The Broadcast

The Good News: The Twin Cities' other boutique lifestyle freebie paper, Rake, interviews Tom Mischke, perhaps the best talk radio personality in the Twin Cities today, and the only truly unabashed original anywhere in the market.

The Bad News: The interview is conducted by Jennifer "F*** the Suburbs" "Bats*** Crazy" Vogel.

Let's take a look.

Mischke - who has an almost uncanny resemblance to my little brother, Jim Berg - and I have one thing in common; Don Vogel got us started in talk radio. I was one of Vogel's producers, and back during the twilight of the "Fairness Doctrine, I did the Twin Cities' first overtly conservative talk show.

Mischke, of course, was a regular caller in those days, the kind that in this day and age would be a legend among talk radio producers:

“The thing is, I wasn’t prepared,” Mischke said with a laugh, remembering that first call. Then he slipped into what can only be described as his amused voice, which sounds like he’s inhaled a bit of helium. “That’s what happens when I’m not prepared.” After hanging up the phone, Mischke sat in the delivery van and listened to himself on the air (the station employs an eight-second delay). It was horrible, he said, but then a very important thing happened. “There must have been something about it, some sense that this wasn’t just a guy who called up to scream, but a guy who kind of panicked. And they started laughing. That hooked me to try again the next day.” Playing a different character with each call, by the fourth time, Mischke had a moniker, the Phantom Caller [The name came from Dave Elvin, the other producer]. He was hooked forever. “I’m on the radio today because Vogel laughed.”

As did everyone in the room. I usually screened calls on the Vogel show, and I used to make out Mischke's voice (in an interview on a fan site, Tom says he caught us by surprise. Not when I was screening; I made his voice out at least four out of five times he called in); I'd cue Don that "The Phantom" was in the queue, and we'd all sit back and look forward to the latest installment; by the time Don left town in '87, we had a good-sized reel of "Phantom" calls, some of the funniest radio ever.

Of course, by the fall of '86 I think Tom knew he was onto something. The Vogel show did a live remote from the front display window of the old Powers Department Store, on the Nicollet Mall (across from the NSP building, I think). About halfway through the show, Mischke showed up wearing a jury-rigged superhero costume, clutching a notepad filled with what amounted to hand-written Phantom clips, passing them out to the crowd assembled on the Mall. Then he and his accomplice ran to a waiting car for their getaway. I had one of those sheets somewhere - probably still do, in some box in my basement - but the only thing I remember about the stuff he handed out was that they were almost as funny as the bit itself...

By the way, I knew who Mischke was before anyone else. Hubbard Broadcasting was famous for lousy pay in those days, and I worked hard to stretch my miserable paycheck, including writing for the Mischke family's chain of papers. One day, I was talking with Tom's brother Mike as I turned in an article. "I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you this, but my brother Tom is the 'Phantom Caller'", he told me. I managed to sit on the secret for the next year or so.

There, of course, the similarities end. Mischke is an amazing talent:

A man named Al was trying to reach the weather line at KSTP television news. Mischke didn’t let that small fact get in the way. He claimed to be the evening weather person himself, a guy named Blow Zephyr...Mischke started off by claiming that his uncle Ned had been killed by a tornado. Because he was a quadriplegic, Ned had been unable to get out of the way, as Al would have suggested. “There is a guy who would have taken a step to the right or left but couldn’t,” said Mischke. “He wanted to, badly. And then, there was old Ned in a cottonwood...It’s this affectionate if not quite on the up-and-up relationship with listeners—one that is not formal or degrading or belligerent—that makes Mischke’s show so fascinating. It’s also what makes him the area’s best known underground radio sensation, the favorite of pizza delivery drivers, DIY auto repairmen, factory workers, insomniacs, late-night lonely guys, and women who lie in the dark wishing their boyfriends were more original.

"Underground" radio. That's funny. Hubbard Broadcasting, although it's a ma and pa operation by the standards of the Clear Channels of the world, is still a billion-dollar-plus operation. Mischke's show runs on a 50,000 watt blowtorch of a station. I wish I were so underground.

Comes now the inevitable sniff, the rueful shrug at what might have been:

Mischke is a self-described throwback to the days of entertainment radio, before the AM dial was given over to political belligerents, when the possibilities and probabilities of the medium seemed endless, and the Lone Ranger always rode again. Garrison Keillor, in a recent Nation essay, described him this way: “a free spirit who gets into wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a joy to listen to.”

One person's wistful idealist is another person's "belligerent".

While she's right about Mischke, Vogel's got AM radio all wrong. Implicit in the article is the idea that in the years between the Golden Age of Radio and Rush Limbaugh, AM radio was a throbbing, diverse polyglot of untrammeled underground creativity. Non-belligerent creativity, at that.

Which is something that could only come from someone that didn't know radios had an AM setting until the nineties.

We'll come back to this.

(Aside: Vogel (Jen) pays homage to Vogel (Don):

Vogel, who died of bladder cancer in 1995, was a throwback himself, a gag man and impersonator who was said to do Larry King better than King himself.

He did King (and Reagan and Jimmy Carter) well. He did Howard Cosell better than the original.

In 1992, six years after his first phantom call, Mischke was hired as Vogel’s sidekick for twenty dollars per show. They worked together for two years before the relationship crumbled. At issue was the fact that Vogel liked to wing it with little or no preparation, while Mischke believed (and still believes) in gathering and fine-tuning a full load of material each day. For every show, he typically spends about six hours combing through newspapers and writing tunes on the upright piano in his home office (he’s painted the black keys red and replaced the front panel with glass, so he can see the hammers as he plays). Preparation is a security blanket of sorts, in case nobody like Al calls in. In case there are no surprises.

