Ace & TJ are returning to Kiss 95.1 — but it won’t be quite like the show they used to do
When David Cannon — much better known as the “Ace” half of “The Ace & TJ Show” — climbed into his car at around 7 o’clock Wednesday morning, he seemed to almost not be able to believe where he was headed.
“I’m just now leaving the house, on my way to Kiss 95.1 for the time in — 11 years?” said the Charlotte radio personality, with an incredulous laugh, as he spoke by phone with The Charlotte Observer. “It’s been awhile.”
An hour later, Cannon and his on-air partner Ritchie “TJ” Beams officially announced the news during a guest appearance on the Kiss 95.1 morning show co-hosted by Steve Maney and LauRen Merola: After more than a decade away from it, Ace & TJ will return next Monday morning to their original home station in Charlotte — WNKS 95.1 FM.
But the new show, set to air from 9 a.m.-noon weekdays on the Beasley Media Group-owned station, will sound a little bit different from the old one. And the new overall gig, like the one Cannon and Beams had held down for the past year, has multiple tentacles.
“It’s odd to explain, because we’re essentially doing a variety of different shows every day now, if that makes any sense,” Cannon said. “So yeah, our show from 6 to 10 that we do every day on our app — and that’s heard on a few radio stations around the country — will remain the same. What we’re doing for Kiss will be unique content in a more short-form fashion, but still very tailored to that audience.
“If you’re a fan or have ever listened to ‘The Ace & TJ Show’ and enjoyed it, it is exactly what you would expect: Just us, having fun, trying to entertain you every day, give you something to relate to, give you something to share later on in the day, and so we’re looking forward to it.”
Cannon said the format for the exclusive Kiss 95.1 show is still being finalized, but in terms of the amount of conversation you can expect to hear from them, he added: “Probably more similar to terrestrial midday shows 9 to 12, from the standpoint of how much we’ll be on the air. But the content will be us doing our regular content.”
Meanwhile, the 6-to-10 show Cannon referred to is the longform, all-talk version of their daily morning show — “Ace TJ 5G,” which will continue to be available for live streaming from 6 to 10 a.m. and on demand 24-7 via AceTJ.com and, starting Monday, at Kiss951.com (as well as through a variety of mobile and desktop apps).
Also new will be the opportunity to watch an accompanying video feed of Cannon and Beams. Initially, there will be live video of just the last hour of their 6-to-10 show, Cannon said, but the hope is that eventually all four hours will be viewable online.
The various incarnations of the show will continue to be aired in syndication in more than a dozen other markets nationwide.
Once “Ace & TJ” launches on Kiss 95.1 next week, Maney and Merola’s current morning-show will begin running an hour shorter, from 6 to 9 a.m. instead of until 10.
Coming around full circle
Cannon and Beams have been Ace and TJ since 1993, when the Louisiana natives were paired up for the first time on a Top 40 station in Alexandria, near their hometowns of Pineville and Winnfield. They moved from nights to mornings, then on to Baton Rouge, then to stations in Huntsville and Birmingham in Alabama, before being hired to do Kiss 95.1’s morning show in Charlotte in 1998.
While making the announcement on-air Wednesday morning, Beams gave a nod to what doing that old show was like.
“When we were on Kiss before,” he said, “we would go on and we would talk for 13, 14 minutes at a time and not even play commercials. If we were hot, we’d say, ‘Oh, put all the commercials in one break.’”
In May 2011, after being unable to come to terms on a new contract with CBS Radio, the duo left Kiss 95.1 — and due to a noncompete clause in their contract, they were restricted from going on the air in Charlotte or negotiating with other local stations until that December. So they spent six months streaming “The Ace & TJ Show” to computers and mobile devices, broadcasting their syndicated program from a leased studio.
They then spent more than 9-1/2 years as the morning-show hosts on Hits 96.1, before blowing up their formula last summer by taking their full show to the streaming world while offering (initially) hourly 60-second vignettes and (eventually) additional on-air content to 95.7 The Ride.
As for the return to Kiss 95.1, Cannon summed it up while driving to Beasley Media Group’s Southend studio by saying: “It’s exciting. It really is exciting. ... They say ‘you can’t go home again,’ but we’re going home in a very different way. And so it’s just an exciting time for us. We’ve been through a lot of change in the past year, me specifically in the past two years. So ... it’s fun. And today’s gonna be fun, and next week’s gonna be even more fun.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 8:01 AM.
