Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Razorback association. Hello everyone. This is April Wallace, associate features editor for the Northwest Arkansas Radio Experience. On the few weeks ago I sat down with radio personality John Williams, who is about to celebrate his 30th year broadcast. But about that earlier than almost exclusively.
Williams is the founder of the John and Deek show on football.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: But even if I wanted to be my real name, there was already John Anthony who was on Kicks, and a guy by the name of Russ Williams who was on the sister station. So they're just like, you can't be John anything or anything.
And I thought at the time, I mean I was in my early twenty s, I wasn't that far removed. Wouldn't it be funny for the rest of use one of the names of the guy, John Williams, I played baseball with and he was my catcher and his name was Greg Daniels. And so I thought it would just be hilarious. I'm like I'll go on the radio and say I'm Greg Daniels and then I'll send the tapes to my friends back home in Colorado and they will just get the biggest kick out of that. And so for the first about, I'd say a little over two years of my career on air, I was known as Greg Daniels.
And it wasn't until one of the stations I was at was going to put me on another station and said hey, I don't want you to be Greg Daniels anymore. You can pick any name you want, but no more Greg Daniels. And so then I started thinking what's some other cool names of guys I played baseball with, I can be them.
But I thought about it and I slept on it. I thought I really just want to be me. I wanted to use my own name and I wanted to brand myself and it was one of the smartest decisions I've ever made for myself in my career was by just being John Williams, because that's my name and so I'm glad I got the chance to be myself on the radio.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: And that's so interesting. Well, so you said the original reason with the first station was for safety. Did they have a lot of issues with their host?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Well, I know that on air personalities in general get a lot of kind of creeps and weirdos and stalkers sometimes, especially if they're female. You really want to protect their identities or their whereabouts or things like that, but they were that way with all their on air talents, and I appreciated that at the time, but I really preferred to be myself, and I'm really glad I did that.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: So did your style change once you were able to go under your real name?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: It did a little bit, because the reason why they didn't want me to be Greg Daniels anymore is because the formats that I had been on up until that point were more like light rock formats.
I wasn't playing a lot of male oriented AOR or anything like that. And so they put me on Keg 92 Kkeg, which is a very male station. And so they wanted me to sort of be a completely different brand. They didn't want me to be Greg Daniels anymore, which was a very female leading radio career I had forged to that point. And so they wanted me to be somebody else. And at that point, yes, our show became a lot more male oriented and focused a lot more on sports and things that guys liked, and that was pretty much the touchstone for my career from that point forward in the mid 90s.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Has it had some evolutions in the years since?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: That's a great question. Yes. So I had been on a rock format from the mid ninety s all the way until 2001, when we had completely destroyed our competition and we were the only really rock station left in northwest Arkansas. And my general manager at the time said, hey, we've got this Top 40 station now that isn't winning. And he said, do you think your show is good enough to beat the competition Top 40? And of course, that immediately I love a challenge, and so I could have stayed in that format forever. But I'm like, I want to see if I can beat this station now. So I did a 180 and went from playing a lot of AC DC and male oriented rock, did a 180 and started playing Top 40 music overnight. And then for the next three years, five of the next six rating periods, we won. And that station had never won ever before. And so I was very proud of the ability to tweak my presentation and my content and the way we did our show and go that direction and win that way, too. So I was really proud of that four year stretch in 2001 to 2005 when I was on Hot Mix 101.9.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that shows greater range and your ability to adapt.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I really wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to challenge myself. I didn't want to just stay in the same old, same old, and it would have been safe and it would have been probably the smart move. But I am a bit of a maverick when it comes to my career, and I take opportunities that I see as kind of like they say in the movie Say Anything, sort of a dare to be great situation. And I saw that and I leapt at it, and I've done that a lot. I've taken very big risks in my career betting on myself, and it has not always worked.
But I'm grateful I've had the opportunity to take those chances. And I wouldn't be where I am now had I not.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: When you made that 180 change, that one in particular, did you have some longtime fans that were less happy about the mix up. Did you have to explain?
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. I lost a lot of my audience, but I gained a whole brand new audience. And the way I looked at it was I'm actually expanding the totality of my audience by doing this. I've got an entire portion of northwest Arkansas and the River Valley that knows me as this kind of show. Now I want to do a completely different show with a completely different partner and do it this way. And it worked. And we were able to win that way, I was able to win the other way, and it made me really happy that I was able to do both of those, because that's something that you don't see a lot of on air personalities do. They usually find their lane, stay in their lane, win in their lane, and go that way. And I wanted to kind of challenge myself.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: So in early years of broadcasting, I'm sure there were plenty of learning curves. It can be quite a challenge to always have something to say no matter what is happening that day or that moment, if something falls through, things always fall through. Do you have some of those big moments early on that you remember the hard things to cover early on?
