Since announcing his pending retirement from Atlanta radio after 36 years, Steve Goss said, his emotions have been all over the map.
“It’s gone between euphoria and ‘Is this the right thing to do?’” Goss said last week. “I’ve always been the type of person who likes to have everything under control. To move into a phase in your life where things are deliberately unknown is kind of different.”
Goss, 63, has been a model of controlled consistency since 1979, a silky, calming presence that worked on both music radio and talk radio. Fans have dubbed him “the velvet voice.”
He spent 27 years at 94.9, which began as Peach, a beautiful music station that morphed into a soft pop station spinning copious amounts of Celine Dion, Elton John and Rod Stewart. After that station disappeared a week before Christmas 2006 and went country, Goss quickly landed a job at NPR-affiliated 90.1/WABE-FM as local host of “Morning Edition.”
“He is one of the all-time greats,” said Mara Davis, a former Dave FM rock jock who co-hosts a WABE weekly music segment with Goss. “I’ve never worked with anybody who is more professional, more prepared, more enthusiastic.”
At the same time, Davis loves Goss’ quirky off-air personality and does her best to tease that out of him during “Mara’s Music Mix,” which has aired every Friday morning for two years. “It allows him to really be himself, to break away from being the straight guy. He binge watches ‘Nashville.’ We talk about that. He loves people’s real names. If I come to the table and say, ‘Sting is in concert,’ he’ll say, ‘Gordon Sumner!’”
While discussing a Boyz II Men concert at Chastain with Davis this past Friday, Goss noted wryly that he spun that group’s biggest ballads quite a bit on Peach, but management prohibited him from uttering the name of their monster hit “I’ll Make Love to You.” Too risqué!
“‘On Bended Knee’? No problem. ‘Water Runs Dry’? Got it! But not that other one. I couldn’t say that on Peach!” he said, with a chuckle.
Denis O’Hayer, host of WABE’s afternoon news show “A Closer Look,” said Goss’ sense of humor is “not vaudevillian. He’s somebody who just makes the place better, smarter and more fun every day.”
A New England native, Goss graduated from Monmouth College in Illinois and moved to Atlanta to get his masters in history at Emory University. He wanted a doctorate, but ran out of money, so he landed a job teaching history at Woodward Academy. After four years, he realized teaching wasn’t his career calling. Radio was.
In the summer of 1978, he interned at news-talk station 640/WGST-AM. Management at sister station Peach 94.9 heard him do sports stories and asked him to do fill-ins.
At the time, Peach played mostly instrumental orchestral pieces by acts such as Mantovani and Henry Mancini, with a bit of vocal flavor from the likes of Anne Murray and Johnny Mathis. “I don’t think we were even playing Barry Manilow,” Goss said.
By the fall of 1979, Peach gave him a full-time job and he left his teaching career for good. He eventually became program director.
The format, Goss said, was “so laid back. It’s tough to excel at as an announcer. My mentor told me it’s not what you say but how you say it — with very few words.” This also meant two-second pauses between every element, anathema in today’s faster-moving radio world.
In 1990, Peach changed format to soft pop, a nod to modernity to a degree, with tunes by Billy Joel, Whitney Houston and Michael Bolton. By 2006, management decided country could bring in younger listeners and more ad dollars. Goss was the last jock on air for what was then called Lite 94.9, and he got to pick the final song by his favorite group: “Your Wildest Dreams” by the Moody Blues.
“It was quite a run,” he said. “I have really only fond recollections of that whole time.”
Soon after, Lois Reitzes, the doyenne of 90.1/WABE-FM, informed him the station was seeking a morning host. He started soon after.
Goss said public radio took some adjustments after 27 years in commercial radio. “It’s like stepping into a looking glass,” he said, “a whole different mindset. It’s content driven, not ratings driven.”
While he enjoyed navigating “Morning Edition,” the early morning hours were rough and facilitated his desire to retire. He and his wife Karen had to turn down evening invites and longed to have a normal social life again.
“For the last eight years, we really only see each other on the weekends,” he said.
Goss, a longtime Stone Mountain resident, won’t disappear from the station completely. As a contributor, he said he will continue to tape segments with Davis and a monthly history piece with Georgia State University associate history professor Cliff Kuhn.
His final day as WABE’s local “Morning Edition” host is Friday.
