Taking a Walk.

It was magical.

It was better than the Scooby Doo van because this thing, you know, it.

Had that sliding door and the back.

You know, on those vans they would have like those back too, like bubble windows kind of towards the way back.

Ours were not circular.

They were star shaped.

I'm buzznight and welcome to the Taking a Walk Podcast, and get ready to meet the mastermind behind some of the most electrifying music television moments.

Her name is Katie Daryl.

Spent a lot of time working for Access TV, the driving force behind some unforgettable interviews with rock legends.

And cultural icons.

And we're going to talk to Katie and get some behind the scenes stories.

Next on taking a Walk.

Taking a Walk?

Well, Hi Katie, it's nice to have you on Taking a Walk.

Well, thank you for having me.

I was thrilled to be invited.

So, you know, we do ask this question at the beginning, since we call this thing taken a walk, and it would be nice if we were taking a walk in your favorite La neighborhood, for sure, but we're not doing that.

So for the magic of technology, we're taking a walk in this virtual way.

But if you could take a walk with somebody, living or dead, who would you take a walk with them?

Where would you take that walk with him?

Oh, Marilyn Monroe.

Somewhere near the Chateau Marmont.

You know, here's the thing.

I grew up fascinated, obsessed, infatuated, if you will, with Meril Monroe.

I first and foremost just thought she was as beautiful as they came.

I loved I loved the movie some like it hot.

Not only was she adorable, but like it was hilarious.

So I, you know, as a young girl growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, I just she epitomized would and glamour and femininity and humor.

And so I really did a deep dive as a little girl with you know, collectibles and posters and memorabilia and going into Spencers and not only just seeing the posters for ac DC and Nirvana, but then being like, ooh, I could buy this poster that has Meril Monroe with Coco Chanel.

So yeah, I think that she has a fascinating story and history.

And I think to walk somewhere over there in that sunset boulevard area Chateau Marmont, where there's still the historic infrastructure would be a pretty interesting hour to spend, if you will.

I guess it would be, for sure, isn't that though?

Don't you get spoiled living where you do that?

There's just so many historic places that you know, you know, there's some presence of some of these folks from the past that are there.

Of course, the ghests to the past.

I love that, you know, and I think that's what makes it really exciting.

But absolutely, you can take it for granted.

And there was a long period of my adult life living in Los Angeles where I absolutely did take it for granted.

But I now have a ten year old son, right and he's at the stage where the other weekend, I literally brought him down into Hollywood by myself, like I don't know what my husband was doing, but I was like, you know, I'm going to take him.

And we went down to the record parlor in Hollywood and it's this tiny little record shop and we kind of flipped through the vinyls and smelt.

I mean, the record parlor is a lot different than Amba records.

If you've been in either of these, I mean the record parlor, it's wood, it's dank, it's damp.

It's vintage.

It's like opening up that box of crans and you get that smell of like the cardboard.

Right.

So I brought him in and I was like, we were just flipping through records.

And then we walked down you know, Hollywood Boulevard and we saw Frank's Natras star, we saw Mariah Carey star.

I was able to point, you know, that's the Capitol Record Building.

You know, that's the house that Nat King, you know, Coal built, It's the house that Nat built.

And there's a bunker down there and Les Paul and then okay, and there's the pantages and you know this is where they held the Emmys like in the.

Sixties and seventies.

And so I've been able to get excited about Hollywood and all the sites and sounds again because I'm dragging.

A ten year old with me, and dragging is probably the key word.

I don't know about that now.

He's probably thinking, all right, maybe I'd rather be doing some other things, but mom's pretty cool, so let's go for a walk and check some stuff out.

I will admit we did stop every once in a while and I let him use my phone to scroll for some poke balls and catch some Pokemon along the way as well, so I still kept it fresh for him.

Of course.

Of course.

Well you started at a very young age and broadcasting.

I believe you were fifteen years old when you started.

But before that period, what was the first moment you knew you had some connection with music?

Oh gosh, that's a great question.

