April Winchell

I’ve received upwards of 900 emails in the last week about the sudden departure of Mr. K.

For his part, Mr. K is being very generous and high-minded in his public reaction to the situation. And that doesn’t surprise me. He has a lot of class.

Fortunately, I don’t. Fuck the high road.

Telling the truth is a powerful, freeing thing. In fact, it’s my insistence on exposing boneheadedness and assholery that has made me what I am today: an unemployable pariah.

But that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, I want to give you my perspective on Mr. K, and this sorry situation. And I even have a glorious happy ending for you, so don’t get bored and go looking for porn.

What it comes down to is this. I know Mr. K well, and I can truthfully say that everything he ever did at KABC was done with the best interests of the station in mind. You have no idea how rare that is.

I’ve known a lot of gasbags in talk radio, and Mr. K is one of maybe two people I’ve ever met who refused to put his own ego above the welfare of the station and the show.

In this way, he was a dream employee. A complete team player who attended every goofball event and pointless, life draining meeting without complaint. A professional who put up with ridiculous hindrances like computers that didn’t work properly (making it impossible to use the internet during the show), equipment that was falling apart, headphones that didn’t work and on and on and on. Never did I ever see him pull a diva act, when he clearly would have been within his right.

His efforts made him a huge hit with advertisers, and paid off handsomely for his employers. And just when he was number one in his time slot and had accomplished everything a station could ask for, they started fucking with him.

What most people don’t know is that KABC in Los Angeles is pretty much controlled by KABC in New York. No matter how successful their local programming may become, New York can simply come in and change it all around. Yes, KABC is New York’s bitch.

And someone in New York has a boner for Mark Levin.

I don’t know why, and neither do you. No one does, because it is the lowest rated show on earth. Agriculture reports get better numbers.

No one is listening. No one. It is death. The Mark Levin show is the sound of death, but not as fun.

It’s not the fact that it’s a right wing perspective that alienates me. I’m not taking issue with that. Honestly, my politics are right down the middle in many ways, so I’m not reflexively turned off by a conservative voice.

It’s just that it’s the same old shit. The ultra theatrical party line rhetoric, only spewed out by someone far less engaging than the usual suspects, which is really almost inconceivable. This guy makes Sean Hannity look like Garrison Keillor.

He’s just another second string O’Reilly-Rush-Coulter wannabe, with nothing to add, no new angle or fresh approach. He’s simply yelling at his listeners, like he sees the big kids doing. It is not new, is it not good, it is not listenable.

And to thank Mr. KABC for all his hard work, and for building such a big audience starting at 9:00 every weeknight, someone in New York moved his show down to 10:00, and gave that first hour to Mark Levin.

Obviously, the idea was to leech on all those people tuning in at 9:00 to hear Mr. KABC. They would be tricked into hearing Mark Levin (there’s a vote of confidence), and they would keep coming back.

It didn’t work. No one came back. The show sank to the very bottom of the schedule.

I really thought this spectacular failure would be enough to get KABC to reverse itself, and allow Mr. KABC back to his rightful time slot. But when his contract expired in January, KABC New York had a surprise: They wanted to take away another hour for Mark Levin, as well as a few other things Mr. K had earned through hard work. Yes, at a time when they should have been negotiating to keep him, they made it impossible for him to stay.

And this, my friends, is how talk radio works. No matter how hard you work, how well you perform, no matter how much you promote on your own, no matter how many listeners and advertisers you bring in, originality and creativity will always be sacrificed for consistency. Which is to say that most talk radio stations would rather have a full menu of shit than feature even one plate of something fresh.

It reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell years ago.

A bunch of cowboys are sitting around the chuckwagon, waiting for their dinner after a hard day of roping and riding.

Suddenly the camp cook appears, with a somber expression.

“Boys, I’m afraid I have some good news and bad news.”

The cowboys look at each other expectantly. Finally one cowboy says, “All right Cookie, let’s hear the bad news first.”

“Well,” says Cookie, “We’re all out of food. From now on, we’ll all be eating horse shit.”

The cowboys are dumbfounded.

“Damn”, says the cowboy. “So what’s the good news?”

“The good news is,” says Cookie, “there’s a lot of it.”

Now the happy ending I promised you.

Mr. K is very close to a new show. I am extremely excited and I can’t wait to hear what lucky station is going to get him. Hopefully he’ll be ready to make an announcement shortly. In the meantime, go over to his web site and sign up for an update. As soon as he has news, you’ll be the first to hear it.

Speaking of my dad, someone sent me an MP3 this morning that really amazed me.

Apparently Bob Dylan has a radio show somewhere (I had no idea). On Valentine’s Day, he did a piece about hearts, and wound up talking about my father. It’s a nice little piece of audio. Thanks to Michael for sending it.

 

 Bob Dylan on Paul Winchell and the artificial heart: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download