's so cool that we're able to all share those experiences together.