The Ricochet Podcast - Rush Remembered

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

It has been one year and one week since Rush Limbaugh last sat behind the Golden EIB microphone and broadcast with substantial talent on loan from God. In this final Ricochet Podcast for 2021, James Lileks welcomes James Golden, aka Bo Snerdley to the show and they reminisce about Rush’s rise, the impact he had across the media landscape and more. See you in the New Year! Music from this week’s... Source

Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busseran.ie today. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

God's with me today. God knows how important this program is to me today. I love you from the bottom of a sizable heart. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with me, James Lilacs. I've stuffed Rob and Peter into the closet for this one because I want this guest all to myself. And that's James Golden. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you! I'm going to take the reins for this one, not because Peter and Rob aren't interested, but because they're not here. Probably shouldn't tell you how the sausage is made, but we had to do this interview ahead of time. And believe me, they would have loved to have questions for this man.

And I'm happy to have them all to myself because this is a radio thing. We have James Golden, known to a lot of you as the most illustrious of the Snurdleys, Bo Snurdley. And he's written a book, Rush on the Radio, which is a wonderful little memoir of his time with the EIB, as well as a series of recollections and interviews with other people who knew the man.

Welcome to the podcast. And thanks so much for making time. Thank you for having me. I do appreciate it. Well, let's for those people who, you know, six or seven of them in the audience who perhaps don't know the whole story. Let's go back to the start and tell us exactly how you got involved with the Rush Limbaugh program. Well, I was an employee of WABC. I was their last music director and their first and senior talk producer when they when the station switched over from being an iconic top 40 station to a talk station. Rush came there, I believe, second or third year into the talk format from Sacramento, where he was just having blazing success.

I met Rush as he was getting ready to come into the ABC headquarters building at 1330 Avenue of the Americas. He was with Ed McLaughlin, who I had known. Ed was the former president of ABC Radio Networks and was Rush's business partner. One of the four partners that started EFM Media, the company that first syndicated the Rush show. I met Rush and Ed outside.

I was on my way out. They were on their way in. We had a conversation. And I recall that before we left, I just said to Rush, wow, it sounds like you're going to be bigger than Paul Harvey, who at that time was dominating. He was the biggest, most successful radio broadcaster. Little did I know that what Rush was doing, and no offense to Mr. Harvey's memory, it would eclipse Paul Harvey's career.

And Russ would just become the most dominant force in radio. And little did I know that I would be intertwined with the show as well at that time. But it was just it was just a happenstance that I would meet him as he was coming in for the first time at ABC. How long have you been in radio before you hooked up to this star this media that's about i walked into a radio station when i was 14 years old and fell in love um i started working there with i think i got my first job in radio when i was like 20 something so i had probably been working in radio over 10 12 years before i met rush but this nevertheless was an opportunity

that few get because you got plugged into something that went coast to coast nationwide you were everywhere so what did you do for the show because rush would call you out we would hear your name and it was like hearing the bombastic bushken on the carson show it's like we know this guy's part of the constellation but what does he do he's not just a lowly guy who's doing some grunt work. He's an important man. So what did you do for the show that we can remember? Well, I was doing the lonely grunt work.

So I was screening the calls for the show. But also, you know, I would rush. Even before I began on the show, as you mentioned, there were other snurleys there. I came on the show, as you mentioned, there were other snurdleys there. I came on the show fairly early. We still have 56 stations, but there were two other snurdleys that were on the show before that. Even then, I was taking Rush news stories that I thought he might be interested in just based on what I was hearing him do. And then later on, of course, my duties expanded to producing the show when he was away working with all the guest hosts and doing that. You know, Rush was his own producer.

He certainly didn't need anyone to tell him how to produce a show. I mean, the man is just simply the most brilliant radio broadcast I've ever met in my life. No offense to anyone else doing it, you know. But he needed somebody to set up the calls. And I mean mean in the early days calls were a lot more prominent than they became later the interchange the interplay especially with somebody who disagreed made for the for the really interesting stuff so you're

the guy and you pick up the phone and you know that the person that you're just going to now has been on hold probably for 90 minutes to two hours you You know, they've been on hold for a long time. This is their moment to shine. What are you looking for in a good caller? They got, what, 10 seconds? I'm looking for, that's kind of a mind-meld thing because it can change from day to day. You know, it's more than just picking up a call.

