Elvis Duran

Elvis Duran has been playing “dee-jay” since the age of 12 when he rigged up a Radio Shack AM Transmitter Kit to his bedroom studio and beamed hours and hours of non-stop programming to the citizens of Dallas, Texas (the ones that lived within 20 feet of the transmitter). From there, the long radio highway has carried Elvis’ talents from Dallas to San Antonio to Houston to Atlanta to Philadelphia to New York City. Who knew back then Elvis would one day become one of the premiere radio personalities of the new millennium?
His passion for radio has not only made him a household name but a brand, an engaging personality, whose only wish is to be thought of as nothing more than an extended family member to the millions of people who now wake up with him every morning on Z100/New York, Y100/Miami and as of this past week at his old stomping ground, Q102/Philly, a station where he even once served as Program Director.
Elvis Duran and the Morning Show is a proven winner, “Never before has a show been so dominant across so many demos in both diary and PPM,” says Clear Channel SVP/Programming & Marketing Tom Poleman. “Elvis has long been Z100’s ratings anchor.”
The Elvis Duran brand has such value nowadays that it was only a matter of time until the Elvis Duran Group would be formed with partner/longtime agent David Katz and Tom Poleman. “Our mission is to expand the strong brand of Elvis Duran, as well as to aggressively seek out growth opportunities amidst new technologies,” Katz explains. “Elvis’ ability to reach listeners, especially women, is unmatched in radio today and we plan to create programming, talent and events which will appeal to this vastly underserved, thriving and fiercely loyal audience.”
While most personalities with this type of talent and hype also have an ego to match, Elvis Duran remains the same down to earth person he was nearly 20 years ago when I first met him, and even though he doesn’t crave world domination, he does have a morning show that’s destined to be radio’s next big thing.  

When did you know radio was going to become your career?
I was growing up in Dallas and I discovered a radio station, KVIL, where a guy named Ron Chapman was doing the morning show. I listened everyday and was totally amazed at how he would do all these fun things on the radio and let people participate. They were so great at theater-of-the-mind, and using words to paint pictures. I was sort of a loner as a kid. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I loved just sitting in my room listening to all the cool things they would do like whenJaws was out they broadcast underneath the water in a shark tank. It was a really cool escape for me, and I decided at that point that I wanted to do radio.

Many people might be surprised to find out that early in your career you held PD positions at some notable stations such as WIOQ (Q102). How was that experience?
It was awful! (lol)…from what I remember. Management is just not my thing. Even on this show where we have over a dozen people who work on the show, I am not a people manager. To be a Program Director and look at research and keep management happy, and then you get a phone call on a Saturday night when someone is barfing and they can’t come to work – I hated it! I was not a good PD and for some reason I thought I was. In hindsight, I was probably the worst candidate for Program Director and I will never do it again ever.

At what point did you know that being an air talent was more important to your future than working in the programming department?
I realized the hard way. Luckily I was given an opportunity to be somewhat of a PD at Q102, and in Austin for a second, but I was in situations where I politically was just eaten alive. In Philadelphia, I worked for a shitty company. Management and the finesse you need with management, dealing with the politics, it wasn’t for me. I’d rather just go on-the-air everyday where I know I’m better on-the-air than my Program Director. That’s when I realized that being an air talent was for me and programming was not.

How did the opportunity to join Z100 come about?
When I was fired from Q102 I looked around and the only station that had an opening that wanted to talk to me was Z100. [PD] Steve Kingston called me. Both Steve and Scott Shannon had called me earlier in my career, but I never had any interest in coming to New York. It was never on my radar. I guess I was naïve. I didn’t understand how important being in New York was. I was just having fun smoking pot and hanging out back in those days. So when I was fired from Q102, the only person who offered me a job was Steve Kingston at Z100, which is kind of funny, because I left Z100 for a minute after being there for a couple of years to go to Austin and New Orleans. It was a disaster tour for me. But at that time the only person who would hire me was, again, Steve Kingston! Luckily Z100 was the only place that would have me.

Was hosting mornings something that you often thought about?
It wasn’t exactly hosting mornings that I wanted to do. I wanted to interact with people, and in this day and age and even back then the morning show is where you typically had to go to do that. Doing afternoons at Z100 was playing ten songs in-a-row, and you had the length of an intro to get your point across. But I wanted to talk with people and interact, and push people’s buttons. So I had to decide, if I wanted to do that, I had to wake up at three o’clock in the morning.

When did you know that something special was happening with the show in morning drive? Did things just click right away?
It didn’t. [Z100 PD] Tom Poleman was the one who moved me to mornings [from afternoons] withElliot [Segal]. We had a lot of fun. It took a long time to get off the ground. There was no overnight success for us. Elliot and I had great chemistry but we were very impatient. We thought that after a year the morning show should be number one — and it wasn’t. Then we learned the hard way that it takes time, and we built an audience. Before Elliot left we did discover that the magic of the show was working and we did achieve numbers. But I really figured out that the morning thing was working when people would come up to us on the street and say: “You know I can’t start my day without listening to you. When you go on vacation it really screws up my life.” That’s when I realized we were doing something right.

Once Elliot left, the show changed. How did the show grow to the ensemble cast that it is today?
When Elliot was still here we had a few people working on the show who were interns. When Elliot left they stayed, and slowly made their way from an internship at Z100 to on-the-air. As a matter of fact, there are three people on our show who have never worked at another radio station: Greg T., our street guy and resident knucklehead, Danielle Monaro who does the sleaze reports andSkeery Jones who’s one of the executive producers. It was also the first show for Dave Brody, our other executive producer. Back then we didn’t have a budget to go out and hire talent from across the country. We still don’t! We used our interns. Our interns basically grew up at this station, right in front of my eyes, and it’s been an amazing adventure.

