Matt Bisbee, Creative Services Director, Bonneville Broadcasting, Chicago, IL
By Jerry Vigil
This month’s RAP Interview stops in at Market #3 for a long overdue interview with Matt Bisbee, one of Chicago radio’s most talented and well known creatives. Matt is best known for his amazing run of 26 years at the legendary WLUP, The Loop. In last month’s interview with Jude Corbett, Jude said of Matt’s imaging contributions to WLUP that Matt was “almost equally as important a personality as the morning show and afternoon show.” Matt tells us about those days, about his new home with the Bonneville stations in Chicago, and we get some tips on how one goes about becoming such an integral part of a station’s personality, from the production room. You’ll love the audio from Matt on this month’s RAP CD!
JV: When did you get the bug for radio?
Matt: In high school, a friend of mine in Park Ridge, Illinois, lived across the street from me. He got a job as a board-op at WLS Radio, and he invited me to come downtown because he knew I had interest in, well, things like stereo equipment and also performing because I was in a lot of the plays and variety shows in high school. So he says, “Why don’t you come down and take a look at this, just watch me run the board,” and so I did. I went down and I watched him and got a chance to see how a Top 40 jock would sit on one side of the glass, and my friend Dan would be on the other side. I saw that and that was it; I was like, “Oh my God, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! This is somebody’s job? You got to be kidding me!”
It was just great to see the person behind the glass talking and giving hand signals to Dan, and him loading up the cart machines and hitting the jingles and then hitting the song and then have the DJ hit the post, I’m like, “Wow, that is really cool.” So that was it. I think I was probably 16 and I knew what I wanted to do right away. After that I would purchase a microphone and a Teac open-reel tape deck, and I would sit in my room and practice talking into the microphone and trying to find a sound… There was a guy in Chicago that I would mimic, a famous voiceover guy — Joel Corley I think was his name. Anyway I would listen to him. He would do tons of commercials in town, and I would try to mimic his sound.
And like I mentioned earlier, when I was in high school I did a lot of the variety shows and would do a lot of impressions, so I was always one to try to mimic Ed Sullivan, John Wayne, Richard Nixon, and other famous people at that time. I was always trying to do impersonations. So I think I always had a love for the David Fry’s of the world, the Rich Little’s of the world, the Frank Gorshins — anybody that could use their voice and sound a little bit different intrigued me. So I think early on I knew right away that I wanted to do something in performing and not necessarily radio, but when I watched my friend Dan at WLS run that board, I kind of knew right away that I had to get into radio.
JV: What were some of the stops along the way to WLUP?
Matt: Right out of high school I got my FCC First Class license. I went to license training school because at that time, before deregulation, you needed an FCC license to get into radio. So I went and studied that summer of my senior year of high school and got my license. Then I started pounding the pavement. I went to a station on Michigan Avenue here called WXFM, which was owned by a guy named Robert Victor. He lived in Switzerland. He was a self-made man, a multi-millionaire, and he owned WXFM. It was a brokered station, and I worked on shows reading the English copy for German programming on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
I was all of 18 years old and very green behind the mic and very nervous. My parents of course would listen to me, and it was just a great experience. “Hey I’m on the radio,” and that kind of thing. Then I sort of morphed from that position into a board-op and kind of a co-host of the gospel show with Reverend Milton Brunson. I was basically his engineer, but he would include me on the air with him talking, and that was a great experience. This guy was very popular, sold millions of gospel albums, invited me to many of the gospel concerts in Chicago, and I got to be known on his show.
