Bare Bones (11 page)

A given for any radio personality is doing stunts. Stunts are what get people talking about you. The bigger and crazier, the more people will remember it, your show, and the radio station. When I was in Little Rock, someone else had to do the stunts that I devised because I was running the show and couldn't leave the building. Enter my sidekick—Gilligan. That's not his real name. I actually don't remember his real name. If anyone gets a name on the air, I never call them by their real name off the air, so I don't accidentally do it
on
air. Consequently, I have no idea what Gilligan's real first name is. What I do know is that he began his illustrious career in radio as an intern for my show. That's where I plucked him out of obscurity. He had a stoner, surfer voice that made anything he said sound kind of funny. But really the quality that landed him the job of my sidekick was that he would do whatever stupid thing I told him to.

When it comes to stunts, the general rule is the more stupid the better—until you cross that line from stupid into trouble. The problem is, you never really know when you're going to cross it. In Little Rock, there were two Top 40 stations, Alice 107.7 and us. Because it's rare for a town that size to have two stations both playing pop music, the competition was fierce. We went head to head every day. I know; sounds pretty dramatic for two radio stations that both played the Backstreet Boys . . .

One day, though, the other side went too far. I can no longer remember what started the whole series of events that subsequently unfolded, but their night DJ guy had done something that really irritated me. Whatever it was, I know it was stupid—like sticking-an-Alice-107.7-bumper-sticker-on-our-van stupid. But I was a twenty-one-year-old with a chip on my shoulder. Because of my days of being a puny, poor pirate, there is nothing I hate more than being picked on. If I think someone's picking on me then I've got to fight back fifty times worse just to prove to them I'm not weak.

So that's what I did with Alice 107.7. Irritated that they had messed with us, I hatched a diabolical plan to take over their airwaves. It began with Gilligan and me driving across town to Alice as soon as we got off the air. We had exactly one hour to accomplish our mission; I got off the air at 10
P
.
M
., and Alice's nighttime DJ, T. J. Mack, got off the air at 11.

Alice's parent company had recently turned on a brand-new country station in their cluster of radio stations, so the plan was for Gilligan to take one of the cowboy hats lying around in our building (we had our own country station, too) and have him say he worked in their building. Because if you show up wearing a cowboy hat, they're going to let you in, right?

Gilligan—a muscular six-foot-two-inch guy with long hair, gauged ears, and tattoos everywhere—put a cowboy hat on and beat on the door. Watching from my car across the street like some bad private dick, I saw the door open and Gilligan gesture with his hands. Then the person let him in! We were in.
Holy crap
. We were in their radio station!

It was all up to Gilligan now. In preparation for this moment, I had taught him how to use the equipment inside their studio using pictures they had posted to their website. I had scoured the Alice 107.7 website for pictures of their studios, mapped out a diagram, and used them to show Gilligan how to get on the air by explaining what each of the important buttons did and how to locate them. And he was now in their building.

I started driving around Little Rock, waiting to hear from my hidden spy DJ. At around ten forty, Gilligan called me. “I'm in the bathroom,” he said. “I'm standing on the toilet so no one sees my feet, so no one knows there's an extra body here.”

Gilligan hid in the bathroom and waited. So did I, by the road where people at the station drove out of when they were done. At a little after 11
P
.
M
. I saw T. J. Mack drive right out. Gilligan did what he had been taught to do—he went into the radio station while it was on air, got on the radio station phone, and called my cell phone. Then he took their music three-quarters of the way down (if it goes silent, the engineer gets a call or alarm) and he turned me all the way up on the air. Lastly, he locked the door and left the station.

True to the original plan, I didn't start talking until I was back in front of the station and he had jumped in the car. Then the fun began as we cruised around Little Rock, broadcasting live from my cell phone on our competitor's radio airwaves.

“You don't mess with Bobby Bones at Q100,” I said over a Celine Dion song that had been playing. “Everyone listen to Q100! Everyone listen to Q100!”

“Let me talk. Let me talk,” Gilligan said, grabbing the phone. “You don't f—”

I tried to pull the phone back in time before he could say what he wanted to, which was, “You don't f— with the Bobby Bones show on Q100.” But I didn't get it back before he dropped the F-bomb on a Top 40 station.

Finally someone working in the building got a key and back into the radio station, but not until after we had broadcast for a while. “For a while” felt like three hours while we were driving around. It was probably only a few minutes until they turned the music back up, and Celine Dion drowned us out. Three hours, three minutes. It mattered little. Victory was ours!

Until the next day. I was called into the program director's office at Q100 first thing in the morning. I was told I should be fired and that if I ever did anything like that again, I would never be able to work anywhere in this industry. I didn't get fired, but I got in a whole lot of trouble—trouble that took me beyond my little dreams of living in Little Rock and to a bigger job than I could have ever imagined.

STUPID PANTY HOSE TRICKS

Six months after arriving in Little Rock, I was moving again. This time, though, I was moving out of Arkansas for the first time in my life.

Hijacking our competitor's radio broadcast might have put my job in jeopardy, but it launched my career. It didn't make any waves in the general media, but the trade magazines for the radio industry picked up the story with splashy headlines like
RADIO
ENGAGES
IN
GUERRILLA
WARFARE
. All I did was wait in the car for Gilligan, but the articles made me into the Che Guevara of radio.

There was one man, it turns out, who read those pieces and decided, “That's exactly the kind of person I'd like to work for me.” Jay Shannon, who programmed KISS 96.7 FM in Austin, Texas, called me up a couple of weeks after the now-infamous incident and, without an interview, offered me nights at the station.

