Steve Gorman, currently of Steve Gorman Rocks and KQRS and formerly the drummer of The Black Crowes, has always had a soft spot for radio. With a dad who ran a music station when he was a kid and a college career that had him thinking he would go into sports broadcasting, Gorman’s place on the Minneapolis airwaves and beyond is no huge departure from his original plans.
Gorman found success as a musician for years until 2008 or 2009, when he began thinking about life after The Black Crowes.
“I cooked up this idea of musicians talking sports because I talked about sports with my musician friends all the time,” he says. He sat in with 104.5 The Zone in Nashville a few times. “I loved it. I could sit there and hold court for hours.”
Steve Gorman Sports was born and eventually picked up by Fox Sports Radio, becoming a national show for 5 years. “I had an idea for a concept. Execution was still a bridge too far, but I knew what I thought it could be,” he recalls.
Sports coverage was changing rapidly, as Gorman wasn’t the only broadcaster who learned that incorporating entertainment into sports talk wasn’t that crazy.
“I thought there’d be something there that I could kind of capitalize on,” he said. Gorman relied on big names who weren’t normally talking sports to call in to his show, saying, “Most fans, I think, don’t want a genius sports analyst to break down coverage and schemes. They want to talk to someone who just enjoys the game like they do… My passions in life are sports and music. It was just kind of a natural fit.”
Gorman stopped doing sports radio in 2018, wrote a book, and then returned to broadcasting with Steve Gorman Rocks in 2019. The show airs in the evening on several stations.
In January of 2023, Gorman started hosting the morning show at KQRS in Minneapolis, which saw a recent shake-up two weeks ago with the exit of Program Director and VP/Classic Rock Wade Linder. “It’s a bummer,” Gorman says of the shift. “I’ve been in radio long enough to know that changes happen constantly. At its best, it’s a proactive workplace, and at its worst, it’s reactive, and I’ve seen a lot of both. With respect to everybody involved in that decision, it was a tough day for everybody.”
While Gorman considers himself a drummer first and foremost, he agrees that “writer” has probably ended up somewhere on the list over the years. “[Writing’s] always been big. I was the kid who would always write,” he says. “I don’t think of myself as a writer, but I’ve written a lot in my life.”
“In my head, I’m a drummer, and then everything else follows…Even with Steve Gorman Sports and then Steve Gorman Rocks, I still would have said I’m a drummer who does radio on the side.” Minneapolis was the first time he thought, “Well, for the first time in my life, I’m kind of a radio guy who also drums still.”
Gorman has been playing a lot of music since getting to Minneapolis and even has a new band in the works with Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish, R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, and guitarist Tom Bukovac.
“It’s a few of us who have been in other bands in the past, but this is all new music,” he says of the new project, which remains without a name for the time being. “The hardest part of getting a band off the ground is figuring out what to call it.”
While Gorman looks towards future endeavors with his new band, despite the variety of streaming platforms available these days, he still recognizes the value of good radio. “Look at the numbers – there are a lot of people still listening to radio… It’s the oldest story in the world, but it’s mine, which is just that it’s so intimate. Most of the people listening to the radio, certainly in the morning, are in their car, they’re on a bus with headphones; you’re the passenger in the car when you’re on the radio.”
His local morning show has shown him the power of a connection with a market, with listeners stopping him on the street, saying hi, or recalling a moment that made them smile on his show. “I have great respect for them. It’s an honor for someone to come up and say, ‘I spend an hour with you five days a week,’” he says.
He thinks back to a time when his mom would drive him to school every day as a kid with the musings of Paul Harvey as the soundtrack to their drives. “I remember very clearly transitioning from ‘He’s just some corny old man’ to ‘I gotta hear what Paul Harvey is gonna say.’ It just happens. It seeps into you… when I hear his voice, I’m in my mom’s car. It takes me back to this day.”
Gorman understands that having this kind of connection with listeners is really valuable, and people tune in because they’ve grown a sort of relationship with the person they’re aiming to hear. “When you’re on the radio, every single day, someone hears something. Even if it’s just a laugh. It doesn’t have to be a life-defining, life-altering moment, but… the part that becomes so familiar, that’s hard to replicate with anything else. People really do feel like you’re family… I don’t take it for granted at all. It means a lot to people.”
When it comes down to it, Gorman has a great love for music, and knowing how to talk about the music and the bands that create it has come a lot from being a musician and a fan himself.
“Bands are just clown cars. The reality of every rock and roll band I’ve ever loved is that they’re just crazy on a certain level. You’re just in this bubble universe. You create your own rules and your own whole society around this band, and it’s inevitably gonna be a black comedy at best if not a Succession-level dysfunctional drama at worst,” he jokes.
“The only way to appropriately talk about bands is you have to have a sense of humor without any disrespect to the music… It’s amazing these clowns can produce magic. That’s kind of where I always land. Those four knuckleheads climbed into that clown car, and they rolled it off a cliff, but they jumped out and made this amazing song. I love that. That’s what I loved about being in a band. I’ve looked at us, myself included, and gone, ‘How in the world is this group of people making this sound?’”
Listening to the music he talks about and discovering new favorites remains a big part of Gorman’s routine. “I just love music. If it works viscerally the first time I hear it, I’ll stay invested. If I have to talk myself into liking something, I’m not gonna like it for very long. I’m still just a fan.”
Jacquie Cadorette is a music features reporter for Barrett Media with over 10 years of experience crafting and managing digital editorial content in the broadcast media space. Her radio career began at Philadelphia’s 102.9 WMGK where she assisted with crafting copy for promotional materials before moving on to blogging for Elvis Duran and the Morning Show, writing prep copy for iHeart, and ultimately becoming a senior editorial content producer on Audacy’s central team, where her work was syndicated to over 250 station sites nationwide. After bringing the company’s podcast editorial brand to life as the Head of Content, Jacquie dove into freelance editorial work alongside her other endeavors.
A PA native, Jacquie spent 9 years in New York City and then a few years in Portland, OR to continue her writing career and indulge in great coffee on the west coast. She now lives in South Philly and can be found enjoying live music, looking at the world through her Canon camera, or diving into a project she’s never tried before with unfounded confidence. Jacquie can be reached at jacquiecad.media@gmail.com.