So growing up it wasn't.

It wasn't in an overly musical family, right, but there were core songs and albums and music moments that happened in my family.

And this is going to be a surprising one, right.

I remember we had this van, a family van.

Okay, nowadays I don't even know if we're allowed to say it, but nowadays people would say see it and say, oh, that's like a rape van.

Right, it's a creepy van.

But it was the eighties, right, So now you understand what the family van looked like and this van, I'm going to take a moment to describe it, because you it was magical.

It was.

It was better than the Scooby Doo van because this thing, you know, it had that sliding door and the back you know on those vans they would have like those back to like bubble windows kind of towards the way back.

Ours were not circular, they were star shaped.

So there are these star shaped windows in the back of the van.

Right.

The interior was shag gray carpet floor to ceiling.

The back was.

Like this bed that can be converted into a bench.

No seat belts, mind you.

And the front were the two captain chairs.

Now in the front above the driver's seat, you know, it had the steering wheel and it had its regular hord, but above the driver's seat there was a button and you pressed it and it was a different horn.

It would go oha oha.

The van was glitter purple, and it had an eight track, and my parents had just this box, a milk crate if you will, of some eight tracks.

I know Sergeant Pepper's was one of them, so I really remember the beatles, you know, running through those speakers.

But they also had a eight track Donna Summer bag Girl, back Girl.

And I was no more than three years old, and I would prance around this van because I'm a munchkin at that time and can walk, and there's nothing there, right, just walking in this van, driving through the neighborhood singing bag girls, and I loved it, and I loved done a summer and then obviously, you know, inside the house my parents, I remember, you know, hearing Tracy Chapman, I remember hearing the Rolling Stones start me up as really a vivid memory from the record player and Paul Simon the Graceland album.

Those were, you know, things that really struck me in my early childhood before I got into working at a classic rock radio station.

So you though, were interested in radio and television in your career, what really pointed you directly to one path or the other?

Sure?

So when I started working at a radio station, it was like this kid's radio station before they even had like a radio disney, if you will.

And I got to learn like how to run the board and just the magic of radio and doing like the weather cut ins and things like that.

And then I started working for the sister radio station, which was an FM station, and I got to do the eight till midnight shift on a Saturday night because no one but like a sixteen or seventeen year old really wanted to do that shift, right, because that's when you go out and have fun.

And I got to know classic rock, and I always then thought, and then this is the heyday of Howard Stern.

So I thought, you know what shock jock radio music.

I think I want to, you know, do be a DJ.

I didn't think.

I've told this story a million times before.

And I'm not saying it to beg for compliments or anything, but I didn't think I was pretty enough to be on television.

I now know, first off, it doesn't matter what you look like.

You could be as ugly as sin or as beautiful as whatever.

Like that's not what it's about.

Being on television is different in talent and followers and stuff these days.

But you know, I was, you know.

Sixteen and just didn't know.

And I just thought, well, I can't be on TV, so I'm gonna, you know, stick with radio.

And so my transition to television was kind of accidental.

Back in the day, it was the MTV Chooser Lose Rock the vote presidential election of two thousand fear recall, back then, back in the olden days, who do we have?

We had Al Gore, we had McCain and the Straight Talk Express, and we had Bush right.

And I sent in an audition tape to MTV like on a VHS and eventually got hired to be a political correspondent and tore around on the Straight Talk Express with Senator John McCain, and so all of a sudden.

I realized, Hey, I can be on television.

Look at me.

Where did you get instilled this?

You know, I don't know this fearless approach to your career and to your life.

That's a compliment, thank you, And I wish I almost still had it.

Like it's interesting because as you.

Get older, I feel like you maybe take less chances and there's a lot more fear.

So I sometimes I miss that spunk that I had, But I don't know I was.

You know, I I don't know where that boldness came from.

I mean I certainly I had a great family and great parents, and so they were always the you know, you can be whatever you want to be, but there are also you could be whatever you want to be, but like, let's be.

Sensible about it.