You have to really be in tune with where the host of the show is if you're going to do the job effectively. Because some days the host might not want to talk to someone who's contentious. You have to read moods, you know, or some days the host might be in the mood to take someone that we not would normally take. Like normally I wouldn't take a person that was, let's say, a conspiracy kook. But then there were days when Rush was feeling in a giddy mood that I might put somebody like that up just to see what would happen because the mood allowed for it. His mood would allow for it. So you have to read your host.

You have to read with where the direction of the show is going. And then your job as a call screener is to pick the best possible calls that you can people who can articulate their point of view whether they agree or disagree and get to their point very quickly without stumbling through it and um and then you have to pick if you if you giving that the leeway how to order those calls so that they make sense for the program. Exactly. It's a great skill to have, and a good producer, a good guy at the boards is invaluable. You know what else is invaluable? Knowing that you are secure every time you're online, every moment you're on the Internet. Here's a scary stat to chew over.

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For a limited time, Aura is offering our listeners up to 40% off plans when you visit aura.com slash ricochet. Go to aura.com slash ricochet to get complete protection and savings of up to 40%. That's A-U-R-A dot com slash ricochet. And we thank Aura for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, I was working in talk radio when Rush started, and it was right around the time that he exploded and the station played michael jackson and it played bruce williams hey tiger here's some financial advice while i play my cards and it

was you know that that middle of the road talk radio that we had before rush and one day my producer slides a cassette across the table and says you got to listen to this guy i think we're going to take him and i went home and i listened to it and I thought I'd never heard anything like this. First of all, I was a good liberal at the time. So I was appalled, but amused. I was, but I was appalled, but amused and fascinated because the style absolutely scorched out of the speakers in a way that nobody in radio had. And people forget, don't they? Exactly how much he transformed the medium,

not just by bringing conservative ideas to it but with a style that really it wasn't bob grant shouting it wasn't madman raving it was comic but solid and a persona the likes of which never seen before so tell us how exactly rush transformed the medium and how you were there when it all took off well one of the things that i noticed was that what was to me and you nailed it perfectly i don't have too much there but to me what happened rush brought top 40 to talk he brought that top 40 energy disc jockey energy he integrated his music his bumper music well and so it was hip to listen to he was fun he brought an an innate sense of irreverent humor so he was funny without being mean spirited right on the edge yes exactly right on the edge yeah Yeah. Yeah. There were people who appalled. I mean, the homeless update. Right.

With Clarence Frogman. A great funny bit. But at the time in the 80s, the homeless were even more so than now sacrosanct because they were victims of Ronald Reagan. So they found his remarks to be cruel, not up to the edge, but they found them over the top. Right. And that was one of the things I think that got him demonized from the start and made it easy for people to believe this caricature that they more constructed in their heads that actually existed. Yeah. But demonized by who demonized by the very people who were, were fine with, with letting the homeless out on the street, as long as they could go lay out on a great once a year and pretend to be homeless so that they can empathize. Okay. So what I will never forget this, you know, and I think I mentioned this in the

book, there was a woman that called an elderly woman and she was in freaking tears because she was so afraid Rush was going to get arrested. I remember that you wrote that. Okay, good. Because nowhere in her life had she ever heard anyone that had the audacity to criticize a Kennedy. Now, here we are in America at this point, and you do have a segment of the population that is so intimidated by our unisex mainstream press that only looks at things one way, and by the whole liberal machinery that operated politically, that people were actually afraid to criticize one of the families that could be criticized for what they did and should have been criticized. And so he changed the dynamics of everything politically, because he did offer that criticism. Look, I remember, I've always

been political as well as loving music and everything else. I remember the outrage among the left when Jerry Falwell first came on the scene and how the evil moral majority and how horrible these people were supposed to be. And then years later, I met Jerry Falwell. And oh my goodness, what a nice man. What an intelligent, down-to-earth, great human being, in my point of view. And I was flabbergasted at the time. How could I believe all this stuff about this guy without really ever meeting him, without ever really knowing what he thought. And all that stuff was the poison that you got from a mainstream media that was monolithic in their hatred of conservatives, monolithic in their belief that liberalism was the only ideology that was acceptable. And to a degree, they're still like that and very intolerant.

