Phil Hendrie: Unpredictable, entertaining, insightful radio

Phil Hendrie

Phil Hendrie got his start in radio as a music DJ and later in 1990 began his career in Talk Radio. The first Phil Hendrie Show was a comedy talk radio program that became renowned for its unique and controversial guests, who were actually fictional characters created and voiced by Hendrie himself. Hendrie would pose as callers and guests and argue with himself and others in a lively and entertaining fashion. The show became nationally syndicated in 1996 and was heard on over 100 key stations around the country.

Hendrie has performed voices on the animated FOX sitcoms King of the Hill and Futurama, and in Team America: World Police. Hendrie ended his original show in 2006 to pursue a career in acting. He played a starring role in NBC's midseason replacement sitcom, Teachers in the spring of 2006 and guest starred in two episodes of The Unit in October, 2006.

Hendrie returned to radio June 25, 2007 with Talk Radio Network-FM. The Phil Hendrie Show, which airs LIVE from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., PST with re-feeds 1 a.m. to 3 a.m.

Hendrie considers his views unique for modern talk radio. On one hand, he is a registered Democrat who vocally supported Bill Clinton, voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000 and both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, while at the same time is extremely supportive of the Iraq War and the War on Terror. Phil voted for and supported George W. Bush in the 2004 election and feels that Bush will in time be viewed as one of the greatest American presidents. That's why people tune in to Hendrie—he’s both unpredictable and entertaining at the same time.

What makes your program unique? 

Well first of all, our slug line is “Truth is our bitch”.  Now I know that that sounds harsh but it’s truthful.  For the sake of being either progressive or conservative, we never ever take a point of view that isn’t genuine.  I have said I support Senator Obama; I also support the War in Iraq.  I happen to think Senator Obama is far more hawkish on Iraq and the world events than his supporters understand and that’s why I like him.  I like him for things that I dare say any other Obama supporter would tell me I’m crazy because that’s not the guy he is--but I in fact believe he is. 

I’m pro-choice and pro-gay marriage but I’m also a strong advocate for gun rights.  That’s the way most people think and I’m happy to be able to have a radio show to reflect that because if you ask yourself well are people listening to somebody who lives where they live I think that’s what they get with the Phil Hendrie Show. 
Beyond that we do it all with a great deal of humor.  We do a lot of character voices.  We do a lot of sketch comedy on the show.  We interviewed, for instance, a character last night by the name of Art Griego who believes that necrophilia in essence is not a violation of a dead body--it’s a way of communicating with spirits beyond our own world.  While he does not actively have sex with dead bodies because that is illegal he has his wife take an ice bath and put on white pancake makeup and hold her jaw open and release a jar of gnats over her body and then rub herself down with Munster cheese so she smells dead and he makes love to her.  The local police need to arrest him but they can’t really pin anything on him.  They walked in one day and smelled something bad and Art says to me that was my wife but she’s not dead she only smells dead.

Do you still have callers call in who have no clue what the hell’s going on and get outraged?

If we get a call like that we put them on the air, but the difference between that show and this show is I don’t actively try to churn those calls.  The reason is because I did it for 16 years--you spend an awful lot of time, in my opinion, an inordinate amount of time trying to hit the point home as hard as you can so you’ll get calls.  That’s fine but as you know when you spend a lot of time talking only to callers you’re leaving your audience someplace else.  I found that spending that 15 or 20 minutes was a waste of time when you could spend that 15 or 20 minutes concentrating on the humor of the bit.  It is fun to have what we call these callers that have been chumped or punked, and we feel that our radio show broke that ground. 

I’ve got a manager that says why couldn’t you have been Borat?  It never occurred to me to do a movie about it.  The fact is if you want to do humor on the radio and it’s live. You’ve got to get to the funny stuff and if I walked out into the public and we had time to roll tape endlessly we could probably pull a lot of really great stuff but a radio show is four-hours live everyday and you’ve got to get to what it is you’re getting to. I decided to dispense with actively churning those calls. 

Now last night we got two calls from people that thought the characters were real and we threw them on the air with them and it was funny and it’s one of those moments where people will go oh wow this is what makes the show so brilliant.  But I can tell you from experience Carl for 10 years over at Clear Channel and Premiere I did a show that was exactly what that was and the show suffered as a result of a couple of things.  It was difficult to pin it, position it on a talk station.  There weren’t enough so-called personality-driven stations where you could put my show and say this is really funny, listen to it.  The advertisers didn’t get it.  So while everybody was telling me what a brilliant show I did frankly commercially it was nowhere near the success I needed it to be.  This is a decision you have to make.

