DJ and Podcaster Mistress Carrie: A passion for music and storytelling on the Takin A Walk podcast

Buzz Knight:

Well I’m Buzz Knight, the host of the Takin’ a Walk podcast, music history on foot. Follow us at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And today we have a member of Boston Radio royalty as our guest and it’s so much fun too that we’re actually taking a walk. It’s still winter, but it’s almost spring in the beautiful town of Leominster. Our guest is a proud military wife, entrepreneur, and she also has recreated her career in a really big way. Mistress Carrie, welcome to the Takin’ a Walk podcast.

Mistress Carrie:

What’s up Buzz? You really do walk on this thing. This is awesome.

Buzz Knight:

We prefer that. We sort of defer to the weather elements from time to time and sometimes it’s a saunter, but that’s okay too.

Mistress Carrie:

This is nice. It’s beautiful out today.

Buzz Knight:

Your hair looks beautiful purple.

Mistress Carrie:

Very purplely in the sun. Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, yeah.

Mistress Carrie:

It doesn’t blend well, that’s for sure.

Buzz Knight:

It’s awesome. So it’s so nice to meet you. I feel like I’ve known you without meeting you, but now in person, this is even better.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah. Right back at you.

Buzz Knight:

So how did you get hooked on music? When did you know you were hooked on music?

Mistress Carrie:

I tell people it’s the greatest gift my mom ever gave me. My mom is one of those music lovers with no musical talent, but loved music and it was such a huge part of her life that she would determine parts and eras of her life based on the music that she was listening to and she was always that person that could name that tune on the radio in five seconds. So she really gifted me with this passion of music. And my parents, one of their first dates was to go see Chicago and I think it was The Beach Boys way back in the day. And my mom’s greatest love, her favorite band, is The Beatles. And so for me, I call it the soundtrack to your childhood, the music that’s around you as you grow up and The Beatles for me, that was it.

Buzz Knight:

So when did you have this radio dream?

Mistress Carrie:

I never dreamed about the radio. I always grew up listening to WAAF because I grew up in the suburbs. So for me, BCN was the city station and AAF was the station that made it okay to be from the burbs. And I always dreamed growing up, those formative high school years in the ’80s, that I was going to work in a recording studio. That I looked at the big control board with all the buttons and I was like, “I want to be the person that knows what all of that does and to be kind of in the middle of the music,” because my musical ability came and went with the marching band and my clarinet in high school.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah.

Mistress Carrie:

And so after my freshman year of college, I did an internship at a recording studio. And rather than it being Mötley Crüe, it was a mariachi band in there and I spent the summer adjusting microphones from maracas and I was like, “This is not what I kind of thought it was going to be.” And right around the corner was WAAF. And I had to deliver some commercials that the studio had produced and I met the production director back then, Mitch Todd. And he asked me how I liked my internship and I was kind of candid with him and said, “Not so much.” And he was like, “Well what are you doing for the rest of the summer? You should intern for me.” And so my first day in radio, and I’ve got the t-shirt to remember it by, was July 1st, 1991 when Extreme played the WAAF DJs in a game of celebrity softball. And I still have the shirt.

Buzz Knight:

Serendipity though, right?

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Well what would’ve happened if Mitch didn’t reach out, have his moment of goodwill? What do you think?

Mistress Carrie:

I don’t know. It changed my whole life and there have been those instances where opportunities have kind of come flippantly. And I look back and I’m like, “Man, that moment really changed a lot of things.” And that moment with Mitch really did because once I saw the inside of a radio station, saw Bill Wightman putting out his Newport Lights on the old board of the AAF studio and I bumped into Joan Jett in the hallway, she’s the first rockstar I ever met, and I was like, “Oh my God. This is where I belong. This is what I should be doing.”

Buzz Knight:

It felt like home.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah, but I always thought I was going to be a producer. I never imagined I’d be the one on the air. That happened. Another chance offer that thankfully I said yes to.

Buzz Knight:

But I think if you hadn’t had the Mitch encounter, there would’ve been some other electricity moment that would’ve forced you into the business.

