Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online Page B

have to master two techniques, and I’m going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of the microphone. To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie, is cuing up the record. Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record, then turn the record until you hear the beginning of the record, back it up a quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking the record will start.” He paused, gave it two beats. “After you have mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex.”
    Limbaugh’s bosses saw that he was talented and popular, but they worried that his humor was stretching the top-40 drive-time format. “They used to send him memos, telling him ‘Shut up and play the records,’ ” says Bill Figenshu, who worked at the station as “Bill Steele” and shared a two-hundred-dollar-a-month flat with Rush in nearby Irwin, Pennsylvania. “It was supposedly a garden apartment but it was in the basement, so there was no garden. We were both very young, ambitious, hard-working guys. He went in at four in the morning. I worked nights, so we didn’t see each other that much. We were friendly, we had a decent time, but we weren’t best buds or anything like that. Mostly we did the wash together on Saturdays and ate pizza. Rush had a good personality but he wasn’t particularly funny. He was a quiet kid, and so was I. When radio is your life, you’re a geek. Especially if you were doing AM, which was becoming uncool at that point. We didn’t smoke dope, we did air-checks. Vietnam was going on, all sorts of changes, but I can’t remember him talking about politics. We talked about radio and the careers we wanted to have.”
    According to Figenshu, who went on to become the head of Viacom’s radio broadcasting division, the flat they shared was a model of bachelor domesticity, with a ratty green shag carpet, furniture pulled together from forgotten sources, and cold pizza crusting on the kitchen counter. Limbaugh, who is an extremely fastidious housekeeper, is offended by the description. He also denies that the apartment was, as has been reported, the scene of his first sexual conquest. “I have no memory of THAT,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “I don’t remember where [I lost my virginity]. Honestly I don’t. All I know is that there was NO ONE else there. That I am certain of.”
    In Cape, Rusty Sharpe had been a minor celebrity. In McKeesport, Jeff Christie surpassed Rusty: He did Toys for Tots charity gigs with players of the Pittsburgh Condors, an ABA basketball team that averaged less than a thousand fans a game and whose star, John Brisker, was the dirtiest player in the history of pro basketball. Bachelor Jeff made appearances for the Variety Club and other civic organizations, and showed up on request to schmooze with sponsors at station events.
    WIXZ was a starter job, and Limbaugh acquitted himself well enough to take the next step. In 1973 he was hired by station KQV, known as 14K, as a nighttime disc jockey. KQV was an ABC affiliate, the second-most-popular AM station in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately for him, ABC quickly sold the station to Taft Broadcasting. There were different bosses, different expectations, and by 1974 Jeff Christie was out of a job and temporarily unable to find a new one.
    The economy was against him—the stock market crashed in 1973, and by the end of ’74 it had lost more than 45 percent of its value. Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh were especially bad places to be. The record industry was changing, too. Singles were being replaced by albums. Billboard reported that FM had established dominance in “market after market . . . in the younger demographics”—that was Jeff Christie’s demographic. But he had no interest in FM, which he considered a radio band for hippies and phony