Brian O'D's 27-year local broadcast odyssey has thrown him more than a few curves, but he's never lost focus on what's ultimately important: the musicFriday morning, a little before 9 a.m., a radio announcer is in the final hour of his shift at Cincinnati's Classical music public radio station, WGUC. Sitting at a high-tech console in a softly lit control room, surrounded by state-of-the-art sound equipment, glowing meters, two computer screens and a TV tuned to a cable channel for weather information, he's juggling bits of local news with updates from National Public Radio, traffic reports and arts calendar information with the station's bread and butter, Classical music.
This is WGUC, FM 90.9, where in the next hour the Cincinnati Spotlight fills you in on what's going on at Coney Island this weekend at Summerfair. The Montreal Expos have exited, and the Reds are thankful for that. In come the Minnesota Twins for a weekend series. This is WGUC Cincinnati.
Just before the turn of the century, Edward Elgar was sort of catapulted into the international musical spotlight with what was originally called the "Variations on an Original Theme." But that original theme was marked "enigma." Speculation was that the original theme was Elgar himself. There were so many of the themes that represented his friends, his family, his wife, folks he knew from the neighborhood, from the church and even a bulldog named Dan. The "Enigma Variations," coming up in the 9 o'clock hour. First the NPR news ... .
Early Saturday morning, 23 hours later, on another FM frequency 89.7 this time the same voice emanates from a cramped but sun-washed studio in Highland Heights. Today he's sitting on a squeaky chair at a 15-year-old control board, amid sound equipment and posters for contemporary singers and bands. The music is decidedly not Classical.
It's a beautiful morning, going to be a great day today, blue skies. If you were up at, oooh, roughly 5:30 or so, the sun was on its way up then with just some amazing colors in the sky. There's some pretty decent colors now, just a few seconds shy of 8 o'clock. We'll hit a high of 75 today, and pretty much the same for tomorrow. All in all, a splendid weekend.
This is the day back in 1967 we heard for the first time an album called Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was released on the first of June in England, two days later on the third of June in the States. If memory serves you well, that was quite the experience, that first listen. We'll be listening to bits and pieces of it. Matter of fact, we might get the whole thing in chunks throughout the morning on Saturday Morning Music, after an NPR news update. This is WNKU, FM 89.7, and it's 8 o'clock ... .
Brian O'Donnell is doing something highly unusual in contemporary broadcasting: He works for two radio stations. He's the regular morning host every weekday for Classical WGUC, from 6 to 10 a.m., presenting symphonies and chamber music. Then on Saturdays, instead of relaxing or sleeping in, he's up at 4:30 a.m., just like weekdays. He drives for a half-hour from his home in Roselawn to the campus of Northern Kentucky University, where he signs WNKU on the air at 6 a.m. for two hours of syndicated programming. Then, as Brian O'D, he spins a four-hour program, blending his own eclectic tastes in Classic Rock tunes with WNKU's more contemporary acoustic singer/songwriters who make up that station's daily musical fare.
Whether he's presenting the enigmas of Edward Elgar or the melodies of The Beatles, Brian O'Donnell is Mr. Radio. His 27-year odyssey in Cincinnati radio has taken him from the legendary early days of WEBN to a tiny station in Hamilton, from Classic Rock to Cool Jazz. He's a walking history lesson in local broadcasting.
But he didn't set out to become the voice of Cincinnati.
Listen to This
"Most high-schoolers," O'Donnell says, "probably don't have any idea of what they're gonna do with their lives. I sure didn't, but as far back as I can remember, I've always been a fanatic about music, about all different styles of music."
O'Donnell's family moved to Cincinnati from Chicago in the mid-1950s, to a house in Golf Manor, not far from where he lives today with Sandy, his wife of 22 years, and their two sons. His Irish heritage is a point of pride: His boys are named Paddy and Ian.
O'Donnell's dad was called Mr. O'D by his kids' friends. As a radio announcer, O'Donnell has used Brian O'D at several radio stations, including WNKU. He's quick to emphasize his Irish roots, correcting an occasional misperception that his name is a drug reference.
