THE LAST PAGE By John Granato
Lawnmowers, Wookies and Mexican Accordians.
first year of business we’d have serious signal issues, an economic collapse which we hadn’t seen in this country since the great depression, and a hurricane would tear our satellite off the roof and drown our building, I might have rethought the move. Not for more than a second or two. A lot of people said what a gutsy thing it was to leave 610 for a startup radio station. Actually, it wasn’t a tough decision at all. It’s a lot scarier and a lot less rewarding working for a big corporation. At CBS I saw too many good people let go just to better the bottom line. I have no idea if I’d still be at 610 right now had I stayed. I can honestly say that at 1560 if you bring anything to the table and work hard there will always be a place for you. And I can tell you that I’ve never worked for better people than I have here. You’ve heard of David Gow. We have made him a focal point of the station for good reason. I want to thank him for these past five years. It’s been an honor working with and for him. He’s the best boss I’ve ever had because he doesn’t yell at me as much as my other bosses did.
Our first five years at 1560AM Radio.
“Heinz, what the @#!*% !!!” And so it began. 15 minutes before we were to flip the switch and begin our first ever programming day at 1560AM Radio, my computer was acting up. Heinz was our IT guy and I said to him, “Heinz, what the @#!*% !!!”. I had no problem swearing because the mics weren't hot, so no fear of any repercussions by the FCC. However, as luck would have it, the mics were on. I know
this because our president David Gow, who spent countless months putting the deal and the station together, and spending millions of dollars in the process, was driving with his wife and young children listening to the historic launch of his new all-sports radio station. The first on-air words were expletives. Great start boys! At the time, that was the least of our worries. If you told me in our
You haven’t heard of Steven and Barrett Webster and Patrick Dugan. They and the other investors have been unwavering in their support and belief in what we are doing. This hasn’t exactly been a windfall for any of them. Business-wise it’s been an extremely rocky road. But they’ve never shown anything but faith in us and for all of us in the trenches I’d like to thank them for that. You just don’t find that kind of loyalty in today’s business world. Which brings us to what we’ve been and where we are going. 1560 started with an “us against the world” mentality and marketing campaign. We were fighting the corporate pile of dung. We were anti-establishment, and at first we were piercing their armor. Chance McClain and Frank Bullington (forevermore referred to as “Chank”) were as imaginative and entertaining as anyone has ever been in this business. We got under the other stations’ collective skin. We had them complaining to our local sports teams to make us cease and desist from giving away tickets on the air or using our talent on tv broadcasts. Our competitors also complained incessantly to Arbitron about our ratings which showed that we had a small but ardent fan base that listened to
us more hours per week than any station in the market. The optimum word in that last sentence though is “small”. We were different than anything anyone had heard in Houston but maybe we were a little too different. While there was a group that loved what we were doing it’s tough to make a business successful when you’re limiting the number of people you’re appealing to. We were so anti-establishment that it hurt us economically, and while we loved doing what we were doing we owed it to the investors who poured millions of dollars into the project to become more main stream. And so we did. Our first move was to wrest Sporting News Radio away from 610. It was a move that we thought would hurt them and help us. To do the deal we had to put Tim Brando’s show on the air. That changed things for almost everyone who was listening to us. Good, bad or indifferent Tim’s show just wasn’t accepted here. Hey, years ago, someone tried Howard Stern in this market and it didn’t work. I’ve heard he’s been pretty successful elsewhere. We ended up buying Sporting News Radio and moving them here. It’s now Yahoo! Sports Radio and it’s an unbelievable success story. When David Gow took it over it was bleeding buckets full of money and in just one short year it’s a profitable enterprise. With 1560 as the flagship, one of our greatest challenges has been to find the right combination of national and local programming. To that end, Adam Clanton and John Wessling are now our local afternoon team. We are very excited about that. While a lot has changed over these five years, we aren’t so different than when we started. Like me or not, I’m not going anywhere. We still have Sean Pendergast, Johnny Harris, David Nuño and Travis Rodgers--the same guys you’ve heard here since we started. We’ve also just purchased ESPN 97.5. It means we’ve grown from that little station that could into an AM, an FM, and a national network. What will it mean in this bloated sports market? I think it’ll mean big things for us in the very near future. I’ll write another one of these in five years and let you know how it’s going.
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