By Rick Kaempfer
CONNECTED TO THE MUSIC
G
reg Brown has been a radio disc jockey in Chicago for more than 40 years
now. For the past six years, he's been
plying his trade at WLS-FM. You would think
that working in a format that provides precious few opportunities to speak would be
frustrating for someone who is hired specifically to speak, but Greg Brown has never, and
will never, look at it that way.
"As a jock your job is to be creative within whatever bounds you're given," he
explains. "It's kind of like an artist who is
given a different sized canvas. If it's the size
of a postage stamp, you've got to be creative
up their time. I want to be articulate in what
I'm saying to them, and not bumbling and
fumbling. It's important to me to show them
that I respect them enough to come prepared
each and every day."
Of course, it's one thing to communicate a
message; it's another to transmit a personality, to get a personal connection with a listener. Greg has a philosophy for accomplishing
that as well. "I just try to be me. I'll talk about
something that I'd tell my friends if I ran into
them, because I consider my listeners to be
my friends. I try to capture the mood of the
day. In my mind I just go back to when I was
WLS' Greg Brown
within that. If your canvas is the size of a
building, the same is true. It's no different for
jocks. Our job is to work within the bounds of
what we have to make that come alive."
In the new People Meter world of radio
ratings, that canvas has been shrinking over
the past few years. It appears clear that radio
listeners don't want a lot of chatter from their
music disc jockeys, and radio programmers
across the country are cracking down on
excessive disc jockey talk. That makes a
jock's canvas much smaller than it used to be.
Brown accepts and embraces the challenge.
"I only have ten or fifteen seconds to connect
with someone, which means I have to make
that time work, and I've got to make those
words work. It's imperative to always bring
my best."
When you treat each word as if it is precious, it's amazing what can be communicated. Anyone with a Twitter account can relate.
"It's a matter of constant rewriting. When you
meet a comedian, those jokes he tells, the
one-liners, are not something that just jump
into his head. He has really worked at it,
come at it from every conceivable angle to
make sure the joke is just right, that every
word is in its place, that the rhythm is just
right, and the punch line is exactly right.
There's an economy of words."
There's also a danger of sounding scripted, and Greg is constantly cognizant of that.
"There are things I will write down because
there's an exact way I want to say them, but
there are things that are simply ad-libbed too.
I'm certainly aware of how I want to get into
something, and I'm aware of how I'm going
to get out of it, but in-between it can go a
variety of different ways. You don't want to
sound like you're reading something, but you
also have to respect the audience. I'm taking
20 illinoisentertainer.com february 2014
a kid listening to the radio and try to remember the things that jumped out at me. Things
that touched me or made me feel like those
guys on the radio knew exactly what I was
thinking. I honestly try to recapture that
every day."
Some days those moments are easier to
recapture than others. "As a kid I used to
play radio in my room. I'd buy my favorite
records and play disc jockey, and write commercials and create my own little radio station. I did that a lot on snow days, when my
folks weren't home and it was just me. When
I come to work on those kinds of days now, it
connects with me in a special way. Those
songs take me back to a time and place."
It helps that he's playing songs that mean
something to him personally. "There should
be a connection to the music. People are listening because they love the music, and you
need to connect to it too. There are mechanics
to get through any format, but the emotional
attachment to the music certainly makes it
easier. Every song we play is something that
I've played before, either as a new song or an
old song. It's a part of my life. These songs are
part of the fabric of this city and who I've
been. Every now and then when I hear a song
I'll flash back to the very first time I heard
that song, and how cool or different I thought
it sounded when it jumped out of the radio,
and I get that feeling again. Just like that first
time."
There's a reason why Greg Brown keeps
getting hired. (He's had long stints at WBBMFM, Q-101, and WJMK before coming to
WLS). He's a program director's dream; a disc
jockey who takes his job seriously, never
phones it in, and seems to accept and understand the changing radio landscape. There's a
word for that: Professional.