My Malibu was dead.

No, not dead. Just terminal. I thought.

It was Wednesday, June 25, 1986. It had been a wettish spring, which meant my trusty ’73 Malibu wouldn’t start for love or money within eight hours of any precipitation. Which played hob with my job schedule.

This week had been the worst; I’d had to get rides to work with Rob Pendelton two straight mornings.

I figured it was time for a change.

(more…)

It was Monday, June 23, 1986. My audition tape had been sitting on Scott Meier’s desk for well over a week.

I figured that was plenty of time. Today was the day to start the big push.

Assuming I could get to work.

My old ’73 Malibu was hanging on, but was fading fast. Every rainstorm left it immobile for a day or so, until it dried out. An early-morning deluge left me calling Rob Pendelton for a lift to work. “I know, I know”, I said as I got into his car, “I gotta get a different ride…”

I got to the station, did my board shift during the Michael Jackson show, and walked into the production meeting with Don and Dave. It was Monday, so Meier – the station’s general manager and program director, would be in shortly.

Now, when I call Scott Meier a “program director”, I don’t mean in the sense that anyone who’s ever worked in radio, especially in the bigs, could possibly relate to. At most “real” radio stations, the PD is an pseudo-deity of format knowledge, an all-powerful dictator who can make or break careers on a whim; a person whose entire careers hinges on the whims of a market’s listening audience, and who passes that down to all who work for him, the station’s “air [programming, production, whatever] department”.

Meier, on the other hand, was a sales guy (although he’d had a brief air career) who got stuck with the job as a cost-cutting measure. He didn’t know talk radio, and – this is the part that astounds “real” radio people – assumed that his staff could figure out the technicalities and do the job they were hired for better than he could.

And it worked. The station was getting the best ratings it’d gotten since it had gone all-talk in 1981. Which wasn’t really saying much, but it was something.

The best thing about working at KSTP back then was its splendid isolation, on the edge of a swamp on Highway 61 (note to Bob Dylan fans – yes, that Highway 61) in north Maplewood, north of Saint Paul. The station sat in an old (as in 1930’s-era) transmitter shack that had been remodeled with some offices, a kitchen, and a studio/control room and a couple of crude but useful production rooms. The station had moved out there about a year earlier; rumor had it that Hubbard Broadcasting wanted to unload the AM station. In those days when the “Fairness Doctrine” ruled and when Rush Limbaugh was still working in Sacramento, the “conventional wisdom” was that AM radio was a dying band, populated by losers broadcasting to geriatrics. The station, a 50,000 watt blowtorch, was apparently on the market for five million dollars – and was getting no takers. Hubbard broadcasting poured all of its resources into the properties it kept down on University Avenue in Saint Paul – Channel 5 (then the #2 station in town) and KS95 FM with its well-connected Program Director and morning guy Chuck Knapp. All of corporate’s attention focused on the “downtown” properties downstairs from the executive offices. Out in Maplewood, we’d go months without hearing from anyone at corporate, except when the biweekly bag of paychecks arrived.

So we were pretty much left alone – to do what we had been hired to do, and to get the best numbers we could.

Bit by bit, it was working. Our Spring Arbitron book showed us in the mid 3-point range among people 12+, and better still among males aged 25-54, the key audience.

Things were good – which meant my timing was good, too.

Meier walked into the studio. “Hey guys”.

“Hey, Scott. Listen to my tape?”

He nodded. “Yep”.

“And…?”

“Interesting”

“So whatdya think?”

“There’s possibilities”.

Vogel chimed in. “Scott, you gotta put him on the air!”

“Yeah!”, I added. “Put me in, coach! I’m ready to play!”

Vogel laughed his unrestrained cackle.

“Yeah”, said Meier, “there’s possibilities there. But I’ll have to think about it…”

I pulled out the closest thing I had to a trump card: “And given that Edwards, Geoff Charles, Michael Jackson, Owen Span and Karen Booth are so far to the left, we have that whole Fairness Doctrine thing to think about…”

Meier nodded. “I’ll think about it”. He changed the subject to talk with Don about something or another. I didn’t pay much attention. I was figuring how to press the issue further.

It wasn’t everything that was on my mind, of course. I got home around 7 that night, spent an hour digging through the classifieds for cheap used cars…

…and then curled up in the basement with my “recording studio” for a couple of hours.

More on both later.

It was my first summer in the Twin Cities – and life was looking fairly decent.

I was entering my third month living in the basement – and enjoying it a lot. My routine; get up around seven, take a bike ride, come home, nosh with the roommates, take a shower, drive out to KSTP…

…assuming my car worked. My ’73 Malibu was acting weirder and weirder. It would flood on the flimsiest pretexts; I carried a BIG screwdriver with me to jam into the carb butterfly to let enough air in to start the car, something I had to do a couple of times a week. And for a day or so after a rainstorm, it wouldn’t start at all.

Anyway, it was off to work around 10. I’d do a little guest booking as I ran the board for the Owen Span show, then go into the Vogel show production meeting.

The routine was always the same; whomever walked into the room last would say “I’ve been having trouble with my bank lately”. One of the guys already there would say “Which bank is that?” The last person into the room would respond “The Sh*t P*ss F*ck bank…”

We’d start planning the show. We’d usually get a visit from our boss, Scott Meier, the general manager. Scott, in his mid-thirties at the time, was a very talented executive – he’d go on to start WFAN in New York, the nation’s first all sports station, and also could fart on command.

“Scott”, Dave Elvin would say as Meier stood in the studio, “fart!”. Meier would let a little “frrrrp” fly with no more effort than clearning his throat, as Vogel laughed – giggled, really – with glee. “Do it again”, Don would usually say, like a baby who’s discovered tennis balls. Meier would let another one fly. No problem.

But this day, Sunday, June 8, was different.

I’d convinced Don that the station really, really needed a conservative talk show, if only to keep the FCC happy back in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine” . He pondered the notion for a few days. “Mitch”, he finally said, “you need to get an audition tape to Meier. I’ll help you”.

So we arranged it. I picked him up at his house in North Saint Paul, and we drove to KSTP. We went into the studio – only I sat in the host’s chair this time. I felt like the first time I sat in my Dad’s car; the ratty swivel chair sat practically nose-to-nose with the glass window into the control room; there were controls for all four microphones in the room, plus the “telemixer” phone controller. I told the person on the board in the control room (who was running some syndicated show at the time) to patch the studio into a reel-to-reel deck and roll tape.

And we started talking. I forget what we talked about – politics of some kind, of course, I’m sure, but the tape is long lost. I also “took some calls” – I’d planted a couple of friends with a topic, and recorded a couple of brief flashes of phone interplay. It went well; I remember feeling exhilarated about it all. The whole thing took about an hour.

I drove Don home, and then came back to the studio. I curled up in a production room for about an hour, editing out the “umms” and “y’know”s. Then I dubbed the whole thing to a cassette tape, typed up a memo to Meier asking him to give it a listen, and stuffed the whole thing in his mailbox.

I drove home. The dice had been rolled.