Talking in the Dark
Cleveland slept through its golden age of radio.
A primer by Rodney E. Griffith
A dark room in a quiet house—one of the advantages of remote living. It has just turned past 11 p.m. The radio dial—depending on how sleepy, either the receiver or a portable (specifically, a Panasonic RX-5100)—is tuned to people talking. A cassette is in the bay.
There have been bright spots in pop radio past—fewer than have made out to be, though the WIXY-AM days, which happened before my time, are hard to dismiss—and present (WQGR-FM, which is like a station programmed by Andrew Sandoval and run by “Jumpin’” Joe Madigan), consistently rated classical (although I only listened for Robert Conrad’s Saturday night show in the early 1980s when he played The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy not long after its original BBC Radio 4 run) and jazz stations, but I slept through much of Cleveland’s golden age of radio.
These were gems hidden in the overnight schedules and far from what modern audiences would expect from the term “talk show.” Weekly shows that were neither fire-and-brimstone preachers nor their direct descendent rightwing political agents, and diametrically opposite to the current local daytime shows. Discovering Wainstead All Night or Live Wire was akin to the way Conan O’Brien describes his discovery of the earliest days of SCTV in late night syndication, an exclusive, almost secret experience. The daily talkers in the present are predictable soap operas; an unholy matrimony of decades of reality television and Family Guy. I’ve never considered giving rubes the vicarious thrill of looking down on the textbook-definition pathetic lives of radio understudies to be entertaining, and for most of the audience, it’s a self-reflecting abyss.
Weekend/overnight radio throughout the 1980s and 1990s ran parallel to television in the days before the creation of the first informercial and the ubiquity of cable networks. Syndicated shows (psychologists in full Agony Aunt mode, Art Bell, music documentaries on FM) mingled with locally-produced public affairs programs created in order to justify a station’s broadcast license (ostensibly granted “in the public interest”), but when the potential for original content was opened—made possible because there was little expectation to be a commercial sales draw and with low production budgets—the results could be unique and affecting.
When Steve Church (1955–2012) came into Cleveland from Indianapolis as chief engineer for WMMS-FM in 1985, he brought with him a Sunday night (9–12 a.m.) talk show, Live Wire. Church had an ultra-relaxed Dick Cavett take on Art Bell-like subjects like local ghost legends and subliminal messages on LPs that engaged an audience in a timeslot that was otherwise of little appeal on rock stations. In 1986, key members of the station, including Church, exited to establish the new WNCX-FM; he seamlessly ported Live Wire to the new frequency. Even though WMMS had, by 1986, been on autopilot for more a decade, a greatest hits station pretending to be progressive, Live Wire had gained a sufficient following that they made an abortive attempt to continue a parallel version of the show without him (Church referred to this on-air in passing, designating his as “The Original”). Memorable from the WNCX run was the 21 December 1986 episode featuring an interview with Douglass Smith in his guise of Ivan $tang of The Church of the SubGenius. For the better part of a ninety minute segment, Smith baffled and infuriated Church’s longtime listeners, which led the usually genteel host to reach a point of exasperation, chastising his audience for lacking the ability to perceive a joke outside of the confines of a TV sitcom. Unfortunately, this lack of perceptiveness also affected the format of the new station, which had attempted to resume the pre-segregated popular music format of WIXY to a bewildered Cleveland audience; the experiment was pulled in favour of a generic classic rock format.
Within a few years—such news was either conveyed by word of mouth or landed upon by an accidental turn of the dial—Church had landed at WWWE-AM, the area’s 50,000 watt clear channel station, in a late night Saturday-to-Sunday slot that perfectly suited Live Wire’s atmosphere. In many ways, the WWWE run was the show’s most intimate incarnation. In his willingness to see what the fuss was about, Church played the uncensored LP version of “Me So Horny” and held discussions on how political campaigns were run exactly like any other advertising campaign, and even indulged in the telling of a mildly salacious story.