From that I went and engineered the Count BJ show, on the same station. Count BJ had a truck stop down by Sox Park, and I would drive down at 3:00 am and help him because he was very inept at running his own board and making his own commercials. And again these were brokered shows, so these guys would pay to be on radio. Count BJ had this big, booming, basey voice. He just sounded great and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and I would watch him behind the mic. He would open up the mic and would play nothing but Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and big bands and Stan Kenton. I would sit there and take all this in, watching as a young kid and I’m like, “Look at that, wow, what a great job.” This guy owns Chicago’s largest truck stop and he’s on the radio. He’s sitting there talking into a microphone in the back room. He took me to a lot of shows. I went and saw Pat Cooper with him. We sat at the same table as Tony Zale, the ex prize fighter. So this is my life right out of high school, and I’m like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”
From there I met a guy named Chris Devine who now owns a number of radio stations. He was another board-op running German programming at WXFM. He left and went over to The Loop and called me one day and said, “Hey Matt, there’s a weekend opening where you can be on Saturday and Sunday nights at 10:00 pm being a jockey here on The Loop. Our Program Director is Jay Blackburn. He runs a real tight ship, but I think if you make a tape he’ll hire you.”
So Chris got me in over at The Loop. I had also met Garry Meier, who was one half of the Steve Dahl & Garry Meier show at that time. He was coming from suburban radio in Arlington Heights when I met him just by chance, and he was also instrumental along with Chris in getting me into The Loop as a part-timer and, “Oh and by the way Matt, you might have to do some production.” I didn’t even know what production was. “What’s that?” “Well you have to make commercials and….” “Well I could probably do that if somebody teaches me but….” So that’s how I found my way into The Loop.
JV: And apparently, you didn’t want to leave. You were there for 26 years. What were some of the jobs that you had while you were there?
Matt: I tried everything at The Loop. I tried sales and wasn’t successful at it. They put me in a suit and said, “You can go out during the week if you want to try to make some extra money and cold-call businesses,” and it just wasn’t for me. It was really tough to do, hard duty. I would do part-time shows as far as on the weekend. I would run the board for Dr. Demento, syndicated programming, and I got a chance to learn by watching other jocks, how they did their shows.
At that time I took great interest watching a guy named Sky Daniels who was a young rock jock from Detroit. I think he came in via Pittsburgh. Sky was just such a great rock jock at the time. We were playing stuff like the Romantics and early AC/DC and the Cars and the Pretenders, before these bands were big, and he would be on the board selling these artists on the air like they were his own children, as far as caressing them and loving them and really selling the record. It’s kind of a lost art. I would watch him do that and I’d think, “My God, look at how he’s selling this,” like it’s a brand new TV set that he’s selling to somebody, and he made it so enjoyable to listen to. Every night when I was there doing part-time production, I would look through the glass and go in the studio and watch Sky Boy, and this guy was really, really good. I learned a lot from him.
So they kind of brought me in slowly and taught me things. A guy named Dave Logan, who is now a PD in Seattle, taught me production. He took me under his wing and said, “Okay, this is how you do it. You’ve got to be confident. You can’t go in here and be wimpy. You’ve got to get in here, and when you do a tag, believe it and sell it. And then here’s how you splice,” and he gave me the razor blade and taught me how to do that. I got really good at splicing and they would call me “the Golden Blade.”
But I was always the young kid. At that time they called me Young John and then that kind of transitioned into Matt the Hat. In fact, the very first day I started at The Loop, I was coming over from Columbia College and it was snowing heavy that day. I had a hat on and it was full of snow, and when I walked in the door they called me “Matt the Hat.” So now the early guys like Dave Logan and Sky Daniels and Greg Solk, they all call me Matt the Hat to this day.
JV: So you were doing production and on-air stuff at The Loop while you were still very young.
Matt: Yeah, when I started at The Loop I was 21. The very first thing I did at The Loop was on-air, and I thought that’s kind of what I wanted to do. I did end up being on the air full-time with The Loop mid-days for a while, but you know I really enjoyed the production studio, and I don’t know how I really ended up in there but I just did. I got this great enjoyment out of trying to create commercials, and it was something that just kind of happened, and again, I didn’t even know what production was. It just happened.
JV: You eventually became the Production Director or Creative Director and were doing a lot of commercial production and the promos I’m sure. Then eventually you were just the Imaging Director there, right?
