Bare Bones (12 page)

Matt: Another Henderson State undergrad, he was trying to do radio just like me. After I got him a job at KLAZ, he went by the name Scott Shady. I think he thought he was Eminem's little half cousin. He was my sidekick for a few years, and we would drive back from work every night and prank-call
The John and Jeff Show,
based out of L.A. We also played a lot of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball on my PlayStation.

Courtney: My best friend. TV sharing. Nap sharing. Life sharing. Brother and soul mate. But I was always really jealous of the number of girls he could get. He was as charming as he was good looking. So it seemed like a revolving door of “girls Bobby could never get.” That's the only reason he isn't number one.

Jennifer: One of the best humans I have ever met. She was clean and paid rent on time, and her mom knew we were both broke so she bought us groceries once a month. It was the greatest living arrangement ever. When I was sick, she took care of me. When I was hungry, her mom fed me. When the house smelled like a dude, she made sure it didn't. Shout-out to female roommates everywhere. And because of Jennifer, to this day, I still use a loofah.

Oh yeah, back to the start of my radio career . . .

Less than a year after I graduated from college,
The Bobby Bones Show
was born. For a while it was four hours of music, punctuated by a few announcements from me. It was basically the night show, only I had to wake up earlier. The reason I wanted a morning show, however, was because I wanted to talk more. As I grew more confident I tried to alter the ratio to less music and more talk, but I got pushback from Dusty and Jay. “Music gets ratings; you don't,” they said. “Music's proven; you're not.”

They were right. But I continued to push for more time making jokes, taking calls, and discussing current events, and slowly the ratings got a little better and a little better. Although Jay, Dusty, and I struggled over this issue for years, I was able to build, and slowly outpace, the station's ratings historically during the morning. And when you start outpacing the ratings, your argument becomes a whole lot stronger.

I'd like to claim total responsibility for the improving ratings, but a lot of the credit had to go to my new sidekick, Lunchbox.

Ah, Lunchbox. Where do I begin? I guess with how we met. We were—naturally—at a bar. (Lunchbox is a party animal. In our little group, he's the wild one. If there's alcohol around he's going to drink it. And he's going to have a great time.) I was doing a station event that he showed up to because his sister knew my morning show. Lunchbox, who wasn't yet Lunchbox but Dan Chappell.

An Austin native, he was working as a delivery driver for Jason's Deli when I met him. He was really loud and obnoxious, and funny—more loud and obnoxious than funny, if I'm honest, but that somehow made him funnier. At the time,
The Bobby Bones Show
was just an intern named Jill and me. Looking to add people to the mix, I had a feeling about this guy and approached Lunchbox: “Hey, man, would you want to come and arm-wrestle female rugby players tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said.

Lunchbox showed up the next morning along with the rugby players, who had arrived to promote a local event. I thought Lunchbox would probably get dominated and that'd be funny enough. But Lunchbox dialed it up. Although he lost to all the team members, he still talked trash to each and every one of them.

“You all got lucky!”

“If we wrestled again, I'd crush you.”

“Were you wearing some kind of cream? I couldn't get a grip.”

“CHEATERS!”

And he kept on and on.

I thought it was the funniest thing that after getting killed by all these women, this guy still had no problem running his mouth. He had all the makings of a great sidekick: funny, game, and totally shameless. So I asked him to come back, again and again, until I was able to hire him part-time. Because I couldn't afford to hire him full-time, he worked a second job at Sam's Club.

That the man who was on the radio with me every day was also a stock boy at Sam's Club pretty much sums up the ethos of those early days of
The Bobby Bones Show.
It was then Lunchbox; my intern, Jill; and me—and we were all kids. At twenty-three, I was the elder statesman. Lunchbox was twenty-two, and Jill, twenty-one, was still in college! She would leave the studio at eight o'clock to make it to school in time for class. It was nuts they let us have a show. The one thing we had going for us: we were cheap.

