Eric Chase, Eric Chase Creative Services, Houston, TX
As you may be aware, Radio And Production had its 20th birthday this past November. It was 20 years ago this month that the first Radio And Production “Cassette” found its way into the mailboxes of our few charter members. On that cassette was a promo for the Glenn Beck show on KRBE in Houston, Texas, sent to us by KRBE’s Production Director, Eric Chase. Wait. Don’t get confused. There’s more than one Eric Chase. In fact, there are three well known Eric Chase’s in our industry. We sort all that out in this month’s RAP Interview with the Eric Chase that landed at some of radio’s greatest radio stations in his illustrious career and now does his own thing in the voiceover and production world through Eric Chase Creative Services, which has been servicing radio clients and more for nearly two decades. Find out more about this Eric Chase at www.eccsvox.com, and be sure to check out some of Eric’s demos on this month’s RAP CD.
JV: You got into radio a little earlier than most, at the age of 13. How did that come about?
Eric: Well, it was way pre-internet, and we had to have a place for nerds in our town. I was probably perfectly suited for radio at the time because I wasn’t an athlete. So I just kind of stumbled into a station in my hometown; it was KBHS in Hot Springs. Believe it or not, the slug line was, “Where the world bathes and plays.” I remember when they used to say that on the radio, and I thought that was kind of cool. Not many cities can attribute to themselves being known as the bathing city.
So it was a hot summer afternoon. I was walking down the only street, called Central Avenue, that was in the middle of the town. The door was open to this building that looked like an interesting place. It was actually a studio. It was the radio station. The guy in the studio had the door open because his air conditioning was out. He was a guy in high school, and I was just barely in junior high. He invited me and my friend in and showed us all the stuff. It was like industrial radio station stuff, you know, Ampex’s and turntables that were huge. It looked like everything was fortified with iron at the time -- and all tubes, of course.
So I pulled in and I said, “This has got to be the place that I want to be,” because it was like magic to a kid. And I’d always sort of played radio station at home with my dad’s old tape recorder, so I kind of was ready for it.
I started at the janitor level, and then within about six months, I was doing the Sunday morning 5:00 a.m. thing, opening up the station with the religious programming. My voice broke early, thank goodness, and so I started doing little shows in the afternoon while I was in junior high and high school.
Then I got a big break to go to the big station in Little Rock, which was KAAY at the time. I enjoyed being on the radio live, but I also always enjoyed working in the studio with the tape recorders and the turntables and other gear. In my downtime I would make commercials and stuff. I realized somewhere in the middle of my radio career that I kind of liked the studio and the voiceover better than I liked being on the air live every day, because on the air, you had to be the same guy every day. And me, I was a little schizo, so I would try different characters. One time I’d go on the radio and I’d be Mr. Cool [in laid back voice], and the next day I would go on the air with this big booming voice, like “hey, it’s Power one oh four!” So the Program Directors thought, you know, we can’t control this guy, and I wound up moving more towards the studio, which is kind of where I still am, doing voiceovers and things.
But, you know, radio is great. It was ‘89 was when I submitted that Glenn Beck promo, and I was getting toward the end of my radio career at the time. I got out of radio in ‘91 and didn’t look back after that.
JV: So you got into radio in the ‘60s, is that right?
Eric: Late ‘60s, yes, and my last station, right after KRBE, was 93Q here in town, which was winding down its Q Zoo radio format with John Lander. After he left, it wasn’t long after that that the station changed to country, which it still is. So that was kind of like my parting from radio. I had put a lot of years in, and radio can be a burnout, especially back in those days. It was actually work. It was pre-digital, so we had turntables. We had cart machines. You were running your own board. It was not nearly as automated as it is today. Those aspects of radio are pretty much gone. I think everything today is pretty much laid in there with the computer. At that time, though, it was a very organic kind of experience for the person who was on the radio -- unless you were one of those lucky ones, like when I was at WRKO in Boston, where we actually had an engineer that ran the board and we were in a booth. We were not allowed to touch the equipment, because we had unions that separated us. So that was kind of a luxury.