Matt: Yes. I would do stacks and stacks and stacks of commercials every day, and then they gave me some help finally to minimize some of that workload. A guy named Bob Stroud came over from WMET, and Bob was a really good production guy. He would sing a lot of parody songs. I got a chance to watch Bob, and he was kind of intimidating for me. He was a little bit older than me, and he had worked under a guy named Sandman in Cleveland, and this guy was the best production guy in the country. Sandman taught him a lot about singing parody songs and having fun in the production studio and then bringing that fun and putting it on the air. There wasn’t a lot of that going on outside of Dick Orkin back then — doing funny things on the radio that were like out of the ordinary. It was pretty cut and dried. And so when Bob came in, I had a chance to watch him do a lot of these parody songs and it was great.
But Bob had more of a love for being on the air. It was funny because I was on the air full-time when Bob came in, and I would just do occasional production, occasional promos and stuff when I got off the air. It ended up that Bob really wanted to be on the air and I didn’t. I really wanted to go back in the production studio. So we just transitioned. Bob went and took mid-days, and I went back full-time in the production studio and started doing nothing but imaging. We hired a part-time guy that would do the commercials. I would still do occasional commercials for freelance, but mostly I would just do the station promos, and that’s all I did.
Then I got known for that, just doing on-air promos for the Steve and Garry Show on AM 1000 and for Jonathan Brandmeier on The Loop. Kevin Matthews was also in there. We had a lot of great personalities, and I was able to kind of take their personalities and put them into the promos and make them really fun. People would actually call up and would want to hear the promos again, “can you play that again?” like it was a song or something.
JV: Elaborate a little on how you would take their personalities and put them into the promos.
Matt: Well for instance, take Steve Dahl, a very irreverent jock of the Steve and Garry Show — they were very popular and this is probably during the Disco Demolition period. I was still very young and didn’t really want to intrude too much on their show, and again, Steve was kind of an intimidating guy as far as his talent goes, and he would say what he wanted on the air. Well one day in particular he was getting into an on-air fight with his wife Janet over Christmas decorations. I was in the other studio taping it, enjoying it as they were fighting on the air, a husband and wife really going at it because he was too lazy to put up the Christmas decorations, and she was letting him have it full-bore. Here’s this guy who was very macho on the air and yells at people and puts them in their place, here he is like this little kitten being yelled at by his wife. It was very humorous.
So I took that promo and I pretended it was like a Hallmark Christmas card. I was the very mellow announcer on there doing the whole, you know, “Christmas is about love, Christmas is about family. It’s all about being together for the holidays.” I would do that kind of a read over them fighting back and forth with this real syrupy like Manheim Steamroller Silent Night music underneath it. I put it together and brought it in the studio and gave it to Steve, and he put it on the air right away, sight unseen. Not only did he play it, but he played it like every day for the next two weeks, and again, people would be calling for it.
So I would do numerous versions of that, and what I was doing basically, unbeknownst to me really, was I was trying to make these people more human, as opposed to these personalities that you couldn’t talk to. I was trying to bring them down to earth in a way, and it really worked. I would do that kind of thing with all the jocks, with Jonathan Brandmeier, with Kevin Matthews, with Howard Stern, Danny Bonaduce, I would do that with everybody, and they all liked it. They weren’t too big; they were gracious enough to let me do that and have fun with them, and the listeners loved it of course.
JV: How did the move to the Bonneville stations come about?
Matt: Chancellor and Evergreen merged, which became Clear Channel. So Jimmy de Castro and Tom Hicks both got out of the business at the same time. I believe they kind of cashed in their chips and said they were going to go into different directions. I think Jimmy ended up at AOL, and now he’s got his own company called Nothing But Net where he provides content for other syndicated radio programming. But Jimmy was in charge at that time and Jimmy got out of the business, and they sold The Loop to Bonneville, owned by the Mormon Church. So it was kind of a strange transition at that time, having the Mormon Church running this AC/DC rock station. I don’t think they were very comfortable with the format from the get-go, but they took it and made it their own, and it really was a successful rock station for the 2, 3 years that they owned it after de Castro left.
