The Voices in Your Head: Phil Hendrie and the Death of Talk Radio, Part 1

Tracing the decline of the once-influential medium through one of its most unique talents

Image by Mike Teague.

2007. My mom and I were winding across a back road north of Schenectady heading home for Christmas. It was late at night and we were listening to WGY, “the Capital Region’s Breaking News, Traffic and Weather Station.” The host was interviewing a high school history teacher who was recently suspended. The teacher explained that he was giving a lesson about the upcoming Iowa caucus, but his students kept laughing every time the fateful word “caucus” came out of his mouth. The teacher then said, “So I pulled down my pants...”

“You what?” the host interjected.

“I pulled down my pants and pointed and said ‘Is this what you think is so funny?’”

My mom and I burst into hysterics. We knew the inside joke.

The host was Phil Hendrie, whose career mirrored the rise and fall of talk radio itself. For over 20 years, Hendrie hosted what seemed to be, on the surface, an ordinary talk show. He interviewed outlandish guests who said or did ridiculous things, such as a black pastor demanding that homeless people perform stunts in order to receive food from his soup kitchen, or a suburban housewife upset that her son was using porn—not because of the porn itself, but because he exclusively preferred porn featuring black women. Hendrie would then take callers, who would predictably lambast the guests for being terrible people. The guests would argue back, and Hendrie would play referee. One memorable exchange involved an upset teenage girl who was told by Hendrie’s guest to use Clearasil pads; she snapped back, “I use tampons!” The guest then howled, “Oh my God! Clearasil is for acne! I’m telling her to wash her face and she wants to stick them up her—” Many interviews would end with Hendrie hanging up on his guest in exasperation and apologizing to the caller.

There was just one catch: none of the guests were real. Every single one of them was performed by Hendrie himself, switching between his regular mic and a phone in which he would do his fake character voice. Sometimes he’d add sound effects in the background to make it seem like his “guest” was calling in from a restaurant kitchen or another location. (A 2005 Atlantic piece by David Foster Wallace inaccurately claimed that Hendrie used “mike [sic] processing” in his show, befitting Wallace’s usual slipshod approach to everything.)

Hendrie was open about his game, referring to his show as “theater of the mind,” and his regular listeners were in on it. The callers weren’t. The Phil Hendrie Show was an extended, cruel prank on the concerned citizens of America. It was also funny as hell.

I was one of a handful of millennials who listened to AM radio. I’m not sure how that happened. Plenty of kids had to put up with Mom or Dad blaring Rush Limbaugh while picking up them up from school, but few actually paid attention. That said, Rush didn’t interest me. I liked Michael Savage rambling about spaghetti recipes, Rammstein, and growing up in Queens in the 50’s; I liked Art Bell talking about UFOs and Area 51; I even liked Steve LeVeille going on about shepherd’s pie and reading off the Massachusetts lotto numbers. But in my teenage years, whenever I got off my horrible second-shift Kmart job, it was Phil Hendrie twisting my diaphragm into knots of laughter on the drive home.

***

There was a time when talk radio mattered, when faceless voices emanating from your car stereo could make or break public figures. Even before talk radio emerged as an institution, disc jockeys wielded enormous power; the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” in 1979, led by Chicago shock jock Steve Dahl, resulted in a full-scale riot and was partially credited with the death of the genre. “Payola” laws passed by the federal government in the 1950’s curbed the practice of record labels paying DJs and stations for song airtime, which gave unfair sales boosts to some musicians.

Talk radio itself was a relatively late innovation driven by FCC rules changes, technological innovations, and changing audience tastes. While opinionated talk hosts have been around as long as radio itself has existed, all-talk stations didn’t begin emerging until the late 1980’s, driven by the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan administration in 1987. The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC policy that required broadcast stations to present controversial issues from both a liberal and conservative perspective. The Democratic Party frequently used the Fairness Doctrine to challenge radio stations whose hosts were critical of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by forcing them to air rebuttals, while Reagan White House officials feared that the doctrine’s abolition would prevent them from doing the same to the Big Three TV networks, many of whom were opposed to Reagan’s policies. The end of the Fairness Doctrine made it easier for stations to hire radio hosts based purely on their ratings and revenue potential, since they were no longer required to balance one host’s viewpoints with another host who may not have been as popular.

Another factor that spurred the growth of talk radio was the increasing popularity of FM radio. FM’s greater audio clarity meant that it was better for music-based formats, leaving lower-fidelity AM stations in the dust. AM stations began switching to all-talk based formats, since the human voice was just as audible on the AM band as it was on FM. It was in 1988 that Rush Limbaugh, who would remain the number one talk host in the U.S. until his death in 2021, entered national syndication, convincing numerous networks and station operators that talk radio formats were commercially viable.

