Dave Foxx, Z100/WHTZ-FM, New York
by Jerry Vigil
Imagine having to image only one station, being paid very well to do it, and not having to deal with commercials. A rare job description these days for sure, but dream jobs like this still exist. One of them is at Z100 in New York. But perhaps we should ask ourselves whether this dream job, or any other, would exist without the individual who has it. And in that case, perhaps it is the individual who creates the dream job. And if that’s true, then we know why there are very few dream jobs… because there are very few finely polished pros like Dave Foxx. This month’s RAP Interview catches up with Dave ten years after our first visit with him. We find him into his fourteenth year with Z100 and having more fun than ever.
JV: Who owned the station when we last interviewed you, and how did consolidation change things in the last decade?
Dave: Malrite Communications, out of Cleveland, Ohio owned us at the time. Milton Maltz was the President and CEO. We had seven or eight other radio stations throughout the country, and one TV station in Puerto Rico. That was it. But things changed. Slowly but surely, we saw the signs of consolidation at Z. Shamrock came along and bought the station from Malrite. Shamrock was owned by Walt Disney’s brother, who is now running the Disney empire. He bought the entire Malrite chain and combined that with another one that he had, and at that point we were up to like fifteen stations.
Then came probably the second biggest jump and that’s when we became part of the Chancellor Media family. After a while and a lot more acquisitions, we became Chancellor Broadcasting. Then we started talking with Evergreen. Jimmy DeCastro and the crew came in and decided to keep the name Chancellor for about a year but then changed it to AM/FM. By this time, I think we were up to four hundred and fifty stations nationwide. And of course, a little over a year ago Clear Channel came in and bought us. They already owned Jacor at that point, and the last number I heard was twelve hundred radio stations worldwide, plus outdoor advertising, plus SFX.
Consolidation has presented some interesting opportunities for radio, at least for us. Because we own SFX, it has given us some incredible promotional opportunities that we just didn’t have access to before, like when it comes to doing a concert. We work directly with the promoters who do all the concerts in the New York City area. We’re sister companies, and now we coordinate things and work with each other. So when someone is coming to town with a tour, it’s a lot easier for us to get tickets if we want them. It’s a lot easier for us to go backstage. It’s just a lot easier, period. Also, because we own a lot of outdoor, we’re starting to be able to utilize some of that at a reduced rate and do more outdoor advertising than we ever have before.
JV: Have there been PD changes over this time?
Dave: When I got there, Scott Shannon was Program Director, and I got there not too long after he had signed on. Steve Kingston was the Operations Manager, and when Scott left and went to Los Angeles for that brief stint at Pirate Radio, Steve Kingston became the Program Director/Operations Manager. When Chancellor came in and Steve’s contract came up, they opted to go with Tom Poleman, which was really interesting to me because the two of them had been constantly vying for number one PD in a major market for years. So three PDs and six GMs, and if you count all the name changes, six companies.
JV: Did the station change format at all in this time?
Dave: Not really. In the early nineties when alternative music became such a powerful force in popular music, we were playing a lot of alternative music, and because of that, we had to change some of the trappings of the radio station. Jingles came off, and the announcing style changed because it just sounded goofy to have this nice bright happy pop sound going into Nirvana. But then, as the world took it’s blinders off and started realizing that this music was really depressing, we started seeing acts like the Spice Girls and the other super produced acts that are out there now—N Sync, Back Street Boyz, Destiny’s Child, Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson. Then we were able to move that central target back into the more pop sounding kind of music. And then we were able to bring back all the other stuff—jingles and the CHR delivery that we’d been used to doing for so long. Technically, we really never changed formats. That’s just where the music was for a long time.
JV: Ten years ago, it was just the one station you were dealing with there. Is it still that way?
Dave: Yes. I’m very fortunate. I know a lot of people across the country are having to image three, four, and five radio stations. I’m not sure I could deal with the insanity of that—having to put on one hat for a day so you could do an oldies station, then a different hat the next day to do a rock station. I’m very fortunate in that Z100 is the only station I deal with. I have very cordial relations with the other stations in the market, particularly in our cluster, but I don’t have anything to do with their imaging.
JV: What has kept you in that one place for fourteen years?