Obviously, we didn’t have people like Jonathan Brandmeier on the station — we were more music driven — but I was able to sit in the production studio and still do a lot of humorous promos in Loop fashion that still fit with the station, since my voice was still identified with The Loop, even though the personalities were gone. I suppose I was kind of like the running thread of personality that still went through the station. We had people on the air like Eddie Webb who was very humorous in the afternoon, and I was able to still do promos with him. But mostly, Bonneville ran a pretty tight ship as far as their on-air presentation. It was more subdued and not as irreverent as the old Loop, but it worked really well and they hung onto The Loop for, 2, 3, maybe 4 years.
The Bonneville ownership got more involved with charity work, so we did a lot of “Make A Wish” broadcast-athons where we would help out sick children. It all seemed to work. I mean just because we were playing this harder music didn’t mean the listeners didn’t care about sick kids and weren’t willing to give their time for charity and all. So surprisingly, the Bonneville ownership with The Loop really worked. I was surprised.
JV: You eventually moved over to some other Bonneville stations as far as your imaging tasks go.
Matt: Yeah. At the time we had The Loop, Bonneville purchased a classical station in town and they turned it into The Drive, which was an older version of The Loop. They wouldn’t play any AC/DC on The Drive. They would play things like Simon and Garfunkel and the Doobie Brothers, mellower Doobie Brothers. It was kind of a mellower adult station. So we had The Drive and we had The Loop at the same time, and we were in the same building, the John Hancock Center here in Chicago. I started doing production for The Drive. Nick Michaels was the voiceover imaging guy for The Drive, and I would write things for Nick to read. We would write stories about the bands and the artists on the air and things like that. I was able to do a lot of production for The Drive while I was working at The Loop, and so when The Loop was sold to Emmis, I was able to transition right over to The Drive without any hesitation. It was a real natural fit at the time.
At the time, I was also working for The Mix, which is another Bonneville station here in town. Eric and Kathy have a very popular morning show, personality driven, a lot of talk. They used me for promos on their show. So I was able to work for them, The Drive, and we also have a station called Love FM which plays kind of Motown “feel good” songs, sing along songs, Earth, Wind & Fire, things like that. I have a love for soul music anyway, so I was able to do all the imaging for that station using other voices. Right now in Chicago, my voice is pretty much on The Mix, but I still do commercials for The Drive as well.
JV: So you’re imaging three stations and doing a little bit of commercial work.
Matt: Yeah, and I also do imaging work to help out some of the other Bonneville markets. I do work for the Arrow in Salt Lake, which is owned by Bonneville, the Arch in St. Louis, and one of the stations that we had in Washington, which they just sold so I’m not working for George 104 any more. But any time they have special projects and want me to help out, I do.
JV: Are you still using humor as pretty much the key ingredient in most your imaging?
Matt: Yeah, I do. It’s natural for me. I grew up watching Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields and all those classic comedians. I would even watch Jack Benny on TV. I would pick up things these guys would do as far as humor. It’s a learning process and I think I always had a personality for it, for finding humor in things and not always stating the obvious. I’m more subtle in my approach, I think. Sometimes you can bang people over the head with something that you lay out as a joke: okay, this is a joke; here listen to this, this is funny. And then other times you can do it more subtly. Again, I think it’s something learned, and not everybody has that in them.
When I talk to college students, I always say, “Know in your gut if you’ve got the ability to do production and how you approach production.” I tend to approach it in a humorous way sometimes, but then sometimes I don’t. It all depends on the situation. But kind of know in your gut if you’ve got it in you to do humor in a station promo. And if you don’t have that, well fine, use another tool or go in another direction. But I always felt comfortable in that pocket of humor, finding humor in something.
