Banana

All Hit Music WFIL Philadelphia 6p-10p personality
Banana Joe on a Top-40 Music Survey. Circa 1974

Show marries radio, television

(Photo: "Banana" Joe Montione and his wife Krissy are the morning hosts on Kat Kountry 105.1. News Herald Photo: Robert Cooper.)

TROY ESPE
Entertainment Editor

Banana Joe Montione and his wife Krissy juggle microphones, two cameras, telephones, soundboard and computers.

While live on radio and TV.

The madness is Kat Kountry 105.1's morning show Kat on Fox. The program is simulcast live from 6 to 8 a.m. weekdays on WAKT-FM and Fox 28 WPGX-TV.

"It's pretty hectic," Banana Joe said. "I can't just sit here and do a radio show."

Both owned by Waitt Media, Kat Kountry and Fox 28 launched the show in January. Listeners hear the show on the radio while viewers watch it on television. During songs, Fox broadcasts coinciding music videos. Chiseled cowboys and country sirens get viewers' juices flowing for their morning commute.

While radio programs The Howard Stern Show and Imus in the Morning are broadcast on national TV, Kat on Fox might be the only locally televised radio show in the country.

"It's kind of experimental," Krissy said. "For people who like music it's an alternative to watching Today or Good Morning America."

The marriage of radio and television was bumpy initially, the hosts said. Computers crashed. Television signals went down.

"At first it made us really nervous," Krissy said. "Now we just roll with it. What are you going to do?"

Video didn't kill these radio stars. It made them more popular. Fox's television signal reaches more listeners than radio waves. TV also has attracted children. On a recent morning, Gary from Grand Ridge dedicated a video to his estranged wife. A 10-year-old girl requested a love song for a boy.

"I love the little kiddies," Banana Joe said.

"Same mentality," Krissy chided.

The Montiones basically run both shows by themselves. In a cramped studio off Thomas Drive, two TV cameras hang from the ceiling. Banana Joe controls camera angles. He also selects songs. For each tune, he coordinates the video with Fox 28.

"It's like a reality TV show, too," Banana Joe said. "They get to see what a morning show is like to put on."

Kat on Fox contains usual morning radio fare: weather, news, gossip, quiz, horoscopes, giveaways and school lunches. Hosts add twists such as Telephone Roulette. Callers go live on the air without screening. Spousal Arousal challenges listeners to talk their unsuspecting lover into a noon quickie.

After meeting at a Tampa radio station, the Montiones have been married for seven years. They've also worked at stations in Dallas, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. They joined Kat Kountry in November, moving to Panama City Beach for the quiet life.

However, station duties often require 12-hour days. Banana Joe doubles as Kat Kountry's program director. Krissy handles promotions for Waitt Media's four local stations.

"It doesn't feel like work," Banana Joe said.

The couple often bickers and uses self-deprecating humor. Krissy once walked out while on the air.

"Any people who do a morning show are going to fight if you're married or not," she said.