Mistress Carrie:

I would hope so. I think that people are kind of doing what they’re supposed to be doing or at least end up doing what they were supposed to do. And so I would like to think that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, but there were those moments that it was like, “Okay, wow. That literally changed the direction of my whole life.”

Buzz Knight:

So who that you had listened to influenced you as you sort of shaped your own voice yourself?

Mistress Carrie:

I’ve had this really weird radio career where obviously up until recently all of my radio exposure was WAAF, literally everything. It’s the station I grew up listening to, the station whose bumper stickers were on all my stuff in high school ’cause I used to grab them coming out of the old Worcester Centrum after I went and saw Bon Jovi or whatever. And so the only DJs that I ever really listened to were on AAF. The only DJs I ever met, worked for, was able to observe. They were all of the DJs at WAAF. So everyone from Mark Raz and Greg Hill and Liz Wilde and John Osterlind and Opie and Anthony and Rocko. These were the people that I was around all the time. That was all I kind of knew. I was born here, raised here, and worked at the station for 29 years that I listened to while I was in high school. Doesn’t get any more sheltered than that.

Buzz Knight:

That’s a pretty killer story though really when you come down to it and a great bunch of people that you mentioned obviously at a time where radio was certainly different than it is now.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah. And I got really lucky working for some of the greatest program directors in rock. Real visionaries. Guys like Ron Valeri and Dave Douglas and Keith Hastings and Ron Valeri again and most recently before AAF went off the air, Joe Calgaro. They were all people that lived the format, loved the music, really believed in the station, and gave you just enough room on the leash to either hang yourself or make magic and you never really knew which one it was going to be, but it was fun.

Buzz Knight:

It really is a delicate balance, isn’t it?

Mistress Carrie:

It really is, especially in this format, I think more so than anything else, is that you really can’t go in those rooms and fake it. In rock, the audience knows if you’re one of them or not. And if you’re not, as soon as you step foot out of the studio, you might sound like one of them in the studio. And if you’re able to fake it enough, you can’t leave. And especially now with the internet and everything, it’s really hard to hide if you’re not a real, true rock fan. And so to be able to live that lifestyle and to be one with the audience and to be in the middle of that F five tornado, you are on a razor’s edge all the time. You have to be.

Buzz Knight:

So what made AAF so special?

Mistress Carrie:

AAF-

Buzz Knight:

Excuse me. WAAF.

Mistress Carrie:

The way I explain AAF to people that don’t know the Boston media market is that it’s like the Boston New York rivalry. There’s the big city, the international city that everybody thinks of New York with all of its teams and superstars and celebrities. And then there’s the scrappy little brother that’s like, “One day I’m going to be bigger than you and kick your ass bro,” and that’s Boston. And the same thing happened with rock radio in Boston between WBCN and WAAF is that AAF was painted the Worcester station, the suburb station, the black t-shirt station that played the metal.

So we were always kind of a little on the outside. And like Tom Brady getting drafted at 199, that comes with a chip. And that chip can either crush you or inspire you. And for everybody that worked at WAAF, regardless of what part of the 50 year history of the station you had, you wore that chip with pride and it pushed you to be creative because we didn’t have the budget that the big stations did and we didn’t have the signal that the big station in Boston did. And so we had to claw our way from Worcester to Westboro to downtown Boston and figure out a way to be MacGyver and to be creative and to get scrappy and get our hands dirty and dive in with the audience and that works. It just works.

Buzz Knight:

And I think also the fact that when you are in that position and your budgets lower, you just think wilder and bigger.

Mistress Carrie:

You have to and you have to have a staff that believes in the mission. That it’s got to go straight from the top down, from ownership to the GM to the PD to the sales department, the engineers, the people in accounting and payroll, everyone has to be focused on the same thing. And no matter what your job was at AAF, part-time, full-time, nights, weekends, it didn’t matter. Everyone had this focus that we are going there and someday we are going to be the biggest rock station in Boston and we are going to do it in a way that puts everybody else out of business and the fuck world. Pardon my French. But that was just it. It was reckless abandon, blue face, brave heart, swords, all of it. And we were all in, all of us.

