John Landecker is a happy man these days. His WJMK-FM 104.3 morning drive-time show is competitive in the toughest time slot in the business. His band, Landecker and the Legends, has released its second CD. And he’s about to get married for a third time.
Plus, the man who brought “Boogie Checks” and parody songs to WLS-AM nearly 25 years ago has survived the often irreversible circumstance of having been absent from the airwaves at a critical point in his career.
No wonder he smiles a lot over lunch at a Near North Side eatery. No longer the hard-drinking, junk-food-eating, rock-‘n’-roll deejay of the ’70s, Landecker, 48, now is a cheap date–a club-soda-and-salad kind of guy. And more philosophical.
“Although I’m very interested in broadcasting, it’s not my entire life,” says Landecker.
Vickie Truax, Landecker’s morning-show sidekick, also notices the change.
“He’s a different person,” says Truax, who spends more time with him some days than she does with her husband, WBBM-Ch. 2 sports anchor Tim Weigel. “He’s not doing all those crazy things he did when he was younger. Now he works out and doesn’t eat doughnuts.”
His audience, too, is different. There isn’t much carryover from his halcyon days at “The Big 89,” WLS. Which means he has had to build his following almost from the ground up. He thinks some of his old listeners may start showing up “when (they) find out where I am. But that’s going to take time.”
For, despite his age, he’s not being marketed as a radio nostalgia act. “I had to win over a great many people” who were regular WJMK listeners, he says. Not to mention find new ones.
But since moving into the a.m. slot in the fall of 1993, Landecker has charged into the top 10 among the key demographic of listeners 25-54 years old, according to the Arbitron ratings. His show reached as high as a tie for fifth last spring with 4.5 audience share (302,800 listeners), only to slip to 12th (3.4 share) in the fall. But recent ratings showed a rebound in the last three weeks of the fall book, to No. 3 and a 4.7 share.
Landecker attributes the fluctuations to the fact that so many stations play rock music these days; listeners shop around. “People did some sampling,” he says. “This isn’t 1975, when there were only two stations playing rock ‘n’ roll.”
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Playing rock ‘n’ roll is what he has been doing since his high school days, when he went to work for a local station in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“What we liked was his enthusiasm,” says Ted Huesel, who hired Landecker at WOIA-AM and now is the morning man at WAAM-AM in Ann Arbor. “He had a great personality. He was a football star at his high school and he wanted to get into radio. He was willing to do anything, from getting on the air to sweeping the floor.”
His radio manner in Ann Arbor, however, was “more subdued” than what it later became, says Huesel. “He was just feeling his way.”
The way eventually led to Michigan State for a degree in broadcasting and communications and then a job in Philadelphia before landing in 1972 at WLS-AM. There he was reunited with Joel Sebastian, whom he had met in 1964 while working as a stock boy in a bookstore, and also met a young afternoon deejay named Bob Sirott, these days the co-host of WFLD-Ch. 32’s “Fox Thing in the Morning.”
Even though Landecker’s show followed his, Sirott says, “He was usually there before I arrived because he’s such a workaholic.”
“I did a lot of production things,” remembers Landecker of those days. “I did a radio version of `Star Wars.’ Sometimes I started at 7 in the morning.” He was also known for his manic, telephone-rattling “Boogie Check,” where listeners called in with nutty things to say.
Sirott remembers Landecker’s passion for the Top 40 music.
“All the whining and complaining I do on my TV show I got from him,” adds Sirott. “At disc-jockey staff meetings, John would complain about music. He didn’t like a lot of the things we were playing, or he’d like something that we weren’t playing. He had a younger audience. He was concerned he was playing the right music.”
Whatever the gimmick, Landecker claims he was the highest-rated deejay in the country at the height of his popularity in the mid-’70s.
Jonathon Brandmeier, like so many other youngsters growing up in the Midwest, would take a transistor radio with him on vacation just to check out Landecker’s show.
Rock ‘n’ roll memories
“To a kid growing up,” adds Brandmeier, “this was radio, this was fun. I would never miss the start of the show and I’d never miss `Boogie Check.’ I never heard guys taking phone calls like that before. I couldn’t believe anyone could talk so fast. It mesmerized me.”
