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October 07, 2013 09:19 AM UTC

How far has talk radio has sunk since Alan Berg’s days?

  • 8 Comments
  • by: Jason Salzman

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Toward the end of the Creative Revolution Theater Company's inspired production of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio, Barry Champlain, who's the talk-show-host character in the play, tells his radio audience, "You're like little children under the blanket, afraid of the bogeyman, but you can't live without him."

It's a great line, among many in the play now showing in Thornton, and it's a big reason why people listen to conservative talk radio. They're scared, and they feed on their own paranoia.

Talk radio is also a place where people find a community of the like-minded, who validate each other's beliefs, whereas in the real world, off the airwaves, in the mainstream media, they often fall into the lunatic-fringe category.

Bogosian's play, based partly on the life and murder of Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg, depicts a talk-radio world, different from today's, where calls are more personal and raw, and the talk-show host mostly berates callers.

"Are you as ugly as you sound?" Champlain asks a caller at one point during the play. Later he tells another caller, "Yes, the world is a terrible place…everything is screwed up, and you like it that way."

Today, talk radio is mostly right-wing Republican not nihilistic or truth-telling, and certainly not liberal, like Berg was, if you heard him in Denver in the 1980s.

Talk-radio hosts will still beat up on callers or at least disagree with them, but they seem more desperate to please them, to legitimize their craziness, and hope they call back, to keep their audience from shrinking further. And to try to build political power for the Republican right.

So the talk-radio world you see in Bogosian's Talk Radio, free from right-wing Republican talking points, is actually more interesting, even if it's a bit dated, than what you hear on the radio now.

The play's simple plot, like the 1988 movie with the same name, centers on Champlain's response to callers during a single night's show, as he gets more wasted, drinking whiskey and snorting cocaine.

Partisan politics doesn't come up at all, as Champlain abuses everyone from a woman who likes "I love Lucy" to a man upset about dog poop in his neighborhood. Champlain dismisses on a black man who says he likes Jews and bigot who says he hates them.

I don't know a lot about theater, but I can tell you that Champlain is performed with such complete and thorough passion and believability by actor Michael Occhuizzo that you're left thinking he needs to get a job on a Denver talk-radio station as soon as possible.

I'm half serious, because talk radio, if done right, is much like a form of theater or reality entertainment–if it doesn't get dragged down by the formula of faux politics and ginned-up paranoia that radio-station corporations seem to want today.

The best talk-radio hosts are artists/actors/entertainers themselves, as well as intellectuals, like Berg, driven to the talk medium as their form of expression.

As Champlain tells his audience in his last drunken lines of the play, before he leaves and ostensibly gets gunned down in the parking lot: "You're pathetic… I guess we're stuck with one another."

Do your best to catch one of the play's last performances this Thurs., Fri., and Sat. at 7 p.m. It's staged in a former retail space in the North Valley Tech Center in Thornton, an eerie, mostly vacant place that conjures up the strange world of talk radio, in Berg's time and today.

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8 thoughts on “How far has talk radio has sunk since Alan Berg’s days?”

  1. I used to love to listen to Alan Berg back in the day, although he frequently did verbally abuse his callers. He was the first liberal talk show host I ever heard of.

    Randi Rhodes reminded me of him, in the early days of Air America radio, as she was also outrageous, vulgar, and too personal with callers. She got canned for doing the same thing publicly to Hillary Clinton. 

    Being outrageous, vulgar, and verbally abusive is good enertainment, but poor politics.  Rhodes had some good points, and now she is relegated to some obscure corner of the web or satellite radio. 

  2. Vulgarity has almost become a business model for some publications. A few weeks back, we had a troll on here (I won't mention his name). Westword actually promoted his obscenities and name-calling contests with another commenter – I suppose it boosted their circulation. People would read the comments just to see what insults were flying.

    Like pro-wrestling, vicarious verbal violence. 

  3. I loved Berg. I used to wait on him at the old White Spot on Speer. He was loud and gruff and profane, but he was kind and generous to a fault. Almost every time he came in, he'd slip money to one of us to pay for a meal for one of the ragged, homeless people nursing their third cup of coffee just to stay out of the cold. But, shh, don't tell anyone, That was a secret. If you asked him, he'd tell you he was a heartless S.O.B.

    1. That's a great Berg story, Cook. I looked up Randi Rhodes, BTW– she's made a good comeback, available in most states and on internet radio. 

      So, entertainment vs. politics – talk radio hosts have to do both well.  Salzman says

      <font-family: arial,="" helvetica,="" sans-serif;="" line-height:="" 18px;="" background-color:="" rgb(180,="" 178,="" 176);"="">The best talk-radio hosts are artists/actors/entertainers themselves, as well as intellectuals, like Berg, driven to the talk medium as their form of expression. 

      Hard to disagree with that. I'd take it further and apply it to MSNBC hosts, many of whom had talk shows on Air America at some point: Maddow, Schultz, for example. They each have an entertainment "schtick" they do well: Maddow with her frenetic bubbliness and her props – Matthews with his manic Philly tough guy thing and his refusal to let his interviewees finish answering questions – Sharpton with his "preacher" shouting style…etc. They're letting the entertainment persona predominate, and IMHO, it doesn't always work for them. 

      They are also mostly good journalists, but much more bloggers and commentators these days. I think that only half of their shows are original interviews or research. That is why I prefer Al Jazeera America for news. Ironically, they're more "old school" journalists. 

    2. I have fond memories of listening to him while sitting in my John Deere tractor.  In those days, the tractor radios didn't work that well and only had an AM option; the 50,000-watt-Rocky-Mountain-blowtorch, KOA, was about the only thing I could pick up in the afternoons. 

      How times have changed – with local radio stations today dominated by Clear Channel affilitates and satellite radio, one has full access to a water-boarding of hate-radio sitting in the same tractor seat: Rush, Mike Huckabee, Anne Coulter, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

      I miss Alan. And to this day remember the exact place in my wheat field where I heard the announcement of his death.   

  4. Alan Berg was simply great! Two important facts:

    1) Alan Berg never drank.  He was a reformed alcoholic. To portray him as drinking and snorting is wrong, even for dramatic purposes.

    2) He was on the air during the time of the Fairness Doctrine.  To the best of my knowledge, he did not screen callers. He also did not insult all his callers. There was great local talk.  He was a treasure. 

    He was briefly on the TV, when Channel 4 was KOA, and in the afternoon.  When the show was canceled, boyles showed up and he and Berg  started carring out items from the set….it was funny.  But, we had a 4 year old kid in the extended family, who saw that skit and started cry.  He wanted to know why was Santa Claus leaving.   Berg, of course, had a beard.

     

    R.I.P.

     

     

     

     

  5. Hey, I know Michael Occhiuzzo.  He did a great job in our production of <i>Glengarry, Glen Ross</i> earlier this year in Lafayette.

    Just adding some minor info to this discussion.

  6. My sad memory of Berg was that I lived in Aurora back in '84 and often caught a ride home with a friend who lived in a nearby neighborhood. We drove down 14th Ave. the night he was killed. We had to detour around all of the emergency vehicles and wondered what it was all about, since we saw no wreck.Then I got home and turned on the 10pm news. Oh, that's what it was. Has anyone else ever read Steven Singular's Talked to Death? Sad and scary.

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