Dave: They ain’t broke. And I’m still having a good time. In fact, without talking too much inside shop, I am working without a contract, and have been for the last several years. And I’ve made it very clear to Tom Poleman and John Fullam, who is now leaving us, that it’s fine with me to not have a contract. I don’t need this job anymore. I’m at a point now where I earn quite a bit of my income from other sources, but I’m having too much fun to leave Z100. I mean, I’m having an absolute ball. Since Tom Poleman came into this radio station, it’s changed everything. Of course, his timing also happened to coincide with the change from Alternative back into real mainstream CHR, but I’m having more fun now than I think I’ve ever had doing this job.
JV: In last month’s interview with John Frost, he mentioned feeling that his creative juices were kind of running low after about as many years at KROQ as you have under your belt at Z100. Do you have similar feelings?
Dave: From time to time. He was in a different format, of course, and I think sometimes a format like that limits you as to what you can do. Now, he obviously stretched the boundaries of those limits quite a bit, but the thing that’s nice about doing CHR production is that you can take a whole different approach. Today, for instance, I did a promo for the on-line rewards program we use for our listeners that had a very classical theme to it. You couldn’t do that on a lot of radio stations. It would sound out of place, weird. Here, because we sound out of place and weird all the time, it fits right in.
I also pull a “Madonna” every once in a while. Madonna is famous in the music business for reinventing herself every so many years, and I sometimes get to a point where I feel I need to pull a Madonna. I need to completely redesign what I sound like and redesign how I approach my work. If I look back in the time since the last interview, my thinking now is much more focused on marketing than it is on cool sound. At that time, it was all about doing things that sound cool and help imprint the radio station on the market. Now, it’s the other way around. It’s like everything is about imprinting the radio station on the market, and oh, if it sounds cool, that’s great. But I’ve found, generally speaking, that if you take care of one, the other one is taken care of all by itself.
So, I pull a Madonna every now and then. I think that’s important. I think everybody needs to from time to time. If anybody wants to really grow in this business as a producer, they need to do that. They need to sit down and rethink, not just their approach to doing production, but the tools they use. And I’m not talking in the technical sense. I’m talking about which music beds they use, which sound effects libraries they use. They need to change that from time to time, given the budget constraints we all have to live with. I think it’s really important that you kind of rethink how you approach just getting into doing a promo.
JV: Is Hal Knapp still handling commercials over there?
Dave: Yes, he is, and he’s doing quite well at it by the way.
JV: How many people on the production staff?
Dave: Well, officially, we have two with Hal and me. We also have a third person that is working with us in an archiving effort. We moved two years ago from Secaucus to Jersey City, and when we moved, we pretty much left our archives in huge disarray. Some of the original broadcasts that aired back in August of 1983, we couldn’t lay our hands on when we wanted to. So we took on a part-time person who is doing nothing but archiving everything—going over to Secaucus, bringing stuff back, transferring it to DAT, baking tapes when he needs to, the whole nine yards—just so we can have this solid backup of all the history of the radio station. So officially, I’d say two and a half people on staff.
JV: Ten years ago you were on an analog eight-track. What was the first digital workstation you installed?
Dave: Well, we fooled around for a while with New England Digital system. I’m really glad we didn’t go that way, although management was ready to do it. They, of course, went out of business like a year later. ProTools was the first one we really used on a full-time basis, and now it’s the only one we use. We keep doing test drives, checking out other systems, but I’ve yet to find one that I think is as flexible and allows for as much creativity as ProTools does.
JV: How long have you been using ProTools?
Dave: Almost ten years. I used ProTools back when it was two applications, Edit and Deck. About four years later they consolidated it into one application, which was wonderful. And now they’re into eight channel mixing on a single track and doing things that just two years ago would have been unheard of.
JV: You’re probably as proficient on ProTools as anybody, and it is becoming very popular in radio and giving the Audicy some competition. However, Audicy users tend to really stand on the claim that it’s faster when it comes to editing. What do you think?
Dave: It can be, but if you know how to do it correctly, ProTools is actually faster because a lot of it is automatic. There are certain commands you can do that will just strip a voice track of all of its blank parts, and you just go through and pluck out the ones you don’t want. Done.