JV: Well you’ve obviously been very successful at doing that, but unfortunately a lot of people fall flat on their face trying to do the same thing.
Matt: Yeah, I sometimes hear that on promos on other shows, and I say to myself, you know you don’t have to say that; you’ve already said it without saying it. You don’t have to say to the people, “Isn’t this show dumb?” You don’t have to say that. It’s obvious. The listener is not stupid; they understand. You can kind of guide them along, but you don’t have to, like I said before, bang them over the head with a statement that says what you have just said without saying it. I hear promos a lot where the announcer will say, basically, isn’t this a ridiculous situation you’re listening to? Well yes it is; you don’t have to say it.
So again it’s a learned experience. You try it and you listen to it and you ask other people in the hallway, what do you think of this, and they’ll tell you. “I don’t think you have to say that.” “Really?” “No, just leave that out.” “Oh, okay.” And that’s how you learn — trial and error.
JV: What are some of your sources for creative inspiration?
Matt: Usually it’s walking outside of the production studio. I’ll tell my wife sometimes, “I’ve got nothing,” I’ll say to her, “I’ve got absolutely nothing. I go to work and I look at the computer and I try to write some funny copy or try to find humor in something and I just got nothing.” And she laughs and says, “Well you know you’ve got to walk out of that production studio sometimes and go talk to people.” And that’s what I do. I walk outside the room, and I’ll talk to someone. And that person, it doesn’t matter who they are — salesperson, Continuity Director, Program Director, anybody that’s walking the hall – maybe it’s an engineer who will say something to me, “Hey Matt, what’s going on,” and I’ll say, “I don’t know, what’s going on in your life?” And they’ll tell me some story that just happened to them, a real situation, a real person telling me a real story, and it doesn’t matter what the story is: “…some guy flipped me off today on the way to work and I spilled my coffee...,” whatever that story is. I use those stories for inspiration.
I try to use those real stories and put them into my promos, because if it happened to them, 9 times out of 10 it happened to a billion other people in Chicago at the same time. They experienced some guy cutting them off in traffic. They experienced spilling their coffee. They experienced talking in a conversation and then forgetting what they were about to say and, oh boy, the embarrassment they felt by that. Anything that happens to real people, I use those stories to provide inspiration and it always works and it always gets me creatively going again.
So I always tell people that: if you’re getting a writer’s block or you’re getting a creative slump, go talk to people outside of your little world, and you’ll all of a sudden get all of this stuff that will start coming in, and you’ll use those little stories for inspiration.
JV: You’ve kept yourself busy in the voiceover business. How’s that going? What are you doing?
Matt: It’s going good. I don’t have any representation. I haven’t really sought that out. I don’t really market myself a lot. I just kind of pick up work as I go. And the people that use me for promo work are usually people that I’ve worked with in the past. I do promo work for the Quake in San Jose; one of the guys I used to work with runs the stations. He knows me from The Loop and uses me to do wacky promos for his station. I’ve done work for the Arch in St. Louis as their voiceover guy. I do work for WISN 12 Milwaukee, a TV station. I do a kind of a tough guy read for the Packer games. They also have me doing a kind of laid back style for their entertainment programming, for Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight and some Oprah Winfrey stuff.
So I’m just kind of doing a crawl, walk, run with that. I’m branching out a little bit more doing more and more freelance work, but as you know, with radio production, when you’re doing more than one station, it’s hard to devote full time to voiceover. There’s so many people doing it full time and only doing voiceover that it’s obviously very competitive; and with the 3 stations I have here in town, I’m very busy all the time.
JV: But you’re not just a “wacky promo” voice guy either; you obviously have some other styles.