But in the real world of radio, pretty much you ran everything. It was hard to believe that you could be at a radio station, the only guy there, running the station, doing the news, doing whatever they wanted you to do. And of course, if you went berserk, you could be on the news, if you wanted. But not many of us went crazy back then, because for some reason we feared the FCC would lock us away forever. I don’t know what the mindset is now.
I think that one of the reasons I left was that I saw radio taking a turn, and I just wasn’t enjoying it as much. But the challenge of voiceover, the challenge of sound design, has always stayed really strong with me, and fortunately, that’s what I chose to do. But I always have a great kinship with radio when I hear it, and the younger guys coming up, I kind of relate to them a little bit these days.
JV: Were you a jock through most of your radio days?
Eric: Oh, yeah. I always wound up doing a show. Even toward the end when I was basically the Imaging Production Director of KRBE and also 93Q, I would do a show just to stay sharp. You can lose your skills really quickly if you don’t do a little live radio. Live radio also puts you in that spot where you can’t make mistakes. Well, you obviously make mistakes, but you are at a heightened sense of awareness as a performer, so you really don’t make as many mistakes because there’s adrenaline pumping through you. When you’re in the production studio by yourself, you can always do another take and edit it together. But on live radio, you can’t. There’s a discipline there that I always liked about radio. When you’re on, if you’re going to be an ass, everybody’s going to know it -- and that was before they had the buttons you could push for the expletives, the delays. Everything was live, in real time.
JV: You’ve had a great radio career at some legendary stations. What are some of the highlights of your radio days?
Eric: Well, the first was when I was at KAAY. It was a 50,000 watt clear channel station booming north and south, and it was kind of a heady experience for a kid just out of high school to be speaking all the way up to Canada and also down to South America. We would get calls from everywhere. We had these breakthrough shows. There was a guy named Clyde Clifford who did this thing called Beaker Street after midnight. He did it from the transmitter, because he had what they call a first phone engineer’s license so he could watch the transmitter. He was right by this huge blower which kept the transmitter cool, but it was also noisy. So he came up with these background tapes of this looping ambient sound that he would throw in behind him to cover up the noise, and it became his signature.
He would play album cuts. He would break stuff like Jimi Hendrix albums, anything that Zeppelin was doing. We’d played album cuts and would do things like the entire second side of Abbey Road, for example. Nobody was doing that then, but we didn’t have many sponsors in that timeslot, so we could. That was an interesting experience.
Coming out of there, I went to Detroit for a short time, and FM was just beginning to become a factor in music. They were making the change. FM originally was occupied mostly by the classic music stations and so on. So this station in Detroit, WDRQ, which I think still exists, was starting out with a rock and roll format on FM. I worked for a guy named Al Casey, who was a very famous programmer at the time. He hired me, but they didn’t pay me enough money. After four or five months, I was starving, and I thought, uh-oh, got to get back down South.
I was able to jump over to a really famous station in Memphis, WHBQ, which of course is still there. It was programmed by George Klein. George was in the inner circle of the Elvis cadre at the time. He was also responsible for playing a lot of Elvis’s early records on the radio as a DJ.
George was an absolute trip, because he had a show on TV at the time, and he was a well-known personality. He would do his shows, and then he would disappear. He was supposed to be the Program Director, but he would party all night with Elvis, because he was in the inner circle, and they would stay up all night. He’d show up the next day with these huge bags under his eyes, and then he’d do his show and then disappear. He was kind of like the mystery Program Director.
I stayed there about a year and a half. I was never quite in the inner circle to meet Elvis, because that takes some time, and it was a highly protected kind of thing. But George was great. I spoke to him later on, and he gave me a couple of breaks. I was a pretty young kid at the time, but I was always working in the studio, and he gave me some carte blanche on creating promos and stuff during the Drake format days. They had taken radio and basically cleaned it from the inside out. They’d streamlined the formats. They had the Johnny Mann jingles, and things like that. We were highly formatted, and it had a very rigid structure for the jocks -- except George could do what he wanted. So that was a different kind of radio than I was trained in. It was a little hard to adapt to at first, but then your personality would start to come through the format after a while.
That kind of gave me a break to go to Dallas. I was at KNUS in Dallas, where there was just a ton of people who have done so well from that era: Tommy Kramer, who is now a consultant; Beau Weaver, who is a huge voice guy out in LA and a friend of mine, and we talk from time to time; and there’s Brother John Rivers who later did the Power Line series.
