Bare Bones (22 page)

A TOTAL NIGHTMARE

I am never late. Ever. To anything. If I am late, that's because something is wrong—like I've-been-hit-by-a-car wrong. But that's never happened, so as I said, I'm never late.

I wish I could say the same thing about the rest of the people on my show.

Although I come in anytime between 3 and 4
A
.
M
., depending on what's happening that day, the official start time for everyone else is 4:30
A
.
M
. so that we have a half hour to organize ourselves before the show starts at 5
A
.
M
. Central.

Lateness is one of my biggest pet peeves. I get so mad when someone is not on time. I'm even madder at myself if for some reason I can't be somewhere when I said I would. It's the most disrespectful thing I can think of; if people are late, it's as if they're saying their time is more important than whomever they've kept waiting. So when people on the show started to consistently come in late, I called a meeting with my staff and gave it to them straight.

“Okay, this being late stuff is out of control,” I said. “It's totally inconsiderate to the rest of the team. Over and over and over again?”

If that wasn't clear enough, I made a new rule.

“If you're one second late, you're going home.”

After I gave the “be here or be sent home” speech, some of them still couldn't be on time for more than a couple of days. Three days after our meeting, two people who shall remain nameless showed up late. By only a few minutes, but it was still late. And this was after we HAD JUST TALKED ABOUT LATENESS NOT BEING TOLERATED. I was so pissed.

“I told you, you have to be there at four thirty, not four thirty-one,” I said. “I can't make a rule and not enforce it. So, go home.”

They couldn't believe it when it happened, but I sent two people home from the show.

I know that was a hard-ass thing to do, but I don't know any other way to be. It's how I am with myself. I've got to be effective with time management if I'm going to manage all the projects I juggle—from radio to my band to writing this book! (At the time I was only speaking to a couple of people who couldn't make it into work on time. But actually, as I write this, everyone except Ray has had an incident of being late within the last thirty days. And it still makes me mad.)

Getting everything done for
The Bobby Bones Show
takes laser focus and a constant vigilance when it comes to time. Cutting commercials for sponsors in all the cities we are in; doing liners for each of our ninety affiliate stations where I read the name of each station and anything else sent in to localize the show; and recording the weekend countdown is all in a day's work for me. So everything with me is about what can I shoehorn into my time in the studio so that I'm not there for ten hours a day, while still completing it all at a high level?

I've found a pattern where in the early hours before the show, I start rattling off station liners for all the affiliates. When I'm done with that, I'll do some local segments for certain cities. Then it's usually time to hop on the air and start the show. At the first break, I start recording the countdown for
Country Top 30,
my four-hour weekend country music program. Then we're back on live. Do the show. Break. Do some commercials. Break. More countdown. Back on.

It just doesn't stop. From 5
A
.
M
. to 10
A
.
M
., I literally don't stop. I can't even go to the bathroom. There isn't a single forty-five-second window for me to get up and pee. And that's how I like it. For as many hours a day and years of my life as I've been doing this, it is still a rush. This is my comfort zone. When I'm sitting behind a console board, controlling all those buttons, I feel my best. That's why even though most people in my world don't run their own board, push their own buttons, I still do. Most personalities just have their microphone and producers who run everything for them. Not me. I want to be able to control every slide, every commercial, every single song that comes through. I'm not bragging or showing off; it's actually the opposite. I should be able to let it go, at least a little bit. And I try. But I feel like it won't get done right unless I do it myself.

I'm a control freak. I like knowing that if something gets screwed up, I have only myself to blame. And on October 24, 2014, I screwed up big time.

Now, I have to be very careful about what I write here. Even in a joking manner. I got in a lot of trouble with the U.S. government (you know,
those
guys) because of something I did on the air that day. Something that was a total accident. Something that ended with me getting my company hit with a fine of one million dollars. Let's just call it the Million-Dollar Bad Thing. I am so nervous even to write about it that I'm just going to say, google “Bobby Bones Fined $1 Million.” What a terrible writer I am! I ask you to pay good money for a book in which I require that you google something to get the full story. Listen, I'm not getting in trouble with Uncle Sam again for a paragraph of a book that maybe no one is even going to read anyway.

I'm joking now, but at the time that the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, I wasn't laughing. In fact I was panicked that I was about to be fired. Not even when Charlamagne Tha God, DJ for one of the other biggest morning shows in the country, out of New York City, and a mentor and friend, sent me hundreds of emojis laughing so hard they were crying could I calm down. And if Charlamagne couldn't get me out of my head, no one could.

I first met Charlamagne at an iHeartRadio Music Festival several years earlier when the company we both worked for took its top people for an off-site where we were stuck together for three days. That's when I became friends with Charlamagne and Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (aka Kennedy, the original conservative MTV VJ now turned Fox Business Network host). I don't use the word “friend” lightly, and I'm even stingier with the term in media circles, but Charlamagne, Kennedy, and I became a tight little triangle of friends.

I particularly identified with Charlamagne, who grew up poor in South Carolina and, like me, had to grind out a career path for himself. Ever since that festival where we met, we talk all the time on the phone, sometimes three times a week. We motivate each other in our work, because we are both examples that where you're from doesn't have to determine who you become.

So it was no surprise, then, that after the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, he was one of the first and only people to reach out to me.

