Talk (14 page)

Well, in the wee hours of a morning during my first week on the job, we did our standard crossover at the shift change per Bernson's instructions. On air, Frank would ask me what I intended to discuss that morning, and I'd mention a few headlines from the
St. Petersburg Times
or
Tampa Tribune
. Frank would play along and tell me that whatever I said sounded interesting when I am sure, in retrospect, it did not. Then the “on air” light would go dark, and he would amble out of the chair, gather up his newspaper clippings from the console and
make room for me. One morning, while a commercial played and I was plugging in my headphones, he said something that I haven't forgotten.

“Just remember, kid, these three things if the phones are dead. First, you can always ask whether social security will be there when you need it. Second, say ‘Don't tell me where I can walk my dog.' And if you really get stuck, ask, ‘How come two parents can raise ten children, but ten children cannot take care of two parents?' ”

All spoken like an overnight veteran, but I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. I just smiled and got in position and started my program as the sun was coming up.

About an hour later, I looked at a computer screen that was intended to display all of the calls from people wanting to get on the air. Only the screen was blank. No one was calling. Whatever I was discussing was tanking, at least in terms of calls. In my mind I equated silent phones with no audience, and so I desperately took Frank's advice and launched into a story about having taken my schnauzer for a walk on the beach the day before.

“There I was on a late afternoon walk, minding my own business when an old bat came along and told me that dogs weren't permitted on public sands. She was in one of those 1950s bathing suits that were a combination of dress and one-piece, standing under an umbrella that was the size of a parachute.”

Then I said that when she harassed me, I'd responded, “Don't tell me where I can walk my dog.”

It wasn't even 7 a.m. in Tampa, but the telephone lines suddenly exploded. I had never had more than two of the twelve lines illuminated at once and I was so panicked at the reaction that I quickly Googled “schnauzer” so I at least knew what one looked like.

Half the people calling were dog lovers who told me that I went easy on the old bag.

“Stan, you should've told her to pound sand. Anyone who disrespects animals is hiding deeper secrets. These guys like Jeffrey Dahmer always start out abusing pets.”

The other half
were
old bags!

“Staaaaannnnn. How dare you speak to a seasoned citizen like that? How would you like it if someone spoke to your mother that way?”

And so for about two weeks, until Phil Dean got into position, I adopted old Frank's philosophy, and yes, it made the phones ring. When I got tired of the dog routine, or the social security thing, or wondering why parents could raise kids who later could not care for parents, I learned a few tricks of my own, like pulling out the DEFCON1 of talk radio: guns, abortion and the Church. It hardly mattered what I said, just so long as I mentioned any of those three, the phone lines melted. And after ten days as a talk show host, I was convinced I'd already learned what I'd need to know to succeed. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Turn on the mic, breath the word “contraception” and sit back and watch the time pass.

But all that ended the minute Phil Dean came aboard. He quickly disabused me of any idea that this was either good talk radio or anything that would ever get ratings. And he went on to prescribe a program schedule and formula that he told me would work.

“Rule No. 1 Powers—there is zero relationship between the number of callers and the number of listeners.”

Years later the only criticism I have of that advice was in calling it “Rule No. 1.” Over the years Phil has given me dozens of Rule No. 1's.

Phil had a detailed thought process as to the role of the caller. He was forever telling me that the callers were there
to be used as “stage props” for whatever I was delivering and that they were never to be looked upon as content in and of themselves.

“Let me ask you something, Stan. When was the last time you yourself called a talk radio program?”

“Never.”

“Exactly.”

Phil's next item of business was to prescribe a program schedule and formula that he said would work. I was enticed by the prospect of success, intrigued by the mystery man from Taos, and dutifully followed all of his advice. My hours were brutal and I worked my balls off, but I was having some fun with the challenge of reinventing myself. My day would begin when the first of my two alarm clocks sounded at 3:30 a.m. Not that any one alarm clock has ever failed; I just refused to take chances. This too was something about which I'd received advice from Frank Sellers. He'd said, “Kid, every morning guy has a strategy to overcome getting up at a God-awful hour. Some guys nap. Some guys go to bed early. Some guys try to catch up on weekends. Well, let me tell you, none of them work. The human body is not made to get up in the middle of the night.”

