Author Bradley C. Freeman is full professor and program leader at Sunway University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (School of Communication and Media Studies) in Malaysia. His research interests include online communities, political communication and radio history.
Alex Bennett’s career in radio spans from the 1950s to the present day, encompassing AM music and talk, the emergence of FM, the peak years of personality radio, satellite radio at SiriusXM and contemporary streaming.
He worked at legendary stations including WMCA(AM) in New York — as one of the “Good Guys” — KMEL(FM), KQAK(FM) and KITS(FM) in San Francisco, where he became known as the “king of comedy” for pioneering a talk format built around standup comedians and unscripted live interaction.
Bennett trained under Gordon McClendon at KILT(FM) in Houston, appeared on both coasts as a personality and later moved to satellite radio before transitioning to YouTube streaming. He claims an early role in automated audio distribution predating modern podcasting and offers insider perspectives on consolidation’s impact on radio.
In 2008, Bennett was inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.
At 86, Bennett continues to stream four nights weekly, maintaining what he calls the practice of “talking to one person” in an era of distributed digital audio. This interview was conducted via video call.
Influences and the clown archetype
Bradley C. Freeman: What initially drew you to radio, and what has kept you behind the microphone all this time?
Alex Bennett: I grew up on radio when I was a kid. There was no television. I listened to things like Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Charlie McCarthy and “Smiling Ed McConnell” on Saturday mornings. They had orchestras, people singing — it was full-bodied entertainment. That’s what I grew up on, listening on my little radio in my bedroom, and it influenced me throughout my entire career. When I did “Breakfast with Bennett” in San Francisco, I wanted to start doing a thing with a big full-sized orchestra. I was doing the kind of radio I grew up on.
Freeman: Who were your major influences in radio?
Bennett: Don Sherwood was a major influence. He was the biggest talk show host ever in the history of San Francisco. You could walk down the street and out of the windows you would hear the same radio show — it was Don Sherwood. You didn’t even have to turn on your radio to hear him. You could hear him from other people’s radios. That’s how big this guy was.
He let me come down and watch him do his show one day. He wasn’t that topical. He just went in and did his show. He was funny and he kidded about stuff. But the program was about what happened to you yesterday, about what’s happening in your life recently, stories and things that bothered you and things that affected you. And that honesty, that kind of honesty rubbed off on me when I listened to Sherwood.
My timing was adopted from Jack Benny, who was a master of timing. I used to describe Jack Benny as not being a comedian. He was a clown. And the difference is a comedian pulls jokes on people, a clown has jokes pulled on him. The funniest laughs on the Jack Benny show were at his expense. I created that kind of image when I got to San Francisco — a comic would come on, sit there and just put me down for a half hour.
Boot camp
Freeman: Tell me about working for Gordon McClendon in Houston. What was that experience like?
Bennett: McClendon was boot camp. He ruled out of fear. You never knew when he was coming to town, when he was going to book himself into a hotel, listen to the station and then send a guy by named Don Keys who was second in command. He would go through the place firing people. So you worked in an element of fear. But it also caused you to be raised to a certain level.
If I say I owe my success to anybody, it would probably be McClendon, because I went through that boot camp and I came out of it a major league broadcaster. A lot of people did. He didn’t influence me exactly, but he forced me to be able to come to a certain level of quality that I wouldn’t have if I was just working some other radio station.
“If I say I owe my success to anybody, it would probably be Gordon McClendon, because I went through that boot camp and I came out of it a major league broadcaster.”
Freeman: You did something unusual in Houston — you performed as a British character for two years. Can you tell that story?
Bennett: They wanted to hire a British announcer. I sent them an audition doing a British accent, and they thought it sounded so great they wanted to hire me. When they called, I finally said, “What if I told you I was him?” I started talking with the British accent and they said, “You’re hired. Come to Houston, Texas.”