Buzz Knight:

But there was also the white glove aspect of things that worked pretty well. Greg Hill and I talked about this on his episode of the podcast. So you could be badass, but you could also do great things to help the community and to really be there when the community needed you.

Mistress Carrie:

I think it’s-

Buzz Knight:

That was important.

Mistress Carrie:

It’s always been important and I think that badass people do that. I’m a motorcycle rider and the motorcycle community, while people might raise their nose at it, are some of the most generous and charitable people and that community is loyal and driven and they take care of their own. And so that was always something that we were encouraged to do. That everyone at WAAF had a passion for a project that benefited part of our community and we were all encouraged to pursue that and to be able to help and to use the airwaves for more than just the goofy stuff, but the goofy stuff made the rest of it possible.

Buzz Knight:

Right. So what one thing could have saved the station? If possible one thing. Maybe two things I’ll give you.

Mistress Carrie:

I have been raked over the coals for my less than subtle opinions over the last few years. And it’s not a blame thing and it’s not an anger thing. I’ll preface this by saying that I am forever grateful that Entercom or now Odyssey allowed us the honor and huge thanks to Mark Hannon for allowing us to send the station off with grace the way because that’s not normal. So I don’t have any ill will towards anyone, but I think rock, more than any other format, requires a little bit more commitment and passion. And I think, like I said before, it has to be in every department. So you’ve got to have a sales department that understands the lifestyle of the station and lives that brand along with the jocks and everyone that are the face of the format. You’ve got to have ownership that understands that, “Okay. Maybe dollar for dollar, the rock station in the building isn’t going to outperform the sports station in dollars or ratings, but that it’s an important piece of the overall puzzle of a radio cluster to have that audience.”

And I think we see with rock bands, with Classic Rock as a format, rock fans are loyal almost to a fault. Once they love you, they love you. And so for a station like AAF, buying and selling based on just people meter doesn’t really do the station justice because we were always able to put money on the books based on the passion of the audience. And one of the things that we were really ahead of the curve on is viral content. We had a television show on Univision at midnight on Saturday nights generating what would now be considered viral YouTube content in the mid ’90s.

And so I think if anything, looking at the rock format nationally, is that I think you’ve got to have a singular vision and you’ve got to have a clear definition of success for revenue and ratings and you’ve got to have a complete staff of people that just get it. And if you have all of those things, I think you can still be successful in rock. And if you don’t have all of those things, I think it just doesn’t work and the postmortem on this thing is three years and counting and I still wonder, “If we had done this, maybe,” or-

Buzz Knight:

And postmortems are sometimes useful and sometimes useless.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah. There’s nothing that can change it.

Buzz Knight:

That’s right.

Mistress Carrie:

I have gone from sad. It’s gone to happy that I had it for so long. I’m so fortunate that I was able to start my career there and be the last one to say anything on those airwaves. Mike Hsu and I along with our PD Joe Calgaro were the three people in the room when the station signed off at midnight and I was just so lucky to be part of something so special for so long.

Buzz Knight:

So as part of your brand, and we’ll get to what you’re doing, which I think is so fantastic, but as part of your brand for so long, interviews have been a part of what has been part of who you are and great interviews. So who are some of your favorite folks you’ve interviewed-

Mistress Carrie:

Oh man.

Buzz Knight:

Over the years and I know there’s a long list probably.

Mistress Carrie:

There is a long list and I think starting at night on a rock station, that’s usually where they started all the new music. So I was able to befriend a lot of bands when they were still new and become friends with them and because AAF was such an influential station, we were able to make careers for bands. And if you got on the air at AAF, it just started the ball rolling for you. And so just over the years, oh my God. The list of bands that I haven’t interviewed is way shorter than the list of bands that I have. Sitting down with guys like Ozzy Osbourne, you grow up listening to this guy and you’re like, “Wait, what?” I don’t know. I haven’t interviewed a Beatle. That would probably be the career cap for me is to sit down.