About this he was right.

So in the morning, I followed one cardinal rule: getting my ass out of bed the minute the first alarm sounded. The worst thing I could do, I soon learned, was lay awake and second-guess my need to get up. Better to get moving instantly and stay on schedule. The way I did it, every second mattered. While it took me 45 minutes to drive home after a program, the early commute took literally half that time. Drunks and DJs were all you'd find on the highway at that early hour (and I know, having been both). After driving through a Stop-N-Go to pick up some coffee, I was sitting in my studio by 4:20 a.m., staring
across a conference table at Alex, who always managed to beat me to work. A television was on in the background, showing a local early morning newscast that had begun at 4 a.m.

Following Phil's advice, I never stopped preparing for the next day's program. All day long I stayed current in the news, and whatever my mobile device of choice was at the time buzzed and hummed constantly with headline updates and news with a conservative analysis. I never went to bed without knowing the lead stories in the nightly cable news world. Phil told me to take my cue from Fox News, which I did. And as he instructed, sometimes I would watch MSNBC just to know what to avoid. Of course, I never told him that the latter often made more sense to me than the former. But mostly, I thought they were both full of shit. When Obama was president, I never took him for a European socialist antichrist, and neither did I think he was a savior. He was not the Kenya-born Manchurian candidate conjured up by Sean Hannity, just like George W. Bush wasn't the stumblebum that Keith Olbermann (himself a pompous horse's ass) suggested in his exhaustive rants. Then, unless it was a night dedicated to grab-assing at Delrios, at about 9:30 p.m., right before turning in, I would send an email to Alex and offer my nightly suggestions for her show outline, which we would go over, face-to-face, the following morning before sunrise.

The program itself always followed a loose formula outlined by Phil. I often started the 5 a.m. hour with a soft story, sometimes pulled from the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
, below the fold with one of those pixilated photos. The
Journal
has a habit of printing terrific, slice-of-life kinda stuff in that spot, often having nothing to do with the world of finance. I remember one day they had a great piece analyzing the number of times college basketball players bounce the ball before they shoot foul shots in games in relation to successful attempts. (Four
times seemed to bring the best success, 77 percent of them went in the hoop, as compared to say, 60 percent if you only dribbled once.) Or another day I pulled something from the
New York Times
about how only seven people in the company that owns Thomas' English Muffins knew how the muffins got their distinctive air pockets, and how when one of the seven left for a competitor, his departure touched off a case of alleged corporate skullduggery. Phil thought these kinds of stories were a nice way to ease into the day before I got to the red meat. In my head, while determining my content, I would picture my typical listeners as they awakened to
Morning Power
. The guys were usually fortysomething masters of the universe in the midst of their early morning workout, having just gotten laid, pumping some serious iron and getting ready to drive a 7-Series or S-Class to work. The women were invariably 25-year-old grad students with giant hooters, listening to me via clock radio while lying in 1,000 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and wearing red thongs. (For some reason, both of my stereotypes were always seriously underrepresented whenever we did remote broadcasts or live events that our listeners attended.)

After the soft stuff, I'd begin the process of running through the main headlines of the day, a combination of the local and national. For the entirety of the 6 a.m. hour, I would continue with the rundown of the news, offering some commentary with every headline. For a while, we called this hour “Headlines Redefined” which I liked. Sometimes I would look to Alex for a female perspective, in which case she would always oblige with a pithy, albeit predictable feminist view with which I would invariably disagree. These were the talk equivalent of whacky morning radio bits where the music staples were kazoos, horns and fart machines. For us, it was trashing liberals.

“Breaking news from the Middle East today where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is brokering peace talks,” I once said with a mock, Ted Baxter-like voice. “Madam Secretary was actually captured on film by paparazzi wearing a dress.”

