Steve Lushbaugh, Production Director, WMMR, Philadelphia, PA
By Jerry Vigil
You’ve heard his work on numerous RAP CDs and Cassettes over the years. He’s been in the business for 30 years. He’s been at one station for 22 years. He’s been a finalist in several past RAP Awards competitions and finally took home a trophy this year for Best Promo–Large Markets. This month’s RAP Interview steps into the halls of WMMR in Philadelphia for a look at what sounds like one of the best places to work as we visit with Production Director Steve Lushbaugh, or Lush as his friends call him. Lush has maintained the position of Production Director at ‘MMR for an amazing 22 years. We find out what the secret to this longevity is or isn’t, and we get a look at the station that nurtures this kind of loyalty. Be sure and check out this month’s RAP CD for an impressive demo from Lush.
JV: Tell us about your background in the biz.
Lush: Well I grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and I guess like anybody that gets in this business, it just was something that I was attracted to. I was the kid that was listening to all the out of town radio stations and taping them, and all my friends were radio freaks. I got a job when I was 16 answering phones at the big top rated station in town, I met people, and one thing led to another. After about three years of hanging out in radio stations on weekends and after school until the middle of the night when I should have been doing homework, I was in the right place at the right time and got an overnight gig at ‘MMS in Cleveland. This was in 1972. It was six 6-hour shifts a week. I remember it was pretty grueling, but it was a great way to get some hours in.
I did overnights for a pretty short period of time. A few months into it, our Production Director went to KMET in Los Angeles. He left on no notice and they were like, “What are we going to do?” And I said, “Well, I do production.” And they said, “You got the job.” So, I was the Production Director for a few months, but at that point, I still wanted to be on the air too. I found another friend of mine who was out of work, Jeff Kinzbach, and asked him if he was interested in doing production. He was, so he came on board and I went back on the air doing 10:00 until 2:00 at night for a while. Then I moved to mornings for a short time. Then they put Jeff on mornings; and I went back into production full-time in’76, and I’ve been doing production full-time ever since. Jeff had quite a dynasty with the Buzzard Morning Zoo. For many years, they were the big thing in Cleveland.
JV: When did you leave WMMS?
Lush: That was in’78. Charlie Kendall was the Music Director at ‘MMS. He had left and landed as PD at WBCN in Boston. He called me up one day and asked me to come to Boston, and I did. And that was an amazing year. I wish it would have lasted longer? Things kind of fell apart at ‘BCN. The company was bought by Hemisphere Broadcasting, and it was kind of an unusual union station. They came in and fired about half the people that worked there, and everybody at the station—secretaries, engineers, and jocks—were in the union. They fired about half the people, and we had a strike. We came back, but there was a lot of damage on both sides, and nobody felt really secure. Charlie went off to Indianapolis, got a job, and hired me there. That lasted about a year, and then my gypsy days finally ended. In 1980, Charlie came on board as PD of WMMR in Philadelphia, hired me again, and I’ve been here every since.
JV: And you’ve been doing production only for all this time?
Lush: Well, actually in Indianapolis I did mornings also for a while. But I’ve almost been exclusively in production since ’76.
JV: You must have utilized your production skills to have a highly produced morning show when you were doing those gigs.
Lush: Yeah, absolutely. I was a production-oriented jock. I like to plan bits out and pre-record things and rehearse things rather than just shooting off one-liners or doing stuff out of the paper. I liked produced bits. I still do.
JV: 22 years at one station is probably a record for the RAP Interview. What’s the secret?
Lush: Well I don’t know if the secret is mine or if this is just a magical place. It has always been a good place to work. I’ve had a series of really good PDs and GMs. I think fondly about all of them. I don’t think I’ve ever had one that I couldn’t say good things about. So, that’s certainly a part of it. I think what has also helped is being able to change and re-invent the radio station, which we’ve done many times. You can’t be in one format doing the same thing for 33 years. You have to change, and we have over the years. And I welcome it when the styles change and tastes change. I like it when they come in and say, “Look, we’re going in a slightly different direction. It’s time to look at what we’re doing, tune it up, and change it. Here’s our audience now.” It’s an exciting challenge, and I look forward to it. The first time I think it scared me a little bit, but now it’s a good thing.
JV: About how many times do you think you’ve done this over the 22 years?
Lush: Well sometimes it’s been a subtle shift, but I’d say major overhauls, 3 or 4, which is not a lot in 22 years. And when that was done, it wasn’t like we went from rock to country or anything like that. We always stayed within the rock genre, with a slightly different attitude or a slightly more modern sound or whatever.
JV: The only other rocker in town is ‘YSP, is that correct?
Lush: Well not even them anymore. I mean they’ve been a rock station for most of the time I’ve been here, but now they have talk on from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with Howard Stern and Don & Mike and Opie & Anthony, so they’re barely playing music anymore. And their evening show talks a lot too. And they have football on the weekends. There’s not a lot of room for rockin’ and so yeah, we’re pretty much the only rock station now.
