I was telling Pio Ferro once that The Carmen Call made me want to plunge knitting needles into my ears. He concurred but said, “The audience just eats that shit up.”
Ugh.
We all have those “fingernails on a chalkboard” bits. Two of my worst were characters done by morning guys.
Every market has that suburb or community that everyone makes fun of. Even people who live there make fun of it…but also qualify it by reminding you that they live “in the good part of Concord.” In Charlotte? It’s Gastonia. So the new morning guy at Kiss 102 was savvy enough to figure that out but wasn’t savvy enough to stop himself from creating “Gastonia Gus.”
Gus was brutal. Even the people from Gastonia who made fun of Gastonia, thought Gus was an abomination.
There’s an unbelievably successful morning guy with a two + decades run at a station. The guy is brilliant. But he created this character that made me and everyone else start looking for the knitting needles. And he could not be dissuaded from “doing him.” It was awful.
We spend so much time trying to create stuff when our answers might be in the audience.
There’s a story about hotels in the news? Open up the phones and talk to people who work in hotels. They have amazing stories. Doctors and nurses? Some of the funniest shit you will ever hear.
I drove a cab for the summer. I’m set for stories for life.
And then there are the true characters.
Dave Morales at Wild in SFO had a regular caller named Gracie. No morning show could ever create Gracie. She was just too unique. A teenage mom living in the projects in Oakland. Dave, being a smart man, used Gracie for movie reviews and relationship advice. We even sent Gracie to the Grammys to cover it. And it did NOT sound like the 800 other DJ’s there covering it. And that’s good.
You just need to have the radar up for these people who, for a minute, might be passing through your orbit. And then get their number and find a way to use them.
The Dog Pound at Wild in San Francisco had a regular caller named Verinder who worked at a gas station. When they needed a minister for a wedding, they got Verinder ordained.
In Minneapolis at WLOL, it was a listener named Tim who was creative and later wrote some books as The Duct Tape Guy. He loved the Hines & Berglund show and created “Helmer Johnson from Lester Prairie with the farm report.”
The first call was during one of their anniversary shows when he was calling and impersonating celebs wishing the show many more years.
Helmer would sometimes overlap with the popular NBC affiliate weatherman, had a brother named “Selmer”, the neighbor was “Arvid Johnson” and his kids were the town idiots. Bleating sheep and goats were the background and he always signed off with “Gotta go stuff feed.”
It was FUNNY and became a “can’t miss” feature. Lester Prairie actually invited Tim/Helmer out for a summer parade, so he dressed in overalls and rode on the roof of the van. People went nuts. Someone had acknowledged their community’s existence.
John Hines had a greeting that he would use a couple of times a morning: “Good morning Mr. and Mrs. Middle America.” So…Tim created “Mrs. Millard America”, a slightly befuddled woman who thought John was giving her a shout out. She was Tim’s riff on Joyce Lamont from WCCO and he’d scroll through recipe books just mixing and matching and creating insane dishes like Tuna Pork Turkey Loaf with curried lime peanut butter stew. Here are a few of “June’s” calls.
Stream 01 Mrs. Millard America – genesis by cprpromo | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
12 velveeta, reviving dead plants, personalized spam by cprpromo (soundcloud.com)
Listeners are truly an untapped resource for content and when someone “unique” calls in, grab them and hold on. You might have hit Gold.
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