There was–and is–nothing phony about Landecker. “If he was in a bad mood,” says Sirott, “he’d take it out on the listeners.”
By the early ’80s, the radio audience for rock music had begun to splinter. Top 40 stations such as WLS were losing listeners at alarming rates. Landecker left for Toronto in 1981 and three years later WLS turned off the music altogether and tried a talk format.
By 1983, Landecker was ready to return to Chicago, and found a spot on WLUP-FM, where Brandmeier was beginning to make his own brand of zaniness.
“We had a big show at the Park West,” says Johnny B. “I was thrilled to have him working with me because . . . that was the first time I felt I was successful–because I’d be working with John Records Landecker.”
(His middle name really is Records–his mother’s maiden name.)
By the time Landecker arrived at the Loop, however, times had changed. “We weren’t Top 40,” says Brandmeier, “so it was a whole different story.”
Landecker tried to fit in but didn’t. After a brief stay at WCKG-FM, he returned for a couple more years at WLS, which had become an oldies station but, he says, “didn’t know what to do with me.” He didn’t last. By 1990, he was in Cleveland. And in a tenuous situation.
He had been signed to a three-year contract, but after half that time, station management wanted him out. “It wasn’t my choice,” he says. “And because it was someone else’s choice, they had to pay. I was not going to rush back.”
Landecker did a little of this (talk shows and fill-ins) and a little of that (TV work and production). He turned down an offer at a Cleveland oldies station because “I had a lot of prejudice against oldies,” he says with some irony, considering he is now working at an oldies station.
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His attempts at all-talk were flawed, he says, “because I’m not real opinionated.”
Eventually he turned to television and won a local Emmy in Cleveland for a weekend magazine-format show. Then, in 1992, “out of a clear blue sky,” talent agent Saul Foos called and offered Landecker a job in his Chicago office. Landecker would learn the agent business and make some money.
“TV paid squat,” says Landecker. “So I became an agent in training.” But when he began making the broadcasting rounds, “they’d ask why I didn’t want the job.” Foos wanted a commitment, but WJMK boss Harvey Pearlman made an offer Landecker really liked. “One thing led to another,” he says. And he signed a long-term contract with the station in September 1993.
As Landecker closes in on the 2 1/2-year mark, he has surpassed the longevity record of previous WJMK morning hosts.
“In a market the size of Chicago,” he says, “the first hurdle is pure survival. That will take three years. That allows people and the station to know the audience and the audience to know the people and the station. That’s the first challenge.”
Another challenge was putting together a team he could work with. He believes he has done that with Truax, producer Rick Kaempfer, newsman Richard Cantu and production assistants Vince Argento and Laura Berliner.
“When you work with someone, it’s like a marriage,” says Truax. “We’re in a situation where we’re three feet apart for four hours. We go through a lot together.”
A fresh approach
Landecker likes surprises. To keep that spontaneity going, he won’t tell Truax what topic is coming up after the break. “It keeps you on your toes,” says Truax.
Which is what Landecker wants. “There’s been a bunch of changes” since he started at WJMK. “I tried to see how other shows operated. I tried different things,” from putting Truax in a separate room to having a producer work over his shoulder.
“It’s an ongoing process,” he says. For now, he just wants to entertain, figuring that alone will cut him a sizable market niche as “the only information, oldies, personality” morning show on the air. “I look around at the people I’m competing with and I’m just lucky to be on the same playing field,” he says.
Just another sign of his maturity.
“When you’re in your 40s, you mature,” says Sirott. “What you’re interested in is different. Your style gets more mature. But he’s always been cutting-edge in music and pop culture. John always makes his audience come up to his level.”
Landecker has had the last laugh about his hiatus from radio. The Cleveland station that dumped him no longer exists. He is honored in that city’s new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in the exhibit “Dedicated to the One I Love,” an interactive look at radio talent across the country in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. He’s not in the Radio Hall of Fame yet, but he’s not bothered.
“There’s so many others who belong there before me,” he says, rattling off the names of Sebastian, Fred Winston, Dick Biondi, Larry Lujack and others. “I’ll be happy just being No. 3 among 25-54-year-olds.”
And then he smiles.