{"id":3772,"date":"2008-12-08T13:15:29","date_gmt":"2008-12-08T18:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3772"},"modified":"2009-01-13T19:03:34","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T00:03:34","slug":"rutabaga-bob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3772","title":{"rendered":"Rutabaga Bob"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m bummed to hear that T.D. “Tommy” Mischke<\/a>\u00a0has gotten whacked at KSTP-AM.<\/p>\n

I’m not, of course, surprised.\u00a0 More on that below.<\/p>\n

David Brauer:<\/p>\n

\n
I called Mischke Saturday morning and he was gracious, diplomatic and cautious. “I want to be able to talk about it, but I need a little time before I can,” he said.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No doubt.\u00a0 Mischke’s career with Hubbard has been a blessing for all of us who’ve loved his show over the years.\u00a0 But in this day and age it was also a pretty unlikely gift, I think, to <\/em>Mischke himself.\u00a0 I have a hunch (an unqualified one, but I’m confident in it) that he knows it.<\/p>\n

Brauer gets this part wrong, though.<\/p>\n

\n

He began as Don Vogel’s sidekick in 1992…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Nope.\u00a0 He started\u00a0in 1986.\u00a0 At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking by it.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Back when I was screening calls for Don Vogel, we had a regular caller – “The Phantom Caller<\/a>“.\u00a0 He’d call in and give a different pseudonym, sometimes a couple of times a week, sometimes with a little gap in between.\u00a0 I quickly figured out his voice; I’d cue Don that I thought the “Phantom Caller” was on the line; Don would go to him quickly; he was a huge fan.\u00a0 Mischke may have known how many times he left Don in stitches and gasping with laughter on the air; he probably didn’t know how many times he incapacitated all of us in the control room as well.<\/p>\n

Tom had some ingenious moments; I have\u00a0a cassette of some of the great Phantom Caller bits from Vogel’s first go-around at KSTP, and it’s still hilarious stuff, each of them a finely-honed little gem of writing delivered with the kind of voices that Mischke has made famous for the past decade and a half.\u00a0 The best moment of all?\u00a0 One blustery, rainy fall day, we took the Vogel show on the road, to a display window in the old “Powers” store in downtown Minneapolis (it’s long gone, of course; it was on one of the blocks where Gaviidae Common sits today, if memory serves).\u00a0 As I stood outside with a microphone looking for comments from the assembled multitude (which was gratifyingly large for that era of KSTP shows), a guy came dashing up Sixth Street in a yellow unitard with a red cape and a mask.\u00a0 He plunged into the center of the crowd, saying not a word, but handing out little one-page, handwritten humorous blurbettes – each completely unique.\u00a0 He handed ’em out until he ran out – maybe twenty seconds – and then ran off to a car that waited with (as I recall) a getaway driver down the street.\u00a0 We spent the next segment having people read their own personalized Phantom Caller (and, I guess, Handbiller) bits live on the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was not long after this that I actually met <\/em>“The Phantom Caller”.\u00a0 Back during the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, talk radio was a financial gulag.\u00a0 The listeners were older and not all that well-off; the audiences at KSTP were a fraction of what they’d be a few short years later after Limbaugh resuscitated the format.\u00a0 As a result, I – like a lot of entry-level talk station employees – freelanced like a madman to make ends meet.\u00a0 One of my many side gigs involved doing freelance writing for a slew of Saint Paul neighborhood papers (which, at that time, was a steadier source of income than trying to freelance for the dailies – if not quite as “glamorous”).\u00a0 Two of them were “The Highland Villager” and “The Grand Avenue Gazette” – both edited by one Mike Mischke.<\/p>\n

One day I drove down to their offices in Highland to turn in a story before I drove out to the station.\u00a0 Mike looked my copy over as we traded some small talk about the Vogel show – and then looked up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“By the way, I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but my brother Tommy is the Phantom Caller”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It all clicked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I did, as a matter of fact, sit on that factoid until the last show of Don’s first hitch at KSTP, back in January of 1987.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I listened to Mischke for much of his career at KSTP, although I regrettably couldn’t listen much after he moved to days, a few years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tom’s more than a host, of course; he’s also a neighbor.\u00a0 He coached my (our, actually) kids’ softball team a few years back; I run into him periodically at the neighborhood coffee shop or the grocery store.\u00a0 He actually remembers me, which is kind of a kick, and not really surprising.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Mischke’s show was a genuine original; all the right people liked him (Garrison Keillor had him on Prairie Home Companion<\/em> as a musical guest a few years back – Tom is, of course, a very talented pianist and harmonical player).\u00a0 But like a lot of genuine originals in any art form (and Mischke’s radio was a sort of art form – and I say this while stressing that radio as a whole is a craft), the art depended on having a patron to shield the artist from the spikes and deadfalls of the open market.<\/p>\n

That someone, so rumor always had it, was Ginny Morris, one of the granddaughters of Stanley Hubbard the Elder, the founder of Hubbard Broadcasting (and one of the great pioneers of American broadcasting in his own right) and the person who really <\/em>pulls the strings on the radio side at Hubbard.\u00a0 Ms. Morris – so the rumors in the industry had it, at least when I was paying attention to them – kept Mischke on the payroll, and on the air, for many long years when there was no explicit market demand <\/em>for a free-form, eccentric stream-of-consciousness show like his.\u00a0 As talk radio morphed into what it is today – a venue for partisan anger, humor and information – Mischke was an outlier who, I think it’s fair to say, could only exist in the market with the aid of someone who really really wanted<\/em> him to exist.<\/p>\n