There’s only two of them left. So Paul, Ringo, if you’re listening. I don’t know. There have been so many over the years, like crazy interviews and crazy places and I’m still trying to digitize my archives because I’ve got stuff on cassettes, I’ve got stuff I forgot that I did. A lot of the stuff that I think I remember are the people that we lost too soon. I think those are some of the most memorable just because they’re not here anymore. So you look at people like Scott Weiland or Chris Cornell or Dimebag Darrell or Chester Bennington. I just found an old Linkin Park interview that I did when Chester and Mike Shinoda were like 18 years old and Hybrid Theory had just come out and all three of us sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. We sound so young.

And to go back now and listen to the naivete of all of us and to see where all of those bands ended up. Legendary band. Soundgarden might get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Those are the moments that I think, and it’s sad because those are the artists that we miss because they’re not here anymore.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Those are touch points.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah. Everybody else, it’s like, “Okay. They’re still around. So there’s still hope I’m going to get another interview out of them with another crazy story.” But I think the ones that mean so much now are the ones that are this moment in time that are captured that can’t be duplicated again.

Buzz Knight:

Besides remaining Beatles, who else is on your hit list to get?

Mistress Carrie:

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. I’ve only talked to Jimmy Page on the phone once, but I’ve never talked to Robert Plant. Believe it or not, Jon Bon Jovi who is literally my high school idol, my first rock concert. I’ve never been able to get a picture with him or do an interview with him. And it was supposed to happen and the pandemic screwed it up. So he is on my very short list just because I spent so many years of my life praying in the church of Bon Jovi that it’s like, “I just want to meet the God, just once.” But the list, like I said, the list of artists that I haven’t talked to is pretty short. I’ve had a really fortunate 32 year career in the business so far. When the first person you meet is Joan Jett and the first ever live radio interview you ever do in your career is Joe Perry and Steven Tyler, it’s been a pretty magical career so far.

Buzz Knight:

Did you ever upset somebody with an interview question that maybe surprised you that they’d get upset?

Mistress Carrie:

The only person that I ever upset in an interview was Scott Weiland. And I think it was more of it was a bad day for him. He was out on tour with Velvet Revolver and I had just recently come home from one of my trips embedded with the military overseas and we started getting into a debate about our troops and the war in Iraq. And because I had just come home, I was, and I’m Sicilian of Portuguese, that I was looking for a fight. And I don’t think he was in a mindset where he should have been fighting anybody either. So that was really the only time that I had, and I had had interactions with him previously that were fantastic. So I think it was just a bad day.

But otherwise, no. I try really hard to respect the artists and to find ways to talk about serious things in a tasteful way because I’m not coming for the gotcha thing. My whole mindset going into interviews is I’m fortunate enough to be the one backstage. The people listening wonder what that’s like and they wonder what their favorite rock stars are like when they’re not on the stage and I’m in a position to be able to show them what that is. It’s personal for me. I want get to know the artists I love as people.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. And you do make them comfortable just by them realizing how authentic you are.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah and it’s coming from a real genuine place. I love music. I love what I do. The hardest thing for me is interviewing people that I’m really good friends with because I know stuff that I shouldn’t know doing what I do for a living. And so sometimes there’s personal things that it’s like, “Oh, I wish I could ask them about that,” but you don’t because it’s like, “No. That’s their personal life,” and I wouldn’t even know to ask the question if I wasn’t friends with them. So I just kind of leave that stuff off to the side. But it’s wanting to really get to know the people and the emotions and the experiences that get filtered through them and into the music that’s literally the soundtrack for our lives.

Buzz Knight:

So I am so amazed at how you’ve recreated life after WAAF and so happy for you. So let’s talk about this. AAF ends and you’re looking around going, “What am I going to do?”

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

What am I going to do with my life?

Mistress Carrie:

Well first I went to Vegas ’cause I was set to go to Vegas for a radio convention anyway. And because the company had already paid for the trip, they were like, “Just go.” So I had to scramble and get business cards made because every business card I had had the AAF phone numbers, the AAF email, and the AAF call letters on it. So I was at Staples the night before trying to get business cards made and registering an email address for myself. And I went to Vegas and met a lot of people and this was the last week of February of 2020. And then I came home to Boston and had some job interviews that I thought went really, really well. And I thought, “Okay. I’m going to be okay.” I was scared to death. Like I said, I was fortunate enough to 29 years in the same building and then you wake up one day and the station’s gone.