Music has fascinated him for as long as he can remember. When he was 5 or 6, he heard a Fats Domino tune on his babysitter's radio. "That's probably my earliest memory of a piece of music that really turned my head. I said, 'What is that?' That's always been with me."
He doesn't play a musical instrument, other than strumming a few chords on a guitar -- "three or four Neil Young songs," he says wistfully -- and keeping an out-of-tune piano at home. But music has always been essential to his life.
"It's a gift to be able to feel music and have music really transform you," he says. "Nowadays, it's a lot of pieces that I hear here at 'GUC that I wasn't aware of 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. But back then it's that Fats Domino tune, a string of Elvis songs, The Beatles."
As a kid he listened to Top 40 radio. "Saturday mornings were countdown time," when he'd tune in to WSAI to find out what was on the list.
"And then you could immediately go over to Swifton Shopping Center, where there was a store called Newmark's Melody Center that had about six or eight booths in the back with record players. You could get a record, put it on the player and listen to it. If I didn't have the money to buy it, I could always go there and listen to it for a while before I got kicked out of the store. Then I'd go home, change clothes and go back in and hope maybe they wouldn't recognize who I was."
Mike Williams has been O'Donnell's friend since the eighth grade, 36 years ago at Our Mother of Sorrows.
"Brian was always the one who would go out and buy the albums," Williams says. "We'd listen on whatever stereo equipment we had. He'd come over and play the music and say, 'Now listen to this! Listen to this! Listen to this!' "
O'Donnell was listening to Elvis and The Beatles back then, and their music made a big impact on him. He recalls the power of hearing The Beatles in a live concert at the Cincinnati Gardens, just before his 14th birthday.
"Seeing them on The Ed Sullivan Show was pretty cool," he says. "But to be in the Gardens in that electric atmosphere when they came out onstage, everything just shot through you.
"It doesn't matter the genre of music. It can be a Folk piece. It can be a Mozart clarinet concerto or ... ," he trails off, groping for an example. "On the way to work (at WGUC) this morning, I'm listening to the Best of Ricky Nelson at 5:15, and it's that same feeling all over again.
"I didn't know it at the time, but that's why I got into radio."
Working on the 'Moon'
Thirty years ago, however, a young Brian O'Donnell had no idea he was on the entrance ramp to a career in broadcasting. He majored in liberal arts at the University of Cincinnati.
After his 1972 graduation, he discovered the on-campus, closed-circuit station, WFIB. Station staff had to be enrolled as students, so he signed up, one course per quarter, to make it possible to dabble in radio.
"I took a ton of literature courses: Asian literature, Indian literature, Jewish literature," he says. "Anything, as long as I was able to work at the station."
Then he learned something even more interesting. WGUC, the university's non-commercial Classical music station, signed off at midnight, and the general manager was letting students use the FM signal in the wee hours. "We were able to do basically whatever we wanted between midnight and 3. Then it became midnight to 6. It was a totally free format. Full Moon Radio is what it was called. Boy, that was just the ultimate to me, to be on this FM radio station.
"The way you could be most creative on the radio," he says, "was to fashion a 20- or 25-minute sweep of music, three or four really good segues, where you ultimately wouldn't know where one piece ended and another piece began."
O'Donnell had found his calling.
Meanwhile, his childhood friend Jacqui Speier got a job at WEBN. (Speier, who grew up in the house O'Donnell owns today, became Jacqui Brumm and eventually managed WEBN.) She got him in to see WEBN's studios, where he met program director Denton Marr.
"Very early in 1973, (Marr) alerted me to the fact that the Saturday night-Sunday morning announcer was leaving and there was going to be an opening," O'Donnell says. He delivered a tape of his work on Full Moon Radio and got hired to work from midnight to 8 a.m.
