Straight From The Mouth
The Morning Mouth's Month Interview with Gene & Julie
(Reprinted by permission; Copyright © 2001 Talentmasters Inc.)
For the second month in a row, we're spotlighting a morning show who,
although new to their market, are no strangers to the morning radio
community. Just a few years ago, following extraordinary success in
Albuqurque, Gene & Julie set out for the "big." Within a blink they landed in
Dallas. However, following an ownership change, their stay was short-lived,
but not short enough for many of radio's top executives to begin taking
notice. Among them, KZLA Los Angeles, where they took over mornings.
Following yet another ownership change, their stay here was even shorter than
in Dallas. Ironically, this may have been the biggest break of their careers.
Within weeks, they were inundated with offers. Their names were popping up in
nearly every major job search. Finally, it was announced that they had
accepted mornings at KZQZ/San Francisco. Oh yeah, did I tell you that while
they were going through this roller coaster couple of years, they got
married? Perhaps we should let them tell the rest of the story.
I'll get to business in a moment, but the Oprah in me has to ask:
Did you start your personal relationship from the get go? And weren't you
both involved with other people at the time?
J: Yeah, there was a romantic thing right from the start. It was a big
risk, scary, but fun.
How did you actually get together?
G: I was working young country in Seattle (KCPL) with a guy named Eric
Logan, and Julie was a personality on the morning show, she was also doing
traffic for Metro. She was on 9 radio stations in Seattle. I was a big fan of
her work. We worked together for a year. Julie did traffic on two of the
stations I worked at. Then, I got my first offer to do mornings, I was going
to go to San Bernadino. So I went to meet Julie for the very first time to
say good-bye, and that was the first time that we met face to face.
How did it go?
G: I went back to my radio station and I said, "I met the woman that I'm
going to marry."
Between KZLA and KZQZ, you were literally offered a half dozen or
more golden job opportunities, which goes against the common perception of
how consolidation has cut down on the number of good opportunities. Were you
surprised by the number of offers?
J: Even though we were employed and worked at stations, we were still
networking with great programmers. Casey Keating, our Program Director here
in San Francisco, is one of those rare guys who took our call when we were
working in Modesto. Nobody knew who we were. Max Miller was fabulous and we
loved working with him, but nobody else would take our call. It really pays
off in the long haul to stay in touch with people.
How do I say this the right way? Is it just me, but every time we've
spoken by phone or e-mail, the two of you are always together. Why is
that?
J: That is totally by design, and it freaks people out, but we learned
early on that if people would just talk to Gene, they would think Gene was
the host and I was his sidekick or vice versa. So we decided right in the
beginning, no matter what, we're a team. No exceptions. We only do personal
appearances as a team. We only do testimonials as a team. We share business
cards. We have one e-mail address, one voicemail. We just really had to brand
us as this one entity. Gene & Julie is one thing.
How personal do you get on the air about your lives?
J: We share everything. I was home with the flu one day and I was not
listening to the radio that morning. So, he told a very personal and
embarrassing story about me. We were on vacation in a hotel room.
G: We were interviewing.
J: Ok, yeah. I was so nervous about this particular job interview, I had
the worst upset stomach known to mankind. So Gene is out in the hotel room on
the phone talking to our perspective employer, and I'm in the bathroom with
an upset stomach. As I am standing up and pulling up my pantyhose, my elbow
knocks the phone, you know how every hotel bathroom has a phone, knocks the
phone in the toilet.
G: The unflushed toilet!
J: So Gene is on the phone and I'm dropping the other phone in the toilet.
I'm laughing hysterically. I pick it up and wipe it with a towel real quick
and put it back in the cradle.
I hope there's not pictures of that for The Mouth?
J: There's no pictures. ...months later when I'm home with the flu, not
listening to the radio, Gene's telling this story. He has managed to convince
several members of the audience to call in the next day and pretend to be
members of the health department, and say 'The people who had been staying in
that particular room at the hotel had been reporting getting terrible rashes
on their ear and face when using the phone.' They wanted to know if I had
received the same rash.
Do you ever fear being together too much?
J: That's a great question. I think when we need the time apart, we both
take it. Then we take those different experiences and put them on the air.
What's also really interesting is that the two of us will be at the same
situation, doing the same thing, and have totally different reactions and
responses. Sometimes that is even more interesting on the radio, that we both
did the same thing and we don't even agree on what we observed.
Have you ever hit a bump in your relationship?
J: Really early on we did. That's when we decided we were going to be a
team no matter what. We were in Modesto, it was our first job as a team. We
were figuring out the show. We got a call from back home that they were going
to launch a CHR and they wanted one of us to host the morning show. They
wanted the other one of us to work in Sales.
G: I don't even think it was Sales. I was going to voice track for
different stations and do a different shift or whatever. But they only wanted
one person on the morning show and they wanted it to be a woman.