JV: Well you have to love that. Owning the rock format in Philadelphia, that’s pretty good.
Lush: Yeah, I think we’re still pinching ourselves.
JV: Being a veteran prod god, you can probably easily remember the old analog days.
Lush: Oh yeah. I had a 4-track quarter-inch Otari tape machine that used to slow down towards the last 10 minutes of tape. You had to sit there and force the pinch roller up against the capstan. It was pretty bad.
JV: Do you remember when you said goodbye to analog and hello to digital?
Lush: We were on it pretty early. I think it was 1990 when we got a device that was made by a small company in New York called Digital Dynamics. It was the Pro Disk 464. The “464” meant it could be configured from 4 tracks up to 64 tracks. It was a big, huge box full of dedicated hardware and a 660 MB drive for every 4 tracks. These were big huge SCSI drives with two controller cards and a streaming tape backup. It used a Macintosh as the interface. The Mac was basically a remote control for the thing. This was a box full of computers, and it was expensive. I think they were about $50,000 to $60,000 for a 12-track version. They were kind of in a development stage as the product was on the market; it was always changing and always being updated, but they were really good at tech support. I thought it was the best thing in the world. You could edit digitally, slip tracks, save sounds in a sound library and drag them into a session. You could nudge things, but that was about it. There was no DSP in the early versions, no EQ, no compression, no time stretching, none of that. It was just like a big tape recorder that had editing capabilities that you couldn’t do on tape.
But Pro Tools came along shortly thereafter. I think I dove into that in ’95, when it was just to the point where you could get it for about $700 or $800. I think it was called Power Mix. You’d get an Audio Media 3 card for about the same, and you could have Pro Tools in a home computer. So I made the plunge and bought that for myself and loved it. Then I convinced the company that we needed it, and so we bought it for all our studios. We’re Pro Tools all the way.
JV: How many stations does Greater Media have there?
Lush: We have 4 stations that are clustered here, and all 4 are in the same building.
JV: And all the stations are running Pro Tools?
Lush: Yes, one in the main production room and one in the aux production room. There are two production rooms for each station for a total of 8 production rooms altogether. We have a really beautiful facility here.
JV: Eight production studios for 4 stations. That’s the way it should be.
Lush: That’s absolutely how it should be. We’re really lucky that Greater Media devotes a lot of resources to production, and it’s an important thing.
JV: Are all eight Pro Tools systems networked together?
Lush: Well, yes and no. They don’t share sound between them, but they’re all on the same network. So, I can move audio files between the various workstations if I need to.
JV: What are your official responsibilities at the four stations?
Lush: I’m responsible for imaging WMMR. And though it doesn’t say this in my job description, I’m also responsible for taking care of the Macs and the Pro Tools systems because I’m kind of the Mac guy and the Pro Tools guy around here. I’m comfortable with it. I know Macs pretty well. But I don’t know PCs nearly as well, so the IT department pretty much handles the PC based stuff. They have their hands full with that, so they kind of leave me to take care of the Macs, and so far I’ve been able to do that.
JV: An IT department…now that’s something you don’t have at every radio station.
Lush: Well, when you have 4 radio stations with a computer on every desk and two big huge Audio Vault systems... I mean these things are gigantic with double redundancy and offsite backup. It’s mind boggling how big these things are. So yeah, there are a lot of computers around here, and we have two IT guys on staff. We run our own websites, and we have a couple of different networks in the building. It’s a very Internet and computer intensive environment around here.
JV: How are the Audio Vault systems working for you?
Lush: They work really well, but there are things about carts, believe it or not, that I miss, like when I want a cart to change at 9:00 at night, you can just leave it for the jock and attach it to the log and say please change this cart at midnight. With the Audio Vault, you’ve got to get somebody to assign it a cart number and then you’ve got to put it in the system. But that’s about the worst thing I could say about it. Actually, I don’t miss carts that much. I love Audio Vault. We have a backup system so if it hiccups, we just automatically switch to the backup. The system is a real timesaver. You put stuff in quickly, it sounds great, and it’s easy to see what you have online.
JV: Who’s handling commercials for ‘MMR?
Lush: A guy named Kevin Gunn, and he’s been at the station on and off for almost 20 years. He’s left a couple of times to do some other projects, but he has been a part of ‘MMR for many, many years. He was actually a participant in the promo that won the RAP Award this year. In fact, he’s part of most of the promos around here. He’s kind of like my partner in crime.
JV: Do the other 3 stations each have their own production guys and imaging guys?
Lush: Yes.
JV: That’s sweet. This leaves you able to focus all your energy on imaging WMMR.
Lush: Yeah, it’s great. And we’re not that territorial. I mean, I’ve done things for the other stations from time to time, and they do things with us from time to time. It’s a pretty open and sharing group of stations here, which is great.
JV: You’ve had your share of doing commercial work somewhere along the line, didn’t you?