The advantage that Audicy has over ProTools is that it was designed with radio in mind, and I can’t fault them for that. But there’s a glass ceiling there that I think a lot of Audicy users are not aware of. I was just training Ann DeWig from DC101 on ProTools, which she’s getting in a couple of weeks. She already had the free version of ProTools and had been playing around with it at home, and after she watched me, she said “My god, I had no idea how restrained I was, how fenced in I was by the system I was using.” On the other hand, there are people who have switched to ProTools and didn’t like it. Even after they learned how to use it, it was just too complex for them. They’d much rather do a cut and paste, slam it together, get on with life—and that’s okay. If that’s the style you do, that works better for you.
I want to experiment with stuff. I want to try different things, different plug-ins. I found a few that really work for me. I will at least once a week take a promo and spend two or three hours on it instead of spending twenty minutes on it the way I do a lot of promos. That was the one luxury digital brought to the table that I just never had with analog. With analog I was spending all my time aligning everything. I had to have a real clear picture in my head before I even started so that I could make it all come together and flow and make sense and get from the beginning to the end with a minimum amount of potholes. The things I like about digital are being able to do and undo, try different plug-ins, try different approaches. And if things don’t quite work right, you can move things around very quickly and very easily until they work the way you think they ought to work. I used to demonstrate ProTools at some of the trade shows, the NAB and AES, and one of the things I warned people about was that this is going to save you a lot of time, yes, but you’re going to end up spending the same amount of time if not more because you can. You have the power to do all of these things, whereas before you just didn’t have that ability.
JV: Ten years ago, salespeople were writing copy at Z100. Has that changed?
Dave: Somewhat. We now have our Continuity Director write most of the copy, and the salesperson will pitch in from time to time. Of course, agencies write a lot of the copy, too. But that doesn’t involve me because all I do is creative, and I’m in probably the world’s best situation for that because Tom and I are on such a wavelength that basically he’s turned it all over to me. Our assistant PD will give me all the copy points, all the things that have to be in the promo—sponsor mentions, particular songs—and I will weave that into a story or into a standard promo, whatever it is that we’re doing. I’ll write it up. When I first started writing, I used to take the copy to Tom, and he would look at it and might pencil a few things differently. But since then, I don’t even bother doing that. I just produce it. He listens to it, and I’d say ninety-eight times out of a hundred, he just gives me a thumbs-up and says, “Way to go.”
So now I get to write it, I get to voice it, I get to produce it. I do not have to spend any time interpreting what somebody else meant. In the old days, when we last did the interview, Steve Kingston would write the copy and fax it to Keith Eubanks. Keith would cut the tracks on DAT, send them to me overnight, and I would walk in and find a DAT waiting for me, not even knowing there was a promo expected. I had no script. I would just sit down and listen to what Keith did. So basically, Keith was interpreting what Steve wrote. I’m interpreting what Keith read. And if you know the old telephone game where one person starts at one end of the room and you pass a rumor along, you know what happens. It’s like that old Mayberry episode where Barney Fife got a blood blister and ended up being stabbed and having to go to the hospital. By the time the promo goes through all those channels, it gets changed. And doing it this way—writing it, voicing it and producing it—gives it a clarity of vision that I have seldom been able to achieve in my own career.
JV: Add the fact that you now put the marketing aspect of the promo ahead of making it “sound cool,” and I’m sure they think, “Hey, you know what you’re doing; do your thing.”
Dave: That’s a big part of it, and anyone who hasn’t read The Twenty-two Immutable Laws of Marketing is short-changing himself. Understanding why certain things are the way they are and understanding how to better position your radio station, knowing how to use your logo, knowing how to use your call letters to the best advantage, that all works in a big favor, and that’s something you’ll get from the book. It’s a real skinny little book. You can read it in twenty minutes.
JV: What are some of the marketing basics that you use when you do a promo? Once you get the facts and the elements you need to include, what is the process you go through with marketing in mind?
