Straight From the Mouth

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 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.