Things I’m Supposed To Hate, But Don’t: The KQ Morning Show
By Mitch Berg
It’s been over twenty-two years since Tom Barnard took the helm of the morning show at a formerly-sleepy Minneapolis “classic rock” station and made it into the most successful local morning show in America.
We’ll come back to the numbers.
It’s considered a faux pas in polite Twin Cities society to admit liking the KQ Morning show,which is into its third decade of dominating the ratings like no other radio show in the country, including Howard Stern at his peak. Oh, the show does the nuts and bolts of radio really, really well; the interplay between Barnard and his huge cast is smooth and polished, in a completely amateur-sounding way. And some of his supporting cast are excellent in their own right; Mike “Stretch” Gelfand, the show’s adenoidal Jewish horse-handicapper is hilarious, and engineer Brian Zepp is to straight lines what an all-star NHL goalie is to pucks; he never lets one past him.
But it’s easy to see why the show doesn’t get any love from the Twin Cities’ self-appoitned intelligentsia. Even leaving aside the show’s occasional contoversies, the show is often described as a junior high locker room, with the sort of potty mouth language that only Al Franken can get away with, the crude, catty peekaboo sexual banter that only Chelsea Handler is allowed to do, and the sort of constant pr0n references that Twin Cities hipsters will only accept in a Diablo Cody book or in a performance art piece at the Bryant Lake Bowl.
But it’s not a junior high locker room. It’s more like one of those beer commercials that you see around super-bowl time.
Work with me, here.
On the show, you have a cross-section of America like you see nowhere else in the Twin Cities media. I mean, nowhere! Quick; name an audibly-African-American voice on MPR? An identified “out” gay, anywhere in the Twin Cities media?
In those Super Bowl beer ads, you see a vision of superbowl parties around the country, each of which shows a perfect racial cross-section of this nation,with black and hispanic and the occasional asian partier joining all us crackers – a heartwarming vision of racial harmony in 2009 that also exists very rarely in nature. And it is a rarity in nature at least in part because Americans are panicked at the notion of offending each other; race and gender orientation in America isn’t just a third rail, it’s a foggy midnight in a Newell Park Transfer Yard full of third rails.
And yet Barnard’s show is like that fictional party, with a middle-aged white guy, a “dumb blonde”, a black guy, a left-leaning Jewish guy, a schlemiel from Jersey, a redneck, a slumming news anchor, a dizzyingly-obsessed pr0n nerd and – for a few years – an openly gay guy, all doing what real people would do if this society were remotely grown-up about race, gender and gender-orientation; bagging on each other constantly, with a nudge and a wink and the subtext that we’re all grownups, so just relax and get over yourselves.
If the whole nation got along like the KQ Morning Show does, it’d be a better place.
Plus, all those whinging libs who’ve been threatening to move to Canada probably would have to shut up and just do it.
But they’re not, which brings us back to the numbers. Barnard’s show gets, literally, the best market share of any major-market morning show anywhere in the country. He was the first person since the Great Depression to upset WCCO in the mornings. In an era where music radio’s audience is collapsing, he and only he still gets Golden-Age-of-WCCO-type numbers. Which means that it’s physically impossible, in one of the most “liberal” cities in the country, to make up those numbers entirely of third-shifters, white trash from the Brooklyns and Shakopee and Newport and the other usual cliché closet crackers. It means that some of that audience has to be those irritating, preening libs sitting next to you who claim they listen religiously to Cathy Wurzer or Jim Ed Poole or podcasts of Prairie Home Companion on the way to work.
So now you’re onto them. So if you’re chatting with ’em by the water cooler, and they make some statement you agree with, just respond by saying “Ex-ACT-ly”, or “HEY now, ain’t nothing wrong with that”, or “EVERYONE’S a winner!”; if you see that muted, panicky, “I’ve been made” look in their eyes, you’ll know it.
And what a wondeful world that’ll be, huh?
May 18th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I didn’t know Bryce was gay.
Zing!
I keed, I keed.
I don’t listen much simply because it’s essentially morning radio by-the-numbers, however I don’t look down my nose at it.
I do tune in now and again… and it is fun. I’d hardly call it great radio, but it is reliable, consistent, and entertaining. You know what you’re going to get whenever you tune in Barnard’s morning show.
I miss Tony, though.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Baba Booey.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
When he started, Barnard was a liberal, then he got rich, now he’s just an arrogant, but extreemely funny, ass. He’s kinda like AC, only without any class, but still, funny.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Leave it to AssClown to deflect a warranted mocking by reminding me that the bar is always capable of being set a few notches lower.
I’d rather be caught in flagrante delicto with Mrs. AC than identify myself as a fan of KQ…but I’d sooner run an ice pick through my ears than have to admit that I ever listened to Howard Stern.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Oh, and teh peevee “gets it” too. Imagine my surprise.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I was a rabid fan in the early to mid-’90s (I got the whole crew’s autographs in 1994 in the MOA Rotunda when they did a 92-couple wedding), but soured when they devoted a week of shows devoted to listeners’ “worst port-a-potty experiences”.
