Photo courtesy of jcontheline.com
This week's big news: JC Corcoran, infamous radio personality, has returned to the St. Louis media scene on KTRS-AM after a 1-year hiatus. Since his arrival to St. Louis in the '80s, Corcoran, labeled as a "shock jock," has built both a dedicated fan base and a dedicated group of disapproving listeners at almost every station in the area. Over the past year, he's become the father of a third child, started a website, jcontheline.com, and broken into social networking. His show will air weekdays on KTRS from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., starting October 25. We sat down with him recently to talk about his return, his on-air personality, and the media culture in St. Louis.
You've been off the radio for a year. Why did you decide to come back?
Why am I deciding to come back? Well I don't know if people just expected me to open a McDonald's or something, but no, this is what I do. I was contractually restricted from doing anything up until now. My former employers finally agreed to a settlement a couple of days ago, so they wrote me a big, fat check and that made me a free man. Once I was officially contractually free, then we weren't afraid to have discussions with people. This was the best and most, uh, practical of the offers that I received.
What made you want to go to KTRS?
Well, it's a great opportunity... It's a great business opportunity—that always counts for something. I've got three kids, you know, and none of them are in college yet. I've done mornings for almost my entire career, and the problem with mornings, and it's not that I'm knocking mornings, it's just that there is a sort of foundational, institutional issue with mornings. That is, you're sort of a slave to what we call the service element—news, traffic, weather, sports, news, traffic, weather, sports, news, traffic, weather, sports, over and over and over again, and this show, you know, being on in the middle of the day, we don't really have to deal with any of that. You have news at the top of the hour, and then you can sit down, and for 50 minutes every hour, 5-0, 50 minutes every hour, you can just do whatever you want as long as there's some practicality to it. I'm really looking forward to that. I think it's going to be a blast.
So you have more time for commentary midday?
Yeah, well, from a practical standpoint, it doesn't get in the way of a lot of other things that I have to do or that I would like to do. I do what's called "The Daily Dose" at jcontheline.com. I do that in the morning, and it takes a little while to post it. By the time the YouTube people go to work or whatever, it's not getting up until 1:30 p.m. every day. I would like to have it up sooner, so it allows me to continue to do that and get that taken care of. And, you know, I have a one-year-old baby, and it's just a blast playing with her when she gets up in the morning. When the weather's nice, we go out for a walk every day, and so that's going to be nice.
What are some of your goals with your new show?
Well, you always want the ratings to be good. Even though the new rating system that was implemented a little over a year ago is completely and totally fallacious on every level. I mean, the broadcasting industry worked with the same rating system for the first 40 to 50 years, and then they plugged in this new rating system during the summer of 2009, and it's a joke. It's the biggest boondoggle in the history of broadcasting as far as I'm concerned. It has turned the entire broadcast industry upside down. I don't even recognize it anymore, but still, that's what we're stuck with using—this new Arbitron PPM system. So you've got to figure out some ways for ratings to be good, and, you know, you have to be doing something that excites people so that they'll listen and that the advertisers will gravitate to. At the end of the day, I know a lot of people who are doing radio shows, and they go, "Well, you know we're No. 3 in the market and we're beating you," and I say the same thing to them. I go, "Well, really? Good. So you're proud that you're ahead of me in the ratings. Now let me ask you a question: Are you having fun doing it, and is the show any good?" You should see the looks on their faces when I ask them that question, because they know, in most cases, they're not really having much fun, and they'd rather be doing what I'm doing. You can just see—you can just see it written all over their faces. You know, you've got to make the ratings, you've got to do something that the advertisers will be interested in. Then, from a personal standpoint, I want to be able to walk out of there and go, "Well that was a good show today."
Your fans seem to like you because they feel like you're brave enough to say what other people are afraid to say...
That's the rumor.
How much of that is technique on your part, versus stream of consciousness?
Well it sounds like stream of consciousness, but it isn't. It's sort of like watching—I'm not comparing myself—but it's sort of like watching Robin Williams. People who watch Robin Williams just are astonished by his ability to improvise, and what they don't know is that 95 percent of it is not improvised, it's written. It just looks like it's improvised. I come in with a basic structure of what I want to do on the show on that particular day, and unless there's some reason to deviate from it, it sounds seat-of-the-pants, but it rarely is.
Do you plan day-of the things you want to say?
I've been using the same formula for this show for over 30 years. I probably won't talk a lot about it just for competitive reasons, but I use a basic outline of what I'm going to be doing, and with the outline, it's designed to work if you decide to go off of it a little bit. It's just a system that I use and it works very well.
Do you think your readiness to say what you say on air is better received here than it might be in other places?
Hell no. Hell no. Especially if you're talking about local people, which I do. Sometimes people get...upset. But, I don't go around looking for people to sort of target. If I'm talking about somebody in a critical fashion, or if we're ridiculing people, it's because they probably deserve it. They've probably done something to direct the spotlight in their direction. It's not like I'm going out there just grabbing innocent people and ridiculing them. If they're in my cross hairs, they've probably put themselves there.
Do you think our current media culture is too wrapped up in being politically correct?
This answer might surprise you—there's a reason that they call what I do a show. And I think sort of what has happened is that, and I don't think this is solely responsible, but I think that electronic media particularly has contributed to the rudeness factor accelerating in the last 20 to 30 years. But nobody is supposed to think that what somebody does on a radio show is real. It's a show. It may be the bottom rung of show business, but it's still show business. I explain to people that Vincent Price—a beloved, iconic St. Louis figure who's got a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in U. City—when Vincent Price went home every day when he was finished making these horror movies, he didn't come home and have cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and bats flying around the house and coffins full of cadavers. There's a reason they call it a show. It's not real. People who have sort of watched TV shows and listened to radio shows that really started operating outside the lines there 20 or 30 years ago were never supposed to apply that to normal, everyday behavior. It's a little depressing to think that people don't understand the difference.
So, what makes a good show?
Lots of sex talk. No, I will occasionally be interviewed like this or speak to students and things like that who ask me for advice, and I just really tell them to take everything you have accumulated for that day's show—for the people who know how to prepare, and there are a lot of people that think you can just go in there and wing it and those people are not going to last very long, but they are extraordinarily talented above and beyond anything that we've seen in St. Louis—but I always say to grab everything you think you can grab that you might be able to use in a show, and then throw 99 percent of it out and use the best 1 percent. That's really what I've been doing for a long time. When I walk in every day, I imagine a big pot of water. Just a big pot of water sitting on a stove and then there's a refrigerator full of ingredients, and what my job to do is to take that big pot of water and those ingredients and make something out of it and start stirring it violently with the heat up on high—that's sort of what I feel like I do. I think that's what my job is.
Anything else you want to talk about?
I think people are going to be a little surprised by the way we're going to do this show. There will be obviously things that people are accustomed to hearing from me, but I think some of the structures and the way we're going to execute some things might really come as a surprise to people.
