The Final Conversation with Pierre Robert

I’ve never been nervous about writing an article before. Not for Billboard, not for Radio and Records, not for the Jacobs Media Blog or any other publication. I’ve been nervous plenty of times getting ready to interview someone for an article. Like I was last Tuesday afternoon when I opened my Zoom room to interview Pierre Robert. He had been on WMMR in Philadelphia for more than four decades, a legendary personality on a station known for having larger than life talent.

As it turned out I should not have been nervous. In no time at all he made me instantly comfortable just like he’s done for millions of MMR listeners. We talked for over ninety minutes as he shared stories and wisdom that only come from a career’s worth of experiences and a life lived with joy. Then, the next day, it came out that Robert had unexpectedly passed away sometime during the night.

That’s why, for the first time I’m nervous to write this story. You see Robert had done hundreds, maybe thousands of interviews during his career. It just turned out that his last one was about him. I’m going to do my best to capture everything we discussed and do justice to the thoughts and stories of a person I didn’t know well but also felt like I knew instantly.

Oddly, we started off talking about consultants because he, usually the person doing the interviewing, had asked about me. That led to talking about Lee Abrams coming to the station back in the day and talking about psychographics. It was the first of many made up “consultant words” that were thrown at him during his career. Another was “stationality” which was big in the ‘nineties and just made him shake his head. But his favorite consultant story was when someone (he didn’t remember who), came to the station and told him what really mattered is being on the streets and in the clubs, introducing bands, “and I’m just there thinking, we do that already.”

Pierre joked that he should have been a consultant, but he didn’t think stations would want to hear his suggestions. I asked what his advice would be. “I would say ‘be live’” he answered. Robert went on to explain that he understands there are economic issues that can prevent stations from following his advice. However, he wants to see the stations win. “I want them to win with live and local. Be live whenever possible because there’s just nothing like it.”

Another suggestion, which he also knew isn’t economically feasible, is to bring back overnight hosts because that’s where young people coming up can learn how to be themselves. “You know who you are, your personality, everybody at least has a semblance of that idea,” he explained. “But getting you, the essence of you, through that microphone, there’s something different there. Being able to carry who you are through that microphone; it doesn’t happen automatically.”

Robert feels it’s important for radio hosts to develop their personalities. It’s what sets radio apart from other places consumers can get music. “There’s a trend to diminish radio and think of it as not so vital now with streaming services like Spotify and Pandora but it’s not the same.” He goes on to explain that radio is like a restaurant. Listeners go there primarily for the food (the music), but a close second is the vibe, the ambiance. “(mimicking a restaurant maître de) Hello, Mike. Nice to see you again. Do you want your usual table? Here, please have a seat.”

In the case of a station like WMMR, that plays both new and older music, Robert thinks of it as offering a variety of dishes, “(now as a waiter) would you like that dish that you’ve loved for years? Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones? Or the chef has just come up with this great new thing, the Struts or the Record Company or Dirty Honey. Would you like to try some of that? Maybe a combination of both? An appetizer of the Struts and a main course of the Rolling Stones.”

As someone who honed his personality in the overnights, I asked Robert to explain who he was on the air. Like many great talent, he struggled some to put it into words. He finally came around to, “personal, warm, friendly, open, sharing.” He then went on to say, “I want to be your friend. I want to share my life. I’m a vegetarian, I like everything from the Grateful Dead to the Ramones and people know it.”

He also added that he wants to go on the listener’s journey. “I tell people, take me with you. Wherever you’re going. I want to go. I’m just like a dog that wants to go for a ride. You want to go to the market? I’ll go with you. You want to go to the beach? Sure. I’ll go. Want to go to the mountains? I’ll go. Want to go on running errands? I want to go with you. And because people do that, even now, it allows an intimacy.”

Another big part of building his persona came from being out with the listeners at shows. “A lot of DJ’s would go introduce a band, collect their $200 and leave,” Robert remembers. “I would go introduce the opening band and the middle band and the headlining band. And I’d walk around and shake hands with people. Then I’d sit on a stool by the exit of the club and shake hands with people going out. That’s how I built my brand. And I did that from the smallest clubs to the largest venues.”

And even forty years later, he was still working to keep his brand front and center with the listeners. He shared plans to see Bryan Adams and Pat Benatar the next night saying at the end of the show he’d likely wind up in a visible spot so if people want to come up and chat or take pictures they could. He said his friends called it running for mayor. Robert felt it was important to maintain that accessibility even after all these years. “Fame, notoriety is a very relative thing, you know, so no DJ should get too complacent.”

