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By
Grace
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ The Phil Hendrie Show ~
“You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
- George W. Bush
It seems that all good things are coming to an end on the radio. Howard Stern is wasting away on XM, Opie and Anthony got fired for being too fucking funny and some radio legends just throw in the towel and try to not slam the door too shut on the station executive’s fingers on their way out.
Phil Hendrie is, to me, the last of the Mohicans.
Today, Friday 23rd, his very last show is aired from wherever he is confined to broadcasting from these days. He has been most everywhere in the ether, but I only find him on my 970 AM – crackling and staticy like it’s 19fucking43. Doesn’t matter… The Phil Hendrie Show needs no bells and whistles, because Phil Hendrie is all the bells and whistles.
To the casual listener, randomly tuning in, the show must be a complete train wreck. It usually starts with a background story about how Phil Hendrie’s production team have landed an exclusive telephone interview with some insanely controversial person – a person who first gets to make his rather harmless, if yet overly wacky, case. Phil will initially sympathize with the interviewee and then go to the phones for caller comments. As callers ring in they get to talk to the controversial guest on the air, and it always, inevitably and without fault, turns out that there is much more to the story than we are first let to know. The Santa who got fired for having a prison record, turns out to be a homicidal maniac who used children as human shields in an armed robbery. Phil is appalled and side with his enraged and shocked listeners as they berate the twisted person and his heinous acts of lunacy. These things can get really ugly when the listeners let their disgust and hysteria get the better of them as the guest reveals more and more disturbing facts. Not only did the Santa use children as human shields, they were his own children, and two of them died from the police bullets, so now he’s suing the LAPD. What a fuckhead! Well, at least good old Phil Hendrie is there on the caller’s side, right? Nodding and agreeing – sometimes even apologizing to his listeners on the rude guest’s behalf… Phil Hendrie is right there, shoulder to shoulder with the listeners on the battlefront against the social predators of the world, like some gay ass Robespierre.
Not so.
Phil Hendrie is a man of many talents – a master of interactive improvisation. Phil Hendrie is the controversial guest being called on his acts of random insanity. Sitting alone in his studio, Phil performs the voice of himself, the show host, and the wacky guest – dealing with his callers by seamlessly switching between the two characters. What the callers never seem to realize is that they are the cruel butt end of an elaborate joke that the rest of us listeners are in on. Kinda like when the whole high school class knows that the much hated jock is drinking a piss deluded sports drink between plays at the game, but also that telling him would be to ruin the joke – at least until the bottle is empty. Like that, only funny instead.
What never ceases to amaze the loyal Hendrie listener is how these people, calling in, keep falling for the gradually increasing madness these “guests” display. Sometimes Hendrie will realize he’s got a real live one on the wire and then pushes the envelope as far as he can with his “guest”, taking the ideas and stories to extremes, just to see how much these people will actually swallow. And they do… they swallow in big gulps, and the end result is almost always hysterical. I don’t know how many times I have driven down the highway, missing my exit on purpose just so I can hear the end of a bit where the “guest” thinks that Mothers of America has taken all the fun out of drunk driving these days.
But here’s the kicker… Often the controversial idea the fuckhead guest is advocating has some sense of core truth to it – by asking important social or personal questions.
For instance… One of the better guest vs. caller exchanges on the show was when Hendrie pretended to be a guest who had saved a little boy’s life, and was upset because the mother wouldn’t grant him his much deserved reward. In the set-up the listeners were told that the mother asked this guy, after his heroic act, what she could do to thank him – “anything at all” - and he said “I would like to spend the weekend with your son”. Of course, people call in and say that the man deserves a break but that the reward is inappropriate, and when the heroic pedophile insists that it is his reward to do what he wants with the boy, people get even more upset and start calling him names. In the end the hero of the day has a heated conversation with a disgruntled mother who thinks he’s the scum of the earth, so he then poises the ultimate question: “Then what is the price of your son’s life, ma’am? What would you grant me?” The guest is left stuttering about weak monetary compensation, while Phil Hendrie, the show host, calls the guest a perverted creep.
It’s pure art.
The callers are the show, without ever realizing it, and the funny thing is that Phil constantly, throughout his show, drops hints at what a big goof it all is. Some people out there actually believes that drunk old “Father James McQuarters” is trying to smooth over the homosexual groping of altar boys as a Catholic rite of passage, taking time to engage in slightly off beat prayers with the most furious of callers.
Or how about the guy who put up a website that listed the names and addresses of women who had been sexually molested as children, to protect the men out there from dating a possible psycho? Molested women, he claimed, are just psychotic bombs waiting to explode. Do you want to be there when that happens? No, of course not, so that’s why there is now a website for you, the dating male, to protect your interests. Of course angry women called in and were subjected to the “guest” inquiring them about their sexual past, and if they failed to meet his stereotypical assumptions he would just dismiss them as bitter cunts looking for a man to bump them through the night. It was a rib-splitter of a show.
Another favorite is the 8-year old boy, Logan, calling in on behalf of his grandfather and made to say all sorts of screwed up things on air, coached by the grouchy old bastard in the background. "My grandpa says that Thanksgiving is a crock and we should have slaughtered the Indians right off the bat when we came."
The slew of characters have been so many through the years that I could sit here all day and reminisce about them all. They all still served the same purpose; to goad the idiot listeners into calling and make asses of themselves on the air. No matter whether it was the black Pastor who bought a gun and silver bullets for Halloween, because he saw a werewolf last year, or whether it’s the LAPD cop who hates old people – the more challenged of the show’s listeners would always call in and voice their heartfelt disgust.
The more upset the caller is, the more Hendrie pushes all the buttons he can, hammering them with both fists, all the while keeping up the appearance of the concerned show host on the caller’s side – just to keep them on the line for more abuse.
Maybe the most refreshing thing about Phil Hendrie is that he calls a spade a spade. Self-proclaimed “outspeakers” like the ever so annoying Bill O’Rilley may think they do, but they are all still victims of commercial radio and TV. Phil Hendrie is the real deal. He will use ethnic slurs and throw uncomfortable stereotypes out there, just to drive a point home. He is the guy who will actually say what you think, the way you think it. Not in any fancy re-worded PG13-rated manner. No… the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the motherfucking hard ass truth – straight from the heart. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s all done with a huge dose of humor.
The Phil Hendrie Show represents the pinnacle of talk radio comedy as a media – and as a dying art form. He has always done it in grand style and with as much controversy as he could possible muster. His shows have gone from prank calls and political discussions, to fictitious guests and blatant mockery of radio colleagues, but through it all he has always managed to entertain his listeners in the most outstanding way – no matter what anybody thought. He has been running his own race this whole time, setting his own pace with a crazy ass wind up monkey for beat reference.
I sure as hell will miss him. Rest in peace.