We worked on a bare-bones budget. Lunchbox didn't even have a microphone in the studio. So we sent him to the streets and he did all the bits on his cell phone. He was and is a total team player, willing to do anything at any point. We did all kinds of stuff to him. Once we wrapped him in bubble wrap and threw him out of a moving car. Another time we had him climb a huge water tower. There was something we called Pain Day, where we would do all these painful things to Lunchbox like putting electric shock probes on him, giving him a body wax, or having him walk across hot coals. We challenged him to see how much butter he could eat in an hour, staged a naked run in the city, and had a competition to see who could put the most clothespins on their face. He even married a listener (who was paid a hundred dollars for the honor), though the marriage was annulled the next day.

If I had needed someone to dress up in a clown outfit and run down Sixth Street with two sheep and a casket, he would have said, “Okay! When?” I mean, for Pete's sake, he robbed a store for me. Well, he didn't
really
rob it. Actually he didn't rob it at all. Here's what happened.

In July 2004, after about a year of the morning show, I was watching some old show on PBS late at night where a guy wearing panty hose on his head goes up to people on the street and starts talking to them like his face isn't smushed down by a woman's stocking. I thought it was hilarious and immediately my mind went to, What if we put panty hose on Lunchbox? Instead of talking to people on the street, I imagined Lunchbox walking into a convenience store with panty hose on his head, like how robbers do when they are going to hold it up. Except Lunchbox obviously wasn't going to rob the store. He'd just walk in and buy some gum or something. That was the bit.

The next morning around 7
A
.
M
., after Lunchbox, Jill, and I chewed over the events of the day—John Kerry tapping John Edwards as his running mate and Britney Spears getting engaged to K-Fed—Lunchbox drove down South Congress Avenue to a convenience store. Using his cell phone to give listeners the play-by-play of the gag, he put the panty hose over his face, walked into the store, and purchased a pack of gum.

We just wanted to see what kind of reaction he would get. From his reports via cell phone, it wasn't much. The clerk rang up his gum for $1.09 and that was it. We were wrong, though. The reaction, as it turned out, was not pleasant.

While Lunchbox was driving back to the studio, four or five cop cars pulled him over. With their guns pointed at him, the policemen shouted for him to put his hands up. This was no speeding-violation stop. Unbeknownst to any of us, the convenience store clerk had hit the silent alarm under the cash register when he saw a guy with panty hose enter. When the police arrived he described the “getaway” car, and Lunchbox was caught within minutes.

The officers threw Lunchbox in the back of a cop car and drove to the radio station, where they summoned me. When I got outside I saw employees from the station trying to enter the parking lot to park their cars for work, except they couldn't because cop cars with flashing lights were blocking it. I ran up to the cops, who said they were going to arrest me, and that's when I saw Lunchbox handcuffed in the back of a cop car.
Holy crap
.

In the end I was not arrested because there was nothing to charge me with. I went back inside to finish the show, or as much as I could before I got pulled off the air. Meanwhile Lunchbox called me from jail. His voice is so deep, and he has such a thick accent, that people who only know him from the radio are always surprised that he's just some skinny white guy. He sounds so big, but he's not. Just a skinny dude—and now he was in jail, charged with making a terrorist threat, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and up to a four-thousand-dollar fine. I had to call his parents. It was an awesome conversation. “Sir, so we did this segment where your son put panty hose on his head . . .”

Before I left work that day, I was suspended indefinitely. And Dusty, my general manager, had to cut his vacation short and fly back to town because of this. I felt awful, but Jay reassured me (even though he had moved to San Antonio to work for a different station by this point). “As long as this doesn't blow up into too much of a story, you'll be fine,” he said. “We'll get through this.”