Well, you’re in 17 of the top 25 markets including the Big Apple so you must be doing something right.

I knew that if I began to do a show that was speaking more directly to people, using comedy but also using myself as the voice of opinion, that we would get cleared in far more stations.  We’re on in Boston and New York and places like that and we have been for a long time and I can tell you after two years we haven’t had any major cancellations.  Now that never has happened to me before.  First of all I’ve never been on in New York.  I’ve never been on in Boston.  I’ve never been on in DC.  Not only am I on in those markets but we remain on the air in those markets because we’re obviously now meeting a need that the stations have.

Give us another funny character that you came up with recently.

We just had a character on named Charlie LaFountain. I was talking to Charlie and he was down at the Indymac Bank run.  He was nervous, he was waiting in line. He was frightened to death and as I began to talk to him we had another little character in there named Jay Santos of the Citizen’s Auxiliary Police--he was down there helping the police keep order, in other words a pain in the ass public servant. 

But this Charlie La Fountain character was very vociferous and vocal about what a disastrous thing this was and as the conversation went on I come to find out that he doesn’t have any money in Indymac--it’s all at Bank of America and he had no real reason to be there.  When I said why were you there?  He said well I saw it on TV and I felt like I had to get down there and make a pain in the ass out of myself.  I said why?  Well Mr. Hendrie this is serious and as the bit sort of unfolded we tried to illustrate the monkey see monkey do anxious nature of a lot of people when it comes to events in this country.  There really may be nothing seriously wrong with what’s going on but this kind of hysteria is infectious.  Here’s a guy with no reason to figure anything but he’s afraid.  We’ve got a lot of that going around these days.

I’ll give you another example: Michael Savage autism comments.  We had a character her name is Bobbie Dooley and she came on and she thought that what Michael Savage said...

Isn’t she an old character?

Yeah well all these characters are.  Some of them are and some of them aren’t. Well she was on and she thought that what Michael Savage said was absolutely terrible and he should be thrown off the air and his advertisers should cancel.  However she does understand where he’s coming from because she has an autistic nephew and she has to resist the urge to shove his head under water sometimes when she goes to visit him. So that bit we are illustrating there is a sort of low-level hypocrisy in our society regarding certain kids.

When you make a really good point on the air--no matter how controversial--truth will eventually vindicate you and broadcasters should know this.  Now let’s take the other example of a Don Imus--and I hate to keep hammering the poor guy--but the example comes to mind.  When you say something on the air and you don’t know why you said it I don’t care if he would have said Nappy Headed Ho but he had a perfectly good explanation in the sense of making a satirical reference nobody would have been able to touch him but Don didn’t know why he said what he said.  You and I both know he said it because he had time to fill, he needed to get to a break. He heard his producers say it, he laughed, this was not professional.  I would have backed the guy up a billion percent if he knew. 

That’s the other thing about our show--I know exactly why I say the things I say.  There will never be a time that Phil Hendrie has to apologize for anything.  I’m not saying people won’t get angry at me but I will never ever apologize or take back anything I say on the air because I’m thinking all the time and I know why I say it.

It’s really not an easy job to do this every day and not screw up at all. What are the benefits of carrying your program that a manager, group operator or PD needs to know?

We offer an alternative at night to the sort of monolithic offerings of other broadcasters--these sort of defacto shows that are grabbing audience by default.  We want them to have a serious news commentary alternative and I do deliver serious news commentary and it’s dead on.  I said on my show two weeks ago that the price of oil is going to come down when the people that are speculating in the market understand we’re serious about drilling for oil on the American continent and not doing business with OPEC.  The reason being, of course, that the value of that oil will drop a little bit and that’s exactly what happened when Bush said he was going to lift the Executive Ban. It was just enough to throw a little bit of nervousness into the market.  Now you can track it to the days that Bush began talking about that that oil prices were coming down.  The fact that the way you get the price of oil down is by saying very strongly yeah we’re going to drill and we’re going to go out and drill today.  Because what happens is the value of the OPEC oil suddenly in the minds of those that invest in it, it isn’t as high. The Americans are getting serious about getting out of the OPEC business. 

How do you assist your affiliates in helping your program grow and helping their ratings grow as well?

My radio show is always prepared anytime, anyplace to actively, physically go to the affiliates’ market and participate in any promotion that they would like me to participate in and we do this at no expense to the affiliate.  For instance if we’re going to do a personal appearance I want them to handle that but my company Hendrie Radio handles the transportation, we handle the accommodation. 