"I did that for a relatively short time, before an evening position became available, from 10 to 2," he says. "That was my first full-time job in radio. I don't remember what I was making then, but I remember being happier than a pig in slop. It was better money than I'd ever made, but to go to work, sit down and play records for four hours, I couldn't have been happier."
Marr, today a part-time announcer on Louisville's WHAS and development director of a food bank, remembers O'Donnell.
"He just started hanging around with a bunch of us at WEBN and was the logical choice when a weekend air shift opened up," Marr says. "He was always a solid and dependable guy, loyal, hardworking and committed to doing good radio. He had a very understated and wry sense of humor and was always a great guy to be around."
O'Donnell remembers his WEBN days fondly. "I got in with a bunch of guys who had their heads exactly where mine was, in that they just absolutely loved music."
After a few years at WEBN, his happiness tripped him up. The station's early success lead to a corporate desire for more.
"The radio industry was changing," O'Donnell says. "Things were getting tighter in terms of what you could play and what you couldn't."
WEBN hired consultants to shape the station's image, who handed down advice: "Here's what we're gonna sound like. Here's how we're gonna dress. You gotta relate to these kids on the street. If you want to be cool and hip when the kids look at you, you wear a beard, you talk like this, you tell time like this. ... All this stuff rubbed me and a lot of other people the wrong way."
O'Donnell had gotten married in 1978 and bought a home. But as his frustrations grew, he also started doubting his career choice. "I began to get weird vibes, to feel guilty about doing this job that was so easy. Nobody else I knew was doing work they liked. (They were) loading trucks, working on the railroad, being in a sweaty-ass caboose when it's 99 degrees in the summertime. All my friends were doing regular jobs. And here I was going to work in an air-conditioned studio, playing music."
Friend Williams puts O'Donnell in perspective: "Radio is not an easy thing to do. It's up. It's down. It's back. It's forth. People know Brian as a radio guy and as a personality on the radio. What they have to keep in mind is he's just a regular guy. He's got a family. He's still got to bring home some cash and make the payments."
O'Donnell resigned from WEBN, almost impulsively, in August 1979.
"I quit there in order to go and get my hands dirty," he remembers. He loaded trucks for a while, then went door-to-door as a census worker in 1980. His hiatus led to a lot of introspection, and O'Donnell realized radio was where he needed to be.
"I really wanted to get back into the only thing I really know how to do, the only thing I've ever really loved to do," he says. "It was about six or eight months, long enough to say you don't miss your water 'til your well runs dry. This (radio) is what I should be doing."
Williams says he and O'Donnell's other personal friends agree: "He's the one of us that throughout his life has been true to his love. His love is radio. His love is music."
Coming Back
An acquaintance told O'Donnell about a job at a little station in Hamilton, WMOH-AM. He showed up and quickly got hired.
"I started doing evenings, then middays, then mornings," he says, noting that he liked the station's Top 40 format and that it got even better when it changed to more Adult Contemporary. "I ended up staying there seven years. I was going up there to get a few paychecks, pay a few bills, then move on to something else. But it was a real comfortable situation. It's one of those small-market stations where you're program director and production director." Handling so many responsibilities gave him the education in broadcasting he'd never had.
In 1986, O'Donnell reduced his commuting time with a job as production director at Cincinnati's WLLT-FM, "Lite 95." In 1988, the station became "The Fox."
"I thought this Classic Rock format was just what this market needed," O'Donnell says. "That was fun, being part of putting that format together. We did a hell of a good job."
But several years later, an ownership change the bane of many careers in broadcasting changed O'Donnell's direction. He was laid off in 1995.
He'd become a regular listener to WNKU, Northern Kentucky University's public radio station, which aired acoustic music by singer-songwriters whose tunes were often a bit too edgy and honest for commercial radio. O'Donnell dropped by the station one day late in 1995, just for a look around. He ended up sitting with program director Dan Reed for a couple of hours. "On the way out I said, 'If you ever need anybody to fill a shift, I'd love to come down here and work.' "
Reed jumped at the offer, and O'Donnell took over the Saturday morning shift he still staffs today. When Reed left WNKU, O'Donnell stepped into the 8 to midnight shift. He loved the work and the music format at WNKU and broadened his radio experience into the non-commercial arena, including activities such as fundraising.
