Bare Bones

by Bobby Bones

  “I hope whoever takes over my job is prepared,” Amy said.

  It was getting ugly fast, and there was no dialing it back now. Microphones up. Keep it real, right?

  But her self-defense only egged on Lunchbox, who continued to mock her, now not only for her food issues but also for her complaining about her job. As his tone grew louder and more aggressive, Amy became quieter, her eyes welling up with tears. Most human beings would give it a rest at that point, but not Lunchbox; he dumped the candy that had been in the tube all over her head.

  “Here is a sucker so you can suck on it while you cry,” he said.

  Refusing to acknowledge Lunchbox directly, which was her best weapon against him, she said to me, “He is such a jerk.”

  On air, she held it together, claiming she was letting the whole thing roll off her back and that she wasn’t going to cry. But as soon as the show was done, she walked out of the studio and quit. She was done. At least for the next hour or so. Then she calmed down. That day was such a mess, I had to ask Amy if I had all the details down when I was writing this chapter. And it all started with something so stupid and small.

  The bad blood between these two had gone far enough. I had to mediate and make them at least relax around each other. Peace didn’t come immediately (or even close to immediately; I think it actually took a couple of years). But finally they worked it out, because they’re both good people. Though obnoxious and loud, fundamentally Lunchbox is a really good guy. We’ve been together longer than anyone else on that show—and remember, he went to jail for me.

  Amy’s just a good person—no caveats. In all ways, from her faith to the connections she makes with others, Amy is really one of the best people I’ve ever met. She is definitely the most devout person I know. But she doesn’t preach and is never in your face about anything. She leads by example.

  There are only about four or five people who I can honestly say have really motivated me to be a better person—and Amy is one of them. Just like hanging around great musicians makes you want to play better, or being around funny people makes you want to be funnier, being around good people makes you want to be a better person.

  After Amy traveled to Haiti on a mission there, she became very involved with the country and eventually created her own nonprofit called TEEMHaiti, which works to improve the lives of a wide variety of Haitians—including providing hunger relief. Listening to her talk about the struggles people were going through down there, you couldn’t help be moved to do something. There are a lot of people here in the U.S. struggling, too, but when your friend finds a passion, it also becomes important to you. In that same way, many of my projects have become important to her. Later on, when we moved to Nashville, I helped Amy with an event where volunteers came out to pack up meals for the orphanage in Port-au-Prince that Amy supports. We wanted to see if we could break the Guinness World Record for most hunger relief meals packaged in one hour by a team (just because we were doing something good doesn’t mean we couldn’t turn it into a stunt), and we did, with 530,064 meals packed in forty-five minutes.

  That’s just one example of so many ways Amy brings positivity into life, even during its darkest moments, like when her mom, Judy, was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. Amy and her sister, Cristi, are both really close to their mom and to each other. They were devastated when they learned of their mom’s illness. But Amy heeded her mom’s message to “choose joy,” so much so that she had JOY tattooed on her wrist in her mother’s handwriting. Before Judy passed away in 2014, we decided to do something called “Pimpin’ Joy Week” on The Bobby Bones Show, where we were looking not for donations or money but for stories that “inspire, influence, and encourage people to Choose Joy.”

  People still call in to the show almost every day to tell us how they are “pimpin’ joy.” As I write this, I just had dinner, and my meal was paid for by two listeners from Houston who didn’t hang around for a thank-you but just wrote “pimpinjoy” on my receipt, which was just awesome. However, they paid for it before I ordered pie. So I still paid for the pie. Just a few more minutes and I’d have gotten some pie pimpinjoyed, too!

  Amy doesn’t just make me a better person; she also makes me a better radio personality. She’s so real that she challenges me to stay real. As our radio show continued to grow in popularity, it would have been natural for me to slip into a fake image of who I thought I needed to be, which ultimately would have become stale to listeners. Sitting every morning next to someone who wears her heart on her sleeve, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t maintain the same level of honesty.