I looked at Alex who took my visual cue and recognized it as her invitation to jump in, in this case, defending the sartorial choice of the former first lady.

“That is so sexist, Stan. And you never once commented on something Condi Rice wore.”

“Why would I? ‘
Dr
.' (with great emphasis added) Rice always comported herself as a lady while representing the affairs of the United States of America.”

The telephone lines would light up, and I'd be off into an eight-minute segment on whether a pant suit was ever appropriate dress for our secretary of state as she engaged world leaders. Of course, my view was that anything this secretary of state was doing was wrong, in contrast to her predecessor, the aforementioned “Dr.” Rice, to whom I would invariably give a pass.

Things changed at the stroke of 7 a.m., prime time for morning drive radio. Now I would take it up a notch and hit hard on the front-page items of the day. The lead political story commanded my attention and this was where I tried to pack a punch. In campaign season, it was always something political. National healthcare (bad), illegal immigration (worse), and the federal deficit (atrocious) had been my stock-in-trade for the last few years. I'd spell out an issue, cue Rod to run some sound bytes that corresponded to that news, then offer my take, and finally go to the phones.

“Ignore those blinking lines until they serve a purpose,” Phil would constantly drum in my ear. Still, it was hard not to be pleased by the instant feedback.

“Remember, those callers are your props. Nobody gives a fuck what that guy says except that guy. If his old lady cared, he'd be telling her not you. But she doesn't give a shit. So you're the only outlet he has. The only reason you let him on
your
air is that he gives you fodder to say more.”

Phil also timed my callers like they were running the 40 at an NFL combine. I swear he would sit on his ass in Taos with a stopwatch and shout whenever any caller was on the air for more than two minutes. No caller was ever worth two minutes of airtime according to him. At first I didn't see any harm in letting someone ramble as long as I thought they were interesting.

“Isn't it supposed to be a talk program?” I would sometimes counter.

“It is… and
you
are the one who is supposed to be talking.”

Over time, I saw his point.

“Callers are there to give you something to play off of, to give you material to say something and appear smart, or acerbic. And let me tell you something else—nobody wants to hear callers who say ‘Stan, you are so right about this.' Booooring.”

In no time we were routinely flooded with callers regardless of the subject, and it took quite a skill set for Alex to juggle 12 ringing lines at once. Her job was to not only get some bare bones information about who was calling and why, but also to type that data on her computer, which in turn put it on a screen in front of me. At the same time she needed to ascertain whether the callers could put together sentences and were younger than Stonehenge. Nothing sucks more oxygen out of a program that an old-timer who dodders when you punch up his call.

Our focal point every morning was the 7:30 segment, during which I would often do interviews with hard news guests. Newsmakers, like elected officials, or nationally known
politicians or pundits or authors of right-wing screeds would usually be heard then. Again, with a short call segment to follow.

“Welcome back to
Morning Power
, on the line, it is my privilege to be joined by former Governor Mike Huckabee. Huck, thanks for being here.”

“You're welcome Stan, and good morning to all in the I-4 corridor….”

In the final hour, having already covered the hard news of the day, I tended to do more shits and giggles. You know, some pop culture, sound from
American Idol
, and the other water cooler stuff that gave the show balance. This was the
Seinfeld
part of the program as Phil liked to refer to it, and handling these subjects came more naturally to me than politics. If you asked me to describe some of my favorite radio that I have done in Tampa, I would not describe my interview with Governor Palin in 2008, or Senator McCain in that same cycle, or my Scott Brown and Marco Rubio interviews in 2010, or Romney in 2012. Not even the time that I broadcast from a Tea Party rally surrounded by 5,000 listeners. Instead I would probably tell you about my tutorial on how to beat a speeding ticket (immediately fess up, ‘Yes officer I know I was speeding and boy am I embarrassed,' cause it catches them by such surprise that they will let you go), or the time that Alex was driving her 12-year-old niece from a birthday party with her young friends and accidentally popped in a CD with Estelle featuring Kanye West singing “American Boy” with some highly explicit lyrics.