by Bobby Bones
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.
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.