Dave: Well, I start by thinking about who our target is and try to think about what is going to appeal to them. In our case, it’s an eighteen-year-old female who lives in the suburbs of New York—not to exclude everybody else but that’s our target. If we can hit that target, then the others will follow. So, I start thinking about what is going to appeal to this girl about this particular promotion that I’m going to work on. If it’s an N Sync concert in Turks and Caicos, then it’s not about Turks and Caicos. They could care less about that. It’s about N Sync. So, it’s a matter of going through and discovering exactly what main thing is going to appeal to them. Then you gear everything in the promo toward that. If there’s going to be a story told, then I tell the story leading to that point. If it’s just going to be a basic presentation of the excitement of the concert—fast edits and all the usual promo tricks we fall back on when we can’t think of a good story line—then everything is pointed to that same thing. So, it’s a heavy hit on N Sync rather than the fact that it’s in Turks and Caicos. Being able to put the blinders on and see things as your target audience does is what these marketing skills will give you more than anything else. It will teach you to see things the way they want to see them, not the way you think they ought to be.
JV: Satellite radio is right on top of us, in more ways than one. Do you see satellite radio being as big as FM radio is?
Dave: Maybe. I’m adopting a wait and see attitude. I’m not sure people want to pay for radio. I’m sure some people will, especially if they know they can get it commercial-free, in their favorite format. If somebody really digs hearing REM all the time, they can tune in the REM channel and be just as happy as pigs. But I’m not convinced people are going to stay with that because one of the real draws to radio is the personality, somebody there in the car with you when you’re making that long, lonely drive home at night. It’s not just having a tune on. It’s having somebody sit there and talk to you about the weather, talk to you about what’s going on in the world, bring you back up to date. You feel like there’s a world out there that you belong to. So, I’m not really sure how that whole commercial-free aspect of satellite is going to work. Of course, not all satellite will be commercial-free. On some of it they will be selling commercials. I think you’ll see a bigger proliferation of the talk formats, the hot talk and the news talk. That’s a huge format here in New York. They are very popular and don’t seem to be going away at all. I think that’s going to grow.
JV: Do you think Internet radio has a shot?
Dave: No. Internet radio so far—and I have to add that caveat so far—has been so unimpressive that I don’t know if it is going to affect that many people. Most of the people who are doing it—again I have to say most of the people who are doing Internet radio—don’t have the marketing savvy. They don’t have the things being in broadcasting thirty years brings to a person, and so their stations are not as polished. They are not as easy to listen to. I’m not sure that is going to improve any time soon, but I really don’t think Internet radio is going to be a huge factor.
As for Satellite radio though, I’m reserving judgment. That could have a huge impact. I think it will probably redefine what AM and FM radio does. I’m not sure exactly how. Another thing—and it’s kind of hard for me to talk about this as far as the whole country is concerned because we’re not playing this huge spot load that so many of the other FM stations around the country are having to deal with. We’re still down at eight minutes or nine units, whichever comes first. And that allows us to do the format the way it was supposed to be done. And there are a lot of radio stations in medium and even in large markets that are having to deal with eighteen minutes of spots. How can you win doing eighteen minutes of spots? You can’t. And that’s where satellite is going to have the biggest impact. So who knows? It may actually cut back on our producers’ workloads because I think FM, and to a lesser extent AM radio stations, are going to have to learn to make their commercials count more and play less, because that’s the only way they will be able to compete with stations that don’t run commercials, if the programming is good on those stations.
JV: As all these satellite channels become available to people, do you think the GMs and programmers of these channels are going to go out and hire good talent, good on-air talent, good production people to polish that sound, to garner the audience, to garner the revenue?
Dave: Oh, I think so. I happen to know a producer who’s working at XM, and he’s a really good producer. His name is Kelly Carmichael. He’s working on two of their channels down there. He feels they are developing a real camaraderie as they get closer and closer to launch date. They’re paying a lot of attention to production. They’ve sucked a lot of money into their studios. They have like forty production suites, all fully blown ProTools suites with the big cinema screens—awesome, awesome facilities. They certainly seem to be willing to spend the money on the hardware. The only question left open is how much money are they going to have left over for the human factor.
JV: An article in last month’s RAP talks about how good-paying production jobs seem to be going away. Do you think we’ll see broadcasters in general—radio, satellite and Internet—handle their production departments by bringing in some interns or amateurs, settling for mediocrity, and then hoping that everybody else in the industry does the same thing so there won’t be any big dog to beat?
