95.5 WPLJ's Monk Shares Experiences in Radio

New Jersey native, Joe Pardavila, sits down with Steve Adubato to talk about his role as Executive Producer on 95.5 WPLJ, and as “Monk” on the "Todd and Jayde in the Morning" program.

2/27/17 #2017

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. It is my pleasure to welcome, for the first time here on One on One, Joe Pardavila, who is a radio TV personality, actor, and can be heard on 95.5 WPLJ. You're the executive producer of the show? Yeah. But you're also on air there? Yes. Jack of all trades, master of none. 6-10 AM? Yes. Correct. But on that show, you are known as? Monk. Play that out for us. Yeah so I've been with the station now for 21 years. No! Yeah. 21 years. So when I started on the program, it was the Scott and Todd show, and I was freshly out of college, well a college dropout, but I was looking for a job, and I got hired on the morning show, and there was already a Joe on the show, the legendary broadcaster Joe Nolan. So they're like, "We can't have two Joes on the show! It's a radio, it's gonna confuse people." So I was like, "You guys can name me anything I want, I'll only be here a couple years, I don't care." So one of the hosts, Scott, goes, "You know it'd be funny if we had a 'Monkey Boy' on the show!" And I'm like, "Fine. You guys... that's fine. I'm only gonna be here for a short while. It's great." Next thing I know, fast forward 21 years later, I'm still there, but as time went on, they shortened it, they got lazy, so they just called it "Monk," so it was "Monk" pretty much the last, you know, 15 years or so. How much do you love radio? I love it with... everything. It's everything about me, because it's... it's one of those things where it's like such an intimate medium where I don't think there's anything like it. It's the one medium where you're literally trapped, and you're in your own thought. When you're watching television, as much as I love television, it's... you can do 500 different things. You could be reading a newspaper and watch, and you could be listening to music watching television. Radio, you have to pay attention, and people are so engaged listening, it's one of those things where it's... it feels like you almost have... you almost have an advantage over them, where you can almost take them on a journey that no other medium can. So it's one of those things where it's like, I just grew up loving it, you know, having the transistor radio in my bed, listening in the middle of the night to sports talk radio to find out when the Mets were making a trade, and that was... Excuse me, the Mets? The Mets. I'm a Mets fan. Yeah. I'm sorry. Mets..."