Scott Shannon Steps Down, But He’s Neither Gone Nor Forgotten
One of the most interesting and consequential careers in modern New York radio reaches another juncture this Friday, December 16, when Scott Shannon ends his run as the morning host on WCBS-FM (101.1).
On the surface it might look like retirement, since Shannon has officially turned 75. But he has faked us out before. When he left the morning show at WPLJ (95.5 FM) in 2014, that also looked like retirement until a few weeks later he popped up on WCBS-FM.
No one would blame him for retiring, and not having to set his alarm clock for 3:15 a.m. His legacy is secure. He will also continue hosting the syndicated weekly show Scott Shannon Presents America’s Greatest Hits, heard weekends on WCBS-FM, and he will still run the True Oldies Channel, a 24/7 operation for which he is the programmer and primary on-air voice. The True Oldies Channel can be heard in New York on WCBS-FM’s HD3.
That is to say, he has plenty to keep him busy, which is good, because there’s been every indication he is like the herding dog who always needs a task. Leave him alone in the house with nothing to do and he’d eat the furniture.
In Shannon’s case, he needs to be doing radio, because it’s hard to think of anyone who has thrown himself more deeply into that medium over the last half century.
Yes, he’s been well paid to do it. But you only need to talk with him for five minutes to realize how intensely he cares about radio, and the music that radio plays.
He can go into the nuts and bolts of programming. He can analyze what other stations are doing and why it is or isn’t working. He can become the quizmaster for 1950s and 1960s music trivia, from the lead singer of the Outsiders to the “two and a half” hits of Bobby Freeman (“Do You Want To Dance,” “C’’mon and Swim,” and “Betty Lou Got a New Pair of Shoes”).
He talks about the transistor radios of his youth, when the radio was his constant companion during the shuffle-around life of a military family. He’s done the pilgrimage to Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959. Whatever music Shannon’s radio stations have been playing over the years, you could bet that on Feb. 3, there would be a reference to Buddy Holly.
Shannon’s early radio career took him through North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and elsewhere before he left briefly to promote records for the later-notorious Casablanca label. He returned to radio and by the early 1980s he and Cleveland Wheeler had created a morning show concept they called The Zoo. Oversimplified, this involved multiple voices, some a little zany, talking about music and matters of the day, with Shannon as participant and referee.
This drew enough attention that when the Malrite company bought the beloved but sleepy “beautiful music” station WVNJ in the New York market, it hired Shannon to come in and open a Zoo in the big city.
In a sense the company had little to lose, but Shannon saw it more like “everything to gain.” He could revive the top-40 format that had been given last rites when the legendary WABC switched to all-talk a year earlier.
Few of the wise New York radio veterans thought he could do it. He did. WHTZ, which stands for “hits” and was almost immediately branded Z100, went on the air in August 1983. By the end of 1983, it was the city’s top-rated station. “Worst to first,” the slogan went, and if that’s not exactly true, the point was accurate. This interloper from Tampa not only rearranged New York radio, but helped spark a national resurgence of top-40.
Shannon has always been an expert music programmer, so that helped, and it also helped that late 1983 happened to be producing great wide-appeal pop music, sparked by Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
But that isn’t the only reason Z100 took off. What Shannon also reminded listeners is that radio should be fun. With morning shows in particular, because they’re more talk-intensive, the people on the air need to sound like they love what they’re doing and they’re in tune with what’s on their listeners’ minds. Most mornings that means breezy banter, joking, gossip, traffic and weather. On the morning the Challenger space shuttle broke up and crashed, the Z100 crew talked about that, in tones of shock and sorrow.
Some radio programmers would have tiptoed around that subject, fearing that to dwell on it would be too depressing and drive listeners away — which in recent years has seemingly become the defining fear of radio programming. As music listening has moved away from radio and toward personal devices and services — Walkman, iPod, phones, Spotify, Pandora, etc. — radio too often has tried to compete on that level rather than doubling down on what’s unique to radio: the human touch. Radio often seems afraid to play any songs listeners don’t already know, or to break the music flow by letting a host talk between songs.
As a guy who grew up with top-40, Shannon never turned any station into unrestrained freeform, where hosts might talk for 10 minutes between songs. But he has always seemed to feel that presenting the hosts as people and not button-pushing robots makes the station more attractive, not less. Shannon listeners have long followed Shannon’s wife Trish and their daughter Kathleen through his random references.
Not everything Shannon touches has turned to radio gold. In the late 1980s, after Z100, he zipped off to Los Angeles for something different, a hard rock format called Pirate Radio. When that sank, he returned in 1991 to New York to Z100’s long-time rival WPLJ. The rivalry was never really fired up again, and WPLJ morphed into a more adult format. It was middle of the pack in the ratings, but nicely profitable and a favorite of suburban listeners, many of whom probably grew up on the original Z100.
Shannon said for years that at some point he’d love to work at WCBS-FM, since oldies/classic hits were the songs with which he grew up, and when he got there in 2014 it turned out to be a happy marriage. He took the morning show to the top of the ratings, with a less frenetic team concept that featured fellow city radio veteran Patty Steele. She’s also leaving the morning show after Friday, to concentrate on, presumably among other things, her Podcast The Deep 6.
Happily, New York radio still has hosts with personality, who make radio lively and give listeners a reason to ask Alexa to turn on a radio station instead of just finding music.
That’s what radio has done for listeners over the past hundred years. It’s talking to you, playing music for you, connecting you to someone who knows you.
Scott Shannon has been doing that in New York for almost 40 years, and who knows, might do it some more. When he signs off Friday after his annual holiday show from Blythedale Children’s Hospital, he won’t owe listeners anything more. He might give them more anyway, because that’s what he does.