Lush: Oh yeah. I’ve done my share of commercial production here. When I came here in 1980, it was just me, and so I did all the imaging and promos and commercials, and that was a long day. It got to be too much. I was brought in to do more creative stuff, and there wasn’t the time. I just didn’t have the luxury of time to do the kind of stuff I was really good at. So, I finally convinced them I was wasting my time doing every commercial for every club in town, and I was able to start farming some of it out to the jocks. Then I got a part-time assistant, and over the years was able to make it a full-time position.
JV: How would you describe your production style?
Lush: Well there is a not a single good answer to that. I think my style is probably eclectic. I do a lot of different kinds of stuff. I like doing simple things. Perhaps a promo has one guy reading. There are a couple of sound bites and then maybe a little music clip under it. But it gels and it works. Other times I’ll do promos that may have music, lots of sound effects, lots of high tech whizzes and bangs and AV Deli kind of stuff. It just depends; the idea kind of drives whether it’s going to be a high tech, highly produced promo or something simple, and this station seems to accept all styles. We can do light hearted goofy stuff. We don’t have to be serious and growling and throwing 100 sound effects in a second to have an effective promo, but we can do that if we want to. So I think I’m really lucky in that way. With this station having been here for so long, people are comfortable with a lot of different sounds coming out of it. So, I have a blank canvas most of the time. I can do what I want.
JV: Sopranos Death Poll was the title of the promo that won the Large Market trophy. Tell us how that promo came about.
Lush: That was one of those last minute things. A lot of us around here are big fans of The Sopranos. It was coming down to the end of the season, there was one episode left, and the show had pretty much telegraphed that somebody was going to get whacked. One of our promotion guys, Ed Marshal, suggested we have a Sopranos death pool, and everybody thought it was a good idea. So we decided to make a weekend out of it. They brought the idea to Kevin and me and Kevin said, “Oh, I know where to go with this,” and started writing. I had the Sopranos on videotape, so I started pulling some sound bites. We all put our heads together and in a pretty short period of time we had the idea for that promo all laid out. Then we needed somebody to voice it. Well, we’ve got this guy in our sales department, Greg Sarotto, who is as authentic a Philly Italian as you can get. He sounds like a character on the Sopranos. If we had tried to do a gangster voice or a Sopranos voice ourselves, it would have sounded funny. But this guy’s the real thing. He’s not an announcer. I spent some time with him and coached him through it. Actually, he was pretty good from the start. He did a great job. So, we put it together and the whole thing just gelled. I listened to it and thought, “This is funny, entertaining, good to listen to,” and it doesn’t have a lot of high tech wizardry in it. It doesn’t need it.
JV: You mentioned AV Deli. Is their material your main source of production music and elements?
Lush: Yes. I have several of their libraries. I like Joe Kelly’s stuff. What can I tell you? The price is right. He seems to understand this kind of radio and other kinds of radio too, judging from what other people tell me. And you get a whole lot of stuff for your money, and most of it is good stuff.
JV: I assume you still have your Pro Tools system at home. Do you do freelance work out of the home studio or take work home from the station?
Lush: I do my freelance work at home, and I’ll take work from here home sometimes. I like the flexibility that working at home gives me. It’s amazing how I can take 8 hours of work home and spread it out over a weekend. You go down in the morning before everybody’s up, do an hour or two of work, get up and have breakfast, watch some TV, do a little half hour of work, have lunch, do a couple of hours of work and spread it out over the weekend. You hardly feel like you worked, and you can get a lot done. I do some freelance, and right now I’m working with Joe Bonadonna at KDKB doing some of their imaging. He was Program Director here at ‘MMR for many, many years. And up until September, I had a job working for Click Radio which is an Internet delivered radio thing, which was really very cool. Unfortunately, that job went away when September 11th kind of killed them financially. It was a shame. It was a good company, good people, good work, and I enjoyed it a lot.
JV: What does a man with 22 years at one station say when asked what his plans are for the future?
Lush: About 8 years ago, our General Manager was talking about the state of the business, and he asked, “Who expects to retire from this radio station?” And of course nobody put up their hands, including me. Now I’m thinking that may be a possibility, but I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel any need to leave here. After 22 years, it feels like home. I really like the people I work with. We have people that have been here almost as long as me. It’s not unusual for people to last 20, 22, 24 years here. I work with a real good group of people, and the station has good respect and good connections in the town. It’s a great place to work and I don’t feel any need to leave here. And if I do retire from here, that’s great. If something better comes along, I’ll look at that if it ever does, but I’m not pursuing it. I love the station, and I love this company.
JV: That sounds like a great place to work.
Lush: I pinch myself everyday. I consider myself very lucky. I know that the business has been a real roller coaster, especially since ’96. We all see the horror stories, but ‘MMR has been able to maintain. Greater Media bought us from Infinity CBS and has really nurtured this station, so my hat’s off to them.