St. Louis is a city of ardent and loyal fandom, and no two areas more demonstrate that fandom than our undying love of classic rock and the Cardinals.
Each year, the St. Louis masses gather at classic rock temples of worship like Enterprise Center and Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre to revel in the music we've been conditioned to love by decades of KSHE radio, just as millions file into Busch Stadium every year to holler for the Redbirds. And for more than 40 years, one voice has united both worlds: the U-Man, John Ulett. Ulett has been a constant presence as a DJ on KSHE's 94.7 FM frequency since 1976 and has been the Cardinals' PA announcer since 1983.
On February 29, Ulett will sit for a live interview at the Sheldon. Billed as Life, Death & Other Scary Things: An Evening with John Ulett, the evening promises a night of stories, music and comedy timed to commemorate Ulett's career at KSHE as he starts to scale back after 47 years with the station.
I chatted with Ulett over Zoom as he was snowbirding comfortably in Phoenix on a day that St. Louis was glazed in from an overnight ice storm. These days, Ulett spends the winter in Arizona, where his daughter recently welcomed Ulett's first grandchild. During our talk, he was in chill mode, yet he walked around the room as we spoke, a sign of the restless energy that has kept him working, often burning the candle at both ends, for all these decades.
The 67-year-old Ulett was raised on 18th street between Park and Lafayette avenues in a pre-gentrified Lafayette Square. His grandfather owned a four-family flat, and Ulett lived with parents and brother upstairs on one side. His maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Lebanon and his mother was Italian, and Ulett has always identified with both ethnicities. "It was heavily Lebanese," he says. "They were all great cooks and made Lebanese food and drinks. It was a great situation."
Despite mostly fond memories of growing up, Ulett remembers the times as also tumultuous, referencing the era's civil rights struggles and the Vietnam War, for which he just missed eligibility, and the deterioration of his own neighborhood. "It was an integrated neighborhood, just west of the projects, relatively volatile," he remembers. "The neighborhood was just collapsing, so many old buildings had condemned signs on them, and those became playgrounds for us. They were also building I-44 through there, just ripping entire neighborhoods out. It was an interesting time to grow up in St. Louis in that spot. But looking back, I wouldn't change it for the world."
A big part of that environment was sitting on his front steps and listening to rock & roll on Top 40 radio, a preview of his life to come. "The whole art form was relatively new back then," he says. "That's what made it so special. It was all new and exciting and fresh. That's what I was picking up on when I was 11 or 12 years old."
Listening to legendary Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck on the radio made an even bigger impression. "Jack Buck sounded bigger than life," Ulett says. "I wondered what world he lived in. I just remember sitting on the front steps of the house on 18th and just one day thinking, you know what, I want to be on the radio. I wanted to make it someday, and be on a popular radio station in my hometown and people would know my name."
The seeds had been sown, and from that point on, Ulett was a single-minded teenager, riding the bus every morning to Bishop Dubourg High School in south St. Louis more focused on his future radio career than anything going on in school. After school let out every day, he would catch a bus downtown and then switch to a bus that carried him to Clayton to the Broadcast Center, a trade school that helped turn the kid into a disc jockey.
At the Broadcast Center, the instructors pushed Ulett away from sports broadcasting, which had been his first interest, and toward music radio. But despite the future that awaited him, Ulett insists that he was never particularly aware that he had a strongly built speaking voice. In fact, he started training at Broadcast Center before his adolescent voice had even changed. "They would use the before and after recordings to recruit other students," he says with a laugh. "They'd say, 'Look what we did to his voice!'"
While still in high school, Ulett landed his first radio job, working the evening shifts at KEZK, playing what Ulett describes as "elevator music." "I would put on these big tapes that would play music for 13 minutes," he recalls. "They'd stop on their own, and I would open the mic and say" — here he turns on his radio voice —"'KEZK. All music. All the time' and then play the commercials. I was, like, 'This is easy, I can do this.'"
After graduating from high school in 1975, Ulett grew bored with KEZK's square format, wishing instead to play the cool music of the day. Already an experienced professional DJ at 18, Ulett eschewed any idea of college, instead taking brief stints with radio stations in St. Charles and Jefferson City until KSHE called in the spring of the bicentennial year.
Recruited by station head Ron Stevens, Ulett was at first unsure that KSHE and its progressive rock radio was the best fit for him, interested as he still was in breaking into sports radio. His mother wasn't wild about the idea either. "My mother didn't want me to take the job because it was a drug-influenced station," Ulett says, smiling.
When Ulett joined the KSHE crew, the station was already established as an AOR juggernaut that played progressive rock nonstop for hours without breaks, allowed its DJs to spin whatever tickled their turntables rather than what was dictated by charts and gave airtime to music that wasn't being played anywhere else. Ulett jumped on board about the time KSHE was helping to break midwestern bands that included REO Speedwagon, Styx and Cheap Trick.
Ulett admits that the learning curve was steep. He liked music as a kid, but he was no encyclopedic aficionado. "The jocks played our own music," he says. "We listened to the albums that came in, and we played what we liked. That's what made the job very interesting. I had no clue that that was a major part of the job. Once I got hired there for my announcing skills, I was like, 'Gosh, I've got to learn so much about the music.'"
