One More Evening of Broadbank

Before a Radio Icon Calls it ‘Quits’

By Greg Hoard

Gary Burbank, World-Wide Frivovalist and International Juke Artist, was tending his flowers. He had a large, old-fashioned, five-gallon, long-necked, watering can in his hand, carefully going from one bed to another; one basket to the next.

His home, tucked away on a heavily, wooded hillside in Campbell, County, Kentucky, is be-decked with flowers and Humming Bird feeders, which draw hundreds of nature’s tiny helicopters so close and seemingly so tame that, occasionally, the rush and whir of their wings thrills the ear, like a sweet and secret whisper. “They’re everywhere,” he says. “Look at the little suckers. Amazing, aren’t they? Never get tired of looking at ’em.”

He seemed perfectly out of place and perfectly in place. Every genius, regardless of his art or eccentricities, needs a retreat. His home in Kentucky, a low-slung tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, is one. He has another on the Rainbow River in North Central Florida, where he sips Gentleman Jack over the rocks with old friends: Dave “Jesse James” Warnock, who he has known for 40 years; Lon Wadsworth, who competes and wins Ernest Hemingway look-alike contests in Key West; and Mark Anderson, a very continental gentlemen born in Cuba, who, thanks to recent developments in international law and payments from Fidel Castro’s government, finds himself suddenly and fabulously wealthy. “Trouble is, he’s nuts,” says Burbank. “He’s always jumping up and doing these wild Latino dances.” Burbank has always been drawn to character and characters.

“We love to get out on that river,” he says. “It’s so clear. It’s like looking through a bottle of gin. We fish a little, drink a little, tell some stories—lots of lies—and just float down that river.”

He hopes to have another home soon, maybe out west, maybe in the mountains. “Some little old shack or something where I can, you know, just throw down for a few days if I want to.”

Burbank is 66-years-old and, after all the years of hustle and push and work and drive, he is thinking about what pleases him, what he needs to do, what he wants to do and where he wants to go, and why he needs to go.

700-WLW’s long-time, drive-time personality, the two-time Marconi Award winner, whose career in radio has spanned 45 years, the last 25 here in Cincinnati, has threatened to retire before. But this time and with tribute to Monty Python—And now for something completely different!—it’s for real. At the end of the year, Burbank, who has given us: Earl Pitts, Uhmerikun; Gilbert Gnarley, The Synonymous Bengal, Euniece and Berniece, Siamese Twins attached at the Telephone; Big Fat Guy with a Cigar in his Mouth and his Pants Half-Zipped, Deuteronomy Skaggs and Howlin’ Blind Muddy Slim, Your 60-Minute, Jelly Belly, Toe Jam Man, will hit the off switch and walk away from WLW. And, he will do so with some sense of relief.

Kicking Back

“Come on and let’s go ’round back. Want something to drink? Let me get us a beer. I’ll get rid of this can and we’ll have a seat and talk. I’ll just be a minute. We’ve fought like hell to keep everything alive around here, but, damn, this summer was the worst I’ve ever seen. We’re about to give up.”

Gary Burbank is a Southerner, born in Memphis at the John Gaston Charity Hospital, raised in Southwestern Tennessee and the Mississippi Delta, where he learned at a very early age, that hospitality, honesty and civility were free and demanded of all, an expected and deserved moral trinity unless, of course, you were crossed. Cross a Southerner unfairly and hospitality was generally and quickly replaced by something hard upside the head: iron skillets, ashtrays, shovel handles, big old sticks, and the occasional bullet.

“There,” he said, “that ought to hold ’em for a while.” He stored the watering can near the pool house and returned with two bottles Negra Medalo. “Now, this is more like it,” he said, after a hardy pull on the Mexican beer.

“Yeah, everybody thinks I’m just foolin’ around. Of course, I can understand that. It’s not like I haven’t said I was going to quit before. What haven’t I said before? Damn, I don’t even know,” he said, that ever-present roll of laughter punctuating his words. “But, this is it. At the end of the year when my contract is up, I’m done.”