So it's not like they were always like big dreamers of like, you know, grab a star, sweetheart.

They were like, well, grab a star that pays well and has benefits.

So but to yeah, that.

Weird omph to be like I'm going to send in a VHS tape to MTV, or I'm going to cold call the executive producer of the Mark Cuban Show and see if I could co host a basketball show with Mark Cuban.

Why, Like, I would do stuff like that, and so I think I maybe didn't know any better.

And you know, it was the loveliness of growing up in a day of not like oversaturated of social media as well, that you could cold call people and find opportunities.

Yeah, there were different ways to reach people, for sure, but still embedded in your thinking was the fact that, oh, what the heck, I'm just going to do this because I believe in it, and I believe in myself.

I could tell that right away, and that is a rare trait and I believe it has served you well.

So go back to cold calling to pitch show ideas into Mark Cuban and his organization.

Yeah.

Sure.

So you know, after working at MTV, I went to Dallas.

You know, so I was I was at MTV because it was the presidential election that only lasts a year, right folks, So like, you got to find another job.

So the next job I decided to find was well, my old radio partners, who I had been doing in Phoenix, so I was going to college.

I was a morning show producer for like a top forty station, and those guys moved to Dallas and started doing shock jock radio.

It was the height.

It was early, you know, two thousands.

FM talk was the rage.

They didn't play music, it was just talk all day.

The talk that rocks, I believe, was the motto at the radio station.

Howard Stern was on in the morning, and then these guys Ron and Don they would come on from ten till two, and they needed a female, and so I reached out to them and they were like, yeah, come along, You'll be the chicken charge.

And I got to come on and produce the show, but also be on air doing.

Shock jockey stuff.

You know, Hooters catered and would bring food every day, things like that, broadcasting from strip bars on a Friday.

Look, ma are you proud of me?

Now?

And as most things in the FM shock jock talk world, the show came to an end.

Those guys ended up going to New Orleans and then up to Seattle, and I just wasn't.

I think I had a boyfriend, a dude, so I was like, I'm not going to travel around following these dudes.

I'm gonna stay with this dude.

I shouldn't even been thinking about any of the dudes, quite frankly, but so I stayed in Dallas and found out that Mark Cuban was going to be starting a basketball show and it was going to each week kind of start with an opening monologue of him talking about the maps and you know where they are, and then feature, you know, segments with the players.

And he was looking for a co host and it was I had bumped into someone at a grocery store.

They're like, oh, I heard that Mark Cuban is doing this thing, and I think they already hired the person.

I wish I had thought of you sooner, would have told you, thanks, jerk, But.

I was like, that's not going to stop me.

So I found out.

Who the executive producer was, cold called the local CBS station, got transferred to his voicemail, left a voicemail saying, I heard you might already have someone, but I promise you like she's wrong and you need to chat with me.

And I was hired within forty eight hours.

And I was sitting next to Mark Cuban co hosting a basketball show, doing features with the basketball players and go into the All Star Game and just doing silly things tours of his house like MTV cribs, and I did that for two years.

But I was lucky enough.

And I'm sorry that I'm rambling.

I feel like I'm just I've just comment deered this podcast.

I've just come and I'm sorry, You've.

Got a lot to tell us.

So, but I I was sitting next to Mark, and he's lovely, He's fantastic.

Hey, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Mark Cuban.

I really really enjoyed my time working for him and value his opinion and respect him.

And you know, he gave me an opportunity to Elevator pitch him.

He's like, well, I'm starting this new network.

It's called hd net.

It's the world's first high definition TV network.

Everyone's going to buy these new TVs and get rid of their old ones.

Like why would anyone get rid of a perfectly good working television, Mark to buy your fancy two thousand dollars one failure as if right?

But I was like, yeah, I got an idea.

I've got an idea where I'm going to go interview rock stars and show their concerts.

What do you think can I have a couple cameras and go do this?

And he's like sure, And I started producing and hosting a music show for HD.

Budweiser came on as a sponsor.

