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Friday, July 11, 2008
7/11: 99X’s Steve Craig moving to New York’s WRXP-FM to join Leslie Fram
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A second 99X vet is off to New York: on the heels of Leslie Fram taking over a new rock station at the Big Apple, long-time 99X mid-day host Steve Craig will be joining her soon. He’ll be doing mid-days at 101.9/WRXP-FM.
“It’s bittersweet to leave a town I love,” he told me today, “but it’s exciting to be building a new radio station. Craig, best known for his lunch hour “Retroplex” on 99X for 15 years, lost his on-air gig in January when 99X became an online-only operation. For the last few weeks, with his contract about to run out, he’s been doing shifts on 99X.com, heard by about 98 percent fewer people.
Craig reached out to Dave FM’s program director Mike Wheeler in January but didn’t hear back. He said he also contacted Rick Caffey, Wheeler’s boss, but Caffey deferred to Wheeler. Craig’s contract with 99X is up August 1 but he was allowed to start negotiating with other parties July 1. The WRXP gig came up immediately so he didn’t really pursue Dave FM, which would have been a good fit for him but he would have been held back by a non-compete clause and kept off the air until February 2009.
As for the New York gig, he doesn’t have a starting date just yet but it should be within a few weeks.
Fram is now the program director and doing some morning work with host Matt Pinfield.
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7/11: Whatever happened to… Willard?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Willard Arbour was a fixture in Atlanta rock radio for 32 years, starting at WRAS-FM at Georgia State and seguing for most of his career to 96rock, then a final stint at Z93.
He left the airwaves in 2004 but he only recently has left radio itself, switching to sales the past four years after Z93 became Dave FM. And he wasn’t half bad at it.
Nonetheless, the 52-year-old has decided to retire today from radio and move to the North Georgia mountains. I talked to him last week.
He said the turning point was late last year when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer (he’s okay right now) and received an unspecified big financial inheritance: “It changed my outlook and priorities.” And though he enjoyed sales, “the stress of the business was aging me and I’m not ready to be aged.”
“I’m not saying I’m going to retire. It’s a lifestyle change… I expect to live long enough to be a burden to my children,” he joked.
He said he loved his 35-plus years in radio: “I’ve had more fun that I’ve forgotten than most radio people remember in their lifetime.”
Ironically, he said he made this decision to retire in his mind earlier this year and proceeded to have his three best sales months of his life. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t need it,” he said. “People sense desperation.”
Willard’s reason for switching to sales after Z93 folded in 2004? “They don’t fire sales people. Sales people drive newer cars. It’s not bad.” His clients included Inview Lasik Vision and Live Nation, the concert promoter.
Not a huge number of DJs do well in sales, but Willard said he had a good feel for the market. “You need to know what’s a good match, what will fly and what won’t fly,” he said.
Willard’s longest stint was at 96rock for 20-plus years. “It was like WKRP on steroids in its heyday,” he said. “If you can think of anything crazy, anything wild, we did it. I remember riding up and down the ramps at Bobby Dodd Stadium during concerts in one of those carts and interviewing Aerosmith in the radio booth at Lakewood.”
He recalls Van Halen in 1984 using one of the studios next to 96rock to do the syndicated show “Rockline.” “They had a parade of people coming in and out,” he said. “Just chaos! There was a stripper. I was in the next room watching this through the glass.”
As mid-day host, he recalls playing “You Are So Beautiful” for his newborn daughter. He also recalls talking about his divorce over the air. His most embarrassing moment? Taking a sledgehammer to a car at a tractor pull before 60,000 people in the Georgia Dome and nothing happening. “You could have heard a pin drop,” he said. “It was so funny!”
He also remembers losing the 96rock van after he drank too much and a buddy drove him home. Fortunately, a man at a bar he couldn’t remember going to called and got him his van before he got in trouble. He recalls getting pulled over for speeding but cops recognizing him and letting him off scot free. He was never suspended but one time he let a gal in a nightie into the van, hanging outside the window, causing him to end up with a caravan of cars behind him.
He was blown out of 96rock five days before Christmas in the mid-1990s. “They brought in a guy who woudl work for half of what we were making,” he said. “I was devastated, That was the worst Christmas of my life.”
Z93 gave him a new lease on life in 1997, doing nights, then days. But in 2004, he lost his gig again. “I was pretty freaked out,” he said. Ironically, the woman who took over the station as Dave FM, Michelle Engel (now gone) was Willard’s intern years earlier at 96rock.
Mara Davis today did a lovely farewell segment to Willard at 9:15 a.m.
“You’ve touched a lot of people’s lives,” Davis said. “I still get people saying, ‘What’s happened to Willard?’ … You were one of the greatest people I’ve ever worked with.”
Coolest concert: “I saw the Stones at the Fox Theatre in the front row,” he said. Best interview: Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. (oops—I wrote Yes, thinking Jon Anderson. Thanks for the correction, readers!)
He said he can be contacted (at least for the next three weeks) via this address: Willardfm@bellsouth.net.
-Jimmy Baron finished up his week as fill in for Zakk Tyler this week on Dave FM. What did you think of his stint? He worked it hard, interviewing George Stephanopoulus, Salman Rushdie, Warren Savage and Creed from “The Office.” And his mom texted him during his Stephanopoulus interviewing telling him he was talking too much. He ended his week with copious thank you’s to Dave FM program director Mike Wheeler and to Zakk and Jane.
“In the past couple of years, I’ve done a little bit of radio in other cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit and San Francisco,” he told the listeners. “People ask me what’s the difference doing it in those cities? The difference is this is my home court. I love this city. So it’s like when you go to a party and know everybody. You can be yourself compared to when you walk into a party for your wife’s work.”
And for those who want to email him, Baron can be contacted through his myspace page at www.myspace.com/jimmybaron
