Chuck Damico had exactly one job for one year. He still talks about it like a vacation.
“For one glorious year, I think it was 2024, I had one job,” Damico said. “Oh my God! What a magical time that was. That was just PD of MMR. That was pretty awesome to have the luxury of focus.”
The luxury didn’t last. A year later, Beasley handed him 102.9 WMGK. Then, this May, the company added Country 92.5 XTU following the retirement of longtime Brand Manager and Program Director Mark “Razz” Radziewicz. Today, Damico programs a heritage rock station, a classic rock institution and one of country radio’s biggest brands — all from the same building.
For a rock lifer, the cowboy hat might look like an odd fit. However, Damico has settled into the boots quickly.
Enrolled for One Class
Damico’s radio story starts the way plenty of them do — with a kid, a recorder and a stack of tapes. He made goofy interview tapes as a child, asking questions and answering them with lines from songs recorded off the radio. He also collected nearly every audio format imaginable.
“I have kind of an affinity for all the different mediums,” Damico said. “Eight tracks and mini discs and DAT tapes. I have carts at home. Anything that you can play sound off of, I just am fascinated with.”
After high school, however, he took a job with an engineering company. Within a few years, the company was selling off and cashing out. That forced some soul searching.
“I really realized that what helped me get through my workday was radio,” he said. “So that’s when I really decided to pursue it. I called WMMR, and they told me you got to be a college intern, and I said, ‘What’s that?’ And then they explained it to me, and the next day I drove to a community college and I enrolled for one class just so I could become an intern at MMR.”
That was 1994. He hasn’t left the building since.
The 29-Year Job Interview
Officially, Damico interned one day a week. Unofficially, he showed up three or four. He made hook tapes, ran music research, filed CDs, opened mail, stuffed prize bins and gassed up the station vehicles.
“I just really tried to be versatile,” Damico said. “I tried to be as useful to as many departments as possible, and then I would just go wherever the opportunity was. I wasn’t fixated on being on the air, although I did get to do that a bunch at a couple different places. I just tried to be ready for whatever came next.”
That versatility carried him through commercial production, imaging, music scheduling and eventually the APD chair at WMMR. Along the way, he programmed 95.7 BEN-FM for nine years and then sports talk 97.5 The Fanatic for three and a half more — all while remaining WMMR’s assistant PD. When Bill Weston retired at the end of 2023, Damico finally got the top job, calling it the completion of his “29-year job interview” at the time.
Notably, the hallways have changed more than he has. When Greater Media bought the station in 1997, Damico personally boxed up the music library and moved it from Center City to the cluster’s current home. The building has since been redesigned three or four times. Yet when everyone moved out for the last rebuild, he was the only one to move back into the exact same spot.
“I’m landlocked in the building,” he laughed. “There have been times when it’s been snowing for six hours and nobody told me. It could be any time, any day, like being in a casino.”
Wearing the Cowboy Hat
Today, Damico is essentially PD and MD of both WMMR and XTU. He makes the programming decisions, builds the music, schedules the logs and takes the calls. Meanwhile, at WMGK, he works from a much higher altitude — promotions, weekends, specialty programming, contesting and branding — while operations lead, Tony Harris, handles day-to-day execution.
What makes the load manageable at WMMR and XTU is staffing. Both are union shops, and those contracts protect positions that have vanished elsewhere.
“I have a five-person morning show on MMR. I have a four-person morning show on XTU,” Damico said. “I have full-time live and local midday and afternoon on both stations. I love the term on-air talent, of course, but I also really love the term off-air talent — production people, promotion people, traffic, continuity, sales, everything. I can delegate and hand off a lot of things to a lot of really talented, dedicated people at both places, and that’s what really helps both radio stations be successful.”
Lifestyle Brands With an Active Core
On paper, a heritage rocker and a country giant look like an odd couple. Damico sees them as siblings.
“They’re both what I would call lifestyle brands of the city, not unlike a sports team,” he said. “MMR is just a part of the fabric of the city. It’s part of people’s social identity. People know around Thanksgiving or Christmas that they’re home because they can tune in and listen to MMR. XTU is very similar in the sense that for the country music fan and the country music community, it’s the same thing. And it’s because the shows are local, the hosts are local, the events are all locally focused.”
By contrast, he points to stations where radio is a utility — something listeners flip on at work like the lights. XTU and WMMR, he says, are the opposite.
“They want to know what’s happening with the music. They want to know what’s going on in the city,” Damico said. “They feel connected to the host, like they’re personal friends.”
WMGK shares that DNA through decades of classic rock credibility built by voices like John DeBella, Debbie Calton, Andre Gardner and Ray Koob. So, is there a secret to activating that core across all three?
“That is the secret. You have to be legitimate,” Damico said. “You can’t be phony. It’s a no BS town, and they can smell it a mile away. You have to be authentic and honest and real and sincere and every other word in the thesaurus for what all that means.”
When Free Became Too Popular
For proof of how hard XTU’s audience shows up, Damico points to the station’s summer anniversary show. Years ago, it was free, driven by ticket giveaways and the usual redemption guessing game.
“If the venue holds 15,000, do you give out 20, hoping 14 show up?” he said. “Well, they had to stop making it a free show because the redemption rate was so high that it became an issue. It became unpredictable, and the reciprocation from the audience was so massive that they had to rethink the model completely.”
That’s not a problem most programmers get to have.
Country’s Open Door
For Damico, learning a new format this deep into his career has been a jolt of energy. The community, the artists, the labels and management are all invested in radio’s success. And they have something he hadn’t seen in a while.
“We used to call them budgets,” he said. “They’re investing in the artists, they’re investing in the events, the experiences, the value of a program director and radio staff getting to know their artists well by seeing them live. It’s just an energy that I haven’t felt for a long time. It’s really, really exciting to be a part of something like that.”
That accessibility stands out most. In other formats, he says, younger acts can be standoffish, and getting to the artist means cutting through promoters and managers.
“The whole trick is you just have to get to the band,” Damico said. “If I need a country artist to call the morning show tomorrow, it’s relatively easy. I think a lot of other formats, and a lot of other businesses for that matter, could probably learn a lot from how the country radio and country music community operates and supports each other.”
Still, he isn’t starry-eyed. Damico believes some of country’s promotional money gets spent on gimmicks that don’t move the needle. His advice to the rest of the industry costs nothing at all.
“Cut back the layers a little bit,” he said. “Have some accessibility. Build some enthusiasm. You don’t have to spend money.”
Thirty-two years after enrolling in one community college class, Damico is still learning — and Philadelphia’s country fans are reaping the benefits.
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