Living On Air by Cipriano Joe

Author:Cipriano, Joe [Cipriano, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joe Cipriano Promos Inc.
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

KIIS AM & FM

The biggest, big-time station I have ever worked at was KIIS radio. Number one in Los Angeles. It was huge! The FM that is, not exactly where I was going. The AM was number 25 in the ratings. At that time, there was a rule by the FCC that prohibited major market stations from simulcasting on both AM and FM. We played the same music as the FM, the same commercials, even the same jingles, but we had a completely different on-air staff. And when I say we played the same music, I mean we played the exact same song at the exact same time. KIIS was allowed to simulcast Rick Dees from six in the morning until ten, after that the two stations parted ways. On the AM, Steve Lehman did middays, Larry Morgan afternoons, Benny Martinez was on from six to ten at night, then I came on from ten to two in the morning, followed by Tom Murphy on the overnight shift.

Listen, it was a job and it paid good money, but if I thought we didn’t have a big audience on KKHR, we had next to no one listening on KIIS-AM. I hadn’t worked on an AM station since WWCO, and that was ten years ago. KIIS-AM had a point one share. Not a one share, a POINT one. I would do a contest to give away an album or concert tickets, to the twentieth caller, and it turned out the winner had also been the fifth caller, and the eleventh, and the fifteenth, before we both finally hit number 20. Sometimes it seemed there were more people listening to the station in our building than there were out in the entire city.

Since absolutely no one was paying attention to us, we tried to amuse ourselves. My friend, comedy writer Louise Palanker, who wrote the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 show, liked to work at night. With her at the station most evenings, I would utilize her comedic skills for a “joke-off” bit I did. Weeze, as I called her, would tell a joke on the air and one of our phone operators at the station would tell a joke and we let our four listeners decide who won. Weeze and I shared many late-night laughs and talks about our futures.

With my whole day free I worked even harder on jump-starting my voice-over career. I discovered that finding work in this business is a never-ending quest. Unless you’re in such demand that you actually have to turn down a job, you need to stay on top of what’s happening around you. That’s where a good agent comes into play. By this time, I had already been represented by Nina Nisenholtz at the iconic William Morris Agency. The building was one block over from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a thrill going into the office for auditions, even if I didn’t book a gig that week. Later I worked with Vanessa Gilbert at TGI and then Steve Tisherman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.