General Manager Dave Arnold says O'Donnell was perfect for WNKU.
"The premise of our format is that everyone from the Baby Boom on was raised on Rock music," Arnold says. "As we move toward middle age, we're also interested in new stuff that's written from a more adult, rather than teen, perspective. So we try to blend old and new for a primarily 35-plus audience, which requires that they trust us to choose wisely.
"It's great to find on-air folks who share the audience's history with the music going back 20 or 30 years, but it's a home run to find someone who is part of the audience's radio history as well (such as O'Donnell). As listeners, we know Brian as part of that experience and we trust his taste implicitly. (WNKU's) air staff has some leeway in choosing music other than the current CDs we play, and to my ear Brian does the best job of picking music that really resonates with our core audience."
While the format was perfect, O'Donnell found it tough to make ends meet.
"To be honest," he says, "WNKU just doesn't pay a whole lot of money, even though it was a good steady paycheck."
Another old acquaintance had become manager of a new "Light Jazz" radio station, WVAE-FM, "The Wave," and he recruited O'Donnell to join him. "For close to double the money," he says wryly.
O'Donnell had one requirement. "I told (him) I'll take this job, provided I can do the public radio Saturday morning shift. He didn't have any problem with that. He said, 'It's a cool thing you do.' "
O'Donnell used his real name on The Wave and was Brian O'D on WNKU. While the commercial station's format wasn't his musical preference, the work was pleasant. After another ownership change, however, he was told his dual gig was over.
"(The new owners) immediately put the kibosh on me doing this public radio thing. 'You can't do that,' they told me. 'You're in commercial radio. You belong to us. We don't want you over there.' I said there's no competition. It's a hobby for me. It's like on a Saturday, going out and working on a '57 Chevy."
He lost the argument.
A Classical Invitation
Before The Wave cut him off from his "hobby," O'Donnell had been approached by yet another radio station, Cincinnati's Classical music non-commercial broadcaster, WGUC. Karla Walker, now working for a Classical music radio network based in Denver, was WGUC's music director in 1996, and she remembers hearing O'Donnell on WNKU one Saturday.
"My first reaction," Walker says, "was, 'Oh, my gosh. Who is this guy? He sounds way too good for public radio,' "
Her remark isn't a slam on public radio announcers. "But in public radio we often bring people up through the volunteer ranks, or we're just not as professional as we want to be. I heard Brian and I thought, 'He just sounds terrific.' "
She called him to talk about public radio and the Cincinnati market. O'Donnell remembers the call: "At the end of the conversation, she asked if I'd be willing to come and work (at WGUC), which kind of flabbergasted me. It took me by surprise. I said I'll have to get back to you on that."
He was pretty comfortable with straddling The Wave and WNKU, so he didn't pursue the opportunity.
Denied his WNKU fix, however, O'Donnell opened up to Walker's offer. In mid-1997, she called him again.
"We kind of rehashed the same conversation," he says, "and she said, 'I really want you to come work over here.' I explained that I didn't have any Classical music training. They were bringing people in who knew radio, more than putting people who were musicians on the air."
"I tricked him into coming in for an interview," Walker says. "I said, 'Why don't you come in and talk, and I'll give you a tour of the station.' He came in, expecting this very casual thing. I had three people assembled in a room. He came in, and we started firing questions at him. He kind of gave me a look like, 'What's going on here?' "
O'Donnell struggled with the decision, but his friend Mike Williams says everyone encouraged him to go for it.
"Classical music was not his forte," Williams says, "but anyone who had known Brian for any number of years and knew his capabilities ... well, we convinced him: Yeah, man, you can do this!"