Head:He's a top 'Banana' once again DJ Joe Montione and the sounds of his
youth are reborn on KTXQ
Byline:Dave Caldwell
Credit:Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News
Art:PHOTO(S): 1. (The Dallas Morning News: John F. Rhodes) Banana Joe
Montione is wide open for business at oldies station KTXQ-FM. 2. The salad
days in Philadelphia, with visitors such as John Travolta. 3. One of Banana
Joe's guests at WFIL's 1975 marathon was John Lennon. ; LOCATION NOTE:
Photos #2 and #3 were not sent to the library for archiving.
Text:
The first time I heard Banana Joe Montione, he was the night guy on a
Philadelphia radio station that did extremely well playing music from the
1970s because, well, it was the 1970s.
He was one of the Boss Jocks on WFIL, a Top 40 radio powerhouse back in the
days when people listened to music on AM stations that "disc jockeys" played
off long-playing records (which you can tell your kids sort of looked like
big, black CDs).
When he first arrived at WFIL, Banana Joe was 20, climbing fast, working his
dream job. I was 15, a high school sophomore from Lancaster, Pa., a kid
interested in a media career.
I love sports too much and went into newspapers, but I can say that Banana
Joe and all the other Boss Jocks made radio so alluring that I considered a
career as a disc jockey very seriously. I had even picked out a name:
"Dynamite Dave."
Now Banana Joe is sitting on a red leather couch in a side office at KTXQ-FM
(102.1), Magic 102, the Dallas radio station that has climbed in listener
surveys playing "Jammin' Oldies," which include a heavy diet of music from
the '70s. And now Banana Joe is telling his life story to a graying,
big-city newspaper reporter . . . me!
It takes about 30 seconds to see that this job has energized him. He was an
inspiration to me then, but his story offers a moral now: Follow your bliss.
At times over the last 20 years, Banana Joe got away from radio, and the
music that defined a decade, but never far enough that he could not come
back.
Now that the '70s are hot again, Banana Joe is playing music that he had to
stop playing for a long time. He just turned 45. He dresses in black - no
flower-print shirts - and a lot of the hair he has left has been pulled into
a ponytail. He has trimmed that Jim Croce-style mustache he had in his WFIL
publicity photos. But, by golly, he still talks like the Banana Joe I
remember, and he loves the music maybe more now than he did then.
"When you know the music, you're so passionate about it," he says now. "I
can't even hear when I get off the air. I keep it cranked up and, you know,
I haven't been able to say that for a while."
Banana Joe can laugh at the irony, too. His audience then, and now, includes
the same type of people - who happen to be 25 years older.
"Isn't this the way it all started?" he says.
He grew up in Pittston, Pa., about 100 miles north of Philadelphia. WFIL's
signal came in strong at night, and Joe Montione became a loyal listener of
a format that took root in 1966.
He dreamed of working for the station one day. He even put together a
pretend radio station in his basement (with the mandatory reverberation
dial, so he could sound like an AM disc jockey).
He was determined to make it. Mr. Montione remembers meeting a WFIL Boss
Jock named George Michael, who has gone on to some national fame as a TV
sportscaster, and telling him, "I just want to let you know when you leave,
I'm going to replace you." And he did.
"You have to have role models," he says of the Boss Jocks. "These guys were
my heroes."
And then Banana Joe became one of mine.
I liked him because he did not sound like what was then a typical Top 40 DJ.
For one thing, he used his real name, not some obvious alias such as Tiny
Tom Tyler. For another, his voice was a little husky. He did not force his
words into the microphone, as DJs tended to do then. He sounded like he had
fun.
WFIL used to get all the big stars to visit the station. The station ran a
56-hour "Helping Hands Marathon" for local charities, and Mr. Montione
remembers Jay Cook, the WFIL program director thinking how great it would be
if the station could reunite the Beatles for the weekend. (Remember, this
was the old days.)
That, of course, never happened, but WFIL got John Lennon to show up for its
1975 marathon. And Mr. Lennon hung around for a while.
Mr. Lennon talked of getting so much, so quickly, that he felt like the
greyhound that had caught up to the racetrack rabbit. Banana Joe was not
John Lennon, but he got the point.
"I had dedicated all this energy to just one thing," Banana Joe says.
What he wanted to do next was to pursue an acting career. It was early 1977,
and he was 22. So, after 21/2 years at WFIL, he moved to Los Angeles. He did
some acting, but ended up on KHJ-AM.
He had some success as an actor in L.A.-area productions, but in the 20
years between then and now he moved from one radio station to another, from
one format to another. He even owned two stations in Pennsylvania for a
while.
Eventually, he heard about the "Jammin' Oldies" format. He started listening
to stations on the Internet that had made the change.
The music reaches him in a way other music can't, and won't. Mr. Montione
was there at the very beginning - before the very beginning of some songs,
actually. Philadelphia was a big music town when he worked at WFIL, and one
of the perks was to meet the songwriters and artists.
Banana Joe saw a couple of area acts named Hall and Oates and Bruce
Springsteen before they amounted to much. When he plays the O'Jays' "I Love
Music" now, he can remember a Philadelphia songwriter named Kenny Gamble
trying the song out on him.
"I play it here," Banana Joe says, "and I flash back to the intimate
moments."
He has updated his shtick a little in the 22 years since I last heard him.
He dropped his Nixon impression and now does a pretty good Bill Clinton. I
don't think he talks as much as he used to, but he seems to be as
enthusiastic.
With Banana Joe's help, and mostly through word of mouth, Magic 102 has
hurdled from No. 19 to No. 4 in the ratings among the highly desired 25- to
54-year-old segment of the Dallas-Fort Worth listening audience. That, to
Banana Joe, is a sign.
"This music, so much of what we're playing, hasn't been on the radio in so
long," he says.
Neither has radio that wraps some personality around the music. What worked
then works now.
"What a concept," Joe Montione says, and his laugh turns into a roar.