By the time WWWE dismissed its talk/weekend talent in June, 1990, Church could no longer divide his time between broadcast/engineering gigs and his commitment to the company he founded in 1985, Telos Systems (now known as The Telos Alliance). He had, in 1984, developed a pioneering digital audio telephone system for use in radio studios, and holds a historical place as having been the first US licensee of the MP3 format, which he integrated as part of a solution to the quality issues that had plagued long-distance remote broadcasting. If the memory of the show has faded since Church’s passing, the name Livewire lives on as the name of the audio-over-switched-Ethernet tech he codesigned1.
Among the regular callers to Live Wire was Gilly, who had also become a regular caller wherever phoning in was an option (mainly WCSB-FM’s many evening and overnight shows). Within a few years, Rick Gilmour (1961–2010) occupied a brokered Saturday night slot on WERE-AM. WERE had, in the 1970s, cast a huge influence over Cleveland by means of its groundbreaking talk show hosts Gary Dee and Don Imus, but any such influence was long since faded by the 1990s, when time slots were made available on a pay-to-play basis analagous to public affairs cable (for example, The Gay ’90s may have had a difficult time getting a slot on FM). Night Talk, which ran from 11 p.m.–2 a.m., was a team effort between Gilly, Mitch Mann, and Monica Gannon, with Steve Wainstead appearing to continue the police blotters news segment he’d begun on his WCSB show Wainstead All Night.
Night Talk was distinguished by the extemporaneousness of its hosts. The format was simply open conversation at a time when radio talking, on the occasions it existed, was provided exclusively by and for boomers and above. During one episode, Gilly played excerpts from airchecks of Gary Dee from his WERE run (most likely a low-generation off-air recording, since mention was made of tape-trading); this led to an ironic revival of the bombastic WERE “People Power” jingles circa 1972 (these interstitials carried over into the later Gilly Show). The hosts ridiculed a competing station’s psychic talk show, which was also entitled Night Talk to their annoyance. Gilly also couldn’t resist ridiculing hosts on his own station: The Gay ’90s was lampooned as a show called This End Up where “the odds are good, but the goods are odd”; reputedly, making light of local politician and WERE personality Mary Rose Oakar was a step too far, and Night Talk was abruptly pulled from the schedule, leaving an uncomfortable three-hour commercial block leading in to that evening’s Wainstead All Night.
Fortunately, at some point Gilly must have sold his friend Jack Curtis, owner of Westlake’s Jack’s Beverage and Deli, on the promotional benefits of a brokered show, for Beer Talk had premiered in the earlier Saturday evening slot, with Gilly effectively acting as the show’s co-host. After an apparent cooling off period, Gilmour was afforded the opportunity for another brokered slot (this time Sunday from 11–2), and in 1996 The Gilly Show premiered.
Listening to the many callers to The Gilly Show was oftentimes like being privy to someone’s party line call. The show had the occasional guest, like Cleveland Cabby Thomas J. Jasany promoting his self-published book A Fares of a Cleveland Cabby and even a theme show making light of the fate of the Heaven’s Gate cult with Gilly as a leader broadcasting “from SPACE!!” Airing four days after the group’s mass suicide, it shows Gilmour’s fondness for the brutal humour of the original Michael O’Donoghue run of National Lampoon. (It was also a rare episode that did not begin with the Gilly Show’s signature David Allan Coe opening theme.)
Unfortunately, Gilmour seemed too willing (especially given how Night Talk was so unceremoniously removed) to risk throwing it all away. On April 20, 1997, he teased a test of the FCC’s Safe Harbor provision by staging a reading of the recently-deceased Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the last half of the show’s “wild and woolly” 1 a.m. hour. While legally he was covered in doing this, WERE station manager John Hill did not take kindly to the sole complaint for offensive language and cancelled the popular show. When Gilmour and his producer “B.I.G.” Phil Ferrante reacted by taking the matter to the press, general manager Walt Tiburski banned him from the station altogether (including any future participation in Beer Talk), citing embarrassment caused by the incident’s national coverage.
Within a few months, however, the incident opened the door to a major opportunity. Morton Downey Jr., infamous for his Joe Pynesque television show, had just failed at a primetime comeback attempt on 1100 (WWWE had by then reclaimed its former WTAM call letters) and the station tapped Gilmour as his immediate replacement: Gilly’s first night was Thursday, August 28, 1997.