Dave: Well, I don’t know. Without getting too deeply philosophical here, I think we’re coming close to a point where the bean counter will rule over radio. One way or another, it’s going to have to break and satellite may be the impetus. The thing the bean counters don’t understand—and I can show you the actual statistics—is that good production can make a difference of twenty-five percent in your share. If you’re running a four share, you can boost it to a five with excellent production if your production is just so-so to begin with. Conversely, bad production can compress your ratings by that much. And believe me, I know exactly where to get the figures. I can show people this. But you tell that to the bean counters, and their eyes just glaze over. They don’t care. Their soul is not in radio the way it is with someone like you or me. We live and die by what we do because this is what we love, and we liked it the old way. I think that many of those good-paying production jobs are going away because bean counters see it as an unnecessary expense.
JV: What would you say to the young guys and gals getting into radio production who may have read last month’s article?
Dave: Keep the faith. It can’t stay that way for long and have the business remain viable. I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but if it keeps going the direction it’s going right now, I think ultimately it’s going to crash and burn, and the business is going to fall apart. Then the bean counters won’t have any beans to count, and they’re going to sit there going “Why?” And it’s because they forget that it’s not just science; it’s art and science. And that’s where people like you and me come in. We bring the art to the process. Anybody can put up a stick, tie a transmitter to it, and spin records. That doesn’t take much in the way of skill. Putting the records in the right order, playing the right records, playing the right production to go between the records, and having a body there to, again, give it a human factor, that’s all part of the art of radio. And that’s something the bean counters just don’t get.
JV: Sounds a little bit like the stock market bubble that finally burst and sent everybody back down to reality.
Dave: And I suspect that is going to happen. How soon that is, I don’t know. I work for a company that’s known as “Cheap Channel,” and I have seen the budget cutting efforts. They’ve been substantial, but so far, at least from my perspective in New York—and I have to clarify that because other people would disagree—so far it has not affected the art part. And I think that’s because the head guys, like Randy Michaels, get it. They understand it. They love radio because of radio. They’re not there just for the money. Certainly, money is a factor, but it’s not the whole reason. So, to those who call Clear Channel “Cheap Channel,” I don’t think so. They’ve made some smart moves money-wise, and the consolidation they are doing makes sense to me, not just from a business point of view but from an overall radio point of view.
JV: You mentioned your free-lance work is doing well. Is this mostly imaging and voice work for radio?
Dave: It’s mostly voice work now. I don’t do much in the way of imaging for the radio stations. It’s really funny. They are willing to pay, say just a ballpark figure of a thousand dollars a month, for voice talent. But when it comes to imaging, they want to pay fifteen dollars a piece. I found myself just having to bow to the pressure of the market and say, “Look, I’ll sell my voice, but I’m not going to sell my production for fifteen dollars a piece. I’m sorry.” And they wanted seventy-five or eighty pieces a month. No thank you. So mostly, it’s voice work, and I’ve recently branched out into doing TV stations as well.
The other thing I’m doing that I’m having a lot of fun with is website design for people. I’ve had some awesome success with just the few websites I have done, and word of mouth is traveling fast. People are calling me up and saying, “I need you to do my website.” I’m actually at a point now where I have to put people off and say, “Okay, I’ll do it, but it will be like a month before I can even look at it.”
JV: Where did you find the time to learn this stuff?
Dave: It’s been my hobby up to about a year ago when I really got serious. It was just a hobby. I had my own site, and I was having fun poking around trying to make it do certain things. Then I discovered that to make it do these things, you have to go through this, do that, this and that. Finally I got to a point where I understood enough of it to where I can actually design a site for somebody. I’ll put it up, do the graphics, do the flash, do whatever, and then turn the whole thing over to them and let them maintain it. I’m not interested in maintaining it for people. That’s a pain.
JV: Still, it seems like a time-consuming task just learning the languages.
Dave: Some of it is. But there are so many reference works on them that it’s really not all that hard.
JV: Well, apparently it’s not taking up that much of your time. When we started this interview, you had just returned from flying lessons. How are those going?Dave: I’m having a ball. I just got into it in the last couple of weeks, so I’m not very far along. I’ve not soloed yet, but by the time this interview comes out, I will have soloed and will be looking toward doing my first cross-country. I’m really enjoying it. It’s a lot of fun, a lot of freedom. My father was a pilot, and I grew up around airplanes all my life. I just never honestly had the time to do it. Now I’ve decided I’m making the time to do it, and I’m really glad I have.
JV: The times you’ve been up there flying your plane, did you ever give a thought to production?
Dave: No.