Straight From The Mouth
The Morning Mouth's February Interview with Bob & Tom
(Reprinted by permission; Copyright © 2005 Talentmasters Inc.)
Due to a slight cold and laryngitis, Bob Kevoian was unable to join this
interview.
Take us back to the beginning?
Tom Griswold: I started in Land Florida near Daytona Beach. I had been
vacationing in Harbor Springs, Michigan, all my life. After I left Land I
went up there and Bob was with a singing group based in Los Angeles called
the Young Americans. It was like a Broadway touring group. That is where Bob
and I met. He was working at a radio station parttime and we hooked up and
worked there for three years. It's a vacation place for people from Detroit
especially, and Chicago.
Can you recall your first impression of Bob?
T: Yes, absolutely. I had gone to see the J. Geils band and on the way
back to my family's house I stopped to get a beer at a place called Bar
Harbor which is a lonely downtown bar in Harbor Springs. There was a guy
tending bar who asked a guy playing pool if they had fixed the cart machine
yet, I thought the only cart machines I have ever heard of were at radio
stations and I said do you work at a radio station with the bartender and he
said yeah, it was Bob. I had just left the station and wanted to look and I
said 'Hey, can I come in and look at a copy of Radio and Records? So,
I went into the radio station the next day and I ended up working there. It
turned out their Program Director was phasing off the air so I ended up
working afternoons and he worked middays, Bob was working three jobs at the
time. During the transition we made some tapes and submitted them to the big
hundred thousand watt station up there at the time there were about three or
four hundred thousand watt giants and one of them was WJML, it was sort of a
Top 40 station, that is where Bob and I submitted a tape and the guy who was
there hated us and never used it, but about a year later that guy got fired
and a new guy came in and just cleaning off the the other guy's desk he heard
the tape and Bob and I got hired. I started doing news and Bob did
afternoons, but eventually Bob and I took over mornings and that is how we
really started. We've been working together since 1980.
The story about us was we had a couple of things happen simultaneously.
One of them was we had a consultant come in and she told us we were terrible
and we talked too much and we were not funny. By chance the book came out the
next day and we were number one against a huge competitor that we had knocked
out and suddenly we were geniuses. We had an enormous book we had shares well
into the 30's and it was a huge confirmation that we were not as bad as we
thought. Then out of no where a few weeks later we got a phone call from I
think it was Birmingham, Alabama. The guy said I was wondering if you guys
would consider moving here? We didn't even have a tape. I thought 'Where did
this guy hear of us? In the course of the next two or three days we got about
20 phone calls. We found out much later what had happened. Dwight Douglas
(then consultant with Kent Burkhart) used to have a seminar where he would
ask you to bring tapes of people in your market that you wanted to get rid
of. It turned out that a guy up there wanted us out of the market and he made
a tape of our show and played it at the seminar and like I said, about 20 of
the people there called us up out of no where. So, I whipped a tape together
and sent it to various people. As it happened my vacation was the following
week so I went to Indianapolis because it was the closest place to where we
were living. Bob flew down and we talked to these guys and they hired us and
that was it.
What year was this?
T: 1983.
Did it take long for the show to catch on?
T: Yeah it did. When we came down, the station was involved in a promotion
in which they had to play five in a row for you to win $5000. It was hard to
do a morning show with all that music, it is laughable now because we have
not played music in a decade, except for our own stuff, we just talk. To make
an impact anytime, when you go into a new city depending on what you are up
against and what kind of promotional stuff is being done for you, it takes
awhile for people to change their listening habits. We fight that to this
day, most people listen to what they listen to and to get them to change the
dial is real tough. When we first got here we were out in the streets every
night and doing stuff and we finally convinced them that it was not doing us
any good to be out until midnight or until two in the morning doing bar gigs
and then getting up at six and trying to be funny. We had to really focus on
doing the show. I remember those were the days of the Birch Ratings. Our
experience was they were sort of a year ahead of the curve, they seemed to be
a lot more responsive and after about a year we had some really good Birch
numbers and eventually it all just kicked in and we started having absurdly
large numbers.
Is it fair to say that you've dominated in Louisville for over 20
years?
T: Yes I think we have been number one in our key demo's forever, but we
have also been number one in the morning as long as I can remember.
How have you managed to stay funny and successful that long?
T: This is like asking people how you lose weight, you tell them diet and
exercise and they go 'But it's boring! We keep it funny by working hard and
we have a great group of people that we work with. And we try to keep it as
fresh as we can. Let me give you and example in the last been a tremendous
success for us and I hope for them.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask about your Christmas CD's. You
were in the forefront here and with some 30 CD's under your belt, haven't you
raised something like 4.5 million dollars?
T: Yes something like that, it's several million.
Any tips that you'd like to pass on?
T: To do a Christmas CD you really have to think about it every day. You
have to take notes and figure out what you are going to do. Because of the
success of our CD's, I have the advantage actually owning a recording studio.
We record stuff on a weekly basis and it's mostly our stuff, our band. My
suggestion is to do as much original stuff as you can and you really have to
be up and running to get the CD's out in between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
When do you start pulling material that you want to use for
that?
T: Right now. This year we did a free DVD with our CD when you purchase it
on our web site. We have a camera now running in the studio so we have just
that much more stuff the first dvd was called "The Bottom Fell Out of the
Whole Movie." We had such a tremendous response from it, it has
behind-the-scenes and out takes from the commercials. In the Classic Rock
area a lot of CD's now come with a free DVD. I did not want to get on board
that but we were extremely successful for us.
You're show's always been a haven for great comedians. Who makes you
laugh the most?
T: It's hard to pick out one. Heywood Banks, Rodney Carrington. I think
Tim Wilson is one of the most energetic and great performers out there. Sean
Morey is great. One of the things I've always found is a lot of times the
best comedians are the guys you haven't heard of because they have to work
it. Sometimes these guys who get a little more fame can't seem to turn it on
as bright as they used to.
What do you make of the whole indecency issue?
T: It's such a grey area, it's making everyone's job kind of difficult.
We've all had to adjust. The problem is if we do a piece and get fined, it's
after the fact. We can't take a song and send it to the FCC and ask "Is this
okay?" We have to do it on-air, and then if they make a judgement later it
could be our careers. We're doing live conversations with comedians and
people on the telephone. During the span of a 7-second delay we have to
decide if something is actionable. The FCC has a year!
I want you to leave us with a phoner that every show out there would
be crazy not to do.
T: This one was fascinating to me and the response was unbelievable. I'll
try to make it brief. The genesis comes from conservative writer William F.
Buckley. He was telling the story of boating in the Colorado river when the
boat he's in, capsizes. As he was hurdling down the rocky rapids -- a time
most others would be thinking of death -- all he could think about was a
magazine article he was writing on pornography. He remembers he has a box of
porno magazines in his closet and he's concerned he would die and his wife
would find them and think he's some kind of pervert. We started taking phone
calls on 'What is in your closet right now that if you dropped dead would be
troublesome?' We had some of the greatest phone calls ever. One guy called
and said he found a 16mm film in a closet which turned out to be a porno film
of his mother-in-law that she had made in the '60's.
Thanks for that and for the interview. We'll cut it off here so
everyone can quickly head for their closets.
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