  Honesty is kind of the through line for everyone who wound up joining The Bobby Bones Show. Oh, and also that Lunchbox hated everybody when they first joined the gang. He hated Amy. He hated Ray. He hated Eddie. It’s happened every single time, with every single person that comes in. But as with any family, I always say, “No one’s going anywhere. You’re just all going to have to sort it out.”

  A family is what The Bobby Bones Show is—an insular family, because I hardly ever bring in new people. And the new people I do bring in aren’t strangers, because they’re either friends of mine or people who started as interns who spent a year or two working with us for free before joining for good.

  Part of the reason my standards were so high for new people was that I would have felt like I had let the team down if I’d brought in someone who wasn’t strong. Ray—a producer who cuts all the audio for the broadcast from a glassed-in room where I can see him while I’m doing the show—was a bulldog of a worker as soon as he arrived. He was an intern, but an older one. Already out of college and working, he just decided one day that he wanted to get into radio. He wasn’t even officially an intern, to be honest; he just showed up. And showed up. And showed up. There were other producers who he was outworking like crazy, and he wasn’t getting paid. And I’m loyal to my people as long as they’re strong and keep the team going—and Ray was very strong.

  Eddie, a family man with a wife and two children, was my old television producer and has been a fast friend for over ten years now. He’s half of my comedy/music band, the Raging Idiots, and we spend pretty much seven days a week together—five in the studio doing radio and two on the road doing concerts on the weekends.

  I should probably give a brief history of the Raging Idiots, which was first the name of my high school band. Well, actually, not the original name. We started out as the Concubine Kings. But after realizing we couldn’t play church events with that name, I changed it to the Raging Idiots. What? I was sixteen years old. We probably played six gigs, pulling in about twenty dollars total, before giving up. That wasn’t a bad run, considering I was the lead singer—and I couldn’t sing.

  Later when I was on the radio, I started playing little songs on my guitar that I made up, à la Adam Sandler. They were funny little segments. At least I thought they were funny. For these segments, I resurrected the Raging Idiots. I became Bobby Bones and the Raging Idiots, even though I was the only one playing. There were no other members. I just turned into a band when I picked up my guitar. My “band” got its first real gig when I opened up for Toya (look her up), who put out her debut single “I Do!!” in 2001. They needed someone to kill twenty minutes before she went on, so I went onstage in Little Rock and played a song I wrote called “Dream Girl.”

  I have a dream girl on my mind.

  She is so perfect she is so fine.

  Yes, the song was really that dumb (my songs still are). But a girl actually came up to me after the show to say she liked my song, and we made out. That was my entrance to music, and I was hooked. But that was pretty much it for my career as a musician—other than a brief moment in 2005 when I recorded a song with Olympic gymnast (and aspiring pop singer) Carly Patterson. For the remix of the song called “Temporary Life,” I was billed under the rap name Captain Caucasian. Oddly enough, the song got some radio play, so I did a few shows as Captain Caucasian and the Raging Idiots.

 
But the real Raging Idiots didn’t get going until Eddie joined The Bobby Bones Show and we began doing parodies of current hit songs on the radio (he on guitar and me “singing”). The Raging Idiots were good for ratings, and it was fun to write and play again. We really had no aspirations of doing anything other than sitting in the studio and making fun of songs until Amy had a charity event and needed a “band” to play. After that, we started playing shows. But not for money, though, since we donated all the proceeds to charity. Driving hundreds of miles every weekend, we went everywhere from California to North Carolina to D.C. to Wisconsin to Texas, only to be back on the air Monday. Before we knew it, we had raised $30,000 for various charities, then $300,000, then $750,000, until we eventually hit $1 million! It was fun and meaningful but also exhausting being on the road that much. But I have nothing on Eddie, who does it with a wife and two kids. So although he’s perpetually late (on tour and on the show), I get past it because I know he’s a stand-up dude.