How challenging is it to manage one of the largest morning show casts in recent memory?
Obviously I have not awakened and discovered how challenging it is — because it’s not. We have our personality conflicts from time to time, but I’ve never heard of a group of people who do a morning show together that have stayed together this long. It’s been twelve years and the majority of people on the show have been here the whole time. John Bell has been at Z100 since 1983, back when he had hair! But I’m blessed to be surrounded with people who are great to work with. Without these people this would be a very boring radio show. And for this large of a group to be together this long, I’ve never heard of it happening.

How excited were you about the thought of potential syndication? Did you have any reservations when you were piped into Y100 in Miami?
I didn’t have reservations, but I was scared as hell and very nervous. We were afraid of what it was going to do to the dynamics of Z100’s morning show, and Z100’s management was afraid too. But what it did, surprisingly, was it took a show that’s been on-the-air for a long time and made us re-think how we do the show, which tightened it up, and in turn made it a better and faster paced show. Ratings went up in New York after we signed on in Miami. The Miami numbers are growing and they’re doing very well. They’re excited and very happy there. I was very excited at the thought of syndicating our show. Never, and still to this day, was it about world domination. I don’t want to or feel the need to be on 500 radio stations. We just want to work with Program Directors in markets that get us. I don’t want to be on stations just for the sake of having another station. We’ve had people approach us who want us on, and we’ve said no to a few. But we would like some more people to call us so that we can say “yes” too.

Radio is such a local media how do you attack that dynamic of the morning show when broadcasting from another city?
We had to make the decision where our show is not a local show, it’s an entertainment show. We entertain and do our thing. It is up to the PDs to take us and add for themselves localisms. They have to make sure our show sounds great at the same time their station is serving their local market. That takes talent and work on the local end. We work with Program Directors to integrate locally. In Miami at Y100, we work with Rod Phillips to integrate members of our morning show into the rest of his dayparts and to talk about things going on locally that he can use the rest of the day. We’ll do the same with Rick Vaughn at Q102.

You also have a different relationship with Q102 and Y100 in that you have people working with the show on-site in those cities producing local content.
What we do is very unique. We started this experiment with Y100 and it works out very well. We’re going to do the same with Diego [Ramos] who’s been a part of the Q102 family for years. But before the show starts we actually produce local breaks with Diego for Philly, as we do withFroggy at Y100 for Miami that will run exclusively on those stations. We also have breaks that run exclusively on Z100. Those are all pre-recorded fresh every morning before the show and they integrate into the show, so it sounds like we know what’s going on. But we do not pretend that we’re in those markets. We never lie and say that we’re not in New York.

This is a bit of a reunion for you and Diego.
He was an intern when I was at Q102 and he never left. He’s such a great guy. I love talking to him about his son. He’s a single father and he’s so devoted to his kid. You can just see the passion he has for being a father. I think people can hear passion on the radio. And to have Diego as a part of this experiment is definitely a feather in our cap.

How surreal is it to return to the Philly airwaves of Q102 where you – to coin a phrase you used to use all the time – spent a “totally festive” year?
What made my year at Q102 “totally festive” back then was the fact that we were f**ked up the whole time! (lol) That year at Q102 really was the end of an era of that type of radio and records. That was also around the same time they stopped having the Bobby Poe Convention. It was a different time and people who come into the business now will never understand what we went through back then and there’s no way for them to get it. But that year at Q102 was my entrée to the Northeast before I came up to Z100. I learned a lot from [OM] Mark Driscoll. He was a very colorful person to work for. I don’t remember a lot of it. Now I’m back on in Philadelphia with more of a sober mind and a little more experience under my belt, and I want to do it right this time and make everyone at Q102 proud. Not only is our show a perfect fit for Q102, but adding the Philly perspective will make us more colorful and fun. Being back is such a thrill.

Tell us about the formation of the Elvis Duran Group and its goals.
David Katz has been my agent for fourteen years. He was withDon Buchwald & Associates, a big agency in New York. We’ve always hit it off and always had great synergy together. I said to him one day: “Why don’t you leave that stupid agency and use your connections;” because he has a lot of connections in TV where he used to be in TV syndication nationally. I said: “Why don’t we put our heads together and do something other than what we’re doing now?” So syndicating our morning show is just a part of it. He definitely brought some of his clients to the table who want to produce TV shows and want to produce content for the Web and documentaries for the Web and for TV. It’s a learning process for me, but what I can do is use some of my connections to bring funding to the table, and he uses his connections to get our foot in the door to people who are in charge of TV and the big sponsors.
We have a couple of projects we’re working on which I can’t speak about yet but I’m excited. We also have some marketing plans for the affiliates as well where we want to do local shows. We don’t want to just offer a morning show to radio stations. We want to offer marketing prospects and events. We want to do things for the stations where they can make money and they can like us even more. And Tom Poleman is simply the smartest radio programmer in the industry. Together, we are going to elevate, and help change the way radio is perceived along with every aspect of the entertainment business. I have never been so excited. I am so proud to be partnered with David and Tom.

When people hear the name Elvis Duran what do you ultimately want them to think of?
I want them to hear my name and not really think anything but being familiar and comfortable with me and what I’m about and what our show is about. It’s all about brand building. I want our show to be like a usable extension of someone’s lives. Like your cell phone and Google where it’s a go-to thing. I want Elvis Duran and this show to be just a daily part of people’s lives where we’re nothing really more special than some member of their family which, if you think about it, is the most special thing in your life.

For more infomation on Elvis Duran and the Morning Show contact David Katz at 212-549-0979 ordavid@elvisdurangroup.com. Also check out www.elvisduran.com

** QB Content by Bob Burke **