Listening to the radio this morning I found WCBS 101.1 FM, which I usually tune in to during afternoon hours. Nightowl that I’ve been the past years I rarely catch morning drive time radio any more, unless I stayed awake past sunrise.
Listening at around 8:30am I thought “this dude sounds familiar.” He was funny and gruff, and most impressively to me he spoke from obvious experience about the world of music and radio over the past several decades.
I listened to FM radio in Tampa almost religiously in the 1980s. Stations came and went but I still remember Q105, 98 Rock, Magic 96…
Wondering whose voice sounded so familiar I looked at the info screen on the radio and couldn’t believe it was Scott Shannon, a childhood hero of mine who inspired me to seek a career in radio.
I did not want to be like him or mimic his style. As a youngster I was just impressed by his self-confident celebrity and ability to influence opinion and be a tastemaker.
I was listening to Q105 the moment Shannon first aired Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been To Me”, that sappy, once-forgotten song from the 1970s that sold nothing on its original release but became something of a global phenomenon upon its re-issue in 1982.
Before airing the song Shannon said something to the effect of “This is gonna be big.”
Minutes after “I’ve Never Been To Me” ended Shannon returned to the mic to report on listener response. He played back recorded phone calls that almost immediately started pouring in from people asking what that song was and could you please play it again… and again… and again. It was my first experience with a song being massively overplayed.
In those days I and two other students from my grade school got rides to school from the 7th grade teacher, Ellen. Any time that song came on the radio we all had to shutup so Ellen could listen to it. I played “Never Been To Me” for my mother and remember her fidgeting, trying not to visibly identify with the song and instead saying (in so many words) that she felt manipulated by Charlene’s tear-jerker.
I could be off about this but Shannon gave the impression that he was solely responsible for the song’s revival. Whatever my thoughts about the song I was impressed by one DJ’s influence. (Keep in mind that I was 12 years old. I can’t imagine falling into hero worship today.)
It was good to hear that the show in New York is actually pretty good, too. The wisecracks sounded unscripted and Shannon seemed entirely in control of the show and its seemingly free-wheeling format.
In 1982 Shannon left Tampa for the big time: New York City. This seemed like a big, huge, honkin’ deal at the time, with hackles of “SELLOUT” filling the local papers — or maybe that was just my mother talking. She thought he was an asshole, and from what I could discern she was not alone. But I admired him. He did things BIG.
I didn’t have a problem with him moving on to so-called bigger and better things — it may have helped inspire my secret childhood fantasy of living in New York — but I was sorry to see him go.
His teary-eyed farewell speech (which my mother said was phony) was televised on a local news show.
When I moved to New York in 1990 I tried to find Scott Shannon on the radio. I never did, learning later that he’d moved on to California just a year earlier. It was no existential crisis for me, but establishing just one bit of harmless continuity between my years growing up and moving on to New York might have helped me feel a little bit more at home.
I made a couple of WRBQ/Q105 airchecks in 1981 & 1982, when I was 13 & 14 years old. Too bad neither of them captured Scott Shannon. Instead they got his colleagues Cat Sommers and Mason Leroy Dixon. You can hear them below.