Jay had believed in me enough to let me fail from day one. He understood I was going to learn the most by messing up. Before the panty hose incident, we did a dumb segment on April Fool's Day where I said, “Hey, I'm going to get on the air and act like we're doing casting for a Justin Timberlake video. Let's see who shows up. And whoever does, we'll put their pictures on our website.” Then I waited about half an hour and actually made the fake announcement about casting for a JT video. Girls dropped whatever they were doing and showed up at the station for a chance to be in the “music video,” and just as I promised, we put their pictures up on the website under a banner that read,
APRIL
FOOL
'
S
:
WE GOT YOU
.

One of those ladies wound up suing us. Now, usually if a program director hears the word “lawsuit,” they go ballistic. But, you know, Jay never got too upset about it. He just kind of handled it. Giving me room to make my own mistakes was the biggest vote of confidence I could imagine receiving.

I was grateful to Jay for it, and clearly took full advantage in terms of messing up. “As long as it doesn't blow up too big,” he had said after Lunchbox was arrested. Well, when I say that the panty hose incident “blew up,” I mean it
blew up
. That night every local newscast flashed Lunchbox's mug shot and the
Bobby Bones Show
logo. When the radio station's attorneys went down to the police station to bail Lunchbox out, they had to take him out the back so he wouldn't be overrun by the throng of TV reporters and cameramen waiting outside the jail.

It didn't stop there. The next morning, it was on the front page of the
Austin Statesman
. “We are taking this very seriously,” police spokesman Kevin Buchman told the
Statesman
. “People at convenience stores, banks and other places of business are on heightened alert, and some business owners have been known to carry weapons. Trying to pull off a prank endangered the life of not only himself but anybody else who might have been in the store.”

It must have been the slowest news day in the history of news, because the Associated Press picked it up. And anytime the AP picks up a story, it goes to everyone who subscribes to the newswire service all over the world. Dusty had to release a written statement: “KISS FM does not endorse behavior that may endanger the public or our employees, and we take these matters very seriously.”

The story continued to grow as it hit CNN, Yahoo's news site, and every outlet imaginable. While watching a late-night talk show, I saw a segment on stupid news—and there we were.

It wasn't just late-night audiences who were laughing at us. Every other radio show in Austin and beyond mocked us and spun the story out until it turned into Lunchbox robbing a convenience store while wearing a ski mask, and the both of us getting fired. Lunchbox hadn't robbed anyone or worn a ski mask—and we weren't fired. Not yet, at least.

We were, however, suspended without pay until further notice. KISS FM's management was furious with me. As one week of suspension turned into two weeks, I had no clue what was going to happen. There were court dates, attorney meetings, and backroom dealings with radio executives while I was left to spend all day sitting on my couch, growing what I could of a beard and contemplating what a moron I had been.

It was a terrible idea. A terrible idea. Not because I was probably going to get fired, but because Lunchbox could have died. The convenience store clerk could have pulled a gun out and shot him. How had I not thought that through before? Had I been so concerned about stunts and ratings that I was willing to put another person's life in jeopardy? What a selfish jerk.

The truth is that most of the kinds of stunts done on the radio have an element of danger to them. Like I said, what makes something go from being a funny bit to a bad idea is if something bad happens. That's it. Years after this, some radio DJs I know at the local station in Sacramento held a contest in which selected listeners competed to see how much water they could drink without peeing. Now, this is a bit that a thousand radio stations have done. But in this case, the twenty-eight-year-old mother of three children who won the contest was found dead of water intoxication a few hours later. Her husband was eventually awarded $16.5 million in a wrongful death lawsuit he brought against the radio station.

It's never anyone's intention for someone to get hurt in these gags. I knew it wasn't mine. But even if Lunchbox didn't get hurt, I'd probably ruined our careers. During our suspension, we knew it was bad while playing golf. (Now that I was making a smooth 50K a year, I felt like I needed to learn golf. You know, like the other millionaires.) While Lunchbox and I were playing, we overheard one of the men teeing up before us say to the other, “Did you hear about those radio DJs that robbed the store?”

Lunchbox and I looked at each other in disbelief.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I said. “Even old people know about this?”