  Sometimes I think the best thing about my show is that I get to work with friends, people who I hired because they are trustworthy, interesting, and enjoyable to be around. But none of them were radio guys. We were the top-rated morning show in Austin and syndicated in five other cities—and no one other than me had any experience or background in radio. Like I mentioned, Amy sold granite. Lunchbox was delivering for Jason’s Deli. Eddie was a TV producer. Ray was a . . . well, I’m not sure what Ray was. He did some telemarketing. . . . I love the fact that everyone on The Bobby Bones Show was a real person, but it means that I have to work behind the scenes, too, in order to preserve that authenticity.

  I put four or five hours of preparation into a four- or five-hour show that to listeners sounds (hopefully) like we’re just talking about whatever we want, whenever we want. So the whole radio show is planned out, minute to minute, but if it ever sounds like that, then it means I’ve done something wrong.

  My trick to making our conversations sound spontaneous and not scripted is simple: I’m the only one on the show who knows what topics are on the table for the day. Amy, Lunchbox, and Eddie have no idea what subjects I’m going to talk about or when I might bring up something they’ve said. Keeping them in the dark keeps them normal people, talking like normal people do.

  I always keep a running list of discussion topics that I gather from all over the place. It could be a heartwarming story I read on the Associated Press about a blind couple that got married after their guide dogs brought them together, or something I overheard at a party (just kidding, I don’t go to parties—it was on the Internet) about how the nutrition bars Amy always eats aren’t actually healthy. Waking up with a pimple after breaking my diet, I put the question of whether sugar causes pimples up for debate. The status of my dating life is an evergreen topic.

  Everyone on the show knows if they send me something, beware, because I can use it on the show at any time. I may use it next week, I may use it today, or I may use it never. I plan every second of the show (although it never goes 100 percent exactly as planned). I know what we’re going to hit and when we’re going to hit it, and the crew all follow my lead. If I need forty-five seconds to read something quietly, they sit quietly and let me refocus on what we’re about to do. Then Ray walks in and hands me a sheet to start reading—read, read, read, read—and in ten seconds we’re back on live and the whole gang is animated again.

  It’s not an act. None of them could act to save their lives. My bringing stuff up at random is how we keep it loose and sounding like the big group of friends we are. The realness isn’t always laughs; it has been known to veer into on-air crying and screaming matches (usually involving Lunchbox). But it’s like a marriage—not that I really know, since I’ve never even been close to married—in that we’re together so much that we’re bound to get on each other’s nerves. I mean, when you spend at minimum five hours a day at arm’s length to another person, talking about everything under the sun, there are going to be times you can’t stand each other.

  For the most part, though, we care for each other. The rawness of real emotion—either good or bad—has always been the main draw of the show. That’s part of the reason why after one of the worst moments in my life, when I really thought I was going to be killed, my immediate instinct was to do a show. The early morning of September 29, 2009, started out like every other morning for the past five years since I had begun broadcasting from Austin. After waking up at 3 A.M. (yup, that’s what I mean by early morning), I would hop out of bed and practically right into the car to arrive at work no later than 4 A.M. I always parked at the bottom of a big hill, atop which was the radio station. There was never anyone in the parking lot, on my walk up the hill, or in the building where I spent the next hour or two before we went on air reading up on the news and plotting out the show.

  On this morning, after walking the hill like always, I got close to the building’s front door, which you have to put a code into and then pull open after the beep, a process that takes a second.

  That’s when I heard someone say, “Hey, Bones.”

  I turned around and there was a man in a ski mask, who started running toward me.

  I don’t know how I didn’t hear him or see him, but all of a sudden he was charging at me with something in his hand that I couldn’t quite identify. I didn’t have a long time to look, anyhow, because there was a man with a mask chasing me.