There was, however, at least one time that being close to the listeners nearly backfired. It happened when Sean “Rabbi” Tyszler, who has since also passed away, was working at WMMR. Robert remembers when Tyszler, a huge metal fan and orthodox jew known for being in mosh pit with his WMMR yarmulke, walked into the studio with a proposition. If Robert went with him to a metal show, Tyszler would agree to attend a Grateful Dead show. The pact was announced on the air and when Slayer came to town it was time for Robert to go. “I thought oh dear god. Although I appreciate all kinds of music Slayer’s not exactly my cup of tea.”

The listeners knew he was going to Slayer so he dressed the part the best he could and along with a couple of other staff members headed off to the show. This is the point in the conversation when reveals he loves mosh pits. “My first one I was probably fifty years old. It was the first time I saw Green Day and I thought ‘I got to get in that mosh pit’ and I did and I loved it. It was so tribal and crazed.”

Back to the Slayer show, Robert is in the audience interviewing people about what he should expect with his tape recorder, a fixture at every show he attends, when the light go out, three upside down crosses descent from the ceiling and the show starts, “and it’s about five million decibels.” That’s when he sees a mosh pit start on the floor. “Our then overnight, now evening host Jackie Bam Bam said ‘you can’t go in there. That’s not a Green Day mosh pit. That’s a Slayer mosh pit.’” But Robert wouldn’t be stopped, “I responded ‘Don’t invite me to the party if you don’t expect me to attend.’”

Robert and Rabbi headed down to the floor and jumped into the mosh pit. “It’s this moving wave of humanity and I made it maybe one and a half rotations and someone bumped into me, and I went down, pow, flat on my face. That’s when I started thinking I’m going to die in this mosh pit. This is not a Green Day, fun, power pop punky mosh pit.”

But then his close relationship with the listeners saved him. “All of a sudden, these giant arms pick me up. It’s a guy that looks like Hagrid from Harry Potter and he says, ‘Pierre?’ and I say ‘yes.’ He says you’re with me now, puts his arm around me and we make several more rotations around the mosh pit.” The listener who rescued him from the floor then asks if he wants to “go up” meaning crowd surf. “Fuck, yes, I want to go up. And up I go. I surfed over the barricade, the security guards caught me, and I went back, and I did it a second time. I think I was fifty-four at the time and I was pretty proud of myself.”

When the dead and company came to town soon after, Robert says Rabbi paid off his part of the agreement. He attended the show with a tie-dyed yarmulke a WMMR listener made for him. “He met other people there from his congregation which was amazing. It speaks to the power of music but also of inserting your personality into your show and sharing what you’re doing with your audience, so they are part of the journey.”

The mention of Robert’s ubiquitous tape recorder leads to another unique part of his personality and work ethic. Not only would he go to shows and interview listeners to get on air content, he would also narrate parts of the show, as a sort of play-by-play describing the scene to use on the air the next day. “It speaks to the power of radio. Back in the ‘thirties and ‘forties people would listen to dramas on the radio. They called it ‘theater of the mind.’ If you describe something well enough, people don’t have to be there.”

Sometimes his use of the tape recorded went beyond fun at shows. One instance was when he went to New York just days after the 9/11 attack. “I just walked down the avenue describing the scene. I got as close as I could to ground zero, and even talked to a firefighter who was still convinced they would find live people.” Once again, Robert tied those recordings to the music relying on that power to fully illustrate his feelings. “There’s a song for everything. You could play ‘Imagine’ or any number of songs that were applicable to that situation.”

Thinking of Robert’s tape recorder in a metaphorical sense the other important role it played across his career was helping him interview many artists. “Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is probably the pinnacle. I’ve gotten to interview them twice. It was amazing sitting across the table from Mick fucking Jagger who is the greatest front man of the greatest Rock band of all time.” He also talked about having a connection with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Audioslave. “Chris was on my show a number of times singing and playing.” Graham Nash was another all-time favorite. “He’s probably the nicest of any person, not just rock star, but person. He’s got so many crazy Neil Young stories, and CSN stories, and drug fueled madness stories.”

The hardest he ever worked to secure an interview was with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam who Robert thinks is one of the most fascinating people in Rock. “I campaigned for over 10 years to get an interview with him. We had every other member of the band on but couldn’t get him. We even found a stat that said we were playing more Pearl Jam than any station including Seattle but there was just this barrier.”