AM radio had one technological advantage over FM radio that made it additionally suited for talk-based formats: broadcast range. Due to skywave propagation, AM signals travel further using less power, particularly over water and at night. So-called “clear channel” stations such as WABC in New York City and the aforementioned WGY, broadcasting at the FCC’s maximum allowed power of 50,000 watts, can be heard across much of North America when the sun goes down. Driving around upstate New York at night, I’ve picked up clear channel stations as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis, and I’ve tuned into WABC as far south as Virginia Beach.

***

Phil Hendrie’s radio show is now ancient history. If you were born after the year 1990 and have heard his name at all, it’s likely from his role as Principal Vagina on Rick and Morty, as well as various other minor roles in other shows. But for a good portion of his life, for five days a week, The Phil Hendrie Show was his bread and butter, his public joke on the world.

Hendrie’s show thrived by exploiting one of the dirty secrets of the radio industry: there’s a big difference between talk radio listeners and talk radio callers.

Conservative talk radio—let's stop pretending there's any other kind—rests on the myth that it’s an agora of well-informed intellectuals. How many times have Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, or other halfwit syndicated and local hosts promoted their shows as giving a voice to da peeple? Talk radio shows—not all, but many—are promoted as forums where intelligent people debate issues and air their views, exercises in democracy where anyone can have a say. They're nothing like the liberal media, those elitists.

The reality is that the average talk radio caller is a crank who calls into shows because they have nothing better to do. They likely don't have a job; what, do you think anyone who works for a living could sit on hold for Rush Limbaugh’s call screener for two plus hours in the middle of the workday? They have no social life and think the hosts are their friends. They’re ill-informed and would have difficulty reading a restaurant menu. They half-listen to what they hear, get outraged, and dial up because they just have to ejaculate their opinions into someone else’s ears. The industry refers to talk radio callers as “chronics,” which should give you an idea of what little regard they have for the poor saps.

I knew a likely “chronic” once, when I lived in Chicago. He was my next door neighbor. He was on disability, listened to Michael Savage, and would leave his door open while listening to the radio or watching TV in the hopes somebody would stop in and talk to him. He would constantly rant about “GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS” and how the Democrats were “KILLING BABIES!” whenever he watched the evening news. He also had a fondness for loudly masturbating on the toilet with the window open and once threw his DVD player out the window while drunk. It landed on the roof of the bungalow next door.

One time, he drunkenly pulled me into his apartment and offered to share his marijuana tea with me while also rambling about how he had bought a smartphone and used it to search for “pretty pink pussies,” but the “lesbian prostitute” who lived one floor down had stolen the phone. He also once woke me up one morning walking past in the hallway loudly talking about how he had been trying to impress some black girl by buying her stuff from Target, but she still wouldn’t fuck him, so he hired two hookers to go down on him. I came back from a trip to Nashville one weekend and found an eviction notice from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office taped to his front door. I never saw him again.

This isn't the only example of the phoniness that radio operates on; for example, FM morning zoo radio contests are generally dominated by a handful of “contest pigs” and nobody else cares. Hendrie’s genius was recognizing that the average talk radio caller was like my neighbor—a crazed, delusional freak with too much free time—and running with it. The frisson of his show was not the humor of his fake guests, but the callers who got alternately bludgeoned and comforted by Hendrie in his different voices, not knowing they were the victims of a scam. While Hendrie was occasionally accused of faking his callers, most prominently by crosstown competitor Tom Leykis—with whom he had a long-running feud—anyone with a tiny bit of insider knowledge of radio knew that Hendrie’s callers were too stupid to be scripted.

***

Talk radio may have gotten its start as an independent medium in the late 80’s, but it wouldn’t hit its stride until the 90’s.

By the middle of the decade, many radio hosts were well-established as influential figures in the political sphere. Rush Limbaugh’s jeremiads against Bill Clinton were partially credited with the Republican Revolution of 1994. Bob Grant, a fixture of local NYC talk who Howard Stern called “the greatest broadcaster that has ever lived,” was a major influence on the victories of Republicans Rudy Giuliani in the 1993 mayoral race, Christine Todd Whitman in the 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial race, and George Pataki in the 1994 New York gubernatorial race. Stern himself, after aborting his run for governor on the Libertarian ticket, endorsed Pataki, who in turn enacted the “Howard Stern Bill” in 1995: a bill restricting road workers in the NYC and Long Island areas to only working at night.