I could go on and on and on. There were so many people that came out of Dallas We were all about the same age, between 20 and 25, and we all had this certain mindset. Our standards were so high, and our salaries were so low. We literally were working for free back then. We just didn’t know it.
But all that discipline and training paid off. And of course, KNUS was a McLendon station, and Gordon McLendon had some huge ties in all aspects of broadcasting. I remember when Elton John had just released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I believe it was. He was coming through on a tour, and Dallas was a big one. I was able to go out with Randy Haines and another guy. Randy, who is now Hudson and Harrigan here in town, he actually interviewed Elton John. He only had like three albums out prior to that.
We decided to do a show called “An Hour with Elton,” for which I took the cassette tape of all the interview comments, and we basically created an hour of music surrounding what he was talking about. To my knowledge, it’s probably one of the rarest Elton interviews out there, because it was very early on. I still have that on reel-to-reel tape. I’ve not restored it, and I should do that soon, put it into the digital world because the original tapes are quite old.
But he talked about “Take Me to the Pilot” and some of his early stuff and how it all came around. It was quite interesting, and it was very different than the documentary style of that day. Actually, it reflects more of the documentary style of what you would hear today, like on satellite radio.
We had a great time at KNUS, and then shortly after that, things… they happen. There are always changes. So I wound up doing about a five-month stretch at X-Rock 80 in El Paso, another infamous 150,000 watt mega-station. A lot of us from KNUS – like three or four of us -- actually went down there as a group to kind of kick the format into gear.
The weird thing about X-Rock was, because the transmitter was in Mexico, we could not transmit live across the country line, and they didn’t have any provision, like a phone line, to broadcast live. So we had to – now this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done in radio, I think -- we had to do our shows the day before, and in studio, as if we were doing it live, and they would take the tapes the next day over across the border, give them to the engineers, who then played the tapes on the radio.
So we figured out, since it’s always sunny in El Paso, we’d just say “sunny and 75”, but we didn’t do a lot of weather. Everything we did was generic, as if you were doing something for a syndicated show. But we weren’t sophisticated like now, where you could really make it sound live, so we did the best we could. I actually did two shifts a day. I did 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., and 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. So that meant we could never say the time is 6:00 “p.m.” We’d just say, “It’s 6 o’clock.”
Probably the most unusual thing that happened one time, and maybe more than one time, was this thing with the tapes. And you have to understand, this is on a 150,000 watt radio station that’s going everywhere. I mean, we were booming all through North America. But once in a while, one of the engineers would get the tapes, and they wouldn’t rewind one of the hours -- they were those 10-inch tapes at 7.5 ips. One time, or more than once, the guy played an hour backwards without stopping. If you can just think about how you would feel tuning into a radio station and it’s backwards for an hour. And the next day, we would say, “Oh, my God!” Of course, we’d make a promo out of it. “This is the only station in the world to turn back time….”
So that was kind of embarrassing, and usually that would happen in the early morning hours, so it would be on the sky wave off of AM, which means millions of people could be listening to it. That was strange, and that only lasted a while, but I did get a pretty big break out of some of the air checks I had done at X-Rock. I managed to go to WRKO in Boston. I think George Klein also kind of gave me a plug, too. He was still in the chain.
So I went to Boston for about a year and a half, and that’s when radio was really big. It changed dramatically for me because I was just a talent. Well, not just a talent; we were all good talents, but we were all in the AFTRA-SAG union. We had good salaries. We had benefits -- something that you never had -- but we couldn’t touch the equipment. I was a producer, and I loved working on the equipment and stuff, but it was never allowed. For a year and a half, I was never allowed to touch anything. I would work with the engineers there to try to get them to work with me, if I were doing a project for fun or whatever. And these guys were engineers; they weren’t producers. So the production was always kind of rudimentary, kind of a-b-c stuff. There was nothing that you’d call elaborately produced. But the talents were so good, and their voices were so good, and they knew how to read so well, that everything sounded great without any kind of huge elaboration. We still had the very clean Johnny Mann jingles, and a cappellas were big back then. So ‘RKO was great. I learned a lot, but I still kind of had an urge to get back to the South.