Matt: Yeah and it’s good. The guy up in Milwaukee has been really good with me, Jim Windsor who is the Creative Services Director in Milwaukee. He’s really good at coaching and he works with a lot of different voiceover people. He says, “I just want you to be real laid back here and real friendly and just smile….” So he’s been very helpful and gracious and giving in helping me and coaching me to find a sound. And most of my work over the years has always been mimicking, again, like from high school, doing impressions, mimicking other people. In a lot of my early work at The Loop, I was mimicking these deep voice guys like Gary Gears who was a big voice guy here in Chicago. He was on WCFL. I would kind of mimic his style. I had a chance to work with Gary, and so I got a chance to watch him behind the microphone.
Another guy named Chuck Britain had another big booming voice, and I got to work with him. I was able to some work with Don Le Fontaine. So a lot of these big voice guys I was able to listen to and mimic, and so a lot of my early work on The Loop was basically mimicking them. And I was kind of picking up a character — the character’s name is Walt Dove — who’s kind of a crusty old, cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking, bar-stool-sitting radio guy who’s been through the radio wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and is very opinionated and sarcastic, and he has his view of the world and nobody can do radio voiceover like he can. I use that character, Walt Dove, as inspiration for coming up with the voice of these old, deep-voiced, ex-Top 40 jocks. I think that really helps: once you know the character you’re doing, the voice comes.
JV: You do seminars and have one coming up in a few days. Tell us about it.
Matt: This one’s called Talent Track and it’s a bunch of aspiring Production Directors and jocks meeting in Chicago here at Columbia College. I’ve been invited to come in and talk to the production people and give them a little hope as we enter a changing world here with PPM and all. I’m trying to help them out and keep the hope that the industry will keep people like myself and create more people that are thinking outside of the box.
One of the main complaints I have with radio production over the past 10 years has been people copying everyone, like talking through the telephone and having this thinned-out sound on their voice, something that Keith Eubanks made popular back in the early 90’s. I was still hearing that, and to this day, in 2007, I still hear that kind of sound coming out of the radio. I always try to tell the young people that you’ve got to be yourself if you want to be a difference-maker in the business. You’ve got to go with what you know and what’s in your gut. You can be inspired by other people, yes. I certainly was and to this day am by other people. But you still have to be yourself if you want to be successful, and what makes you unique is what you bring, and it isn’t trying to sound like somebody else all the time. It’s kind of finding your own voice, and I think that’s what I’m going to tell the people this weekend, that you’ve got to be yourself and be different than the next guy if you want to break through.
I always say that to kids. It’s always good to be inspired. At an early age I was very inspired by Ken Nordine and Dick Orkin. Those are the guys that really inspired me, but again I have to take that inspiration and make it my own and make it Matt Bisbee and not Ken Nordine and not Dick Orkin. I’ve got to make it me. And once you do that, I think then you find that voice, and then people respond to you, because you don’t want to sound like everybody else.
JV: Twenty six years at one station — what advice might you give someone on being able to maintain that kind of longevity? Do you credit that to the station being such a great place with great management, or is there something that you had to contribute to that as well?
Matt: I would say both. I think great management is very important in making a station successful. The people walking the hallways are the ones who are really responsible for the success. That’s why I really don’t like seeing stations with just a computer and nobody in the studio. I think that’s really deadly for a radio station — having no stationality, having nobody walking the halls as a face in the place. I think that’s really important. I could work out of my house — and I do have a studio in my house that I do work out of every day — but I prefer to come downtown and be a part of the station because when you have different people and different characters walking the halls, it brings that feel and that spirit that you really need to make a successful radio station. I learned that early on.
When we had The Loop and we were so successful, we had Jimmy de Castro, who’s a very charismatic salesman type of guy. He was our General Manager. And we had Larry Wert who was a very charismatic guy who’s now the station manager of NBC Chicago. These guys were stars as well as the on-air talent. We would go to promotions and people knew Jimmy de Castro. Listeners knew Larry Wert. These guys were stars just as well as the jocks.