I had to remain being British for like two years. I couldn’t tell anybody. I had to do it in my real life when I met up with people. I’d go home and I’d be doing the accent and my wife would look at me and go, “You stop that.” We went out on promotions and I had the British accent wherever I went. It was KILT, owned by McClendon. I was James Bond, agent 009, with a license to kilt.
The comedy king and unscreened calls
Freeman: You became known as San Francisco’s “king of comedy” at Live 105. How did that happen?
Bennett: It was organic. I had a comedian on my show — Bobby Slayton — and I loved having him there. It was fun. I knew how to be a good straight man because I had a sense of timing. I said, “You got any other friends?” And he said, “I got a few.” I said, “Send them my way.” And before I knew it, I was up to my ass in comics. I would have five comedians on the show at a time and they’d all be sitting there riffing for three hours. I didn’t even have to work. But this was organic. This wasn’t premeditated.
Freeman: What was your role as the host with all these comedians?
Bennett: I created that Jack Benny model — the clown, not the comedian. A comic would come on, sit there and just put me down for a half hour. The host becomes the durable object that makes improvisational comedy workable over long airtime. I could take it. I knew how to respond. That structure made it possible to sustain.
Freeman: You didn’t screen calls on your shows. Why?
Bennett: When you’re screening calls, you have a tendency to have somebody there making the decisions — what’s good for you? If I just take them randomly and I see a light going and I push the button and I say, “you’re on the air,” I don’t know what I’m getting and neither does anybody in the studio. So it’s a more unpredictable kind of thing. If somebody isn’t any good on the phone, I just go click, you’re off. I go to the next one. And that became part of my style. That unpredictability was the point.
Stern, podcasting and consolidation
Freeman: When you think about your contemporaries in radio, who comes to mind?
Bennett: My contemporaries today — the people I wouldn’t want to be compared to but who I recognize — the biggest imitator of what I did is Howard Stern. I know he was listening to me as he was growing up because he has told people privately that I was one of his major influences. He has never said it publicly, but that’s what he’s told people.
In spite of the fact that I hate him for a lot of things — number one, saying I stole from him. How could I have done that? I’m much older than he is. But I recognized that he adopted a lot of what I did and based a career on it. Actually, he took two things I did and combined them. He took my radio and combined that with what I did on “Midnight Blue” in New York, which was a sex show. And those two things combined became Howard Stern.
Freeman: Did you have any direct interactions with him?
Bennett: I only had one interaction with him ever at Sirius. The day I pissed him off and he came into my studio with his crew and his microphone, and we duked it out and I won him over. He went back to his studio and Robin said to him, “You were so nice to him.” He said, “Well, I walked in the door and the first thing he did was shake my hand and say, ‘Good to meet you.’ How do you fight that?” I was just really nice to him. I wasn’t about ready to fight him. I knew how he fought. He fought dirty. I wasn’t going to fight with him.
Freeman: You’ve claimed you were doing something like podcasting before the term existed. Can you explain that?
Bennett: I was out of work between stations in San Francisco — I believe it was in 1997, somewhere around that time. I figured, what am I going to do to satisfy my audience? I had a website and started doing a little show, posting it so people could click and listen whenever they wanted.
Then a guy came to me — I still have the program — and said, “I’ve invented something for you. It’s called Auto Alex.” It was a simple idea: people could install it, and once a day it would check the site, download any new show and have it ready to play when they got home. That’s exactly what we did, and a lot of people used it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later I realized we were essentially doing what would come to be known as podcasting — letting people hear the show on their own time, outside the limits of broadcast schedules.
Freeman: You’ve said consolidation was radio’s “first death blow.” What happened?
Bennett: Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. But if you want to know why there’s no radio anymore, consolidation was the first death blow. When you allowed people to own as many radio stations as they could gobble up, you’re not creating competition — you’re creating monopolies.
When I was in San Francisco, I was competing with 20 other radio stations. By the time I left, I went and worked for Clear Channel and they owned about 10 stations in the market, and they were all in the same building. So now, who’s your competition? I would take a break from my show, walk out in the hallway and the guy who became my friend because he was working in the studio next door doing his show was Jim Lang. Here I’m literally spending time on a break talking to my major competitor. My major competitor in the old days was across town. That was it. And I learned to hate him because that’s how you competed. You hated them.