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Well, one of the strangest things that people continually bring up to me every year is at 911, because I have so many people come up to me and go, I was listening to you, and I remember where I was, and I had you on the radio. My son had been born the Friday before 911. He was born on the 7th, so he was born on the 7th. It was a very difficult birth, very traumatic for both he and his mother. And so I took the whole next week off, plus the fact that he was in the Nic unit for two weeks and she was in the hospital for four days. And so it was a very tense time in my life because I was worried about her, I was worried about him. And so Tuesday morning when 911 happened, I was in my home with his mother and her mother, just watching TV like everybody else, and I was not on the radio, but I've had so many people go, I remember listening to you. And it's interesting the way that people rearrange the furniture in their minds about things like that. I know that wasn't exactly the spirit of the question you were asking, but stuff like that always comes to me. But more to the point of your question, our content changed a lot when I changed formats because a lot of things that we would do when I was on 92.1 the Keg and 93 three, the Eagle, which are rock stations. Male is we appealed to the sense of humor of a 40 year old dude. And so we did a lot of speed trap reports. We did a lot of phone scams. We did a lot of bits that would appeal to them. But then when I went on Top 40 station, we had to talk about Survivor. We had to talk about a lot of, like, The Bachelor. We had to talk about what women who were listening to that format would have liked. And so it was a completely different thing. You don't talk as much about football. The Razorbacks don't appeal to people as much, things like that. You want to talk more about the fact that I just had a kid and so I talked about being a new dad.
The partner I had on the Top 40 station, she also had a young child. So that was something we focused on as well. And so that is what you look for in your show prep, is relatable content that your audience is going to be attracted to day to day. And it definitely was an adjustment, and I definitely lost a lot of people that were not fans of the music that I then went to on Top 40 station.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: And how did you judge when you were making relatable content? How did you know that fans responded to it?
[00:10:47] Speaker B: It was generally in the early 2000s before people stopped using their phones as phones with phone calls. We did a lot of contest called I had a contest called You Can't Win this, where we would ask a really difficult question that before Google existed that you knew they were going to get and you'd take like five or ten callers and they would all miss it. And then we would go from that point. We would also do a contest called tell US Your Secret, Don't Tell US Your Name, where we would say, hey, give us a call. You want to kind of tell us your secret but not give your name. And that way you provide us with a funny story, but you remain anonymous. Those shows were bananas. The things that we would hear from people, holy cow. We also had the Friday morning joke off where people call up and tell jokes.
The barometer I used was phone interaction. And the more phone calls we got, the more I felt that we were connecting with the audience. Nowadays, it's a lot more like texts. It's a lot more social media reaction. We'll put stuff up on our page, how many likes we get, how many comments we get, how much it gets shared. So it's completely changed over time. The evolution of knowing if you're connecting with your audience has definitely evolved with social media and the fact that people just stopped using their phones as phones. They use them more as a Facebook machine or Twitter or Instagram.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Now, are there any of the segments that you've done that you miss doing?
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I stopped doing phone pranks because one of two things happens if you call them from a number they don't recognize. They've just completely stopped answering the phone.
Also, around the time in the late two thousand s, the birthday scams had gotten so big people were waiting for me to call them. So we would have this thing where people would say, hey, I want to do your birthday scam on my brother or my girlfriend or whatever, and then we'd call them and they were just waiting, like the phone would ring on their birthday and be like, this is John and Deeke, right? This is John. And it got to the point where we couldn't fool anybody. We had to call people from out of state, and it was a whole different deal. I do miss the birthday scams a lot. I missed the bits we did that were so phone oriented because people just don't use their phones anymore. They use text to answer things or trivia questions or the social media. So I do miss that a little bit.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Do you think that that adds a little less predictability with it, or less, like, off the cuff when they're texting it instead of speaking it?
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, the neat thing is so, for example, we ask questions on both our Facebook page, which we have 900,000 reactions in the last 28 days to our Facebook page. It's gratifying to see those kind of numbers. The way that people respond to our page, it's what our advertisers look at. They see our ratings and then they see our social media insights. And it is staggering sometimes to see how much interaction we get with our audience, and it's completely changed the way we interact with them. Because what we'll do is we'll start the show off with a great question, either on Twitter or Facebook, and then you just watch the reactions. We'll sometimes get 300 and 5400 comments on one question, and you're just sitting there going, well, Tina and Bella Vista says this or Eric and Fayetteville says that, and then Deacon I feed off that. It's an incredible way to get show prep and material now is through our social media.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Was there anything that you introduced that you were really surprised it took off the way that it did?