Now this gives a local presence to our show to any and all affiliates.  It gives the station the opportunity to bring us into town to meet their listeners and to show that we are a part of that team and familiar with that team.  I think that’s one of the single most valuable things we can do so it’s not costing the stations any money other than setting up a microphone, a banner and a chair. We can at a minute’s notice, at the drop of a hat, get on an airplane and fly anywhere in the United States or Canada wherever we have an affiliate.

Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing with your website and how you’re monetizing that with listeners.

Our listeners have a daily podcast video where they can watch me performing pieces of the show.  We also animate. We offer our listeners a daily glimpse into the radio show and behind the scenes so they see the performance. They sometimes get behind-the-scenes video of me talking to my crew.  In fact there’s a clip on there from Monday where I’m losing my temper with them over some problem we had on Friday night.  This is everyday. They are getting what we call a video Phil Cast of entire segments of the show as its being performed and behind the scenes.  We also take audio from our show and animate it and turn them into what we call webisodes.  These are animated episodes that the audio, the voice tracks are pulled literally from the show and we animate the characters.  That’s done by Steve White.  We’ve got four of those up right now.  We have the archives some 15 years of different generations of the show.  We’ve got a bunch of obvious video archives and what we’re planning on doing hopefully in the very, very near future is offering on-demand streaming of the show so no matter what time of day you sit down at your computer you can get that day’s show.  That also will be archived.  Essentially what we offer is probably about three times more than any other radio website in the history of the business. On my website Phil Hendrie I make around $35 to $40,000.00 a month, just me.

Wow!

I’m going to tell you something because you’ve got to connect the dots here man.  If there is talent out there that can pull 40 grand a month from a website why can’t these guys at Sirius figure it out?  Well they can’t figure it out because they don’t know what the hell makes people listen to the radio. Mel Karmazin couldn’t program his way out of a wet paper bag other than the fact that he hired Howard Stern.  It was the greatest single decision anybody ever made because it built an entire company. Beyond that he doesn’t know anything about programming.  So what did he do?  He went and bought the competition. That way they can’t beat his ass.  He can buy them and the price will go up, the choices will go down, the radio will get worse that’s just the nature of the game.

They’ve now got all these extra satellites--I think they are going to offer one service that’s going to have commercials in the music channels and it will be offered free.  I think that they are going to make their money off of ad dollars.

Yeah, because they don’t know how to program for subscription models. 

What do you do for show prep?  Do you subscribe to any services, do you do it all on your own with your producers?

My producer sends me batches of stories that he feels are necessary to do.  He also sends a schedule as to when these stories should fall in the course of the show.  I go online and look at the news and I’m looking for anything that really grabs my attention that personally inspires me or I know is going to get my mouth working.  There might be one or two or three stories like that a day and there may be none so I’m also watching TV.  In my studio I have two televisions tuned to news channels and I’m looking for different things. 

For instance last night there was a comment made by Pete Hamill on MSNBC where he said that McCain shouldn’t be talking about how to win a war, look at Vietnam he lost that one.  Some people made a big deal out of that. Well of course he was saying that he was a part of a losing effort in Vietnam.  I did talk about Pete Hamill because I don’t particularly like him.  He is a New York writer who espouses sort of these neighborhood New York ideas and one of them that he espoused on the New York Documentary Series was that the Irish gained political power in New York as the results of the 1863 draft riots basically gussing up one of the most violent episodes in the history of America as an empowerment tool for the Irish Americans. I thought it was an ignorant statement typical of this ethnocentric Irish New York attitude and I called him out on it.  Basically what I said was Pete Hamill is a great writer but like most of these guys when you stick them in front of a microphone or a camera they couldn’t find their ass with both hands. 

This is what our industry also does it falls in love with TV personalities or it falls in love with personalities and then it tries to make broadcasters out of them to the embarrassment of the industry.  I could go down the list but radio is not being run by radio people. It’s being run by TV people or movie people in the case of Sirius or it’s being run by bankers or guys that ran pharmaceutical companies. 

In terms of the creative effort it’s in an extremely bad situation.  There is only one thing that is helping talent these days there are far more outlets for talent to access and be on and so it gives talent that much more but you see Sirius swallowing up XM is an attempt to take the power away from talent and to monopolize the satellite channels so that talent has that much less of an option in terms of employment and a place to do their thing. 


Tell us about your role with “King of the Hill.”

I’ve been performing a variety of characters on that show since probably the late ‘90’s.  The first show I did was in 1998. It was the result of talking with one of the producers at that time who listened to my radio show and heard the different characters we performed on the show so I was invited to come over and be a character in a number of episodes and ever since then it’s been a regular part of my work regime I guess.  Every so often--maybe three episodes, four episodes a year they call me over and it just so happens I just got done voice tracking a show. 