And I was like, “Okay. It’s going to be different, but it’s going to be okay.” And then COVID hit and all the stations had hiring freezes and they started sending people home and laying people off and I was like, “Oh my God. I don’t know what to do now.” So I thought about it and I just said, “If I don’t have a place to work, I can’t work. This job, this business, this industry requires a place.” And so I thought, “You know what? I’m going to build my own studio. I have the room in the house, I’m going to build my own studio.” And then I was like, “Well if I’m going to build a studio, I got to start a company ’cause I want the tax write offs.” So then I started my company and one of the guys that I worked with at AFF, our imaging guy Kaiser, gave me, again, some really life-altering advice and I didn’t realize it was that life-altering when he gave it to me.

And he was like, “You should go live on Instagram or Facebook or something and just let people know how you’re doing.” ‘Cause I had been posting up on social media and stuff, but I hadn’t gone live or anything. And I was like, “All right.” And there’s a room in my house where the bar is that we call the War Room. It’s where all my military stuff from my family is and the stuff I’ve brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I just tweeted out and put up on Facebook, “Hey. Get a cocktail ready. Join me for a cocktail in the War Room.” The room’s been called the War Room since I bought the house. And I went live and 11,000 people went live with me on Facebook and I was like, “What the hell?”

And that was March 14th of 2020. And people were like, “It’s so nice to see you. It’s nice to hear you. We’re going to get through this.” They had just canceled the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Tom Brady was getting traded to the Buccaneers. The world was literally falling apart and AAF was gone. And so after about 17 minutes, I was like, “All right guys. I’m going to let you go,” and everybody was like, “Will you come back tomorrow? Let’s do this again.” So I did that for 80 nights in a row to ride out the height of the pandemic and it became a show, Cocktails in the War Room. And it was 80 nights in a row. I had logos made. We made t-shirts that we sold for charity off my dining room table. And then I was able to keep that connection with the audience long enough to get the podcast lined up, to get the studio built, to get my website built, to get logos made.

And I used Cocktails in the War Room, and they call themselves the War Room family, I used the War Room family as the launchpad for the podcast. And so the podcast went live on June 10th of 2020 and that’s when Cocktails in the War Room became the weekly show that it is now, 224 episodes later. So every Tuesday night at 8:30 eastern I go live on Facebook to talk about whatever’s going on, music, the crazy world we live in, whatever, and to talk about the podcast guest and to talk about the show, concerts that are coming around, tours that got announced, and it’s interactive. So the fans can leave comments and let me know what they’re doing and then we started taking the show out on the road. So we call it on deployment. I got another one coming up May 6th where we’re going to take the show out so people can come and hang out and do it live. And when the podcast took off, everything changed.

Buzz Knight:

So talk about the podcast.

Mistress Carrie:

My radio career was always at AAF. I was known for active rock as a format. And I wanted to be able to stretch my wings a little bit and have it be more of a rock lifestyle. Because like I said earlier, rock is a lifestyle. It’s a community that is close-knit, but welcoming and if you love the music, you love all the other things that come along with it. The horror movies, the tattoos, the motorcycles, the sports, all of those things. I think when you’re launching a podcast, you have to kind of find a lane or a reason that yours is different. And so I wanted mine to be more of a rock lifestyle podcast because there’s no rock station in Boston that plays new music anymore, I wanted to have a place for new bands to be able to come to find an audience.

But I also wanted to keep in touch with all the bands that I knew over the decades from my career. I was a roadie before I started on the air at AAF in those years of interning and working on the street team at AAF. So I was building stages and rigging lights and I know the roadies and the techs are the ones with all the stories. So I wanted there to be a place for those guys to come in and talk about the crazy behind the scenes stuff and then I wanted to talk to the people that make the instruments, to understand what it’s like to design a guitar for a specific guitar player or drumsticks for a specific drummer.

