4/15/2022
Performances and Artists
John Tesh boasts a long list of accolades for his globally acclaimed career as a radio and television host, pianist and composer, including three gold records, 8 million albums sold and several Emmys.
But before all that, he got kicked out of college and his home.
Although Tesh attended North Carolina State University to study textile chemistry — under the request of his father, vice president of the Hanes underwear division — he found himself drawn to TV and radio.
To quickly switch majors, he forged his professor’s signature on a university document.
“He caught me and reported me to the university, and I got suspended,” Tesh recalls. “When my dad got the letter, he said ‘you’re no longer welcome in my house.’ I got in my Volkswagen, lived in a tent, pumped gas and prayed.”
Never lacking initiative, he broke into the college campus’ radio station.
“I was already a criminal, so what the heck, right?” he says with a laugh.
He recorded his own radio segment and sent it out to a variety of stations, with one taking pity and hiring him.
“Thirty-six months from the point I was in that tent, I ended up anchoring the news in New York City for WCBS at 23 years old,” Tesh says.
This represents just one of many compelling stories Tesh recently compiled in his memoir, “Relentless,” chronicling his 25-year musical and broadcast career that spans anchoring “Entertainment Tonight,” working as an investigative journalist for CBS, recording several No. 1 hits and building a widespread fanbase as a radio host.
“I wanted to go through the process of looking at my life and seeing how some of this stuff happened,” he explains of both the book and concert tour.
Risking Everything for a Concert
A lifelong musician, Tesh initially struggled to launch a music career as an adult.
Many record labels rejected him, concerned that he couldn’t branch out beyond his work on CBS and “Entertainment Tonight.”
“I don’t think they wanted a guy who was reading celebrity birthdays to be on their labels with Billy Joel,” he says.
He took matters into his own hands and pitched an ambitious idea to PBS: a music special starring himself on piano, backed by the Colorado Symphony at the famous Red Rocks Amphitheater.
PBS producers, nervous about Tesh’s lack of fanbase, told him: “if you do it, we’ll take a look, but we can’t finance it,” he remembers.
So he funded the $1.2 million concert himself, even though it meant taking out loans from three banks and risking all the savings he shared with his pregnant wife.
“She says now, ‘I can’t believe I said yes,’” he admits. “Everybody was like, ‘you should not use your own money. This cannot work.’”
And yet, the first TV station to air his special – at midnight – found it raised an astonishing amount of money, securing his music career that would include playing at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.
“It ended up being a special that changed my life and raised millions for PBS,” he says.
More Stories to Come
Tesh will elaborate on these and many more thrilling anecdotes at his show in Myron’s.
He has many phases of his life to choose from, including working with iconic celebrities in his broadcasting career, composing music for the Olympics and surviving two bouts of cancer.
His family and his innate drive to succeed saw him through it all, he says.
“It was the fact that we not only had faith, but we didn’t have unbelief,” he says.