I had no idea--they said Phil we’d like you to be in this episode and it’s our 250th and we’re going to have the table read over at FOX Studio.  I said oh great thank you very much and they said oh and there might be some media there.  I said okay and so I roll over and I find that we’re in the Darryl Zanuck Theater with 300 media and they’ve got a big cake and there are all kinds of publicity around the thing.  God knows there are other actors that have worked more on the show than I have in recurring parts so I was really grateful. 
Mike Judge, the guy that created the show, is a real gentleman and obviously a brilliant man so every month when I go to the mailbox and find the residual checks. It’s one of those perks I guess, one of those little bonuses. 

Same thing with Team America--I did two characters in what arguably is probably one of the funniest movies ever made and it was because Trey Parker and Matt Stone listened to the show and invited me to do a couple of character voices in that film.  I knew the movie would be funny. I knew it was a creative idea using marionette puppets but I had no idea that it was going to be the bust out DVD phenomenon that it became. So every now and again I get a check for Team America. 

Didn’t you do something with NBC so many years ago?  I know it’s been a while since I first interviewed you. 

Well I first started doing some recurring parts in episodic comedy shows.  I was on a show called A.U.S.A. where I played a judge and I did about three episodes of that show.  Then I did a show called Teachers which was produced by Matt Parses.

That’s the one.

Yeah that ran six episodes on NBC.  I do a recurring part on the CBS show The Unit.  I play George Tatelman who is ironically enough the manager of the local radio station.  That’s a slightly different part because it’s obviously dramatic as opposed to comedic. Although when you’re playing the part of a radio station manager you can’t get to far away from comedy it’s always lurking around the corner  there someplace.

It’s neat that you wear so many hats—must be a key to a good life.

Man, you’re like a handyman.  I consider myself to be an actor because even when you’re doing a radio show you’re performing a part, you’re playing a character that you wouldn’t ordinarily play in real life.  The opinions are my own but the way I present them might be a little bit more artfully than I would.

What can radio do to regain some of what it has lost—especially with younger demos?

Number one you’re not going to bring music radio back the way it is now because the iPod, as everybody has said brilliantly, has destroyed music radio.  What you do is this if people are listening to the radio for spoken word you bring back the disc jockey presenter.  You bring back the disc jockeys that I grew up with who are cats that not only pick their own music and play the tops hits but presented a show.  You bring back the disc jockey as the star not the liner card reader.  You bring him back and there is a reason to listen to his show not just because he plays really cool music that maybe other people didn’t think to play but because he himself is a compelling person. 

Wolfman Jack, to some extent Casey Kasem--whoever you want to talk about--these guys that were legendary because they created an environment where listening to the music was fun.  This is one thing that you do. 
The other thing is you’ve got to get rid of the computers.  You’re not going to out iPod somebody.  If a guy knows exactly what it is he wants to hear he knows what he wants to hear. What you have to do on the radio is the only thing that radio can do and that is present the performer that is the individual the disc jockey the talk show host that person that brings life to the medium and creates something completed different that the iPpod owner cannot create for himself.

Wonderful, well said. What are the three key focuses of your programming content?

Information, commentary, humor. We have to have information that the audience wants.  We have to comment on that to give it perspective to alert people or direct people to things they may not be thinking about.  Then we need to provide a relief--and by relief I don’t mean relief as in I just took a shit--but relief as in putting something in relief like a painting.  We need to put it into a painting that is enjoyable to look at and so we are constantly weaving humor and satire through the show so that we never get to heavy-handed.  We are always ready to lighten the mood just when everybody thinks it can’t get any worse and we’re certainly ready to take a good hard shot at something we need to take a shot at.  Satire is the greatest humor for that because it’s humor with a point of view. Humor with a point of view is extremely, extremely effective and it pisses off a lot of people it makes other people really happy. 

A great example of how not to do satire was the New Yorker cover of Obama.  I don’t know what happened to the New Yorker, I’m told that it used to be a great magazine but that was absolutely without question not satire.  If they wanted to satirize the popular opinion of Barack Obama they would have satirized the people that hold those opinions, not Obama himself and not his wife.  Your target has to be someone or something that is not sympathetic.  The target in that case should have been the idiots who think his is a Muslim not Obama.  He’s a sympathetic target which made the magazine cover one of the stupidest efforts on behalf of what some people tell me is a highly intellectual magazine. 

--by Carl Marcucci

Below are sample audio clips and a video clip of Phil Hendrie in action.
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