I wound up getting a break, going to Pittsburgh for a couple of years and put a station on called 13Q where I had worked with a guy named Dennis Waters, who was the Program Director. But a guy that you might remember is Bob Pittman. He created MTV. Bob Pittman and I we’re about the same age. We worked together at 13Q for a year or two, and he was such a brilliant guy. He was a great jock, but you already knew that something was cooking in his brain. He loved research, and just being around him, you knew that he was a special guy. Very shortly after that, he and a couple of other guys created MTV. It was very powerful, that whole iconic thing. We think of MTV today differently than we did back then. It was a huge force back then. It was all brand new.
So I’ve been really privileged to work with a lot of great people along the way that you learn stuff from, and it creeps into your work after a certain point. It comes back around in the generations, too, because we set some standards back then that I think are pretty high, and hopefully they’re still competitive with what’s going on in today’s production world and radio world.
JV: There are several Eric Chases out there in our industry. There was one that worked at KGB in LA in ‘71. That wasn’t you, was it?
Eric: No. That was a guy who is now called Paul Christie, and that’s an interesting story. I don’t know if Paul’s ever told the story, but I’ve told it. This is very odd, that we were sort of karmatically linked in a way. There was a guy named Michael Spears, who passed away two or three years ago. Michael was a big programmer at the time. His name was Hal Martin, and he was the programmer of KNUS when I got there. When he hired me, my name at the time was Phil North, and that was who I was at ‘HBQ and other stations prior to that. Michael said, “You know, your name just doesn’t make it. It just doesn’t have anything, you know, distinctive about it. There’s this DJ at KFRC in San Francisco, he’s like the hottest DJ out there, and you guys sound a little bit alike. He’s kind of irreverent and so on.” He says, “I think I’ll make you Eric Chase.” And I said, “Okay.” What are you going to say?
Well, it was about three weeks later that Hal or Michael Spears winds up being the actual Program Director of KFRC in San Francisco, which was a huge station at the time. And of course, there was an Eric Chase now working for him there, too. I don’t know how Paul got his Eric Chase name, but his name is not really Eric Chase either. But he became a phenomenon. He worked at KFRC, and I think he also worked in LA at a couple of the stations.
I became sort of the Midwest or the South Eric Chase. I kind of got branded with that name in my radio career, and when I started my production company and doing voiceovers, I decided to keep the brand.
Then I realized there’s another very talented Eric Chase in Florida, who works for Glenn Beck and is the Chase Cuts guy, and he is very, very talented and huge. So I’m thinking, “Okay, how much business am I getting of his, and how much is he getting of mine?”
JV: Well, there are three of you for sure, and I believe there’s actually a fourth one doing imaging in Nevada!
Eric: Here’s the weird thing about the Paul Christie/Eric Chase guy. When I was at KNUS, we needed another jock, and I was going through a box of air checks -- they were on tape back then. I looked at this one tape, and it’s Eric Chase, KJR in Seattle. I thought, “I think this is the guy that I was named after.” So I gave it to the Program Director and said, “This guy is really good. You need to hire him. But of course, you’ll have to change his name,” and he said, “Well, yeah, that’s true.” So, Paul came to the station. They decided, well, we already have our Eric Chase, so you’re going to be Paul Christie. So he changed his name to Paul Christie and becomes a huge radio phenomenon. He is still on the air here at the oldies station, and he does a lot of voiceover. And we’re still good friends; we worked together for many years. He actually wound up being the Program Director of KRBE. When I sent you that tape in ‘89, Paul was the Program Director at the station. So he was responsible for me becoming Eric Chase, and I was responsible for him getting to be Paul Christie. I don’t know; he probably hates me for that. But Paul and I, we have a rich history. I used to do a lot of work producing his voice on stuff, because he had a very dynamic delivery, and I could direct him in some places he had never gone before.
But of course, when I got here, I was not at KRBE. I actually got hired at the original KILT-FM. When I finally left Pittsburgh and was able to get South again, a guy named Rick Candia was Captain Jack on KILT-AM back then, and I was on the FM side. We ended up working for Bill Young for about three and a half, four years, and that was an experience because Bill was a huge name, and he had created some wonderful radio stations, including the old KILT 610. Of course, he had his Bill Young Productions, which still exists, and Bill still lives around here, although I think he’s pretty retired now.