It was then called The Budweiser True Music Show, and I did over two hundred episodes and there was at least three bands per episode.

So I booked and.

Interviewed over six hundred bands and then transitioned into multiple different programs at the network, which we can talk about in different titles, and you know, became the VP of Programming after working with them for twenty years.

It's a great story.

It's the key I think is resilience, Like I said, the fearless approach, creativity, dreaming, and just really just saying there's no wall in front of me.

I'm just going to go to the next place that I want to go creatively.

So then you became, you know, a person wearing all these multiple hats for sure, which I think.

In today's world is also.

Key because this is the reality of the world of content creation of media.

You know, we wearing multiple hats, but you have to admit the most fun of those hats had to be the interviews.

Oh.

I love doing the interviews on camera and off camera, you know.

I mean it's so funny when when you go over you know, and if you whether you're googling me or you're looking over at access TVs sites and everything.

Like I got to do so many great on camera interviews, you know, with on a series called at Home and Social and Now Listen and like, so you know, getting to sit there and do what you're doing and talk to Robert Plant, Allison Krause, right, or Alice Cooper or Sammy Hagar.

That was exciting.

I loved chatting.

With all these rock stars, but equally for the other shows that I produced, like the Very Best of the Seventies and the Very Best of the Eighties and the Top Ten Revealed.

You know, you see all these talking heads on those shows responding and talking about their favorite songs, and it's an off camera interview.

And I was getting to conduct those interviews as well and help them, you know, pause and say hold on, can you rephrase that?

And can we make it shorter?

And let's make it punchy.

And I've got a joke and you want to deliver it this way, so, you know, brainstorming directly with ALDA Ford, you know, or a Jeff Pilson from Foreigner and sitting across from them and coming up with ooh zingers together.

I got to create form like these really intimate, nice friendships with so many of these musicians over the years.

And I do consider it friendships, you know.

I mean, I.

Feel, you know, there's there's a lot of great phone numbers on this phone, and I really truly, honestly believe I can text a lot of them and just say hi, and and that's that's pretty cool.

Is there one that stands at the the you know, the ultimate height that you achieved in terms of an interview, you know.

And it's not to pick favorites, because we don't pick favorites here, but I have to say one of the last interviews I did when I was over at Access TV talk about going out with a Bang.

It was Robert Plant and Alison Krause and I had been chasing a Robert Plant interview for years, years, and this one.

Was really special for a couple of reasons.

One, the publicist or the book there's a publicist came to me.

I didn't have to ask for the interview, so I found that to be a compliment that, you know, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss only have X amount time of their day.

They're only going to say to X yes to X amount of interviews.

And I didn't have to ask for it.

They slotted me in.

So I found that really cool and special.

I also, I want to use the word humbled.

It's not that I was humbled, but.

Robert Plant put me back and reminded me something that I think we all still need the reminding of every once in a while.

Is that a rock star, a movie star and icon.

There's still just people, right, and over my years of doing interviews, you know, I've always I always love the people that are very charismatic, you know, Justin Hawkins from like The Darkness, you know, or a Sammy Hagar who you know logs on and they're like oh and you're like, yeah, big energy.

I love it.

It's rugsury interview man.

But Robert didn't do that, and so I was disappointed at first and had to kind of recalibrate my thinking.

When you know, we log on, I'm like hello Robert and he's like, hello, Katie, how are you today?

And You're like, oh man, he just brings his I'm having my afternoon earl tea energy, not my whiskey vodka, backstage energy.

And so it was nice to just be able to talk.

To him and feel him and his presence as a person versus a rock star.

And so I just I found that to be a very special interview.

Oh my god, is it a great one or what?

And what is so amazing about him?

But also, you know, Allison's work speaks for its self as well.

But you think about Robert and.

You think about agent gracefully.

Yeah right, I mean there's there's really nothing he's putting on here.

He's doing what he what he loves.

You must have loved the led Zeppelin documentary.

Oh absolutely absolutely.

I mean led Zeppelin's a very special band.

