One afternoon back in the early 2000’s I was sitting in my closet sized office at the radio station and two of my co-workers busted in and said “We want to start a punk show on the station! They already said yes!”
Me, looking at these two dudes who on the surface are the least Punk looking people in the building: “Fuck. Okay. But I’m helping.”
At the time I was already the Music Director, Assistant Program Director and hosting a specialty show of my own, but hey… what’s one more thing?
Initially I wasn’t going to be on the show. I was just going to get them started. I spent a couple of weeks contacting labels to ask for music, and downloading music from the huge Clear Channel archives we had access to, think iTunes but you know it was free. During this time I got to talk to Punk legends at labels like SideOneDummy, Epitaph, Fueled By Ramen, etc. Artists were in charge of some of these labels and it wasn’t weird at all for Brett Gurewitz to answer the phone at Epitaph. When the cases of CDs started coming in and I started picking songs at home, laying on the floor with my old roommate, drinking Two Buck Chuck, she grabbed one of the CDs and sent an email to the record rep for Fat Wreck Chords telling him how much she liked the Real Mackenzies album. It was a really amusing email that Jason from Fat Wreck actually hand delivered to Fat Mike from NoFX and it ended up printed out and hung up all over the office.
We finally got the music library together between the labels, the downloads and yes the two dudes that wanted to start the show in the first place and I’s personal CD collections. We were going on the air from 11-12 on Saturday nights. It’s kind of a throw away daypart but we were ready. Except the show didn’t have a name and no one could think of anything. My boss decided we were called The Punk Ass Bitches Show. He had no idea what he had done.
Our show was a monster. If you know anything about radio ratings to grab a 35% share of the market in that daypart when generally no one gives a shit about what’s on the radio is huge. We quickly went up to a two hour show.
Unless it was “fuck it, we’re doing it live,” time.
I got to call this one. We did pre-record the shows a lot. We’d get a 12 pack of whatever beer we were drinking this week and pre-record. But on very special days, we’d do the show live. Holiday shows were almost always live. Sometimes we’d just all be too broke to go out that weekend so we’d pool our resources and get beer or liquor and do the show live just for something to do.
I was the boss after all, I wasn’t going to fire us.
(My co-hosts and best friends on the night the show celebrated our 1st birthday in 2006)
On the nights we did the show live sometimes we’d blow out the 1am hour and stay on until 2. I had to do this on the fly but our listeners knew if they heard “La Bamba,” we were staying on for another hour.
The studio at KURQ was too small for all four or five or 12 of us on some shows to fit into, so our Engineer worked it out where we could use the country station across the hall to do this. We bypassed the board and let their pre-programmed music play and sent the board feed across the hall to our station, bringing it up on KURQ board. It took two people to get us on the air and to make sure we weren’t broadcasting Punk Rock on the country station but once we were on, everything was gravy.
(Stealing the Country studio to make ridiculous radio.)
The Punk Ass Bitches show debuted in November that year. Some how the total chaos continued long after I was gone. We went through cast changes. I ended up being a host. Our friends came on the show. The pizza guy was a guest. Our other co-workers came on as characters or guests for absolutely no reason. It was like what radio morning shows aspire to be, except in the middle of the night. And very very drunk.
(One of our interns came on the show once. I can’t remember which one this is because he and his roommate looked like identical twins.)
The trick to the show was that we all actually hung out in real life. We were already all friends, it wasn’t forced. The guys supplied the funny and the dick jokes and I just knew everything about the music. I’m not saying I wasn’t funny, but I was basically there to talk about when albums were dropping, to make the playlists and to try to keep some sense of order in the building.
I failed terribly at the order part.
It’s not hard to get swept up in silliness when it happens. I’m not saying we never got in trouble for some of the stuff we did, but it was more like a stern finger wagging than we got written up or fired. Because even though we got a pizza guy fired on accident or the trailer park next to the station called our boss to complain about us or someone’s sister threw up all over the parking lot one night or one of my co-hosts just got in his truck in the middle of the show and went home while we thought he was in the bathroom…. we were just allowed to do whatever we wanted.
(The final jock line up for the Punk Ass Bitches Show, before I left the station. Andre Champagne is fucking terrible.)
After the big sale of our station, the show was forced to simmer down a little bit. After I left the cast grew smaller with each round of firing. Eventually it was just my friend Tristan there alone doing the show.
One night, I think it was the PABS birthday show, I drove up to SLO from my little house in Avila and Tristan snuck me into the station. I brought two beers and sat on the floor of the studios with him while he did the show. I don’t know if management ever found out about it but it was still my baby and we were going to celebrate it’s birthday, even if I got the cops called on me for trespassing.
The Punk Ass Bitches Show launched in November of 2005 and ran for 10 years. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of in radio and probably the most fun I’ve ever had, talking to a wall for money.