I would say that the secret for me for longevity is to do what the salesperson wants. Don’t get confrontational. Even though there are days that they can drive you crazy with their demands, it’s not usually them; it’s sometimes the client who doesn’t understand. I always try to maintain a certain level of decorum with the sales department and their demands. Sure, I can get it on for you in 10 minutes, don’t worry about it, just give me the copy, and then they leave. They leave the studio and then you go to work. I’m able to churn and burn a lot of production, and early on I said to myself, if I can do that many pieces of production a day, I’m going to be employed because no one’s going to F with me, basically. The management’s not going to bother me, salespeople aren’t going to bother me, in fact sales is going to go tell management what a great guy I am.
So I use that as my ammunition and just say, “Yeah, bring it on. Give me 100 pieces of production. I’m going to bang it out, watch.” And I would. People were always amazed that I was able to do that. But I think I always had a work ethic ever since I was a kid. I had a paper route. I was working at a pizza parlor. I worked in a factory. I never didn’t have a job. So I kind of brought that mentality into the radio station, that I’m going to work and I’m going to work really hard.
I still get a kick out of Greg Solk, who’s the Vice President of Programming for Bonneville; he’ll come to me and say, “Hey, we’re going to put a station on tomorrow, can you have it ready for me?” I’ll go, “Yeah, what do you want me to do?” “Okay we’re going to start a format in St. Louis, and we’re going to need it on the air tomorrow at three. Here’s what I need from you.” And I’ll go in the studio and bang out 100 pieces of production to get it on the air. For me that’s kind of a challenge and a thrill, and I still kind of have that mentality to this day.
So I think the reason I’ve lasted over 30 years in the production studio is that I’m accommodating, I’m not confrontational, I’m easy going, and I’m trying to be fun. I think I’m a fun person to work with, and I think that’s why I’ve lasted so long. I’m also going to tell that to the students when I talk to them this weekend.
JV: Did you or do you find yourself having to pull back on the quality of work that you churn out just to get the quantity out there?
Matt: Yeah, sometimes I’ll do a promo that I’m not really happy with. I tend, as all production guys do, to be anal — you want it to be perfect, you want it to be great — but I’ve tended to let that go over the years. I’ll do a promo and just kind of let it go. I don’t try to over-think it, and usually those are the ones that end up being most remembered — the funnier, longer-lasting promos — the ones that I let go of quicker. The ones that I kind of tweak too much, which I tend to do, I think those tend to be so tightly constructed that they lose their luster.
One of the promos that I did over the years that people still talk about is a promo I must have done in less than 5 minutes, and I’m being totally serious. I had an Ozzie Osborne interview that Pete McMurray had cut at a hotel room. He brought it back, and as you obviously know, Ozzie doesn’t make much sense when he talks. So I took all the outtakes of the really inaudible responses that you couldn’t understand, all the slurring and the mumbling, and I cut them up really fast. There were about 5 or 6 of them, responses where he would just go [mumbles], and with them I did this Christmas promo. I was saying, “This Christmas, Ozzie Osborne wants to say Happy Holidays,” and he would mumble, and then I would have another response, and it just built itself in minutes. I put it on the air and people were going crazy, and they still want to hear it.
So sometimes those quick promos that you don’t even think about, those promos that you let go of, are the best ones.
JV: Any final thoughts before we let you go?
Matt: I would like to thank all of the Production Directors I’ve ever worked with, that I still work with. All these great production guys are so inspirational, and it helped me along the way. It’s not all about me. It’s really other people that have influenced me along the way. This is not all my doing. It’s other people that have really been instrumental in helping me — the people like Dave Logan who took me under his wing. To this day I work with a guy over at the Mix, Steve McKenzie, who is a really talented production guy. He’s a young guy, much younger than me, but he’s very good. And Tom Couch here at The Drive. Tom has worked with tons of different people in New York and at WXRT here in Chicago. All these other guys really help you along the way, and you don’t even realize it but they really do. It’s not all about me; it’s really other people that have helped me and teach me stuff every day. You never want to stop learning, and you learn from other people.