A lot of the legacy and iconic bands you know are uh and he himself exactly, I mean his story.

I mean I I one of my favorite interviews by you know, Dan Rather, because on over an Access TV we had Dan Rather show the Big Interview and he has this great interview with Robert and and Dan you know, peels the onion as he always does with any you know, great interview, and just talking to Robert about you know, the death of his you know, Toddler.

Aged son, and that has always.

Sat with me that you know, this is a guy that you know, it was a rock star and commandeering a stage and you know, idolized by so many and at the end of the day, he was still you know, living life and having to go through stuff that humans go through.

You know, you can't escape life, and you know he you know, certainly has a story to tell and experiences to share and pain and to carry.

So tell me what you're working on these days.

Well, you know, one of the things that I'm working on that's really actually very near and dear to my heart is I started working with a charity.

It's called Cancer Can Rock.

Which I love the irony in that, right because obviously cancer doesn't rock.

But in this form, it's it's very similar to as one would say, like maybe a Make a Wish foundation, right, but it's we take these artists, you know, non professional musicians that are battling cancer, and we raise the money to give them the opportunity to go into a local recording studio for the day and record one of their original songs, and we bring in a videographer.

So at the of the day, they have a recording, they have a music video.

If they say we need a guitarist, we bring in a guitar.

So if they say I need a drummer, we bring it.

We need a cow bell, I'll get you a guy with a cow bell.

So we fill that studio with the people and the engineers and the producers that they need to make this song, so that they have this experience that allows them to forget cancer for a moment.

It gives them a tangible memory for themselves and their family.

And so I've been working with them, and Rufus and Martha Wainwright are on our board as well.

They were doing something very similar called folk Cancer, the Kate McGarrigle Project, in honor of their mom, and so we've kind of merged them together.

It's like a charity baby, so Cancer Can Rock and Folk Cancer And it's just been really great to be on the board and be working with this organization for the last year.

So that's been one of my big focuses.

I just also joined the board over at the she Rocks and that's cool because i'd been working with them for almost like five years, hosting some of their events, hosting some of their online interviews, and then I eventually got honored myself, and so to join the board and try to pick who's going to get honored for twenty twenty six is pretty exciting as well.

And then I'm just schlepping.

I'm trying to figure it out like everyone else, you know.

I mean we talked about Access TV earlier, but you know that network has taken some turns and did mass layoffs.

There's about, you know, less than a dozen people still there, and they're playing the shows on repeat, but they're not creating anything new.

And so I'm out here trying to figure out what do I want to be when I grow up?

Right?

Well, you know you love music, so you got the background and backbone for that for sure.

But you know, it is the era for content creators, as you know, So you know, I think you're certainly riding that.

And not afraid to you know, No, it's true.

I mean I have a great roll at X and a great interest in learning and a gift for gab one would.

Say, so in closing, what advice would you give to, you know, young people aspiring to have a diverse and evolving career like yours?

In media and entertainment.

Well, I mean listen, and it is this industry is changing, like in real time.

So it's like I feel like I'm having a hard time keeping up as well.

So the biggest thing I would say is learn as many skills as you can, right I mean, I grew up in a time when talent got to just be talent and didn't have to also be a cameraman and an editor and all those things.

Right now, it truly is a content creator.

You develop it, you shoot it, you come up with it.

You have to do it all, so wear all the hats, whether you want to or not.

So learning that skill set, I think understanding and embracing AI is pretty key.

I am still a firm believer.

You know, listen, AI is scary.

You know, we know how things could potentially go wrong.

We've all seen that movie.

But I will say, you know, it's not necessarily AI that's going to take over.

It's the people who know how to use AI that are going to take over.

So continue to learn, research, learn another language.

I don't know.

Katie Darryl, what a nice conversation.

I'm so honored that you came on taking a walk and You're a breath of fresh air and I wish you only the best in all your many endeavors.

Well, thank you.

I've had a lovely time chatting with you, and I hope one day we get to be on the same footpath together, actually taking that walk together.

Let's do it.

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