O'Donnell made the switch to WGUC in August 1997, first taking on an afternoon shift from 2 to 6 p.m., which meant hosting two hours of Classical music (2-4 p.m.) and then anchoring the local cut-ins to WGUC's broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered. In the summer of 1998, after a year of abortive attempts to find a satisfactory replacement for WGUC's popular morning host John Birge -- who went to non-commercial powerhouse Minnesota Public Radio -- O'Donnell slipped comfortably into the 6-10 a.m. slot.
WGUC's General Manager Rich Eiswerth thinks that O'Donnell is especially well-suited for morning drive time.
"He has a calm, steady, reassuring tone to his voice," Eiswerth says. "It's the kind of thing that's comfortable to wake up and listen to, not shouting you down, not being frenetic. His tone is reassuring that the day is here and everything's going fine. The world didn't end overnight."
Today O'Donnell fits comfortably into listeners' morning routines.
Holographic
O'Donnell has a great voice that seems to attracts listeners initially, regardless of the music format. Not only is it smooth and pleasant, but it also conveys a real human being.
"I'm just me on the air," he says. "I'm a guy playing records."
He likens himself to Lenny Harris, a Reds utility player from the late 1980s and early 1990s. "He could play any position and could play it very well. He's not probably going to be in the Hall of Fame, but he was always somebody you could count on to get the job done.
"I'm not great, but I'm good, and I can do what needs to be done. I think that's why I've weathered all those (different radio formats). And because I'm real. All in all, if you listen to the different formats I've done, it would be very easy to identify who I was. What you hear is what you get at each station. There's not a whole lot of variance."
Eiswerth agrees that being "real" is O'Donnell's fundamental quality. "What you hear is what he is. He's obviously not attempting to be a fake or attempting an on-air persona that's in any way different from what he is in person."
Walker calls O'Donnell's presence "holographic."
"He has the ability to sound like he's talking to one person," she says. "You know he's talking to 140,000 listeners, but he has that ability to sound as if he's talking just to you. It's just natural ability.
"What makes him so transferable from one format to another is that he's incredibly well versed in a variety of different music genres, in Rock & Roll, in Folk and acoustic and now in Classical. He'd be the first to admit that he didn't know a whole lot about Classical when he first came to WGUC."
His initial lack of knowledge actually spurred him to achieve, she believes. "We always try to hire people who have knowledge, but what Brian brought was a professionalism to learn the music. Every single day he would spend four hours preparing for a four-hour show. Just reading and reading and reading and reading, as much as he could, talking to people, to other announcers who knew things, reading books, reading liner notes, reading magazines -- everything he could do to learn the music and become very intimate with it."
O'Donnell recalls the transition to WGUC as a bit intimidating.
"It was one of the most frightening things I've ever done," he says. "But, boy, looking back now, it's the best career move I've ever made, coming to work here with this wonderful bunch of people, coming to work in this musical format that I hope to keep working in until I call it quits from broadcasting."
Suzanne Bona was a full-time WGUC announcer when O'Donnell started, and today she's a part-timer who creates Sunday Morning Baroque, a program carried on many NPR stations. One of his regular resources at first, she has a theory about why he's done so well.
"Brian has never rested on repeating tired clichés about the music, because he didn't know any of them," Bona says. "He's been able to look at it with a fresh perspective and introduce new listeners who may be less familiar with the music, because he's answering the questions they may also be asking. At the same time, he's augmenting the knowledge of those who do know about the music by finding a new angle.
"I know I often find myself hearing new tidbits of interesting information from Brian, and I have a college degree in music. He's respectful of listeners' curiosity and intelligence, and his hard work and research are always evident."
WNKU's Arnold says, "Brian's gift is his ability to be the listener's best friend. Brian never talks at us, always with us. He's never impressed with his own considerable knowledge of music. He instinctively knows when to talk, what to say, when to be quiet."
Music Therapy
O'Donnell's mental health has been positive since WGUC approved and encouraged his Saturday shift on WNKU. Walker, he recalls, "not only said I could do it but encouraged me to be as creative as I can. In order to do that, she told me, 'I think it would be really good (for you) to keep doing the WNKU thing.' Which to me was just the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard."