So something about Houston stuck with me, because it was a very dynamic city, and there was a lot going on. And I did enjoy my early radio days here, but radio sort of played out with me after a while. I just kind of got burned out on the whole thing, although sometimes I have inklings of going back on the air just for fun.
JV: You’re having a blast up and down the dial while you’re in radio, all the while honing your voice and production skills. At what point did you think, “Hey, I need to start doing some serious freelance work here”?
Eric: Well, I kind of did it all along, but I didn’t realize that it could be a whole job unto itself. I had done some work in 1979 with a guy named Herb Holland. Herb is a political consultant now in Austin, but back then, we were just young punks. We’re like 24, 25 years old. We approached TM Productions in Dallas, their syndicated side, about a concept that we had. It was early ‘79, and August of ‘79 would have been the 10th anniversary of Woodstock. We said, “We’d love to do a show…,” and our working title was “Woodstock: Ten Years Later,” which won out to be the title. I was doing a lot of production at the time on the side. I loved working on projects.
So we got a guy named Ed Shane to write the treatment, and Herb and I managed to get a $50,000 budget. We traveled all over the US and talked to all these people and did all these interviews. We got John Sebastian of Lovin’ Spoonful to be the actual host. We went in the studio, and it took about ten straight days of studio work, but we created a six-hour documentary on Woodstock. It wound up winning the documentary of the year for its content. It was syndicated on about 50 stations.
About three years ago, I took all those tapes and restored them from the original backup master tapes, took all the noise off of them, punched them up, and got them to actually sounding what I think is better than it was back then. When XM Satellite Radio signed on in its first year, they needed some programming stuff, so they ran our documentary, Woodstock: Ten Years Later, that we managed to get all the rights for, and then created a new documentary. It was a documentary of a documentary. It was 35 years later than the actual event, but it was looking at a perspective from 1979. So we figured out a way to sell that, and that has actually been aired nationally since about three years ago, on the 35th anniversary, I believe.
So those were the things that started telling me that, you know, there’s something more for me in terms of production. I knew what radio needed, and I was beginning to find out what the different markets needed. And always, I was just going for the highest standard I could, but it was very hard work. We had eight tracks that we could use, but in pairs of two, that means you really only had four tracks, because you were stereo, obviously. We had to build things in such a way that it would have flow, but it wouldn’t be like one edit after another. There was a lot of technical stuff that we worked out to get a high standard, and I’m very proud of some of those old shows.
We also did two shows for Billboard magazine at that time. Herb moved out of Houston, but we work all the time on political stuff. He’ll get a campaign together, and I’ll voice the candidate’s message and also do sound design. That’s one of those long ties over 30 years. One of the things about our business, on the freelance side, you always discover someone’s skills, and then they just go to you again and again: “This is the guy I go to; he can do stuff very fast,” or, “He has this kind of delivery.” I’ve built a career on keeping those relationships ongoing. You never know when they’ll come back around. But I’ve been involved in the production/voiceover side pretty much right parallel with radio, I’d say.
JV: You broke away from the radio gigs and went full time with ECCS in early 1991. What was that first year like?
Eric: It was a bitch. [laughs] Scary as hell. Well, the thing about it was, I had my own mic chain -- which I still use, an Orban 442 limiter kind of built the way I like it; and I know they have some wonderful equipment out now, but I just like the way that stuff sounds. Anyway, I had the mic chain, but I didn’t have a studio to go with it. So I wound up doing a deal with a guy named Jay West here in town. He had a studio, and he always closed up tight at 5:00. I would sublet his studio between 5:00 and around midnight, and I did that for the first two years.
I set up my schedule where I’d get all my clients together in the day. By this time I was doing national work for Men’s Wearhouse, and I was doing some casino work with Sam’s Town and Tunica, just building a client base. I would do all my production between 5:00 and midnight or 1:00, and then go home and crash. I was trying to save my money and build toward getting my own studio. This was right before digital came in, so I was still doing everything in analog.