The overwhelmingly right-wing bent of AM talk didn’t escape scrutiny, with journalists and politicians accusing Limbaugh and his imitators of coarsening public discourse and causing polarization, as Republican politicians became more extreme out of fear of being denounced by radio hosts. Many urged the government to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, arguing that the promotion of conservative talkers was influenced by runaway corporate dominance of the media. This did not happen. Instead, Clinton went in the opposite direction with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened the floodgates.

Longstanding FCC rules limited companies to owning two AM stations and two FM stations per media market, as well as 40 stations in total. The 1996 act increased the individual media market cap to eight stations, as well as eliminating the overall cap. This set off a feeding frenzy among media corporations as they began buying up every radio station they could find, then merging and gobbling each other up like the slimes in Ultima. The economy was doing great then. Surely those stations would keep making money forever.

Keeping track of the corporate consolidations and so on during this period is like trying to map out the love triangles in a telenovela, and equally pointless. All you really need to know is that despite the proponents of the 1996 act claiming it would foster competition, by 2001, the number of individual radio station owners in the U.S. had dropped from 5,100 to 3,800. By 2005, the number of major media companies had been reduced to only six.

***

Like many talk radio hosts, Phil Hendrie got his start as a DJ, working at the suburban Orlando station of WBJW in 1973 at the age of 20. He would hold a succession of radio jobs in New Orleans, Miami, San Diego, and other cities before getting a weekend talk show on KFI in his native Los Angeles in 1989.

A year later, he would move to KVEN in Ventura, California, where he struck gold. With the Gulf War in the news, Hendrie created a fake character, an Iraqi named Raj Fahneen, who defended Saddam Hussein. Callers poured in to angrily argue with “Fahneen,” and Hendrie realized he had a hit on his hands. He began creating more characters, such as Jay Santos, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman; Doug Dannger, an Orange County gossip columnist who incessantly reminds everyone that he is “a gay man and a gay journalist”; Ted Bell, the arrogant owner of the Ted’s of Beverly Hills steakhouse with its cheery tagline, “Here at Ted’s, we'd love to put our meat in your mouth.”

After stints in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Miami, Hendrie would return to LA in 1996 to host his show on KFI, the top-rated talk station in the city. Three years of ratings success later, his show was picked up for national syndication by Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), the largest owner of radio stations in America and responsible for syndicating Rush Limbaugh's program. It also greatly expanded the number of unwitting victims who’d call in.

At its apogee, The Phil Hendrie Show had over a million weekly listeners and was carried on over 100 radio stations across the country, such as WSYR in my hometown of Syracuse and WGY in nearby Albany. This is all the more remarkable given the timeslot in which it aired: 10PM-1AM Eastern (7-10PM Pacific), well outside of peak listening hours. At the same time, Hendrie began to pursue an acting career, appearing in several episodes of Futurama, an episode of Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and the film Team America: World Police. In 2006, he landed a starring role in NBC’s Teachers, a sitcom from one of the creators of Scrubs that was unfortunately cancelled after its first season.

***

In the early 2000’s, the first signs of trouble were on the horizon for the radio industry.

Most stations and companies were still profitable. The economy was still doing well, ensconced in the post-9/11 bubble of delusion. But unlike in the 90’s, radio no longer had a captive audience. New competitors were emerging. And radio completely miscalculated and responded to the wrong competitor.

The early oughts saw the emergence of satellite radio, which traditional radio firms mistakenly saw as their primary threat. This fear was amplified when Howard Stern decamped to Sirius Satellite Radio in 2006, citing longtime frustrations with management following indecency crackdowns in the wake of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004. Opie and Anthony, another popular NYC shock jock act, also moved to XM Satellite Radio in 2004 following their firing from WNEW over the “Sex for Sam” contest, in which they encouraged a couple to hook up in a vestibule in a church.

Another problem for talk radio was demographics. The most coveted advertising demographic for talk radio stations was the 25-54 age range. But by the turn of the century, the Limbaugh audience was getting AARP cards and Viagra scripts. A long-term crisis was around the corner.

Radio responded in the way you’d imagine corporate suits who think purely in numbers would. One ill-fated maneuver was launched by CBS Radio with its “Free FM” stations. The branding was simple: FM radio was free, satellite radio cost money. Capische? These stations featured more youth-oriented “hot talk” hosts of the Howard Stern variety, such as Adam Carolla, Tom Leykis, and Opie and Anthony (airing a censored version of their XM show).