Okay. And Rush was the one that came on the scene that busted up that liberal monopoly for a lot of people. He made fun of the liberal mainstream media too, and they despised him for it. But until then, nobody did that. If it were not for Rush, I don't think we would have the kind of competition we do right now in cable news with even these fledgling conservative news channels trying to rise up. authors. That happened after Rush wrote two books that sold multi-million copies. That industry began to flourish, and it's still going on. We have a conservative print media now that has expanded beyond just having the National Review as the only source for conservatives to read.

There's so many conservative publications, and none of that, none of that media landscape was present before Rush Limbaugh. So to me, he had a great deal with not only influencing what radio did, but also the media landscape of the United States. You got a point. And not only did he bring AM radio back, I wonder if AM radio can actually succeed and thrive in the future without him. It was so important to it. And the medium itself seems to be eclipsed by others. Here we know, I know you got to go soon. I want to tell people that. Jockey.

I talk radio, actually. So only talk radio. You have the radio voice of radio voices. I'm like, well, coming from you, Mr. Snurley, that's a good, that's a great compliment. I want everybody to know that the book has all kinds of stuff. You're going to love. It's got information on Rush doing the television bit and why exactly it didn't work.

It's got tales of the last day. I mean, it's ready for Christmas, right? This book is available for order. Oh, it's available now. Yes, absolutely. All right. You got somebody in your family. You can't figure out what to get them, and they were a Rush fan.

This is the book. But let's go out with this. What are you doing right now? Are you back at wabc are you spinning platters are you returned to your first love of music i have never left my first love of music even during all those years i was still doing some songwriting i'm a published songwriter and also um i'm back at wabc six days a week during the radio talk show with WABC, an afternoon drive and then on Saturday mornings. And I'm busy writing and...

Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you.

To apply, visit careers.busaaron.ie today. Doing some other plotting of what I want to do with my remaining time on Earth. So you are behind the microphone. What colour is it? It can't be golden. day doing some other plotting of what I want to do with my remaining time on earth. So you are behind the microphone. What color is it? It can't be golden. Oh, no, no, no. It's the same. It's the same microphone you're using. Oh, good. And you got somebody else doing your boards and choosing your music or are you choosing your music? I choose the music, but I get help from my engineer in New York, who's the only guy that survived the music radio days and is still at W.A.B WABC. I'm teamed up with him. We're

old friends. And then I also have a chief engineer when I'm working on the road. And so they've made it very pleasant for me to come back home to WABC. Do you have access to all the old shouts and idents, the old Pam's library stuff? You know, I do not. But I had some of that in my own personal archive when I left. And I just met somebody, one of the people that was with Pam's. And I said, I'm going to have to find that stuff and see what I have. Some of those are just classic. Those jingles are just classic.

I got about 15 of them. And I would love to give them to you in repaying for the enjoyment that I got from your book. And we know you got to go. So we're just going to let you get on to the next interview. And I would love to give them to you in, in, in repaying for the enjoyment that I got from your book. And we know you got to go. So we're just going to let you get onto the next interview. And I hope you sell a million copies. James Golden, Bo Snurdley, Rush on the radio is the book.

Thank you for being with us in the Ricochet podcast today. Best of luck. Thanks, James. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you. That'll do it. We thank you for another year of hanging out with us here in the Ricochet

podcast. Rob Long and Peter Robinson will be back with us next week. We thank James Golden for dropping by, and we thank Aura for sponsoring this miniature but oh-so-fulfilling edition. Have a safe New Year's Eve, everybody, because we want to see you back here in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. And this is

where I usually say to the guys, next week, so I'll say it to you, next week. I went back to Ohio But my city was gone There was no train station There was no downtown So town had disappeared

All my favorite places My city had been pulled down Reduced to fucking spaces Oh, where to go, Ohio? Ricochet. Join the conversation. I'm out.