http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertain ... 2325.storyThe first show of the Jonathon Brandmeier era at WGN-AM 720 began inauspiciously: He spilled water on the control board.
Things sort of fizzled and frazzled from there. Throughout the three-and-a-half hour program Friday morning, cuts to and from commercials were uncharacteristically choppy. The host didn’t know the phone system and couldn’t seem to remember people’s names or where the microphone is outside WGN’s Michigan Avenue showcase studio.
Perhaps more ominously, Brandmeier, who made his mark in the more freewheeling days at the WLUP-FM of the late 1980s, chafed openly at WGN’s tight format – newscasts on the half-hour, please – and at the many and long “live reads” of commercials he was supposed to do.
“There’s a break. I got it. I’m very clear on it,” he said at one point to somebody off-mic, who had apparently interrupted him in the middle of a story about hanging out with 1985-era Bears players. “Lemme just talk for a second.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, calling in, essentially threatened to hang up if the guy doing the Mr. Moviefone feature from Hollywood wouldn’t stop trying to butt in as the mayor and host shared their favorite Scorcese and DeNiro movies. Without so much as a kiss on either cheek, Mr. Moviefone was eliminated, but not as quickly as a Brandmeier at the top of his game would have done.
In the morning’s not-quite-chaos, reporters and photographers who had been told they could sit in the studio and observe Day One were disinvited. But they could still hear, over the radio, Brandmeier himself using the phrase “train wreck” on at least two occasions and calling Friday’s a test show on others.
It was, all told, not up to the level of polish listeners would expect of WGN or its new morning man, no matter how much this may have been done in a hurry, to take advantage of big holiday ad budgets, no matter how much those involved may have been viewing it as a work in progress.
And yet.
And yet suddenly there was energy on WGN in the morning, Brandmeier’s peripatetic-verging-on-scattershot mind and hearty enthusiasms playing out like a sudden switch from decaf to espresso shots dropped in a Red Bull. He loves snow! He loves Ditka! He loves Chicago! At his best he has always found a way to win you over with that energy, to salvage bits that weren’t panning out, and he had the gift of knowing to get out of bits before they started to flag.
And suddenly, too, there was a host with a strong connection to Chicago on the city’s big AM talk and sports station (a corporate sibling of this newspaper in the Tribune Co. empire). Maybe the Harry Caray impersonator was one toe dip too many in old waters, but Brandmeier talked to Ron Santo’s son and, with charm, made fun of himself while playing rote greetings welcoming him to WGN taped by the Chicago Blackhawks Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane.
He talked not only with Emanuel, over the phone, but with Gov. Pat Quinn, in person. While he has said he wants the show to be like “Today” on the radio, these newsmaker interviews barely brushed on the news.
But with the Emanuel segment turning into an impromptu edition of “At the Movies,” and with Quinn gamely reading Trump hotel ad copy – as the governor and host made fun of the Donald’s ego – the interviews were warm and human. They hinted at what the host may be able to do with the show once he settles in and gets on top of things, technically, and gets his mind around his new radio address, the old-line station he and fellow Loopsters such as Steve Dahl and Garry Meier used to make fun of.
WLUP, of course, has taken several formats since, its deejays, once so hot, scattering to spots like WCKG-FM and WMVP-AM, to podcasting (Dahl and Kevin Matthews), and even, in Brandmeier’s case, to Los Angeles for a time.
WGN, meanwhile, has stayed the news-talk-sports, 50,000-watt blowtorch course. While its audience has been aging, it’s one of the last stations in town with the format and the finances to be able to make a home for the likes of Brandmeier. It has, of course, already taken on Meier as its afternoon man, the 62-year-old spearhead of a youth movement.
A Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, native, Brandmeier, 55, clearly knows the place and its lore. The host he replaces, Greg Jarrett, brought in from San Francisco during the Randy Michaels regime at Tribune Co., was polished to the point of blandness, more about information than personality. What he knew about the city never felt deeper than the very basics and, worse, did not seem to include an eagerness to learn; maybe a transplant TV anchor, who is mostly working from a script, can get away with that, but not a man who’s asking to be listeners’ companion for hours a day, speaking off the cuff.
The Brandmeier move makes sense for WGN, which needed a way to make non-listeners pay it new attention, and which got a proven professional and ratings getter with a big upside. Whether the new partnership will play out to maximum effect depends on the host getting a lot more comfortable than he seemed Friday, and on the station making some concessions, too.
Brandmeier wasn’t hired to hit all his cues, exactly on time. He was hired to finish his Bears stories and, in taking this assignment on, to come up with some new ones.
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