His work for WNKU is a labor of love, not a source of revenue. "They certainly don't have to pay me," he says, noting that he earns a minimal hourly rate. "This is stupid to say, but I'd pay them. Minimal, but if they said, 'You can do this show, but it'll cost you $10 a week,' I'd gladly give up 10 bucks to play my records and hear my music for four hours. That's about what I get paid there, probably."
Ask O'Donnell about his favorite artists, and he says, "It depends on what day you ask me." But he has a fundamental list: Elvis Presley; The Beatles; Bruce Springsteen ("I can probably say that I'm the first person in this whole market to have played Springsteen," he says, recalling a 45 rpm demo back in 1973 that he played on Full Moon Radio); Crosby, Stills and Nash; Eric Clapton; and James Taylor.
There are common threads he can identify to his enjoyment of the music he broadcasts on both WGUC and WNKU.
"I'm a big lover of Folk songs, back to Pete Seeger and others." he notes. As a result, he loves the work of a Classical composer like Ralph Vaughn Williams, who scoured small towns and villages in England seeking folk melodies to incorporate into his orchestral compositions.
In a similar vein are Antonin Dvorák's Slavonic Dances. "Especially 'Dance No. 4,' which sounds like a 19th-century Top 40 hit. It's got a hook that's just so pronounced. These are Pop masterpieces. You can pluck them right out of the Classical music genre. Mozart. Dvorák. Vaughn Williams. Most of Mendelssohn. Some Baroque things. Most of J.S. Bach. I'm a real sucker for melodic (music)."
Memorable lyrics are important in the Pop music he loves. "If it's a serious song, it's got to have somewhat mature, non-sophomoric lyrics. Well-structured, though not necessarily in a Classical sense. It just shouldn't sound like a kid wrote it. Musically, I'm not a big fan of real hard thrashing Rock. I like it melodic, a nice tune. A good guitar lick doesn't hurt."
He again mentions Clapton and Taylor, who he feels have gotten even better as they get older.
Some might say the same of O'Donnell.
A Good Neighbor
Being a good friend might be O'Donnell's ultimate qualification for success.
"Brian is probably one of the most humble people and among just the nicest people I have ever met," Walker says. "I've been gone from Cincinnati for a couple of years now, and he's been so wonderful, always sending updates and e-mails, how are things going, here's what's happening here."
Bona chimes in, "Brian is one of the most levelheaded people I've ever met. Let's face it: Radio is performing, and often performers can be 'difficult.' There isn't a difficult bone in that man's body. He's so easygoing and considerate and supportive of his colleagues, and he has a really wholesome and healthy personality."
At WGUC, O'Donnell organizes staff outings to Reds games and other events. "If I could choose a neighbor or a best friend, Brian's the guy," Eiswerth says. "He's willing to pitch in and help. He's easygoing and reliable."
O'Donnell's enthusiasm for music is intertwined in sharing it with friends, especially when it comes to performers he's listened to for years. The recent release of a recording by B.B. King and Eric Clapton piqued his interest back in early June when he had a demo of one song to air on WNKU. A few weeks later, he'd added it to his collection and couldn't wait to share it.
"It came out Tuesday," he says, "and I went up to Everybody's Records and bought it. I was so looking forward to taking it on a camping trip and turning these guys on to it."
The "guys" -- Williams and O'Donnell's other long-time buddies -- still hearken back to him bringing to a party a stack of 45s he wanted everyone to hear. Things haven't changed all that much more than 30 years later.
"His interests are so varied," Williams says. "He'll turn you on to something that ordinary folks like me would never hear of. When we're playing cards or off on a camping trip, he's the one who's got the music."
O'Donnell sounds like he's creating yet another radio program. "It's usually old Blues stuff that we listen to when we play cards, some Classical things for the evening. It's always good to bring a new piece. In the middle of a card game, somebody will say, 'What the hell is that?' "
With a sly smile, Brian O'Donnell simply looks back at the questioner and says, "Listen to this!" ©
