Anthony Cumia

Anthony Cumia (born April 26, 1961) is an American talk radio broadcaster known for his long association with Gregg "Opie" Hughes, most notably on a series of radio shows named The Opie and Anthony Show or Opie and Anthony from 1995 to 2014. Comedian Jim Norton was a frequent collaborator of the pair. In 2014 he was fired from XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio. Soon after that, he started his own video podcast, known as The Anthony Cumia Show.

Early life

Cumia was raised on Long Island, New York, in Elwood and attended John Glenn High School but did not graduate. Before breaking into radio, he was earning a living as a "tin knocker," and began recording comedy songs with his brother Joe.

Radio career

Early years

Opie's Nighttime Attitude, an evening show at WBAB on Long Island, received an entry during an O. J. Simpson parody song contest. The song was titled "Gonna Electric Shock OJ" (sung to the tune of Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay") by the band Rotgut, of which the Cumia brothers were both founding members and the primary creative force. After Joseph Cumia hand-delivered the cassette tape directly to Opie by being persistent with the interns trying have him drop it off, the song was played by Opie and it was a hit. Opie invited the Cumia brothers to the studio to play live in September 1994. Soon afterward, Hughes and Cumia became a radio team. Cumia, prior to meeting up with Opie, always wanted to get into radio, after listening to his idols Howard Stern and Don Imus.

Sam Roberts

Sam Roberts (born October 2, 1974) is a Canadian rock singer-songwriter, whose 2001 debut release, The Inhuman Condition, became one of the bestselling independent releases in Quebec and Canadian music history.

Life and career

Born in Westmount, to South African immigrants who had arrived in Montreal three weeks earlier, Roberts grew up on Cedar Avenue in Pointe-Claire, where his family moved to when he was five years old. Roberts is an alumnus of St. Edmund Elementary School, Beaconsfield, Loyola High School, N.D.G. and John Abbott College, Ste. Anne de Bellevue and McGill University. Roberts' first band was William in 1993, then changed to Northstar in 1996. Although prominent in the local indie rock scene, the band never got a major record contract and broke up in 1999. Roberts' bandmate George Donoso went on with The Dears, leaving Roberts to struggle for several years.

Disbanding Northstar, Roberts recorded his homemade demo, Brother Down. In 2001, Roberts recorded and independently released the EP, The Inhuman Condition. It wasn't promoted much but following a record contract with MapleMusic Recordings, Roberts' two breakthrough singles, "Brother Down" (released in mid-2002) and "Don't Walk Away Eileen" (released in late 2002) were heavily promoted in the Canadian market.

Opie and Anthony

Opie and Anthony was an American talk radio show that featured Gregg "Opie" Hughes and Anthony Cumia, until Cumia's firing in July 2014. Stand-up comedian Jim Norton also served as co-host. Following Cumia's firing, Hughes and Norton continued on with a show that airs in the United States and Canada on XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio under the title Opie with Jim Norton, while Cumia started a subscription-based video internet show at his website under the title The Anthony Cumia Show.

Based in New York City, The Opie & Anthony Show began in 1995 on WAAF in Boston, Massachusetts, and later moved to WNEW-FM in New York with syndication on other stations, until being canceled in 2002. After exhausting their contract with their previous employers, which kept them from broadcasting on WNEW-FM while also preventing them from appearing on radio elsewhere, they moved to XM Satellite Radio in 2004.

On April 26, 2006, Opie and Anthony returned to the terrestrial airwaves after a four-year absence, replacing CBS Radio's short-lived David Lee Roth Show, which aired mainly on the eastern coast of the United States. The terrestrial broadcast of the show ran until March 9, 2009. The team was terminated by WXRK when it flipped formats from rock to Top 40. In July 2014, Cumia was fired by SiriusXM. The show resumed on July 14, 2014 without Cumia as Hughes and Norton retained their hosting duties. In October 2014, Hughes and Norton renewed their contract with SiriusXM to continue the show.

Howard Stern

Howard Allan Stern (born January 12, 1954) is an American radio and television personality, producer, author, actor, and photographer. He is best known as the host of The Howard Stern Show, his long-running radio show which gained popularity when it was nationally syndicated on terrestrial radio from 1986 to 2005 before its move to Sirius XM Radio in 2006. Stern first wished to be on the radio at five years of age. He landed his first radio jobs while at Boston University—WTBU, the campus station, and WNTN in Newton, Massachusetts. From 1976 to 1982, Stern developed his on-air personality through morning positions at WRNW in Briarcliff Manor, New York, WCCC in Hartford, Connecticut, WWWW in Detroit, Michigan, and WWDC in Washington, D.C. Stern worked afternoons at WNBC in New York City from 1982 until his firing in 1985.

In 1985, Stern began a 20-year run at WXRK in New York City, where his show was syndicated to 60 markets and attracted 20 million listeners. Stern won numerous awards, including Billboard’s Nationally Syndicated Air Personality of the Year eight times. He became the most fined radio host when the Federal Communications Commission issued fines totaling $2.5 million to station licensees for content it deemed indecent. Stern became one of the highest paid radio figures after signing a five-year deal with Sirius in 2004 worth $500 million. In recent years, Stern took up photography and has had work featured in Hamptons and WHIRL magazines. From 2012 to 2015, he served as a judge on America's Got Talent.