Freeman: Can you give a concrete example of how consolidation changed the work?
Bennett: My newswoman, Lori Thompson, who I still talk to and love and adore—she wound up working at Clear Channel when I was over there. I said, “How are things going here?” She said, “Well, I do some shows on the weekend, but I voice track them.” Which means you just lay down the tracks—“and that was so-and-so, here’s so-and-so”—whatever. She said, “I’m on the air over the weekend for something like 20 hours, but I voice track it and they only pay me for the time I’m voice tracking. So they pay me for an hour and a half.” And that’s what happened to radio.
The talk format and future of the medium
Freeman: Why did right-wing talk come to dominate radio?
Bennett: Rush Limbaugh — when I first heard him, I said, “This guy’s fun. This guy’s good. This guy is phenomenal.” And he was. If you want to talk about who was a good broadcaster to me, I would say Limbaugh was a great broadcaster. His opinions I didn’t agree with. But man, he was entertaining. He came out of the same school I did — you did a radio show and your job wasn’t to politicize. Your job was to entertain. If you’re talking politics, then while you’re talking about it, you better entertain, because that’s why people are going to listen to you.
As soon as he did what he did, all the wannabes came along and imitated him — whether it was Hannity or whatever. When I worked at Clear Channel, the head of Clear Channel heard me on the air and said, “Is he for real?” Because he defined talk radio as right-wing talk. That was the definition of talk radio.
Freeman: You were involved with Air America. What happened there?
Bennett: I was in on the beginning of that. I was supposed to be one of their first hires. But in the process of creating Air America, it got sold to some other people. They started going after different people. The people they had on Air America were Al Franken, Rachel Maddow and Janeane Garofalo — these were the hires they tried to make.
What do all these people have in common? Not radio people. They were having non-radio people doing radio shows. The other big mistake they made was if you’re a station and you want Air America, you have to take the full 24/7 schedule. Nobody wanted to do that. They wanted, “Hey, that Rachel Maddow, she sounds okay. I’ll take her. Oh, Al Franken, I’ll try him.” But they couldn’t do that. That’s one of the reasons it failed. The way they set it up, it was destined to fail. And what it did to the rest of the industry is they said, “See? If you go right-wing, it works. If you go left, it doesn’t work.” That’s a total lie.
Freeman: When you’re doing a show, who are you talking to?
Bennett: One person. I don’t care if there are 10 million people listening to that podcast. You’re talking to one person. And a lot of people don’t know that lesson. They think they’re playing to a whole audience. No, you’re playing to that one person who’s listening to you, and you have to talk directly to them.
Freeman: What keeps you doing shows now at 86?
Bennett: I honestly believe it’s like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it will atrophy. So I do these shows if nothing more to just keep my chops up. I don’t know how much of myself I’m inserting into these shows like I would have in the old days. I listen to old things of myself and I go, “Hey, it’s pretty good.” I wish I thought it was that good when I did it.
But all of this stuff is relative. I’m very happy to just be doing my thing, keeping my chops up by doing it. Sometimes one show or another will get a large audience and other times it won’t. But I don’t care. I’ve never done anything to promote it. I haven’t played the game as it were. This is the end of my career, not the beginning of it.
Freeman: Can radio recover? What should it do?
Bennett: Most car radios now are capable of picking up podcasts. What do you think people are listening to in their car? They’re not listening to some DJ playing records. They’re searching the worldwide web and the 30,000 podcasts that are out there, and they find one they enjoy and listen to it. The point is, I think I’m still doing radio. I’m not doing internet. I’m doing radio. I’m keeping the muscle active.
Bradley C. Freeman is a full professor and programme leader at Sunway University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (School of Communication & Media Studies) in Malaysia. His research interests include online communities, political communication and radio history.