I know a lot of this can be trial and error sometimes.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Oh, it's all trial and error. 100%, man.
I never really was married to one bit for the entirety of my career. We always change it up. I think if you're not changing your material, it can get stale. And there were bits that I feel like it ran their course, like the Friday morning joke off. There's only so many times you can keep hearing the same joke over and over and over. So we kind of killed that. We did another bit called Dead Guy in the Envelope, which is basically another way of doing 20 questions. And you find someone who's died in history that's famous for anything, and then you just take yes no questions every day. Was it a man, was it in the 20th century, things like that. And at the end of it, we would give away, like, a TV because it would take a month to win it. I loved that game, but that ran its course. Everything has its time. And what we've really done now with Deke is we do a lot more engagement with our social media and then take the answers from that and read that on our show.
That's what we really tried to do, and it's worked really well.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Well, what's an experience you had early in your career that just really solidified for you, that that was going to be your thing.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Wow.
Another great question. I remember vividly when we did a remote one time at Shadow Lake in Knoll, Missouri. We were doing Labor Day remote there, and I got up on stage, and it was the first time we ever done a remote there. And it's late at night, it's on a Friday night. It's just chaos. And it was the first time I had ever really had a reaction in a live audience setting to Deke and I doing our show. And it was a lot. And when you start getting noticed on the street, when you start getting noticed in Walmart, when you start getting noticed in restaurants, it changes your perception of what you're doing. You're like, oh, my goodness, it's getting traction. It's actually a thing. The best reaction and the most fun thing I ever did was when I was syndicated in Little Rock. Also in the early 2000s, we hosted Family Fest with Otown and Lionel Ritchie in front of 25 30,000 people on the river in Little Rock. And you're out there and you just as a joke, say, let's see if we can make them chant our show's name. And then they do, and it just blows you away. You're like, oh, my God, these people are chanting my name like I matter. I'm not Lionel Richie. I am just some dope with a radio show. Things like that were really fun. And when I started getting to do things on the field for the Razorbacks and hosting the Pregame, it's called Hogtown now, but at the time it was called the At T Fan Zone. And you're just there with thousands of Razorback fans who are excited about the game, and you're doing all sorts of fun, engaged games like the Cha Cha Slide and giving away tickets, and you got the Razorback marching band coming in and playing with you along with the cheer and palm squads. That early time in my career when I started doing stuff with the Razorbacks was intoxicating to see all the passion of all these Razorback fans playing along with you in a setting where you have them as an audience.
It was a lot of fun. When I started doing those, that's when it really hits you that, man, there's so many people who really care about the Razorbacks and that experience and to be able to MC those events was an absolute blast. And I love getting to do it with Deek to this day.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: It sounds like it gives you the same kind of feeling that you had doing that Lionel Richie in feel.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: I mean, and you're performing and now I do it on the floor at the Razorback games and on the field for the Razorback football, and I love doing that. And improvisation and extemporaneous thinking with not having a script is kind of my business model. It's what Deke and I do best on the show every day. You're live without a net, you're on a wire, and it's just you're there in front of all these people and you've got to get them fired up for the game. You got to get them fired up for what's going to happen that quarter, and you got to get in and out in like 60 to 90 seconds. So you got to have kind of an idea of a beginning, a middle and an end of what you're going to do on the screen. And I love that time. It's what I do best and I really enjoy getting to do that every time. It never gets old.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Well, it seems like that probably obviously it increases your visibility even more. And so kind of wondering what I.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Do with the Razorbacks. I'm not going to pretend like it's been in a vacuum towards only the Razorbacks because it has helped the visibility of our show a great deal. And I'm grateful for the opportunity from the Razorbacks that they put in their trust in me to be a positive fan experience inside both the football stadium, bud Walton Arena and at Hogtown. And I love doing that. And as long as they let me do that, I'll continue to do that and I have such a fun time and it has helped the branding of our show, no doubt about it.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: At first, being recognized out and about was a little strange, as you mentioned earlier, but by now I'm sure you're recognized everywhere. But would you tell me a little about getting to know your fans through the years and what kinds of things they ask you when they see you grocery shopping or whatever?