And then it was like, “Okay. Well I know a bunch of music producers too and I want to be able to talk to them about being that outside voice, working with a band in the studio.” And so all of those things with the added work that I do with the veterans community and the military, which is rock lifestyle as well, that’s kind of all the umbrella of what I consider to be a rock lifestyle podcast. So that’s what the Mistress Carrie podcast is.

Buzz Knight:

And you could find it everywhere you get your podcast.

Mistress Carrie:

Literally everywhere. There are websites that are only available in India and you can get the podcast and there’s people listening.

Buzz Knight:

What you’ve done is really, I think in my mind, a textbook way that someone who has come out of a radio career, that’s had success, and then has had a new challenge put forth, you’ve done this in a textbook way, I don’t know if you intended it to be textbook, but you’ve added to your brand. Nothing has detracted. You’ve only added to an already great brand.

Mistress Carrie:

I got really lucky to be in radio and rock radio specifically, active rock radio, at a time where it was at its height. My first day full-time day on the air was April 17th, 1998. And AAF was firing on all cylinders, breaking bands like Korn and Godsmack and bands that were all over rock radio and are still touring and playing amphitheater’s and arenas now. And I was able, because of the time at the early stages of the internet, to be able to ride the wave to build a name for myself, which I think people that get into the industry now, it’s a lot harder to build a brand. And I’m so fortunate that I was able to take that brand with me and that audience with me and have that to launch from because I can’t imagine just trying to launch a podcast out of nothing now.

Buzz Knight:

I can.

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah, but you have this whole radio career that you’re launching it from too and all the people you know. I’m talking about somebody that just during the pandemic was like, “I’m going to buy a microphone and launch a podcast just for fun.” I was really lucky that I got out of AAF having made a name for myself that meant something. What it means, I still don’t know, but it meant something to somebody. And so for me, being able for the first time to make decisions based on just what I wanted, that was really scary because if you make good decisions, you get all the credit, but if you make bad decisions, all the blame is on your shoulders.

There’s nobody to point a finger at but you. So I’ve tried to be really careful to grow at a pace that I could maintain a level of quality because I think anybody that starts a company, if it grows too fast, things fall off that you don’t want to fall off. So I’ve really tried hard to grow at a manageable rate and to bring everybody that wants to be with me with me. But it’s not easy.

Buzz Knight:

No one was going to hand it to you so you had to take it upon yourself, as they say, right?

Mistress Carrie:

Yeah. It’s uncharted territory for me. The industry is changing, technology is changing things, the world is different because of COVID. Everything happened all at once. So I think that people are still kind of trying to figure out where things are going with streaming and podcasting and the way people consume content now and it’s just so different. I know the radio part and I’m still not an expert. I’m still learning stuff every day. So I’m just trying to figure it out.

Buzz Knight:

So we talk about music on this podcast all the time, why music is so important, what it means. So in your point of view, why is music such an important, even saving grace at times, for us in our lives?

Mistress Carrie:

I think it’s literally tribal. I think music is an evolutionary art form that has been part of the human experience for as long as archeologists can trace back, there was music. And I think that it’s a way of telling stories. I think it’s a way of people communing together, especially in rock. We talk about it a lot on the podcast that when we couldn’t go to concerts, the rock community felt like they didn’t have a home anymore ’cause that’s where we go to get together. And so it’s something we experience together. It makes you feel not alone in a world that’s more connected than ever and more isolating than ever. That music kind of reminds you that, “Oh, wait. I’m not the only one that feels that way.” And music, there’s a song for literally everything.

Your best day, your worst day, the birth of your child, the death of a parent, literally there is a song for everything. And so for me, being someone that can’t create it, but someone that loves it so much, that it literally dictates everything in my life. And I know people that aren’t like that and I don’t get that because it’s on all the time. I’m constantly looking for new bands and going to see shows and I love music. Country music not so much, but most music I love and I just think that it’s something that we all have in common.

Buzz Knight:

Mistress Carrie, it’s so great to have you on Takin’ a Walk.

Mistress Carrie:

Thanks for having me. This is really cool. I wish I had come up with this idea. You would’ve gotten me out of a studio. The fresh air is nice.

Buzz Knight:

Thanks for having me.

Takin’ a Walk with Buzz Night is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.