A group approached me in 1994 or 1995, and they had a studio they were putting together for television production, and their biggest client was Six Flags. They needed an in-house guy who could be a go-to guy for sound design. So for about six or seven years, I was the voice of Six Flags nationally -- not just Dallas and Houston, but all of them. They had like 20 parks back then. Of course, now they have one or two because the bottom fell out of the theme park business a few years ago. But back then it was a thriving business. They were doing multiple commercials for television. I was doing sound design for TV, voiceover for Six Flags, national stuff for Men’s Wearhouse... I mean, it was a huge year.
Then I had just acquired my first Pro Tools system, and I was making the jump between the analog and the Pro Tools, which was a learning curve, but the way they had set up Pro Tools in my mind was very linear. It was a very good way to take the concepts of tape and tracks and make them simple. And of course, being digital, there were so many things that you could do. My productivity went sky high at that point, and I was able to do a lot of cool stuff. I didn’t look back. Now I’ve got a much more modern Pro Tools system, but I’m still working with the same creative group, Off The Wall Productions. They do a lot of stuff for industrial and theme parks still. We’re kind of a loose association of creative talents where we don’t bother each other and we get the job done.
But those early years, the first two or three, man, it was very difficult. I said, “I’m going to give myself one year to see if I can actually make a living doing voiceover and production,” and it’s turned out to be 18 or 19 years now. Time flies fast.
But all that discipline in radio kind of came into play, because there’s a lot of hard work there. If you’re in the production side in radio, it’s like from one door it’s coming at you, and you’re shoving it out the back door as soon as you can produce it. You get used to that pace. The freelance world was hardly anything compared to radio stations, but that discipline really helped me stay on track and get stuff out. It was just great training. It’s hard to get people into radio now in the same way, because radio’s changed so much. But it certainly helped me at the time.
JV: You obviously do a lot of voice work. Are you still doing a lot of production work?
Eric: Well, I do have a few specialty clients. I work with casinos. Wheeling Island Twin River casino up in Providence, and I’ve done Sam’s Town. I do a lot of sound design in the casino world, a lot of concert-oriented stuff, music things, like the old Pace concert stuff. They have a lot of artists that go through these casinos, and so I do a fair amount of sound design for that. I do a lot of sound design for the TV guys here. But a lot of my emphasis now is mostly doing voice work. I do a lot of narration work. One of my accounts is GTV, God TV, out of England, and they have a channel on 365. They kind of like this delivery I do, it’s a movie trailer guy, but it’s for a religiously-oriented channel, so it’s very apocalyptic-sounding at times.
But most of my work is voiceover; 65 percent is probably voiceover only. I do some imaging for some stations. I’m back in Detroit. I’ve got a jazz station up there, so that’s kind of cool, and I have a TV station here. So I would say 65, 70 percent is voice, but I still do a good amount of sound design. When it becomes good for the clients to use me, I try to push that because I can do a turnkey deal. I have the writing experience and the mixing, and I have the tool libraries. I can make it very easy on a client if they wanted to go that way. But when they’re outside of the market, they sometimes like to produce their own stuff, and that’s the beauty of the internet, being able to send the tracks anywhere and everywhere. A lot of time, you never hear the final piece. Why would they even send it, except if you asked for it? But I’m glad to say that my talent, my ability to read, my narration skills, have gotten better with time, and that’s good. Some things don’t.
JV: Narration can be an awkward jump for some who’ve only done the commercial or imaging stuff. Did you find that to be the case on your first few jumps into narration?
Eric: Well, I had a lot of good training, people to help me out once in a while. There was a guy, I think he lives in the Dallas area, his name’s Tommy Kramer, and we worked together briefly back in the KNUS days. He is one of my best coaches. He is the master of the understatement. He’s the master of being able to take the radio out of you, if you will.
Of course, I can hit the button and go one direction being like the radio guy, “Today on….” But when it comes to the understated narration, that natural style, that took a while to work on. I did a lot of voice workshops, acting workshops, and sending tracks to different people. I still do it today. I’ll send something to Tommy or some people that I trust, and they will give me feedback. They’ll say, “You’re sounding a little radio here, or you’re sounding a little bit too strained.” A lot of it’s how to de-train yourself from those old bad habits that are appropriate for radio but are not nearly for voice acting, because they’re two different things.