[00:20:58] Speaker B: We would do a thing on our show. We would answer the phone and they go, hey, guys, and we had them to where they would tell us their name and then they would say where they were from, but they wouldn't say the city. It would be, hey, it's Brian from the one two, and because Bentonville 72712. So we got them using the numbers, which we thought was really cool. And so it's, hey, it's Eric from the one, or James from the 56, or Tina from the dirty 30, which is what we call farmington because it's 30 and fun stuff like that. We would really make them feel like they had ownership of involving themselves in our show. That's why we got to where I came up with it in the 90s, calling them the Loyal and Royal Army and a name like that, instills by the very name, loyalty to the program, but also loyalty from us to them. And it's a reciprocal situation, and it has been that way. And to say humbled is an understatement. When people come up to me or I mean, I had one. The one that always stands out to me was at a Razorback game last year. And I had this gentleman, probably he's younger than me, but I would say he was around late 30s, maybe 40. And he had his daughter there who was like, I don't know. Twelve or 13. And he goes, I've been listening to you since I was my daughter's age in the now we listen to you when I take her to school, and it's a bonding moment for us. And I'm just like when you have one person say that, it makes what you do makes you so grateful to have the opportunity and blessed that these people are choosing our show, to have that time either alone in the car before work or on the way to school with their kids. And it is a really sacred thing that I do not take lightly. And I'm so grateful that so many people over the years have chosen our show to do that.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: That's very special.
Well, I know you said that you grew up. Was it Colorado?
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Yes. So I grew up my dad was a traveling shoe salesman, so we moved a lot.
But by the time I was six, I lived in five towns, but we settled in a town called Longmont, which is just outside of Boulder in Denver, and I grew up there, K through twelve. And so that is kind of the bedrock of how I grew up, was being a giant Denver Broncos fan, big Cu Buffs fan, loving all things Colorado. And that's where I spent my formative years, along with my older brother and my younger brother.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: And we talked about this earlier, but you were a Razorback fan from childhood. So tell me about your earliest Razorback connection and how you wound up coming to northwest Arkansas eventually.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: First question. I started being a Razorback fan when I would go see my grandparents, my mother's mother and father. My mother grew up in El Dorado in southern Arkansas, and just like everybody else within the borders of Arkansas, enormous Razorback fans, both my grandfather and my grandmother, my grandmother specifically was a Razorback basketball fan, loved Eddie Sutton, loved the triplets. And so when I was seven years old, I believe, was the year that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird faced off in the finals, and I was an emerging sports fanatic at seven years old, but that was also the year that the Razorbacks made the Final Four and they lost to Indiana State.
So in kind of the way that my grandparents saw it was all about Sydney Moncrief and all about the Razorbacks, and their passion for the Razorbacks completely rubbed off on me. So I would go back to Colorado and I'd be like, well, I don't hear anything about the Razorbacks here, but I love them. And so I'd read the paper and always look for Arkansas, and I've been a Buffalo dual citizenship my whole life, and so I love Cu, but I always joke I have a Colorado heart but Arkansas blood.
And that is absolutely I love all things Denver, Colorado, but the most important team to me is the Razorbacks, and my grandmother specifically. I give credit for what a huge Razorback fan I am.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: So how did you wind up coming to northwest Arkansas?
[00:25:40] Speaker B: I came here, ironically, because my mother, after I graduated high school in 1989, came here to be closer to her parents, who were at the time much, much older, a little more dependent. They were in their eighty s, and she moved to Rogers, and so she's like, you can come to Arkansas and you can get in state tuition, which we're thankful that even to this day, arkansas has very affordable in state tuition compared to most other states and schools in those states. And so I came here and I wanted to walk on the baseball team, which will show you what a dreamer I am, and was as it took me less than a week to figure out, I was nowhere near good enough to play baseball for Norm de Bruyne or the Razorbacks. And so I just ended up staying here and going to school for four years. And that was where I met Rick Stockdall, Kyle Kellums, and everybody at KUAF, and that's really where my radio career began, was being tutored by Kyle and Rick and everybody there.
It was really the launching pad of my career, was working at KUAF.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: And so you had a detour before coming back to Arkansas. What was that first internship or job that you had in radio?
[00:27:05] Speaker B: I was dating a girl here at Arkansas, and she was from the Baltimore area, and so we were together for a couple years. The first year, it was all just two hour phone calls and letters. There was no internet, there was no texting, there was nothing. It was just you write letters and you run up gigantic phone bills. And so the next year we were together, her mother had the bright idea of, why doesn't John just come out and live with us? And then he can get an internship either at C Span because it's near Washington DC. Or one of the other big market network affiliates that is in Baltimore. And I got an internship at channel Two, W Nar TV in Baltimore, who are at least they were, the oriole affiliate for the Baltimore Orioles.