And like anyone with a cult following, his cult can’t imagine life without him.\u00a0 David Brauer – himself a former KSTP-AM morning guy and someone for whom the radio market could not find a place – does what many of Mischke’s biggest (or at least most-prominent) fans do; sneer down their rhetorically-patrician noses at the hoi-polloi that just didn’t get it<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

Expect a torrent of outrage; for 17 years, Mischke has been a genuine, funny, decent presence in a commercial-radio landscape filled with haters and bloviators.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If a conservative talk show host orders a pizza in the woods and David Brauer or Garrison Keillor or Nick Coleman isn’t there to hear it, is he still\u00a0hateful?<\/p>\n

Seriously – do\u00a0Mischke’s more exceptionalistic fans seriously believe that Tom was a higher life form that suffered the fools with whom he was forced (by some unthinking, lumpen fate) to associate out of\u00a0the goodness of his\u00a0own sainted heart?<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0\u00a0Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and Dr.\u00a0Laura Schlesinger and all\u00a0of the other “haters and bloviators”\u00a0during the station’s golden age that, as it happens, coincided with Mischke’s career as a headliner, gave KSTP-AM the opportunity to give Mischke his opportunity<\/em>.\u00a0 “Hate and bloviation” (AKA “opinion that dissents from Garrison Keillor and David Brauer and Steve Perry and the rest of the Twin Cities’ closely-held media elite) allowed KSTP to run <\/em>a show like Mischke’s – a show that earned the station a lot of high-end mindshare but never (so the rumor mill has it) got the numbers that would have allowed it to survive purely on the merits of its own market share.<\/p>\n

Limbaugh and Jason Lewis carried Mischke – not the other way around.<\/p>\n

In the past few years, KSTP-AM embarked (this is my opinion, but I’ll stand by it) on a suicide dive, following the opinions of some pretty dubious consultants who never much liked the conservative talk phenomenon; the shows that pulled KSTP-AM out of palookaville fifteen and twenty years ago, Limbaugh and Jason Lewis (along with Joe Soucheray, who still delivers the numbers although he’s been doing essentially the same show every day since Bob Dole was a candidate, not a pitchman) got away without much overt gnashing and wailing on KSTP’s part.\u00a0 That, combined with the drastic drop in ad revenue tied to the economic slowdown, is making life pretty dismal (according to the rumor mill as well as the news of layoffs at Channel Five)\u00a0over at Hubbard.<\/p>\n

So what’s next for Tom?\u00a0 Tom’s always audibly chafed at life in corporate America, even the indulgent, “Lord of the Flies” version of it that Hubbard seemed to have provided him for the past sixteen years; he’s always been able to not only string together a living, but do it with style.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s happening all over the business.\u00a0 All <\/em>of radio is hitting an epic revenue trough.\u00a0 There is almost no part of radio that isn’t being gutted by the combined onslaught of the IPod, satellite radio, the proliferation of media.<\/p>\n

Except conservative talk, of course.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For better or worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Me?\u00a0 I hope his goodwill with Garrison Keillor pays off for him.\u00a0 I think he’d be an excellent addition to some <\/em>part of Keillor’s little empire (although Tom might find Keillor a much less understanding or tolerable boss than Ginny Morris); I think having TD alongside Tim Russell and Sue Scott would be genius.<\/p>\n

\n

[Conflict of interest note; Konrad hired me at KSTP in the mid-’90s; he was a very supportive boss. Tommy was a very supportive colleague.]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[Conflict of interest note of my own:\u00a0 I also used to work with Konrad, at KDWB in the early ’90s.\u00a0 In 1991, KSTP-AM interviewed for a new program director; Steve and I were the final two.\u00a0 Steve got the job, partly because he’s a very talented guy who deserved a job, and partly because the consultant who was being paid to bend Ginny Morris’ ear was convinced that political talk was dead, and that Limbaugh was a success not because he was conservative, but because he was breezy and irreverent.\u00a0 In his world, Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and, for that matter, the Northern Alliance had no future – but Turi Rider was a creative genius.\u00a0 I disagreed; Steve got the job.\u00a0 Would KSTP-AM be better-off today had I gotten the gig?\u00a0 Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n

But at my third interview, whilst discussing the point with the consultant who, it was clear, was going to make the call, and feeling like I was losing the point, I figured I’d toss out a favor to an old friend.<\/p>\n

“If you like funny radio…have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?\u00a0 I hear he just got fired in Milwaukee”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I think I have is tape somewhere”, said the consultant.\u00a0 “I haven’t really listened to it”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Give it a listen”, I said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It wasn’t long after that that Vogel came back to KSTP-AM (along with not a few of the products from a number of my answers to the question “what would you do if you were the program director”).\u00a0 And then they hired Mischke, first as the producer and then his sidekick.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Don on left, Tom on right, and the listener who owns the photo<\/a> in the middle).<\/p>\n

Make what you will of it.\u00a0 Just saying.<\/p>\n

Anyway – best of luck, Tom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m bummed to hear that T.D. “Tommy” Mischke\u00a0has gotten whacked at KSTP-AM. I’m not, of course, surprised.\u00a0 More on that below. David Brauer: I called Mischke Saturday morning and he was gracious, diplomatic and cautious. “I want to be able to talk about it, but I need a little time before I can,” he said. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-mitch","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}