His personality watered down for a more general, prime-time audience accustomed to nonstop sports coverage, the WTAM Gilmour show became at once too much of a good thing (5 days/week barring sports preemptions) and less than what it had been on WERE. Drawn into the station’s rightwing politics and self-promotion (he could scarcely resist reminding the audience he was broadcasting to “40 states and half of Canada,” a line he’d cribbed from sports talk host Pete Franklin), Gilmour failed to avoid being goaded into stagy arguments with/by the station’s afternoon drive sports host Mike Trivisonno (by virtue of Trivisonno’s ratings dominance at WTAM, this was never intended to be a fair fight even while Gilly held his own). By the end of the WTAM run Gilly had experienced an unflattering portrait in a Scene article2, an off-air controversy over on-air material lifted from WCSB’s Craig Callander only resolved in a court hearing3, and a brief marriage that ended acrimoniously in October, 2002. Gilmour’s show was no longer appointment listening (the station’s erratic scheduling helped ensure that). After being whittled down to weekend host, he broke doctrinal rules by questioning the wisdom of the US involvement in the Iraq war and was fired in 2004. He’d reached the big time only to find Cleveland radio’s big time was no longer what it was in the mid-1970s.
After the WTAM show ended, attempts were made to reingratiate himself with members of the WCSB staff, but a sad and rapid decline in health precluded any eventual comeback. Gilmour died at 48 from brain and lung cancer. Brain cancer would oddly claim the life of Steve Church two years later (at age 56), the coincidence of which would have made for a killer subject on either of their shows4.
Notably alive is Steve Wainstead, whose radio shows ran for a decade; it was the last incarnation of Wainstead All Night that ran on WERE following Night Talk from September 1995 to March 1997. This was a genial show highlighted by Steve’s readings of the Police blotters from the local Sun Newspaper chain—a kind of suburban Springfield Shopper weekly, recorded in the style of headlines from the early days of media, with SFX of teletype machines running nonstop in the background. It was somehow the perfect counterpart to the copy’s dry coverage of suburban disputes and petty crime gone wrong. Blocks of callers (and, in pre-CD catalogue reissue days, blocks of Frank Zappa records) were joined by occasional thrift store record finds, including a 1960s high school band’s rather tenuous rendition of the theme from Hogan’s Heroes (this briefly became a de facto WAN opener on WERE). For all the perceived superiority of commercial broadcasting, Wainstead found the WERE experience somewhat lacking, noting the station’s primitive studio facilities and a broadcast reach that was significantly smaller than college radio’s WCSB.
It is tricky to convey why these radio hours were so listenable when they were defined by some degree by their callers, some of whom viewed the airwaves of WCSB and WERE as their own Tube Bar. Such immediate interaction is unique to live broadcasting, or was: in an age of universal caller ID, juvenile exuberance would be easier to avoid. A YouTube livestream chat is a poor substitute and podcasts have no such interaction by design, even if the ease in which they can be created and distributed makes the prospect of a brokered AM show in 2022 seem ridiculous in comparison.
Airchecks of shows like Gilly’s or Wainstead’s have the effect of being like a Gen X version of Old Time Radio, probably untranslatable or unreachable to younger generations. If Church kept airchecks of Live Wire, they have yet to surface. Gilly’s later WTAM producer “Board-Op Dan” Grossman preserved two episodes of The Gilly Show (available via clevelandlivemusic here and here); Wainstead maintained a substantial archive (as early as 2007 he was offering his shows online)—some 600 hours of WAN and assorted shows survives—but you’d need access to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame library to hear much of it (a few shows can be found at The Internet Archive). It was a weirdly gilded age for local radio and if I had had any idea how fleeting it would be, I would have bought a case of cassettes.
1 See Audio Over IP: Building Pro AoIP Systems with Livewire.
2 Compiled in Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology (2005).
3 99 CRB 1959 City of Westlake vs Callander, Craig D DCF.
4 Gary Schwartz, Gilmour’s early producer from WTAM, died November 2, 2001.
Update [29 May]: The Cleveland Retro Archive Project is posting a collection of Gilly, Wainstead, and WCSB shows.
©2022 Rodney E. Griffith. All rights reserved.
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