And what an incredible you talk about falling into an incredible situation. I was the intern for the Orioles at a time when Cal Ripken was playing for Baltimore, at a time when John Miller, who is a hall of Fame play by play announcer, is their everyday baseball announcer. I got to hang out with John Miller and learn from him. I got to go on the field and hang out with Cal Ripken, Kirby Puckett, George Bret, all these players who come through. And you talk about being a kid in a candy store. That summer, I would just walk around Camden Yards, the stadium of the Orioles, just wide eyed going, how is this happening to me? And it was a dream come true, and it solidified how badly I wanted to be in broadcasting. And I got a piece of advice, the final day of my internship from a reporter at Wmartv who said, hey, you know what? You probably can get on TV, and you'll probably have a good career. But my advice to you, get into radio, train your voice. And that way he goes, TV is filled with people that look decent, but it's very rare. You'll find people on TV who sound great. He's like stage speech. Train your voice. Get in radio, learn to sound better, and it'll give you an advantage over everybody in TV. And that was the reason why I got into radio initially, was to do that, and then I never got out.
I stayed in radio because I loved it so much. I love the medium. I love the spontaneity. That really doesn't exist in television. In TV. You're reporting. You have two minutes. You got to do your stand up back to you in the studio. There's no creativity. Even the anchors, as talented as they all are, have to stick to the teleprompter, and they have to tell that exact story. And radio, it's like jazz.
You want to do a show about this one day, you can. You want to do a show about that one day, you can. And that appealed to my absolutely unstructured nature, and that's why I've been doing it now over 30 years, because I loved that about radio.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: And so that's still the huge motivator for you?
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Every day I get to go into work with my absolute best friend, and we get to create fun content every day on the radio.
If we can make each other laugh, we know we're going to make the audience laugh. He is a tough laugh. Deke is tough to make laugh. And so if he and I are laughing at each other, we know that the audience is probably having fun with us, and that's always been the barometer for our show.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Well, we have just a couple of minutes left. I know it's impossible to nail down only one favorite memory, but what's one of your top memories that you just absolutely love about your time in radio?
[00:30:53] Speaker B: Wow, I need to think about that for a. Second.
Wow.
I think it was my first day doing my first show with Deek.
We had been friends and had known each other since the mid 90s, but we didn't get to do a show together until 2005, november 3. I remember the date. We desperately wanted to work together because I knew how talented he was. I know how great a partner he would be with me.
The joke with each other is we are each other's. Scotty Pippen. We don't need the other guy. He doesn't need me.
And we look at the show where there is no lead.
He is a rock star in Tulsa on his own, he is a huge, big radio star in Tulsa. But here, it's like when they say the sum is bigger than the parts, it adds up to more than what the parts are, and that's what our chemistry is. So the day that we got to do our first show together, that might be it, because I was so excited. I just knew we would kick down the doors. And sure enough, within a year, we're the number one rated show in Northwest Arkansas. And it was just an absolute blast finally getting to do that with him. And that's what we've done now for 18 years.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Well, we've got two minutes on the call. Is there anything that shook loose that you wanted to make sure we got to?
[00:32:41] Speaker B: I don't know.
I'm grateful that my family and my kid and everybody has just been so supportive of my insane schedule, because now that I do five sports with the Razorbacks, I do Hogtown. And now Saturday nights, Deke and I are doing the Razorback recap on 92 on the Ticket, in addition to our show.
I'm just grateful that I'm surrounded by an incredible support system all my life and all my career, all my adulthood, and there's no way I would have been able to do any of this for 30 years without the support and love of my family and my friends and Deke and all that. There's just no way. It's truly amazing to sit here and think it's been 30 years. It's crazy.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: It sounds like they know exactly how much it means to you.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: They do. And I think that they enjoy it, too, and I think that they love being a part of it. And even though it's very the time constraint and the time involvement has been a lot.
Another moment that I will always cherish. And I think I want to send you photos because I don't know if you could use them or not. There's the last year or two when my son was able to be one of the videographers on the court at Budwalton Arena while I was actually working. And so I would do my nonsense on the court about, it's time for the Whataburger or Fry Shuffle or whatever, and he'd be the guy videoing me, and I would just be like, I'm here with 20,000 Razorback fans. I got my kid doing his dream, which is doing video work and learning the camera work and things like that, along with me getting to do what I love to do.
What an honor it was for me to work with my son, and it was just the best, the best. I will never forget those times that he has been on the field or on the court with me while I was working. It's just truly what a blessing it was every time I got to do it with him.