What hasn’t he said before, and in how many different voices? There is the story, of course, of how one day when he was 13 or 14, he and a buddy were hitchhiking around Memphis when a brand, new, black, shiny, Chevy panel-truck swung by. “I looked real close and then I looked again, and I said to my buddy, David Welch, ‘Damn, I think that was Elvis.’ He said, ‘Sure.’ Told me I was crazy. Course everybody did—even back then.

“I said, ‘No, I swear. It was him!’ Well, the truck pulls over a ways up the street and we go running up and sure as hell, it was Elvis.  He said, ‘Where ya headed, boys?’ We jumped in and he gave us a ride down the street. He was nice as could be. Now, that’s a true story and David will verify it. But see I’ve told it so many times and embellished the hell out of it so much, that nobody believes it. Over the years, I’d add a little something here and there like: Ann Margaret was in the truck with Elvis and she started hitting on me. Stuff like that. See, I’ve done this to myself, and all my life. I’ve got no credibility left—at all.”

An Angry Roster and Stories Well-Told

When Burbank was a little boy, his mother, Dot, who he adored, learned early on that her son wasn’t much good around the farm and was somewhat dangerous with tools. Sent to the fields to pick cotton, he returned with “with about eights cents worth in my gunny sack. They didn’t approve.” The next day he was re-assigned. He was charged with bringing water to the workers. That didn’t work out either. Confronted by a cantankerous rooster, Burbank pulled out a pocketknife. In the ensuing tussle, the angry rooster—“And he was a mean one!”—escaped harm, but somehow Burbank cut his finger. “I mean, flat laid it open,” he said.

He washed the blood off in the drinking water and then took the buckets to the field. “Someone said, ‘Why does this water look pink?’ I said, ‘I put Kool-Aid in it.’ I think they thought I was retarded,” he said. “They would just look at me kinda curious and say, ‘That boy ain’t gonna make it past 10.’ But they liked to hear my stories.

“Back then, families actually got together and talked and everyone was expected to contribute. Well, I’d tell one of my long, elaborate tales and my mom would just look at me for a while and say, ‘Son, that can’t all possibly be true, but you sure told it well.’ I guess you could say they indulged me.”

“Mom and Them,” as he calls his family, realized the boy had a knack for telling a good story, but no idea if it would ever lead to anything worthwhile in the work-a-day world. “Years later, when I came back to Memphis to work at WDIA, they all thought it was pretty cool, especially my mom,” Burbank says, “but they still didn’t think I was quite right, you know, in the head. They never did and, I’ll admit, they were correct in their judgment.”

A Dinosaur and a Road-Trip Too Long

The topography of AM radio has dramatically changed since Billy Purser, Burbank’s given name, landed his first radio job at KLPL, a 250-Watt station in Lake Providence, Louisiana, as Johnny Apollo. “And to the point it’s almost unrecognizable,” he says. “Back then, it was all Top-40 and comedy. Today, it’s what?” Burbank seldom struggles for words, but in this case he does. For a while, he is quiet. It’s odd. Gary Burbank saying nothing, vaguely reminiscent of those moments when he is “on,” doing Paul Harvey, and the pauses stretch on for 20 seconds.

“I’m not sure,” he says, finally. “I’m not sure I fit into Clear Channel’s way of doing things anymore. That’s not a putdown in any way. I’m just not sure I fit as well as I used to. I’m not smash-mouth when it comes to comedy. I hold to my principles of trying to be clever about a bit, having that twist and irony in a bit. It all has to fit in.

“Today’s radio is more—what’s the right word—truculent? Abrasive? Put it this way. Today if no one is bleeding at the end of a joke, what’s funny? You got to fool somebody or make a fool of somebody. I can’t do that. If I’m going to fool somebody, I will do it as Gilbert Gnarley and I will be the fool and that person I’m talking to is going to be laughing along with everyone else.”

