RIP Bob Shannon, a DJ Who Knew His Discs
On an otherwise unremarkable day in late 2011, radio host Bob Shannon of WCBS-FM (101.1) in New York disappeared.
Well, he disappeared from the radio. First he was on the air at WCBS-FM, as he had been for most of the previous 30 years and then he wasn’t. The station eventually indicated he was on medical leave and filled his afternoon slot with guest hosts, a traditional signal it was holding the slot until he returned.
The following July, Ron Parker became the afternoon host and Bob Shannon became gone.
There was no official word ever, from the station or elsewhere, about what had happened. Long-time colleagues said they simply didn’t know. Shannon’s wife, Connie Frances (Connie T The Empress), politely deflected questions.
She continued to do that on Wednesday when she announced on Facebook that Bob Shannon, who was born Don Bombard, had died at the age of 74.
To New York radio fans, this is a mystery without a resolution. Which is okay. The family obviously decided that whatever had happened and would happen after he left the air, it would be private. In an era of oversharing, a little undersharing isn’t a terrible thing.
More important, as Connie wrote on her Facebook post, the closing mystery isn’t Bob Shannon’s legacy.
“Please remember all the positive things he brought to all,” she wrote. She’s right, because he did.
On the air, Bob Shannon was a throwback to the deejays with whom he grew up — the top-40 crowd of the 1950s and 1960s, when jocks were allowed to become personalities who presented the music with a recognizable style.
Every city and a lot of small towns had their own top-40 jocks. New York had the likes of Alan Freed, Jocko, Dr. Jive, Murray the K, Bruce Morrow and Dan Ingram, the last of whom was the closest antecedent to Bob Shannon.
For most of his years on WCBS-FM, Shannon hosted afternoon drive, Ingram’s old shift, and he had a similar gift for puns, irreverent one-liners and more than occasional riffs about the undertones of a song. One afternoon he played Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now Or Never” and accompanied it with panting that became ever-more urgent as the song reached its climax.
More often, his wit was brief clever asides. A 10-minute video tribute to Shannon, available on Vimeo and produced by Art Vuolo Jr., catches him promoting fellow WCBS-FM host Jeff Mazzei as “a shining star,” followed by the incidental remark that “he did a great job on my shoes.”
Like all commercial music radio stations by the 1980s, WCBS-FM played the songs its listeners best remembered and most wanted to hear. Shannon was allowed to play “lost hits,” which included tunes WCBS-FM never would have included in its regular rotation. He had mini-features like songs that crossed the ocean from America to England and vice versa, or different songs with the same title. (No, he didn’t do an hour of “Gloria.” Program director Joe McCoy gave him latitude, but there were limits.)
Shannon also cowrote with John Javna a fun book called Behind The Hits, which recounted the often amusing backstories of several hundred well-known songs. Like how “Whole Lotta Shaking Goin’ On” started with two drunks out fishing, or how Proud Mary was originally a washerwoman, not a paddlewheeler.
The book has a folksy tone, like Shannon had on the air, and it reflected the fact that unlike some radio hosts, he was a fan of the music. He was a serious music historian who had insightful reflections on matters as diverse as the legacy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album and the suicide of Del Shannon.
While he called Pepper a “game changer” for the rock biz, he mused that “there was also the negative effect of marking the end of the Beatles as just a rock band.” They were so good in that role, he said, that the music world lost something.
He had gotten to know Del Shannon over the years, he said, “and not just because neither of us was born with the name Shannon.” He said Del Shannon only looked “tired” the last time they met, but “you never know the demons that can be lurking inside.”
Bob Shannon started as the quintessential teen music geek, a kid who reverse-wired his radio to make it a transmitter and “broadcast” a “Big 50 Hits of the Week” show to his childhood neighborhood in Syracuse. To make it more official, he printed the list and had record stores hand it out.
He won a “guest deejay” contest at WOLF in Syracuse, leading to his first legal radio appearance in May 1962, age 15. He was introduced, fun fact, by Marv Albert, then a host on the station.
He attended Syracuse University and spent the decade from 1967 to 1977 shuffling between WOLF and WNDR in Syracuse. Besides hosting shows, he was a music and program director.
He moved to Pittsburgh’s WKTQ in 1977 and four years later headed out to New York. He worked briefly at WYNY before moving to WCBS-FM, where he first did weekend shows and then took the evening slot, launching the station’s popular nightly Hall of Fame segment. He took over afternoon drive in 1986, and as one of the few hosts who didn’t hail from radio’s golden age of top-40, he became an anchor for one of the city’s most enduring and successful radio stations.
McCoy, program director through almost all those years, was the one who renamed Don Bombard Bob Shannon. “He was a great jock and a big part of the CBS-FM team,” McCoy said after Shannon’s death.
Vuolo’s tribute video shows Shannon at various points in his WCBS-FM career, standing behind the microphone and gesturing animatedly with his hands as he spins his radio rap.
He looks like he enjoys what he’s doing, and it was doubtless not accidental that when WCBS-FM ended its ill-fated two-year “Jack” experiment in 2007, Shannon was the only pre-“Jack” deejay the station hired back for its reboot as a classic hits station.
He stayed another four years. Then he disappeared. But not before he left a vivid audio footprint.
