Paul and Al of WHJY-FM are Still Rockin’

Paul Fuller, left, and
Al Matthews have entertained 94 WHJY listeners for almost four decades. Photograph courtesy of WHJY.

If you know Rhode Island radio, you know Paul and Al go together like Federal Hill and Italian food, beach parking lots and seagull doo-doo on your car and Washington Bridge rush-hour traffic and agita.

Or if you prefer, like the two main gross noises humans make but deign to talk about in polite company — never mind on the air.

“Yeah, we’re still immature,” says Al Matthews, sixty-seven, with his early-
morning on-air partner at WHJY-FM, Paul Fuller, sixty-nine, finishing his sentence as only two old friends can. “We still laugh at farts and burps.”

Matthews and Fuller were young deejay pups in 1990 when they were lured away from an Alabama radio station, the story goes, because the WHJY boss at the time was flying over Mobile, heard their show and asked the duo to submit a tape.

“I guess we didn’t suck,” Fuller shrugs, invoking one of the pair’s favorite words that ranks right up there with the other two.

Their shtick over their thirty-five years in the 6–10 a.m. slot hasn’t changed much, save for laying off political humor unlike the days of yore.

“We still do some but not as much,” Matthews says. “The old days you could be way more political. Not these days.”

One thing that hasn’t changed are callers who — instead of just not tuning in — listen and find Paul and Al offensive enough to call and leave invective-laden diatribes on tape. Much to the delight of the two guys it’s aimed at.

“Oh, here’s a good one,” Fuller says the day I visit their show, playing an old tape seemingly peppered with as many a-hole references as there are rubber ducks in the water at the Pawcatuck River Duck Race in Westerly every spring. “It never gets old.”

In radio’s deejay salad days, there was only competition from other radio stations and jocks. Now, they have to battle the internet, streaming platforms and social media for attention. Their target audience remains in the age range they used to actually be in: twenty-five to fifty-four.

“As the saying goes,” Fuller says, “we’re out of the demographic.”

The national focus is on that age group when it comes to advertising, he says, “which doesn’t make sense — our age group has much more disposable income.”

But, he says of station owner iHeart
Media, which owns WHJY and nearly 900 other stations across the country, “as long as we meet the [ratings] numbers, they leave us alone.” Ratings these days also include digital listeners. 

Being in one place at one station for three-and-a-half decades is a seeming rarity in the radio biz, where jocks go where the money is. I have to ask, knowing it would likely evoke a punny response: “Are you guys dinosaurs?”

It did, with Matthews smirking, “Well, T-Rex was one of my favorite bands, so …”

So don’t look for them to stop any time soon, or at least until the end of 2026 when their current contract is up. They seem pretty content to do the same-old, same-old, day-in and day-out playing off each other like the great friends they are.

“I stuck around because of raising kids, I didn’t want to move,” Fuller says, with Matthews, as usual, finishing the thought. 

“If you’re really good, you get hired away, and if you suck, you get fired,” he says. “We’re still here. I guess we made mediocrity an art form.”

I try one last time to pin them down, asking Fuller when he’ll retire. 

Smiling, he looks at the clock and shrugs. “10 a.m.”