There is no bitterness in his voice, only resolve that enough is enough; that it’s time to leave the party. “Look, it’s not that I am an altruistic person,” he says. “It’s just that the way I think doesn’t seem to be mainstream anymore, and in radio you have to be mainstream. That’s one reason I’m leaving.”
Not long ago he was named one of the most influential top talk show hosts in the country. He was shocked by the news. “My first reaction was: ‘I’m not a talk show host, I’m an entertainer,’” he said. “Then I started thinking: ‘I’m a freaking dinosaur. I’m a leftover. I’m a throwback to Ernie Kovacs and Jonathon Winters, people like that. I like to make people laugh, but I like to make them think, too. In all good comedy there is room for thought.”

Frankly, Burbank is no longer comfortable in his surroundings. “Everyday, when I go to the office,” he says, “I feel like I am on a road-trip. I don’t feel like I’m playing in front of a home crowd, because the home crowd is now this hardcore, inner-circle…Radio has limited its own audience, doing anything and saying anything—whether it’s right or true, whether they believe it or not—just to light up the board, anything and everything to evoke a response: ‘Yeah! They love me. Yeah! They hate me. That’s all that matters.

“But here’s the rub, man. The pendulum has swung when it comes to my kind of comedy. Watch TV and the comics these days. Ten years ago you had Sam Kennison screaming obscenities. That was basically it and people were laughing like crazy, and there was rarely anything clever about what he said. That’s okay. He was effective for a time. Now look what’s going on: Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, The Colbert Report. Look at South Park, even though it seems crass and base, look at the satire involved there. Look at Ron White. These people are very clever. The people watching this stuff are the 30-year-olds. Their 45-year-old big brothers and sisters are still into this smash-mouth, sophomoric crap. This younger generation—these 30-year-olds—are much more intelligent about their humor and if these program directors don’t figure this out real soon, they are going to be dead in the water.”

More Negra Medalos
It was getting dark. Whippoorwills and crickets sang in the woods.  Gary didn’t bother to turn on any lights. “Damn, this is getting deep. Le’ me get us a couple more beers. Maybe,” he says, plopping the two, stubby brown bottles on the table, “it’s a little bit about my age. I’m not sensitive about may age, but I am sensitive to the extent that other people are sensitive about it. They don’t realize you can be this old and still be viable, still be talented and still be clever. Yeah, I forget words. I have to pee a lot more, but other than that, I’m good.”

Still, he has faced enough health problems to recognize his own mortality. He most certainly has enjoyed life and availed himself of the indulgences it has offered. “At my age, you ask yourself: ‘How much longer will I live?’” he says. “There are things I want to do. Music is one, even if it’s sitting by myself and playing music. I want to get out on my motorcycle. I want to go out west. I want to go to Alaska in the summertime. I want to see a lot of old friends I haven’t seen for years that I talk to on the phone. I want to read. I want to go fishing in the Caribbean. I like to play golf. I want to stay drunk for three days. Now, I can only stay drunk for two days because I have to be at work on Monday. I need a year off.

“I may take a year off and decide, ‘Okay, it’s time to get back into radio.’ But I will pick the place I get in and I will pick a place that is friendly to my kind of radio and there are people who still like it.

“Man,” he said, “deep stuff, too deep,” he said. He chuckled and took another swig on the Negra Medallo.

Enough was enough. For the rest of the night, sitting there in the dark, Earl Pitts showed up, as did Big Fat, Gilbert Gnarley, Howlin’ Blind and Paul Harvey. Gary was on. We laughed. We talked. In the woods, the Whippoorwills and crickets sang and chortled along.
He says he is quitting, walking away. But, he will never really quit. There’s too much inside that brain flying around and waiting to come out. He says it will be nice not to have to be funny every day. Of course, he will be. He can’t help it. He’s leaving WLW at the end of the year but odds are this is just a station break. Gary Burbank will be back—right after this.