Johnjay and Rich still clicking after 20 years
Morning radio show now syndicated in 25 markets
“I thought, ‘Huh. This could be a show.’ ”
Rich Berra
Radio is a notoriously fickle industry, with on-air talent coming and going faster than you can finish reading this sentence.
“The Johnjay & Rich Show” is an exception. This month marks 20 years since Johnjay Van Es and Rich Berra teamed up, first at Tucson’s KRQQ in 2001 and then, five years later, moving to KISS-FM (104.7) in Phoenix. The show is syndicated in 25 markets, including Portland, Oregon; Colorado Springs; and Springfield, Missouri. It’s a long and successful run, but there were signs the two would be a hit before they even really got started.
The two met by chance in New Orleans. Van Es was working at a station in Houston, Berra at one in Dallas. Van Es and his wife recently had lost twins.
“We were in a dark, dark, dark period,” he said. “I had to go to a radio convention in New Orleans and I was speaking there. I didn’t want to go.”
His father convinced him to. During a panel, Van Es was sitting next to an agent and mentioned he was thinking about getting a partner for his radio show.
“He said, ‘I represent this guy named Rich Berra,’” Van Es said.
They met in the lobby of the hotel. You hear about things clicking immediately. How about sooner?
“It’s like 1 in the morning,” Berra said. “Johnjay and I were sitting in the hotel lobby, and we sit on the couch and we start talking. And before I know it, there’s a bunch of radio guys that do morning shows just standing around and watching us talk. I thought, ‘Huh. This could be a show.’ ”
It was. It still is.
Van Es, for one, isn’t surprised how things have worked out, even though teaming up meant moving from two larger markets to a smaller one.
“The phrase take a small step backward, take a giant leap forward?” Van Es, who grew up in Arizona, said. “There was never any question that the show wasn’t going to succeed. Maybe I’m stupid, but in my mind it was like, this is it. Let’s go. We went to Tucson and it was fireworks from day one.”
Berra, a native of St. Louis, felt the same.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘Did you guys think it would be 20 years?’ ” he said. “For me that was an easy ‘yes’ at the beginning.”
“The Johnjay & Rich Show”
Morning radio is perhaps the last vestige of creativity in an industry now so heavily formatted.
Conglomerates like iHeartMedia, which owns KISS-FM and several other Phoenix stations, have greater control over programming.
Granted, the creativity on some shows is … questionable. Some of it, let’s call it what it is, is stupid. But “The Johnjay & Rich” show — 5-10 a.m. weekdays — relies on a lot of interaction with the audience. At times it’s almost like an alternate-universe therapy session.
‘We feel like we’re just chatting with our friends’
“It’s like the place where you connect,” Berra said. “There’s something about the friendliness. … We feel like we’re just chatting with our friends, sitting around the table chatting with friends.”
Van Es said, “It’s a business, we have a target, we know our target and we stay on track. We don’t get into that crazy stuff.”
Well, OK, there was the time they had a live bull in the studio, wrote a country song and sent the bull to a country station with the song, hoping the station would play it. (It didn’t.)
This is morning radio, after all, not a church service. One of the show’s popular features is the Drunk Dial Line, which is just what it sounds like. But you get his point.
“People use this buzzword now, but we’ve used it for 20 years,” Van Es said. “We try to be as authentic as possible.”
Truly, along with co-hosts Kyle Unfug and Suzette Rodriguez, a lot of the show is people sitting around talking.
Why listeners ‘drive the culture of the show’
“We’re curious by nature,” Berra said. “And we have such interesting listeners with interesting lives. I mean, we just had a guy call in today who his job is to like trap beavers in Colorado. How do you not ask that guy questions? How do you not get behind a story like that?
“The more people we have on, the more stories there are to share and the bigger the party becomes. The listeners really do drive the culture of the show. Hopefully we’ve been able to last so long because we’ve involved with the listeners and what the culture is reflecting.”
Indeed, Van Es said: “Our listeners and us are what separate us from Spotify.”
Often successful radio teams are close only on the air. That doesn’t mean it’s an act, exactly, although of course on some level all of it is. It’s more like you want to save your best, most spontaneous stuff for air. That’s been an evolution for Van Es and Berra.
“I’ve had just as challenging conversations with Johnjay as I have with any family member,” Berra said.
“You’ve just got to do it every now and then. You hang out more, you take little breaks from each other. It’s like family first.”
But there was a plan from the start.
The story behind the duo’s well-tuned chemistry
“The very first day we talked about doing a show together, Johnjay was like, ‘Man, if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to figure each other out. We’ve got to walk through a park and talk together,’” Berra said.
“He was in Houston and I was in Dallas, and that’s exactly what we did. We walked through the park together and hung out. Our kids have grown up together.
We basically moved in the same neighborhood in Tucson when we first started so that we were close.”
It was a strategy — get to know each other so that the on-air chemistry wasn’t fake.
But familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then overfamiliarity.
“What happened was, let’s say we were going to Portland to go visit our station in Portland, or going to Colorado or we go wherever,” Van Es said. “We found out that when I go live my life, when I leave the radio station, I try to do as many adventures as I can so I can present them on the radio to our audience. And I’m also presenting them to Rich. But when we were together, and we’d go to Portland together, I was with him all day. So the next day, when I would tell the story, he was there.
“I was like, “Holy crap. You need to go somewhere else. I need to go somewhere else, so we have different points of view, different stories.’ So now, we get off the air, we know each other inside and out. … He goes where he goes after the show, I go where I go after the show and we connect via email at night or early in the morning, and then those stories come up on the air the next day.”
What’s next for Johnjay and Rich
That keeps the stories — and more importantly, the interaction around them — fresh. Which is key to spontaneity. You can’t fake it.
“We’re not that good of actors,” Van Es said. “I can’t stand when it’s already happened and we try to do it again. It’s terrible.”
So what’s next? More of the same, it sounds like. Van Es said the two are in the process of working out a new fiveyear deal. “I would go another 20 years, easily,” he said.
Berra’s game.
“I’ve always liked bands better than solo artists,” he said. “And being in a band, when you share the successes and you have people to lean on when times are a little troubling, that matters to me. The people matter a lot. So if you say another 20 years with Johnjay I’ll be laughing my ass off. That’s a pretty good run.”