The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Going with the flow
While he prides himself in prep work, the namesake host of WINT Radio’s ‘The Jon Cupo Show’ largely follows the talk where it leads weekday mornings
Off beat conversations like this one are common on “The Jon Cupo Show” since it launched Oct. 1, replacing, after a hiatus, “The Wake Up Show.” However, Cupo also mixes in plenty of current events and sports news — both local and otherwise — along with interviews.
When in discussions for the job, he says during an interview following the broadcast, he pitched station station owners on a show that puts “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon in a blender with longtime Cleveland personalities Charles “Big Chuck” Schodowski and “Lil’ John” Rinaldi.
While he says he puts in a lot of prep work on the show, he also lets the talk go with the flow instead of having it all mapped out.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to what we do, because to me that’s not radio,” Cupo says. “You can hear when it’s scripted.”
He says he strives to book interviews with a local connection, not just get the biggest names he can, and to make the guests relatable.
“If I interview, say, (Clevelandbased celebrity chef) Michael Symon, if I start talking to him about what he did on ‘Iron Chef America’ and all that stuff, how he won those episodes, you and I don’t cook like that,” says Cupo, who enjoys cooking. “I wanna hear about when he was on ‘The Best Thing I Ever Ate’ and he’s talking about (chef) Jonathon Sawyer’s gravy fries at The Greenhouse Tavern, because that’s a place you and I can go. We can have that. And, in a pinch, we can grab a bag of Ore-Idas and some Heinz jarred gravy and make that for ourselves.”
(Weekly guests include Rempe, host of the Web-based “The Barbecue Central Show,” so you get a good bit of food talk.)
“Can we get to the pressing issue here?” Jon Cupo asks. “Do you know there are two sides to tinfoil?” ¶ “You know there’s a matte side and a shiny side?” he continues as he grills the most recent visitor to the Lake County studios of WINT Radio, which broadcasts both on AM 1330 and FM 101.5. ¶ This is the final 30 minutes of “The Jon Cupo Show” — WINT’s three-hour weekday-morning show — on a recent Friday. It’s clear the different characteristics of the two sides of foil has been a topic discussed by Cupo, regular Friday guest Greg Rempe and Thomas Pope, who works all the equipment on the other side of the glass from the microphones but also regularly joins in on discussions such as this one. ¶ Cupo, 40, voices what is at least somewhat-faux frustration that neither of his guests knew with absolute certainty of this foil fact. ¶ “How is this now just coming to light?” he asks, sounding flabbergasted.
Cupo’s route to this gig was a long and winding one. Born in New Jersey, he grew up in Berea.
His first taste of radio came years ago in Marshall, Minnesota, where he worked for food company Schwan’s. He was encouraged by someone he knew, who originally was from Rocky River, to take a role at a “podunk” station first thing in the morning before his dayjob.
“I went in, I did one high school update,” he says. “The next week I had a morning show.”
From there, it was years of bouncing around for Cupo, including a 2 a.m. Sunday shift at an Oberlin station — playing music he liked — before taking a sales job for 1300 AM in Lexington, Kentucky, an ESPN affiliate, in 2012. That led to airtime — Cupo would interview national ESPN television personalities about teams of interest in the region and was interviewed a few times himself by then-ESPN host Colin Cowherd on his national show, “The Herd,” about University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball. Then there was another nice gig at another ESPN station, in Charlotte, North Carolina, involving coverage of NASCAR and the NFL’s Carolina Panthers.
The goal, he says, always was to return to Northeast Ohio, and in subsequent years he did take a job deejaying on Cleveland’s Star 102.1 in a couple of slots.
“I’m not Casey Kasem,” Cupo says. “I can’t do that, ‘All right, we’re going to spin another Kelly Clarkson song here on Star 102,’ so I left.”
After a national podcast for Yahoo Sports, there was, essentially, nothing.
“From 2015 to 2016,” he says, “I don’t remember doing anything.”
That kind of situation can be tough for anyone, but it was especially so for Cupo, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder about 10 years earlier.
“It was dark, man,” he says. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I wanted to do radio anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, period.”
He’s is thankful for his girlfriend of about a decade, Adrian.
“She’s just — I …I get tongue-tied when I talk about her because anyone
else would have thrown me to the side,” he says.” She’s dealt with my crap for 10 years.”
And then there’s Choo, a St. Bernard.
Because, Cupo says, his body doesn’t respond to medication often used to treat those with bipolar disorder, the last prescription he received was for an ESA — emotional support dog.