J: That almost split us up. That's when we started seeing the best
therapist we ever seen. We almost broke up and called it quits over that.
That event made Gene feel so betrayed.
Whose advice have you never forgotten?
J: I have a good example. Our OM in Albuquerque was Frank Jackson. He
pulled me and Gene in a meeting and he says, 'Look guys, you need to slow
down and spend more time in the smoking section.' We were like, 'What are you
talking about!?' We were working our tails off. We really wanted to succeed
in the ratings and we felt this pressure with time and we had to do it fast.
We realize now that what he was saying is, 'Slow down. Spend time with the
staff, you gotta make everyone in the building a P1, if they are on your side
then they will do everything they can to help you succeed outside of the
radio station.'
What are some tricks for getting media attention when you are the
new morning show in town?
G: We have been on TV five times since we've been here. That's in three
months. I think that people need to remember one thing, every reporter has a
job to do. Every reporter is trying to find a great story that they can do
well and be recognized for doing good work.
J: We press release up the ying yang. Everything we do. We build
relationships with all the newsrooms and the newspapers. I think the most
important thing is not only writing a good press release, but find out who it
is suppose to go to and make sure it gets to them. You have got to make sure
you are sending it to the right people and then we always call after we send
it. We confirm that they received it and then ask if they are going to send
someone out to cover the story.
What kind of things got you on TV?
J: We did this bit, "Madonna's coming to town." We asked people who would
give their right arm for Madonna tickets. We had five listeners put their arm
in a cast for a week and they had to see how many celebrity autographs they
could get on their cast. Well, the Wednesday they came in, we had a TV crew
waiting for them.
G: We did another event, because we found out about foster care, that
sometimes children have to carry their clothing around in garbage bags when
they go from home to home. So we did a thing called "Cases for Kids", where
people could come by and drop off gently used and new bags that would go to
foster kids. So these kids would have a little bit of dignity when they got
shuffled from home to home. That's just a big slam dunk that got coverage.
What do you fear most?
G: Failure, probably.
J: This will sound really insecure, but I fear not being respected by my
peers. I had an occasion once when I went on a radio web site and we had just
taken on a new job and we were really excited. I went in to look at their
postings and someone wrote something so horribly mean about us, and this
happens to jocks all over the country, but for some reason that just sunk in
and made me feel so horrible. You know you should blow that stuff off, but
it's so sad how hurtful people are in these blind chatrooms I think we are
all seeking public approval or we wouldn't be disc jockeys.
What do you want most?
J: Happiness really. I just want to have fun. I want to do a job where I
have a good time, where I work with people I care about and where I can make
a difference in the world. I am doing that with radio. When this isn't fun
any more, then something new will come along.
What's the best thing a PD can tell a morning show after a bad
book?
G: Take a load off. Don't worry about it. You are going to have a down
book. You live by the book, you die by the book. You have to look at a
rolling trend. A book is not going to make you realize that you have a
problem. If a book makes you realize that you have a problem, then I think
there is a bigger problem there.
Do you think radio is experiencing more morale issues now than in
the past?
G: Yes, I don't' know if this is true, but I keep reading that radio is
losing audience. I think there is a particular kind of attitude that a lot of
programmers and consultants seem to be into, and I do think that there is a
lot of the audience that isn't in to that. That sort of mean and vile
attitude, it's just too much of one thing.
J: I also think there is a lot of fear right now in our business, because
of consolidation and a lot of layoffs.
What would you do boost morale?
J: There's one thing that happened that totally changed the way I look at
people in radio. We were in market 121 in Modesto. We were completely broke
and Gene and I shared the salary of one person, just to see if we could get
our show to work. We were flat broke, couldn't afford our groceries. And
there's a dj in Los Angeles who we called to network with called Hagan
Higgins, he was on KZLA. We said, 'Can we drive and visit you and see what
it's like in your big studio in LA and watch you do a shift someday?' He was
wonderful. He said, 'yeah, you come on down and check out what I do.' We sat
in on a weekend airshift. We got some advice from him on how to do a better
show and how to move up to bigger markets. The next week Hagan sent us a $100
check and the sweetest letter in the world. It said, 'Gene and Julie, Here's
a hundred dollars. Please go out and buy yourself the nicest dinner and have
a great time. Hagan' That just move us so much. It's one of those things
where we have to keep remembering to look back to the people who are trying
to break into this business and do what we can to help them. It was just an
amazing thing that he did. I just wish that everyone in radio would remember
that person who did something like that for them.
Have you ever communicated with him since?
G: Yeah. All the time.
J: He's still a mentor. We are still very close friends.
G: We have a little thing we call the Hagan Higgins Award. Every year we
give at least $100 dollars to someone who is in radio that we meet that is
struggling. We do it every year.
Read previous Morning Mouth interviews.
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