An even dumber solution was “HD radio.” FM and AM stations spent thousands on upgrading their transmitters for marginally better audio fidelity. HD-FM stations were also capable of broadcasting secondary stations on the same bandwidth, similar to digital over-the-air TV stations. The only problem is that you needed a special HD radio to receive these superior signals. HD radios ranged from $50 for cheapo models to hundreds of dollars. Most listeners were unwilling to spend this amount of money to replace their car stereos and alarm clocks. The only thing that would have made them do it is a law forcing them to, akin to the digital TV changeover that occurred in 2009. Nobody cared enough to force a similar law for radio through Congress, so HD radio withered on the vine.

HD-AM radio technology was also flawed on a technical level. Many HD-AM stations had a habit of blasting static across adjacent frequencies, a major problem for any station that happened to broadcast there. In the late 2000’s, Bob Savage, the owner of talk radio station WYSL in Rochester, New York, filed an FCC complaint against Boston-based clear channel station WBZ, alleging that interference from WBZ’s HD signal was making WYSL, located on the adjacent 1040 frequency, unlistenable within its broadcast range.

A final, desperate maneuver from many talk radio stations was moving to the FM band. While I already mentioned that CBS Radio tried to compete with Stern with their “Free FM” stations, many long-running traditional talk stations began transferring their formats to FM wholesale, under the thinking that younger listeners had abandoned the AM band entirely. KIRO in Seattle was one of the first to migrate to FM, making the move in 2008 and turning its former AM clear channel frequency into an all-sports station, while other stations such as WGY stuck to simulcasting their programming on FM.

Worth mentioning during this time is the formation of Air America Radio, an explicitly progressive talk radio network designed to compete with the traditionally right-wing industry. Launched in 2004, Air America initially featured programs hosted by prominent celebrities such as Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Arianna Huffington, as well as some actual radio hosts such as Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow. However, the network never took off due to the inexperience of many of its key hosts (whose talents didn’t translate to the radio realm), incompetent management, and its insistence on a network-based distribution format as opposed to the more common syndication model, which inhibited its growth by restricting only one station per media market from carrying its programs. By 2006, Air America had filed for bankruptcy; after being purchased by new buyers the following year, it would attempt to retool by hiring experienced hosts such as Ron Kuby, Lionel (yes, the same Lionel who would later become a major QAnon proponent), and the Young Turks. This was not enough, and the Great Recession would end Air America for good in 2010.

***

In April of 2006, Phil Hendrie announced that he was retiring from radio. After over three decades on the air, he was moving on.

His stated reason was to focus on his acting career. While it had recently been announced that Teachers would not be renewed for another season, Hendrie had other projects going on at the time and believed he had taken his show as far as it could go. However, any longtime listener could read between the lines. Hendrie was frustrated with Premiere for the same reasons that had driven Stern away from terrestrial radio. Following the Janet Jackson incident, Hendrie’s show had been increasingly censored by management; for example, the infamous Ted’s of Beverly Hills ad now had to have the word “mouth” bleeped out. In 2005, his show had also been moved from number one-rated KFI to the less-popular KLAC, a sports talk station; his replacement on KFI was John Ziegler, the generic conservative talker that David Foster Wallace profiled in his Atlantic piece.

However, in the months leading up to his retirement announcement, Hendrie had increasingly dedicated shorter segments on his program to lamenting the sorry state of corporate radio. Hendrie had always been an odd duck in the talk radio world beyond the nature of his program. For one, he was an ardent liberal and registered Democrat in an industry dominated by the right-wing. While he had a dim view of the average talk radio caller due to how easily he was able to fool so many of them, he believed in radio as an art form and felt it could be so much more than what it was: hundreds of Rush Limbaugh clones spouting the same “Republicans rule, Democrats drool” talking points. He often ridiculed Z-grade syndicated talkers like Rusty Humphries for being unable to think for themselves or take the medium beyond what better hosts like Limbaugh or Stern had done. Hendrie also frequently took aim at Tom Leykis, viciously mocking him as “Combover Boy,” a washed-up, morbidly obese shock jock handing out advice on how to get laid without a shred of self-awareness.

I don’t know if Hendrie had some insider knowledge that radio was headed for a fall, he had a gut feeling that bad things were around the bend, or he was just tired of the whole thing. But regardless, on June 23, 2006, The Phil Hendrie Show ended its decade-long run. Hendrie would retain his website and “Backstage Pass” subscription plan for fans to access his large archive of past shows, but his radio career was over.

Read Part 2 here.