Q104’s Ken Dashow has witnessed a tidal wave of change in the radio business since his first airshift on WNEW-FM back in 1982.
But the intervening 30 years, all of which he’s spent on the New York airwaves, haven’t dampened Dashow’s enthusiasm or the modest pride he takes in being the last local link to those heady days of ’NEW — Scott Muni, Pete Fornatale, Dennis Elsas, et al.
“WNEW was everything to me, everything I knew,” says Dashow, a Brooklyn native and the longtime afternoon voice of Q104 (and the host of its popular Sunday-morning show, “Breakfast With the Beatles”). “When Scott interviewed me [for the job], he sat me down in his office . . . just looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, so?’ and that was the interview,” Dashow says of Muni, who passed away in 2004. “I said to him, ‘If you’ve played it or said it on this radio station, I know it.’ ”
Dashow, who’s also an actor, a published playwright and the author of several screenplays, says the highlight of his ’NEW career occurred a year into the job, when he subbed for his idol Muni.
“Scott came into the studio, gave me this big smile and just nodded and walked out of the studio,” Dashow says. “I just felt 10 feet tall. There was nothing he could have said or done to make me feel better.
“He was my older brother, my rabbi.”
Dashow’s longevity is a testament to the many changes he’s weathered in the country’s toughest media market, including the death of ’NEW — “proof of how easy a consultant can unscrew everything you’ve built by chasing phantom profits,” he says — and his rebirth on Q104, which he joined in 1999 (shortly after Muni).
“That was one of the great phone calls,” he says. “The late Steve Young, who was then the program director, said, ‘I’ve got the last seat on the last lifeboat on the Titanic and it’s got your name on it.’”
So to what does Dashow attribute his longevity?
“Part of it is a great deal of luck and part of it was to duck and cover long enough, at the end of the ’NEW days, to let the two or three sociopaths we had pass by,” he says.
“A day doesn’t go by, truly, that I don’t walk into the station and thank God I’m working with people who are family.
“I grew up here, in Brooklyn, so I’m just one of the listeners who happen to be on the air,” he says. “To be able to play music to my neighbors just feels so comfortable.”