Jeff Kinzbach and Ed “Flash” Ferenc are putting the Buzzard Morning Zoo back in a Cleveland room for two days, almost 50 years after the show first went on WMMS. The reunion is set for Nov. 20 and 21 at the Music Box, and by publication Friday night was already sold out.
Malcolm X Abram reported the plans for Cleveland.com. Friday is a special edition of the Music Box’s Cleveland Stories series, built from archival audio and video, storytelling, and appearances by former WMMS colleagues. The show debuted on Dec. 28, 1976. The anniversary is of that morning program, not of the station that carried it.
A Sold-Out Friday, Then A Free Market
Special guests expected Friday include David Spero, Ruby Cheeks, John Gorman, Denny Sanders, Alex Bevan and Charlie Weiner. Kinzbach has said he and Ferenc want substantial audience interaction, so the evening is pitched as a room full of people who already know the bits, not a lecture about them.
Saturday opens with a free Buzzard Rock n’ Roll Market from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., stocked with station memorabilia, classic photographs, vinyl and artwork. That part does not require a ticket. The paid night is different: Kinzbach and Ferenc plan to recreate the Morning Zoo with vintage videos and songs from their album, then move into an ’80s-themed dance party. Tickets for Saturday night were on sale when the plans were reported.
The dance party is meant to evoke Monopolies, the Lorain nightclub the two co-owned in 1979. A Cleveland stage is being asked to stand in for a Lorain room that closed a long time ago. The weekend splits cleanly between a sold-out storytelling night and a Saturday that still has a free afternoon and a ticketed night.
How A Fill-In Became The Morning Show
Kinzbach and Ferenc met at WMMS in 1973 and, by Kinzbach’s account, became close friends. Ferenc was a news editor on the WHK side. Kinzbach was doing commercial production and fill-in shifts. Station management liked the sound of Jeff and Flash as a team and later selected them as morning hosts.
The opening came through someone else’s absence. Charlie Kendall left WMMS in 1976, and Kinzbach had often filled in on mornings when Kendall could not make the studio. The permanent show that followed was not a solo act. The Morning Zoo’s regular company included Len “Boom” Goldberg, Ruby Cheeks, Casey Coleman and Mr. Leonard. Cheeks is also on the Friday guest list, so at least one voice from the original ensemble is expected back in the room.
That staffing mattered because WMMS was still close to the freeform years of FM. Personalities controlled their playlists to a significant degree. A morning team could sound like a clubhouse and still function as the station’s front door.
The Station Behind The Zoo
The call letters arrived before either host. In August 1968, owner Metromedia changed the station to WMMS as it switched toward underground progressive and contemporary rock, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. It settled permanently on a rock ’n’ roll format in September 1970. By the time Jeff and Flash got mornings, the Buzzard identity was already the station’s public face.
WMMS became known for breaking national acts in the U.S. market. Donna Halper championed the Canadian trio Rush when it had no U.S. airplay. Kinzbach has said “Working Man” would resonate with the station’s blue-collar audience, and that WMMS helped break David Bowie in Cleveland. An oral history in Cleveland Scene says Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” sold one million copies in the Cleveland area alone. Kinzbach has also called Cleveland the capital of rock and roll at the station’s peak and said Northeast Ohio sold more albums per capita than anywhere in the world. Those are his measures of the market, not an audited ranking.
The station’s civic argument ran alongside the record sales. WMMS advocated for Cleveland as the home of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the hall was announced for the city in May 1986. Readers of Rolling Stone voted WMMS Radio Station of the Year from 1979 through 1986, the encyclopedia notes. The Morning Zoo’s mid-1980s ratings peak, as Ferenc has described it, sat inside that same stretch.
Peak Ratings, A Hunger Drive, Then Consolidation
Ferenc has said the mid-1980s brought the highest ratings the morning show achieved. The broader station was dominant in Cleveland in the 1980s and one of the highest-rated radio stations in the country, the encyclopedia says. The Scene oral history puts the climb in plainer language: through the ’70s and into the ’80s, the ratings soared. The morning team was the daily habit inside a station that had already become a regional institution.
The Zoo also left the studio. Kinzbach and Ferenc launched a food drive for St. Augustine’s Hunger Center and broadcast live from the center the day before Thanksgiving. Randy “Macho Man” Savage and Elizabeth helped after arriving at 5 o’clock in the morning. A wrestling star at a hunger-center microphone is a very specific kind of Cleveland morning.
The run on WMMS ended in 1994, when Kinzbach and Ferenc left as consolidation changed the radio industry. The anniversary being celebrated now is not a claim that the old station still exists in that form. It is a claim that the morning show, and the people who made it, still have an audience willing to buy a seat.
What Cleveland Can Still Walk Into
Friday’s archival night is the harder ticket. Saturday is the more public half of the weekend: a free market in the middle of the day, then a paid recreation of the Zoo and a dance floor pointed at 1979 Lorain. The Music Box is selling memory in two formats, one already gone and one still available.
Nothing in the announcement says the old playlist rules are coming back, or that a two-day reunion restores a dominant station. It does put former colleagues, station objects and a pair of hosts who met in 1973 in the same building. For listeners who heard the Zoo on the way to work, Nov. 21 is the day they can still get in without having bought Friday.