I suspect that was more a matter of burnout on Don's part. When I worked on the show, Don and Dave and I met for about two hours every day, a meeting that had a fairly strictly-defined ritual:

1. The last person into the studio for the meeting always said "I'm having trouble with my bank". The other guys would reply "what bank?" The reply - every day for a year and a half - "the S*** P*** F*** Bank!".
2. Dave and I would read articles to Don, who'd punch them out on his braille machine.
3. If he was feeling bored, I'd grab a guitar (and sometimes Dave's bass, and a drum machine) and we'd punch out a song - many of the best of which got spiked by management).
4. If we got done early and we were feeling good about things, Don'd hand me a ten dollar bill and I'd dash over to White Castle

I was told that on his second hitch in the Cities - after stints in Chicago and Milwaukee - he was a different Don; bitter over his second divorce, in a bit of mid-life crisis, and then his illness.

Anyway - cue the inevitable editoria:

Mischke found rather quickly, within six months, that he didn’t like contributing to the cranky churn of AM radio, designed as it is to incite apoplectic fits...The proliferation of rant-filled, right-wing AM radio can be linked to the repeal, by Ronald Reagan in 1987, of what was known as the Fairness Doctrine. The 1949 FCC rule mandated that in return for a license to broadcast, radio stations had to cover “controversial issues of public importance” in a way that allowed for a “reasonable” representation of opposing views. Once that pesky standard was out of the way, a man named Rush Limbaugh emerged. Limbaugh built his career on the notion that mainstream media outlets were liberally biased. Through endless chest thumping, he enraged listeners already mistrustful of the news and ensured an appetite for more conservative fare. The biased media morphed into the elite biased media, and talk radio’s modern audience was solidified. AM talk stations have been propagating ever since, born of the syndicated likes of Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Which is the conventional wisdom.

And, like most conventional wisdom, it's wrong. AM radio has a loooong history of opinion-mongering brick-throwers. Those who think (mistakenly) that Rush Limbaugh is the father of chest-beating provocation have never heard of Morton Downey Jr, or Joe Pyne, or Bob Grant (or, on the left, Alan Berg or Tom Leykis), each of which were more obstreporous than Limbaugh or Hannity (or Franken or Sam Seder); they were conservative and angry, but they were countered as a matter of law by countervailing hosts on the left (like the mealy-mouthed Michael Jackson and Owen Span) or, in the case of the old KSTP where both Mischke and I started, the right, where at 2AM on the first Monday morning in July of 1986 "The Mitch Berg Show" debuted, purely to counterbalance the mildly-lefty politics of Mike Edwards, Span, Jackson, and even Vogel himself (and the harder-left stream-of-consciousness that was Geoff Charles).

Of course, I can forgive Vogel's ignorance of history - AM was so uncool back then. Misrepresenting the present - well, that's another matter:

KSTP-AM 1500 program director Joe O’Brien doesn’t like to think of his station, which is owned by St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting, as right wing. He says he chooses hosts according to their entertainment value and their understanding of Minnesota culture, not by any certain ideology. “If radio were a party,” he said, “these would be the people everyone would want to hang out with.” But the fact is, nearly all of KSTP’s hosts are conservatives.

Really?

Conservatives: Limbaugh and Hannity - both national. Locally - Bob Davis, sort of. Joe Soucheray is more a curmudgeon than a conservative.

Liberals: Rosenbaum and O'Connor both shade left of center. Kris Krok has swung to the center at best since he started at the station. The lefty Mischke and the just-plain-insane, but probably left-of-center George Noory complete the lineup. You do the math, especially among local hosts.

Conventional wisdom is misleading at best:

“I’m around that climate every day,” said Mischke. “It’s all get on board the train. And I’m not on the train. And what I hate is that there even is a train. Because what I love about this country, what I used to see, is that you just had all these wild individualists and all these different ways of thinking and just this cacophony out there of different views. There should be 280 million different views, to go with every American, and somehow that has been winnowed down to two. I don’t know how in the hell that happened.”

Which is, of course, bullshit.

Amercans' views are still cacaphonous; AM radio veers to the right because it was a totally untapped market fifteen years ago. The blogosphere (which, for all his alleged love of cacaphony, Mischke claims to abhor on the air) is a textbook case of anarchy. That government doesn't step in in its nannystatist glory to ensure that every medium is "balanced" (like NPR!) doesn't mean that American society is any more homogenized than ever before.

And as much as I love Tom's show, there's a curmudgeonly aspect to it that is a real dial-spinner for me:

His worldview still bubbles up between the cracks. He recently talked with a co-author of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots and wondered aloud whether the business world makes people “less human.”

Which is the kind of question you can ask after twenty years of successfully insulating yourself from the kind of "square" jobs the rest of us get to do to pay our families' bills. For those of us without that luxury, it comes across as self-adulatory navel-gazing. Which is, indeed, my big tuneout with Mischke's show; he's become every bit as much of a "counterculture" curmudgeon as his stationmate Joe Soucheray has for the stodgy, majority Minnesota culture. Both forms bore me stiff.

But then, it could be that Mischke has some help in the self-adulatory navel-gazing department:

The randomness of the Mischke Broadcast doesn’t appear to ruffle longtime fans (though it sometimes confuses new listeners), perhaps indicating that we as a people are less brain-dead than we’re led to believe.

Who's "leading" "us" to believe "the people" are "Brain-dead"?

Oh, yeah - people like Jennifer Vogel.

I digress. The piece is a decent catalogue of Mischke's charmed radio life, and hints at just how damn enjoyable the Broadcast is for people who just love the art of radio. It's worth a read.

Posted by Mitch at July 15, 2005 06:28 PM | TrackBack