Was Ulett aware of KSHE's influence at the time, the station's nationwide impact, its instrumental role in helping make or break bands? "Absolutely," he says. "We felt the magnitude of what we were doing, that we were helping these bands get airplay. We felt it in the audience and the bands. Radio was very powerful as an entity then. FM radio kept growing in stature, and we felt that success. It was enjoyable knowing that we were becoming a very important aspect of entertainment in St. Louis."
I also ask Ulett a chicken-or-egg question: Is there something about St. Louisans that makes us natural fans of long-haired arena rock of the '70s and '80s thereby making KSHE possible, or was it KSHE that shaped St. Louis's classic-rock-loving culture, which still lasts today?
"I really think KSHE did it," Ulett says. "The way we presented the music. The way we marketed it. Sweetmeat the pig and all that. To this day, artists who are in their 70s will say they still have their KSHE T-shirt from the '70s with Sweetmeat on it. KSHE was unique in the way we did it. We were relentless with it. We worked the community really hard."
Ulett lists some bands that he believes he personally helped expose to wider audiences, including Yes, Supertramp, Journey and Rush, citing Rush drummer Neil Peart as one of his all-time favorite interviews. Throughout the years, Ulett has rubbed elbows with more rock stars that he can possibly remember.
"We would bring in bands to the drive-in theater next to the radio station," he says. "We were always bringing in artists and built a level of confidence with the fans that KSHE radio was the one that was really supporting the music that they loved. We put on hundreds and hundreds of events."
Ulett and fellow DJ Mark Klose are the two last men standing from KSHE's '70s glory days. Ulett's longevity is certainly due in part to his persistent work ethic and his unfailing nice-guy congeniality. But he also discloses another secret to his success: He didn't go crazy with rock-star debauchery back in his youth. This is a guy who could have been partying with David Lee Roth or Steven Tyler back in the day, but he kept it together with longevity in mind. That's true of Klose, too, he says.
"Mark Klose and I were the two biggest nerds in the whole bunch," he says. "When cocaine was everywhere, I never got into that. I was afraid of the drugs. I watched other people just disintegrate, but I was always determined to outlast these guys and do the things that kept me healthy."
Still, Ulett had his share of fun amid the wild days of sex, drugs and rock & roll: "Other than the drugs part, I was into the other two," he says with a laugh. "We were the hot station, so it was a pretty crazy time."
For many listeners, the U-Man has been the one consistent voice on KSHE's morning show amid dozens of personnel changes. "I knew I had to get on the morning show to make it in the business," he says. "I volunteered to do news and sports for the morning show in 1981, and it was the most important career decision I made."
It was when local radio legend JC Corcoran was brought on in 1984 to anchor the mornings that Ulett's profile really took off. "It just turned the radio business on its ear when he came," Ulett says. "A crazy, fun, wild morning show was totally against what was going on at KSHE at the time. The station was lowkey and all about the music. Well, [Corcoran] came in, and he was all talk. Initially, our listeners hated what we were doing. But I knew this guy was talented and it had the potential of being really good. So the negative turned to positives. He's the one that gave me the nickname 'the U-Man' when the morning show was really hot."
These days, Ulett is easing away from his morning show duties, although he still appears on a couple mornings per week for now, and he plans to continue hosting his Sunday speciality shows — Vinyl Exam with Mark Klose and KSHE Klassics — into the future.
As for the Cardinals, Ulett is coming up on his 40th full season as PA announcer, a job that also came courtesy of KSHE. In 1981, Ulett volunteered to be the station's sport reporter, which came with media credentials to Cardinals games. The Cardinals won the World Series in 1982, and Ulett fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting paid to travel with the team and report on the games. In 1983, the stadium announcer job opened, and Ulett slid in front of the mic and has remained there for four decades. Incredibly, in those 39 seasons, he has missed only five games.
"I consider it my mountain to climb every year," he says. "When they hired me in '83, they said they wanted somebody to do every game because they wanted fans to have the same consistent experience every time. I said I'd do it." Ulett admits that the turnaround was tough on some of those extra-inning games that went very late when he had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to do the KSHE morning show. "I just did it," he says with a shrug.
A full-circle moment happened toward the end of his hero Jack Buck's life when Buck gave him a picture of the two of them, signing it, "Nice working with you." "I get choked up just thinking about it," Ulett says.
These days you still see Ulett on the field before every Cards home game, reading starting lineups and introducing special guests, still as fit and trim as he was during his youthful afro-wearing days, thanks to a regimen of running three or four 5Ks every week. "I just keep running," he says.
The show at the Sheldon was his original boss Ron Stevens' idea, and it's Stevens who will interview him on stage. "There's all kinds of stuff I've never talked about that we're going to get into," Ulett says. "I promised him that whatever question he asks, I'll answer it, whether it's about coworkers, the radio station, management, listeners, bad things that have happened, good things that have happened."
However, Ulett promises the night at the Sheldon will involve more than just a live conversation. "It won't be just two old guys talking on the stage," he says. "We're going to have some live music, a comedian, some game show type things and celebrity appearances." And while the event does not mark a total retirement from radio, he says the evening will be "part of me trying to land this plane."
Despite that goal, however, the U-Man has no plans to slow down. The St. Louis legend doesn't know how. He remains as he has always been: born to talk, born to rock, born to run.
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