It was pretty disgusting, and the “controversies” they’ve had over the years since then haven’t exactly enticed me back.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
AC,
I knew that was coming. Consider it an early XMas present.
Pen,
Actually, while Barnard is certainly not PC, and reputedly has his personality tics (who doesn’t? Indeed, as I’ve noted in the past, it’s hard to succeed in radio with ’em, and the industry actively breeds ’em) and he’s certainly had his views change as he’s gotten older and wealthier, he does have class. He’s loyal to his (tiny coterie of) friends and colleagues; the turnover on the Morning Show staff over the past 20 years has been vanishingly low by radio standards. He honors his mother constantly. He’s as hard-working a fella as they get (he used to do the morning show and then, several days a week, would fly to NYC to do voiceover work).
You don’t have to like the guy, but let’s be clear on what “class” really is…
May 18th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
You’re not meant to think Howard is funny, shiftee. Illiterate rednecks like you are the target, not the audience.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Illiterate rednecks like you are the target, not the audience.
Right, Clown. Stern competes with Terry Gross and Bob Simon.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Howard Stern? Isn’t that a medical condition? Kinda like Herpes Simplex?
May 18th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Jason Matheson has his own radio show and TV segment on the Hubbard Empire. He’s pretty openly gay.
I’m not awake in the morning much anymore, but when I am I usually listen to KQ.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Right, Clown. Where Howard Stern is concerned, I’m not worthy.
Too bad KQ isn’t syndicated…it’s chock full of Sternian intellectual pearls; you’d love it.
BTW, have you been bitch slapped to the floor in Scores by Chuck Zito, AC? It’s all the rage among true Stern connoisseurs and other such lovers of “the high life”.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
“Jason Matheson has his own radio show and TV segment on the Hubbard Empire. He’s pretty openly gay.”
See there stool? Something for everyone out there. Since you’re getting yours, will you tell all of your Democrat pals to call off the “Fairness doctrine” dogs?
May 18th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
#1 problerm with KQ? Music. How many frikkin times can you listen to the same “classic rock”? Over and over and over again. Ooooh! Born To Run for the 600,000the time! Baby! Up next, Rod Stewart sings Maggie Mae for rotation #5,000,000.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
That’s the time warp the Boomers have imposed on pop culture, kermit.
The Stones ‘Satisfaction’ was released as a single in 1965. That’s forty-four years ago. 1965 is as distant in time from 2009 as 1921 is to 1965.
May 18th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
He’s kinda like AC
Wow, that’s a low blow.
May 18th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
I’m firmly against the Fairness Doctirne, and tell my Democrat pals every chance I get.
And I don’t care for Matheson’s show. I was just quick pointing out an out gay person in TC media, like Mitch asked.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:00 am
I still listen, but got to agree with Kermit on that. As soon as the music comes up, I turn the station. But for me its shoving The Eagles or Bob Seger down our throats EVERY morning. And the Stones released more than just Beast of Burden.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:30 am
The problem with KQ’s music is that they’ll pick an artist and play exactly one of their songs for months at a stretch. No others.
I counted a three-month stretch where the only Who song they played was “Behind Blue Eyes”. the only Creedence song was “Fortunate Son”; the only Stones as “It’s Only Rock And Roll”. And then, three months later, all you could hear was “Who Are You”, “Bad Moon Rising” and “Beast of Burden”. Etc, etc, etc.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I remember Barnard when his show was Cat & Kincaid! I’m big on the voice that grabs ya, so I’ve always dug his voice. I was a KQ morning show listener for years and got kinda sick of the humor, so I took a 10 year break and found another morning guy that I dug. Now that he’s gone, I mosey back to Barnard’s show occasionally. It’s a bit like coming home.
May 19th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
The problem with KQ’s music is that they’ll pick an artist and play exactly one of their songs for months at a stretch. No others.
I’ve noticed the same thing about KQ, Mitch — their playlist is so short that a lot of great songs by the artists that they play never appear.
I got out of the habit of listening to Barnard because I have my kids in the car with me at times in the morning and I didn’t really want to explain some of the Morning Crew’s subject matter to my daughter. That and when she was 5, she started singing along to Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name” one day when I had KQ on in the car. Stuff like that tends to focus your attention to, ahem, content.
May 20th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I quit listening to the KQ Morning Show a few years back when Tom Barnard got on a streak of rabid anti-Catholic “humor” that would have had Jack Chick rolling in the aisles. The morning commute was aggravating enough without that noise.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Haven’t listened to it since the early ’90s. Let me know if I am missing anything. My 5 minute commute to work in the morning doesn’t lend itself to much radio time.