Robert finally broke through when the station gave away meet and greet passes to a Pearl Jam show. He accompanied the listeners and got the chance to talk with Vedder. He talked about the station’s long history, how they take requests, are live and local, host a giant annual food drive and more, all of which Vedder wrote down in a notebook. At the end of their time together, Robert mentioned that he’d been trying to get an interview for years. Vedder agreed to do one before the next night’s show. “I calmly walked out the door and then started skipping and jumping all the way down the hallway going holy fuck!”

That next night two amazing things happened. The first was at the end of the interview when Robert asked Vedder if he would do a station ID. “I was leaving and I said I don’t mean to be corny, but would you do a station id. He looked and said, ‘for you I will.’ It’s a four second ID where he says, ‘this is Eddie Vedder, pause, with MMR. Yep that’s what you’re listening to.’”

The second was at the end of the show. When the band came on for an encore Vedder not only dedicated “Last Kiss” to Robert and former WMMR host Matt Cord but proceeded to talk to the crowd about all the things Robert had told him the night before. Robert remembers the moment vividly.

“He goes ‘you know it’s not often we get to shout out local radio stations, but you know what they’re live and local, you can call up and a DJ is actually going to answer the phone and talk to you, and they’ll play a request for you’ and he goes ‘hell you might even get laid.’ He went over everything I had told him the night before that he had written in his journal. All the people around me started high-fiving and I had to sit down. I started crying I was so moved by it.”

But even the reach of MMR hasn’t made it possible to interview everyone he wanted to. “My biggest frustration is MMR has been playing Bruce Springsteen since he started, more than the stations in New York and New Jersey, where he was from and in 43 years I’ve been there we haven’t even been able to get a phoner and I don’t know why.” But don’t misunderstand, Robert was incredibly happy with the stars he did speak to. “Sure there’s frustration that I can’t get some of these other ones that are still on my list, but I’m quite pleased with the ones I have.”

For any talent who want to take over Robert’s legacy of talking to the stars, he says it all starts with preparation. “I do a lot of research and try to get as much information about the band as possible, even if I already know them.” He also makes sure to get ahold of any new projects and ideally prefers to get an album or CD so he can look at the details. “You learn things by reading the liner notes and the artwork is a whole conversation you can have. The more questions you have, the more you know about the person or the project they’re promoting, the better off you are.”

The other important piece of the equation is how to use the interview once you have it. He was always frustrated by television stations that would get the same length of time to talk with an act but only use ten seconds of material. He once turned a ten-minute interview with Bono into a two-hour on-air special. “I don’t like short form. I like long conversations like the one we’re having.”

As the call began to wrap up we started talking more about the power of radio. “Radio is still a vital commodity. It’s a vital part of the landscape,” Robert said. “It has the ability to be that audio scrapbook, and sure anyone can do that on their own, but it sounds better when it’s on the radio.”

He also respected the power of radio to impact the community on an individual level and on a larger scale. “We can accompany people through their journey. I’ve helped listeners get through when Chris (Cornell) killed himself and when Chester Bennington killed himself. I was able to play songs from those guys and say, ‘there’s a lot of shit out there and you must not give up’ and I got feedback later that said it helped people.” On a larger scale he talks about the Preston and Steve Food Drive and the impact those sort of efforts have. “You find something in your community that needs fixing and go try to fix it. We can be helpful in that way.”

He continued, “In MMR’s case, we’re blessed that we’ve been the soundtrack for people’s lives from t-shirts and jeans, you know, to death. I get calls from delivery rooms where a baby is coming and from funeral processions where people are driving home.” He continued, “That’s a blessing, to be able to put out a message of kindness and friendship and spend a person’s life with them. That’s our blessing.”

For anyone who never got the chance to get to know Pierre Robert I hope this shines a light into the life of one of the greatest Rock radio hosts ever to put on headphones. For those who did know him, I hope this final conversation brings some comfort in, what I’m sure is, a difficult time.

In drafting this article, as I do with all pieces like this, I have cleaned up and altered some of Robert’s words for clarity and narrative always careful to capture the true spirit of his comments. If you want to hear the full conversation to hear Robert’s voice one more time, click the video up above.

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Mike Stern

Mike Stern is a Classic Rock columnist and Features writer for Barrett Media. He has been with Jacobs Media consulting stations in the Classic Rock, Rock, Alternative and AAA world for more than a decade. Prior to that he programmed stations in Chicago, Detroit, Denver Las Vegas and other markets. He also worked as News/Talk Editor for Radio and Records, wrote about Top 40 Radio for Billboard Magazine and had his own radio talent coaching business called Talent Mechanic.