Announcing and voice acting are way different, and they can be the same. But the acting part is something that you have to have a different mindset for. And if you don’t, then you won’t get that kind of work. I really worked hard to get the voice acting right, and I still fall back on my old habits or old voice styles. I do get a lot of this hyperactive, really up stuff, but I’m now getting a lot more of the serious narrational style stuff. It’s taken several years to get to that point, and you cannot stop learning. If you do, then you really just become yesterday’s news real fast, because there are a lot of people who want to do voiceover now, more than ever. And because of radio being as it is, laying people off, these people come out of radio saying, “Oh, I guess I’ll be a voice actor now.” Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. You really have to have the right talent. Actually, talent is one thing, but some of the skills just come with time, working at it. It hasn’t been easy, but I feel like I have two minds now, I have two sets of skills in the voice world that I can go to. It all depends on what’s being called for by the script.
JV: Has your radio background been a problem for you when dealing with clients that are looking for voiceover in this voice “actors’” world?
Eric: No. I don’t really talk about radio much when I’m doing auditions. A lot of times it’s very anonymous, and you just do the read. Each script is as it is, and you read it as an actor. I never really talk about my old radio career anymore, but if it comes up, it cannot work for you. With agencies and people who are doing the casting, usually when someone says radio, that’s a red flag – they can’t be an actor. It’s not true necessarily, but it is a mindset. So you do have to kind of avoid getting into the radio rap. They’re interested in an actor doing their part, and even if the script calls for an announcer, they’re really still looking for an actor, in my view.
JV: Your website mentions that you do some copywriting, is that correct?
Eric: Well, copywriting is not my favorite, because I think that a lot of people can do that better than me. But if it calls for it, I can certainly create. Since I write visually, I’m writing copy for me based on how I would produce it. So I hear the production, and I can usually get the words to go with the music. But I don’t really feel that that’s my strong suit. Although I have won a couple of awards for some spots I have written, I wouldn’t call myself a major writer really. I write by necessity.
One thing I will say about production and voiceover: it’s a very organic kind of profession, and it does have a way of reaching into a lot of areas. There are so many of us out there that have this unique set of skills. It’s sort of a brotherhood to some degree -- and sisterhood, because there are some great female actresses out there that don’t get their dues, honestly. So it’s kind of nice to be in this community still. I’m very proud of our profession. Believe it or not, we move the things that get bought in this economy, and we’ve done very well as a group. Consumerism being as it is, we’ve helped to supply the voice for our economy for years. We’re always the voices that you take for granted being there, just helping to sell the message. What would a great movie be without a great movie voiceover guy? It’s one of those professions where most people don’t know that we exist, although they hear us all the time. That’s kind of magical to me, in a way.
JV: Well I’m glad I listened to that 20 year old Glenn Beck promo and gave you a call. This was a lot of fun, Eric.
Eric: It’s just nice to be rediscovered. I have to thank you for listening to that promo. In fact, I’ve always thought that Glenn Beck would be famous, even when he was a crazy kid back in Houston doing morning shows and wild stuff. It’s just a case in point, how things come back around. You’re interested in that promo, and it kind of brought you back to me, and then I’m going to drop a note to Glenn Beck, who is starting on Fox soon, just to say hi, good luck, and all that. So it’s really nice to still be a part of the community and not be hidden behind the scenes so much.
JV: Any final thoughts for our readers in those radio production studios?
Eric: Keep hanging in there and working on your skills. Don’t let the technology overtake your creativity. Or in other words, don’t let the technology represent your creativity. Use them as tools. Don’t let it use you. I see a lot of people out there -- because you can do so many things in the digital world -- they don’t always realize that it still comes from the idea of, are you really selling the product? What does it need?
Always strive for a better presentation that comes from within you. Let that technology work for you, and don’t let it dominate you. It’s so easy to do some things now that it replaces that certain effort and certain quality that comes from inside. Always strive for that quality inside. I think if you do that, you’ll continue to get better. You’ll get better gigs. Your stuff will stand out. And don’t hesitate to take risks at times. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes an easy production is better on the ear and gets the message sent more effectively than jamming them with reverb and all the things that you can do. Strive for the quality always, and if you do that, then you can’t go wrong. You’ll just continue to get better.