  I kicked off the flip-flops I was wearing and ran as fast as I could. I never considered fighting him. I tore down an outdoor alley that was about sixty yards long. I can still run pretty fast. I’m still in decent shape even though I sit in a studio most of the time. I was running as fast as I could, but he was on my heels. I still had my backpack on with a computer inside—the same backpack I still carry today. “Well, this is holding me down,” I thought to myself as I threw it off my back, hoping he just wanted to rob me and would stop for the bag.

  Nope.

  The guy in the ski mask passed the backpack and continued to chase me. I ran until I hit a concrete barrier. Fueled by adrenaline and the desire not to die, I jumped over the barrier. But the ground on the other side was much farther down than on the side I had come from, so I wiped out when I jumped and smacked my knee and shoulder. I was in pain.

  Luckily, a car pulled up right at that moment, otherwise the guy definitely would have gotten to me. When he saw the lights of the car, the man in the ski mask stopped, turned around, and ran away.

  The man in the car, Matt, an engineer and producer who worked at another station in the building, gave me a look like WTF just happened to you?

  I went into the building, got some ice for my knee, and called 911. The cops showed up and started to ask me questions for the report about what happened, but at four thirty in the morning I looked at the officers and told them we had to stop the interview. “Guys, I have to go on the air at five o’clock,” I said.

  So I hopped on the air and opened up the microphone.

  “Hey, everybody. Good morning,” I said. “Welcome to the show. You guys are not going to believe what just happened to me. I just got jumped.”

  About forty-five seconds into the story, I started crying on the air. I wasn’t sad, but I couldn’t control my reactions. Whatever had just happened had built up such a mass of anxiety and feeling that everything came pouring out when I began talking about it. It was a similar reaction to how I responded after I competed in a few triathlons. Each time I finished one of those, I experienced a release that wasn’t about happiness or sadness, just raw emotion. This crying was physical, a real breaking down. And the listeners heard each sob.

  I eventually settled myself down, finished telling the story, and then finished the show. When I was done, the cops continued their questioning of me. Except now they started to act as if the whole thing was a prank. “Are you sure it wasn’t one of your buddies?” one asked. “You set this up?”

  I’d never been so pissed off in my life. I almost died and the members of th
e Austin PD were treating me like I was making it up? (Later, a rival radio station accused me of the same thing.) But they didn’t have to take my word for it; there was surveillance footage of the incident that we watched together later. Watching that video footage was almost scarier than the real thing. You could see the guy waiting for me, which is why I didn’t see him. What he had in his hand turned out to be a knife—and on his belt he had a pair of rubber gloves!

  A couple of weeks later, the cops showed up at the radio station and started beating on the window of my studio. “We need you to come outside and identify this guy,” one said through the glass.

  Since the attack, I had hardly slept. Just like when I had a gun held to my head outside the Electric Cowboy in Little Rock, I had vivid nightmares in which I lived out the terror of the moment right in the confines of my bedroom.

  “Not doing it,” I said.

  I didn’t want to leave my studio, because he definitely knew who I was. If I identified him, and in the best-case scenario, he went to jail, how long would he serve? A month? Six months? And then, he’d be back out . . .

  “We really need you to identify this guy,” the officer said. “If you don’t, he could do this to someone else.”

  Oh man, how could I say no to that?

  “Fine.”

  I left the station and got in the back of the cop car. We drove up to another cop car where the police had the suspect handcuffed and standing facing the car. When my window was right beside the man, they shone a light right in his face. I didn’t know his face, because he’d had a ski mask on, but I said to the officers that his body type looked exactly like the body type of the guy that chased me. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him.

  Even if I had seen the guy’s face, I don’t know how much help I could have been. The whole incident was such a blur. I couldn’t even think straight until after the show that morning. Because of that and the fact that I was so emotional on air, a lot of my friends and the public said I shouldn’t have done the show right away. I should have taken the day off, they said. But I think that’s always been the appeal of the show—conveying my experiences exactly as they are and without a filter. That realness and rawness is what connects to listeners. The attempted attack was no different. If I had taken the day off, I wouldn’t have been able to capture what really happened and put it out there. That for me, is the best therapy.