That's how I found myself heading to Austin for a new job. I was nervous, because I'd never even been to Austin before I moved there. I hadn't been anywhere. The sum total of my travels were that vacation I took in high school with Evan's family, my summer roofing with Uncle Bub in Kansas City, and a road trip I took in college with a buddy to Chicago to see a baseball game. We were both huge Cubs fans, so we saved up money, drove thirteen hours to watch a game at Wrigley Field, and then turned right around and drove thirteen hours back to school. That was the farthest I'd ever been. I'd never lived outside of the state—in fact, I never lived more than an hour away from Mountain Pine.

When Jay called to offer me the job, he explained that his night guy was leaving and that although I had been in trouble, it was funny trouble. “We can't believe you did that. We want to hire you, Trouble,” he said. “Move to Austin.”

So I did. As frightening as it was going somewhere that felt so far from home and everyone, I knew it was the right thing to do for my career. Austin dwarfed Little Rock in size. The move to a much bigger market was a huge one for me and I knew it.

Courtney helped me pack up my stuff and move in what was the worst road trip ever. Courtney drove a truck with a trailer that contained all my stuff, and I was following behind in my little white Pontiac Sunfire with 160,000 miles on it, when we hit a massive ice storm. What normally would have been an eight-hour trip took us twenty-seven hours of ice, snow, eighteen-wheelers that had skidded out, and pure misery. All my stuff was ruined in the move. But I was happy to make it in one piece and have as good a friend as Courtney who was willing to go through hell like that with me.

On the drive into my first day of work at KISS FM, I was bowled over by Austin. Heading north up Congress Avenue, the state capitol looming in front of me, flanked by the tallest towers of glass and steel I had ever seen, I thought, Holy cow! Now
this
is a big city. Little Rock felt very far away. And now, very small.

As soon I walked into the radio station I was greeted by Jay, a friendly man who was not quite old enough to be a father figure but too old to be a big brother. Either way, he took a big chance on me and wound up being one of the most instrumental forces in my career.

From the start of my job, I felt comfortable enough that I talked to Jay almost every day after the show to discuss how it had gone. He never asked me to do this; I always wanted to. He made the radio station an environment I felt comfortable in and wanted to be a part of, which was no easy feat. Jay—who never air-checked me, meaning that he never made me listen to a tape of myself as part of a critique, an excruciating process for a DJ—never made me feel criticized, not one time.

Because of that, I craved his feedback, which was wide-ranging and mostly always right. Even when he knew I was doing wrong, he let me learn from my mistakes. He helped me with the technical aspects of radio, including how to edit down my breaks. Particularly at nights, which is what I started out doing at KISS FM, no one cares about any sort of small talk. Listeners are just waiting for you to get back to the music. “Whatever you think you're going to say, cut it down,” he said. “Focus on the point and get to it faster and funnier.”

I wanted that kind of advice from him, because I knew he had total confidence in me. The whole management at the station did, it seemed—so much so that only a few months after I had arrived they gave me my own morning show.

This unexpected promotion was precipitated by another job offer, to go to the West Coast. Although I had just started in Austin, I wasn't under contract. And Seattle was an even bigger market than Austin. So I approached the station's general manager, Dusty Black, to explain the situation. “Hey, I think I may go to Seattle,” I said. “They're offering me a job, and since I have no contract here, it seems like the right move.”

He presided over all six radio stations in our building, heading up everything from programming to sales. Dusty was everybody's boss in Austin. A stout middle-aged guy, he was really pleasant and very Texan, even wearing a cowboy hat at times. Having made a ton of money earlier in radio, he lived in a huge house in the fancy part of town, did his job, but didn't worry about much. I liked Dusty a lot.

“What do you want to stay?” he asked.

Before I moved to Austin, the station had a syndicated morning show that was doing so terrible they cut it. In its place was nothing but music. In that moment, I decided they should put me in that slot.

“I want to do mornings,” I said.

“Let me have a couple days to think about it,” Dusty said.

Now, I was twenty-two at the time. They should have never given me this job. I was way too young and too dumb. But on Monday, Dusty called me into his office and offered me the morning show for fifty thousand dollars a year.

Not only was I the youngest morning show host of any of the top-fifty rated markets in the country, but I was now rich. Fifty thousand dollars was more money than I had ever imagined I'd be making in my life, and I hadn't even been out of college for three months. With rent worries a thing of the past, I immediately moved out of the apartment I was sharing with a roommate who would leave me little notes like “You owe me seven cents for the slice of bread you took.” I'm not kidding. And I would literally find the seven cents that I owed her and put it on the counter. I even referred to her as “the Devil” on the air, which didn't help our living situation much.

In order to put the Devil in context, here is a quick list of the roommates I've had in my life, in descending rank:

Evan: My best friend from high school, with whom I shared a college dorm room for about a second. One day I came back from work, and he had just moved out. Was gone.
WTF?
It was embarrassing to have someone just jump ship like that. Looking back, however, I was pretty difficult to live with. I had terrible hours in college; I woke up early and went to bed really, really late. And I didn't party. There was
no
partying in the room. When I was there, I needed rest. Still, it was pretty crappy to have my best friend bail like that.

Josh: I lived with Josh twice. Once after Evan moved out when he was assigned to me. And then in Little Rock with his wife. Good dude. Quiet. Quirky. I remember when he moved into my dorm room. I wasn't there, but all of his stuff was, so I went through his closet. It was all slacks and T-shirts. I thought, This guy might just be nerdier than I am. And luckily, he was! We were perfect roomies.