“He’ll recognize when I’m starting to get in a mood,” Cupo says of Choo. “He’ll come over, he’ll put his head on my leg or he’ll lean up against me, and it’s the greatest thing in the world, for this 175-pound dog to do that.
An animal lover who also has three cats, he adds, “I can’t emphasize how much the relationship I have with him means to me.”
Still, living with bipolar disorder is an ongoing
challenge, he says, and being on the air is one thing that helps.
“All those things give me a distraction from actually having to be Jon Cupo,” he says. “Jon Cupo is a sad, sick, depressed, unhealthy human being at the end of the day.”
It helps him to map out what he’s going to do on a given day. On the day of the interview, he said he knew he was going to play with Choo and work on a song on his guitar.
“When I’m done with that, I’m going to be to me. And, unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do with that.”
Cupo says if he can be of help to anyone dealing with a similar issue, he encourages them to reach out.
After that dark stint in the mid 2010s, Cupo eventually picked himself up and moved to Sacramento, California, to be the publicaddress announcer for the River Cats, a minor league affiliate of the San Francisco Giants baseball franchise. He enjoyed doing that but says he feared his life could parallel that of a minor-league player, bouncing from one team and city to another every summer.
When he saw the opportunity at WINT, he went after it and got it.
WINT Radio, which very soon should be able to reach many more listeners on the FM frequency thanks to a big investment in equipment, had one thing very much in mind as it looked for a new morning host, says Ray Somich, president and general manager.
“We basically wanted to have a show that reached a younger audience,” Somich says. “It was very important to us, because of expansion capabilities, to be able to reach some younger people that were in their 30s and 40s, and we felt we needed to get a younger host and change the format somewhat. “We certainly didn’t want to have our established listeners leave,” he adds, “but we wanted to bring more people in.”
While much of the other weekday slots are filled with highly rated national shows — Somich says they’d love to offer more local content if they could find the talent — it’s long been important to them to have their own morning show. They envision it to mix local news topics, such as sports (while not becoming a sports show), with nostalgia and general entertainment mixed in.
“I think life is too serious,” Somich says. “There are too many problems that we all have to face every day, so we wanted something that was definitely lighter.”
Somich says they are very interested in listener feedback and says “The Jon Cupo Show” is a work in progress for all involved, including its namesake.
“It’s not an easy job to come up with three hours of content five days a week that is always interesting and informative to all kinds of people,” Somich says. “We know we’ve got a great diversity of listeners of all ages and cultural backgrounds and economic status. Lake County is kind of a microcosm of Ohio and the country. We know that.”
He says they’re grateful to have a “young, creative talent” and that Cupo is putting forth the effort to help the show reach its full potential.
“He works much more off the air than he does on the air on the show to try to promote the show properly.”
To that end, Cupo — who lives about “a football field” from the studios, which sit near the border of Willoughby and Eastlake — says he does a ton of prep work, often late at night, adding that he’s occasionally still been there working when Pope arrives for the 6 a.m. start.
“Let’s face it,” he says, “Cleveland’s not the most exciting city for stuff to happen.”
And Cupo doesn’t exactly strike you as one of those energetic morning people, and acknowledges that when 6 a.m. rolls around he’s not wide-eyed.
“It takes me a little while to get warmed up, but I think that’s normal,” he says. “If I did come out like a bolt of lightning, or a bull in a China shop, I don’t think people would really go for that first thing in the morning — because they’re still waking up. I kind of gradually go as the people go.”
Cupo’s interests range from the classic comedy duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to hard-rock bands Slipknot and KISS. (He has spent time playing the role of Paul Stanley, makeup and all, in a KISS cover band — “not with temple you see before you but back in my heyday,” he says, gesturing to his body.)
The worst part of the job, he says, is that you cannot please everybody and that sometimes listeners will go out of their way to be very critical. On the flip side, knowing that he’s entertaining people is the best part, even if it’s via the mundane. (He delights in the thought that some listeners may have gone to their kitchens to examine their foil after the aforementioned segment.)
“Just having one person listen means the world to me,” he says. “But the fact that I can do that to multiple people … that means s much to me. It’s unbelievable.”
“If I did come out like a bolt of lightning, or a bull in a China shop, I don’t think people would really go for that first thing in the morning — because they’re still waking up. I kind of gradually go as the people go.” — Jon Cupo, host of “The John Cupo Show” on WINT Radio, on doing a morning show