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A.D. Rowntree is an experienced recording artist, broadcaster, and producer who has been hitting the airwaves of St. Louis, via Hubbard Broadcasting’s KSHE 95 for a couple of years now. On The A.D. Show, Rowntree brings listeners the rock he loves to talk about.
In a conversation about radio, Rowntree talks about his time with recording studios, what makes good broadcasting, and the beauty of working with the soundtrack to his life.
Tell me about your journey to your current broadcasting career.
Well, I was in a band. In high school, I snagged a scholarship, and I was headed to Tufts & New England Conservatory of Music to get a degree in jazz & classical percussion (grew up playing drums) while studying journalism. But then, the group I’d just joined got a record deal. I discovered pretty fast that if you offer a teenage boy a choice between a dorm room and a tour bus, he’ll choose the tour bus every time. We did records for Mercury, A&M, and Columbia. We were signed and managed by the same folks that looked after Linkin Park, Korn, Limp Bizkit, & Rob Zombie. Needless to say, we were the one band out of that bunch that did NOT sell millions of albums…. But we had some fun, we saw the world, and I learned some stuff.
When it was all done, I needed a job. All my friends were getting out of college and starting careers. My resume said “singer in a band,” and I didn’t even have a band anymore. With zero education or practical life skills, radio seemed like a good bet. A friend of mine, Will Pendarvis, told me to try and be on the radio. He’s a legend, and he helped me make an aircheck that made me sound like I had way more experience than I had (none). He gave it to Jose Mangin at Sirius, and I got it to Vince Richards at the Buzz in Houston. I actually got hired at both places the same week… I was the overnight guy on Octane and the weekend guy on KTBZ, and I’ve been weaseling my way up ever since.
Have you ever thought about what career you might pursue if you weren’t working in radio?
Well, I’d been a writer before radio. I wrote for some magazines & newspapers, and I did a little TV writing work, so I’m guessing I’d have done more of that. The further we get into digital media, the more all that stuff seems to be related, though. Writing, video, and audio all falls into the digital content bucket now, so I don’t know if it’s that different, but I guess I’d be trying to hack out a living as a writer.
The one thing I miss about being in a band is the travel. If radio went away, and I could work out a way to travel and write about it for a living, that would be great. I also flipped houses before radio was paying the bills, and I have a bit of a real estate side hustle. Can I write about real estate? That actually doesn’t sound very exciting. I’ll stick with this. I really LOVE radio. I still find it magical. The way music and voices sound and FEEL coming out of your car’s speakers after going through radio processing and frequency modulation is unique and awesome.
Notable career moment? If you were to write a book, this would be the can’t-miss chapter.
I think the moment I decided radio was it for me. I’d been the singer in a band that was the subject of a massive bidding war. Music moguls had promised us we’d be on top of the world, but it all went up in a puff of label mergers and tax debt. I was a kid in my 20s and was already washed up. I remember one especially humbling moment when I delivered a pizza… to the million-dollar recording studio where I’d made my album a couple of years earlier.
I was beyond broke and going absolutely nowhere. I had no education and no experience doing anything but music, and there was no reason to expect that I would land any kind of job, but I made a decision that I would carve out some kind of life for myself using my voice… and it worked out.
How important is format to you? Do your personal music tastes align with what you play and talk about? What sets the genre apart from other genres?
I’ve only ever worked in rock/alt and talk radio. I love them both for different reasons. I feel like there are radio fundamentals that you can apply to any format, and I love all kinds of music, but it’s amazing to be on KSHE. The music is the soundtrack to our listeners’ life, and to my life. Being on a station where you can take a deep dive into that is very special.
When the previous job ended, I was fortunate enough to have some options. (Thanks, Brad Samuel & Kraig Kitchin). I remember driving around, punching through the stations where I could have potentially wound up, and I landed on KSHE while they were playing “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan. Thanks to my parent’s record collection, it’s one of my very favorite songs by one of my very favorite bands, but it’s not something you EVER hear on the radio. I remember saying to myself, “There’s only ONE place I could go and wind up talking about who played what instrument on deep cuts from Steely Dan at 7 in the morning. I think KSHE is my spiritual home.” I know that sounds kind of out there, but it’s really how I feel.
What makes for really good radio? What makes radio a special media outlet that sets it apart from other digital platforms?
Growing up, I was kind of a solitary kid, and I was pretty content to keep to myself. When I’m done with work, I still am. I love just being at home with my wife, my dog, and the cat. Sometimes, though, you want or need some company. I loved the radio because it was always just enough to make me feel like I was sharing something with other people. As a listener, radio made me feel like I was part of something that was going on…right now. When I needed it, radio kept me company, and it still does. To me, no matter what you’re doing or what kind of station it’s on, that’s what good radio does for people: it keeps you company.
Check out the A.D. Show on KSHE 95.