“It sucks right now, but fight through it,” he said, “because this is what legends are made of.”

I appreciated Charlamagne—I always do. But even he couldn't get through to me with this one. I felt like a complete loser. People trusted me to do the biggest show this format's ever seen—and I let this happen? It wasn't like I went on a creative limb and fell off. What happened was just a dumb technical error that shook my foundation. And usually nothing,
nothing
messes with me.

Whenever I do something on a massive level—like when I hosted morning TV with Kelly Ripa or some of the biggest music managers in country came to see one of my Raging Idiots shows—I don't experience it as pressure and get nervous. Instead it's time to compete and win—and I get pumped. Now, sometimes I don't win. But I always try to.

The Million-Dollar Bad Thing rocked me pretty hard, though, not only because of the enormous sum of money iHeartMedia was facing in terms of FCC fines but because I let down the same people who had taken such a big chance on me. Unlike many of the other disappointments I have experienced, this was one I couldn't compartmentalize and put away.

Work wasn't the only thing in my life that was out of control at that moment. After Rachel and I dated for about a year, her team convinced her that she needed to stop seeing me because it was ruining her career. I had predicted this moment months before. “You know what's going to happen?” I had told her. “They're going to tell you that I'm hurting your career. And maybe I am. If you date the biggest radio personality on iHeartRadio, you may be penalized by Cumulus or CBS.”

Rachel didn't want to hear it. She told me how much she loved me and wanted to stay together. But I cut it off. I couldn't stand the idea that there was even a chance I was hurting someone's career for a relationship that probably wasn't going to last anyway—no matter how good it was. It didn't matter that we laughed all the time. Or that we started as friends and morphed into a relationship in the best possible way. I knew no one would stay with me long term.

As soon as Rachel and I split up, I found myself in a bizarre scenario. For the first time in the short history of Bobby Estell, women, and lots of them, were interested in me. It was crazy. Women, real-life women, wanted to go out with
me
. So, like a man who's been starving for years and is taken to an all-you-can-eat buffet, I dated everyone. At the height of this small blip in an otherwise flatlined social life, I went out with six or seven girls—all at once.

They were actresses and musicians, famous folks, but I never talked about any of it on the air. I would have, but it was their business. That's always my rule with what I'll say on air—I'm not going to talk about
you;
I'm going to talk about
me
. And then, if you're okay with me talking about you, I'll talk about you, too. But in terms of the women I was seeing during this period, I didn't need everyone to know I was dating them. I especially didn't want the women I was dating to know about each other!

Keeping my stories straight was the hardest part of being a Casanova. (The second-hardest part was typing that line.) I had to remember what I had or hadn't told to each woman. Sometimes I'd repeat myself. Other times I made a reference to something she'd never heard before. It was a mess. Again, I didn't have tons of experience with women, and certainly never juggled multiple relationships, so this was all Louis-and-Clark stuff to me. One area where I nailed it, however, was my phone system.

I've only had one phone number for the past fifteen years, and I don't keep two phones. So I came up with the idea to put the women I was seeing into my phone under the names of old Cubs baseball players. In my twisted code, a woman whose name started with M appeared as Mark Grace—the Cubs' first baseman—when she texted. I could be out for a romantic dinner with said Mark Grace and suddenly my phone is blowing up with Andre Dawson, who played right field; Shawon Dunston (shortstop); Ryne Sandberg (second baseman); I had the whole 1989 National League East's winning team sending me text messages.

It was fun for a minute, but more as a diversion than anything else. It wasn't like I sowed my wild oats. I went on lots of dates, held lots of hands, paid for lots of dinners, and that's about it. In truth, I didn't go out with any of my Cubs more than a handful of times. We'd make out a little bit and then become friends. My fear of getting an STD or a woman pregnant slammed the brakes on getting freaky. Sad but true.

In the end, my serial dating was more wearing and exhausting than anything else. I couldn't even find fun in dating beautiful and occasionally really famous women. Everything seemed to be draining—even work—mostly because I had stopped sleeping. The Million-Dollar Bad Thing was out there and hanging over my head. At this point, the dollar amount still hadn't been decided, but I was told it was going to be a Five-Million-Dollar Bad Thing. I beat myself up about it over and over while I lay in bed at night.

The stress pushed me over some kind of edge and I found myself reliving a series of traumatic events that had happened since moving to Nashville and which until this point I had kept bottled up.

The first messed-up thing happened after I'd been in Nashville for only three days. On my company's suggestion, I had moved into a fancy, gated neighborhood right on a golf course. I thought it was way too expensive a place to live, but they insisted. “It doesn't matter. You've had too much crap happen to you,” one exec said, referring not only to the crazed lunatic with a knife who had been waiting for me outside the radio station in Austin but also to repeated death threats against me.

I wasn't even that controversial. I talked about not getting girls and my dog, Dusty. Still, people wanted to mess with me. (After a person repeatedly called to say, “If you walk outside of the radio station, I'm going to kill you,” the station had to build a whole bulletproof-glass room in the front of the building and hire security.) So I moved into my super safe house in Nashville with twenty-four-hour security. And three days later (I hadn't even started to unpack my boxes) I was asleep when everything went insane—my phone, my computer, and my sense of well-being.