Bob Lassiter


Bob Lassiter, also known as "Mad Dog", was a controversial and highly influential American radio talk show host in the 1980s and 1990s. He worked in several markets but is best known for his long stint in the Tampa Bay area.

Career

Early career

Lassiter was born Robert Henry Glodowski in Camden, New Jersey and raised in Collingswood, New Jersey, where he lived until dropping out of high school in the middle of his junior year and running away to New York City. He then wandered the United States doing odd jobs until arriving in 1970 on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
A sales representative from a beautiful music radio station heard Lassiter's voice in a bar in Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands one afternoon and immediately suggested he apply for an on-air job. Lassiter was soon hired as a music disc jockey at the salesman's station, WESP-FM, signing on September 1, 1970, under the air name of "Ron Scott."
He would move from there to beautiful music and progressive rock stations all over the country: WOUR-FM in Utica, New York; WOWI-FM in Norfolk, Virginia; WEZS-FM in Richmond, Virginia; and WJOI-FM in Pittsburgh. After his first marriage in 1972, he legally changed his name to Lassiter.
In 1981, Lassiter was working as a country music DJ at WKQS-FM 99.9 in Miami under the name Bobby Clifford when he heard talk-radio giant Neil Rogers on WINZ. Rogers became Lassiter's mentor and idol, whom he followed into talk radio by taking a late-night weekend slot at Miami's WGBS-AM in 1984. Rogers heard Lassiter on WGBS and liked what he did, urging his own station—in a relentless, on-air campaign—to hire the newcomer. WINZ did hire Lassiter as a weekend host, but fired him in December 1985 when he uttered a profanity on the air.

Tampa: WPLP (1985–87) and WFLA (1987–89)

In September 1985, Tampa Bay's first all-talk station, WPLP-AM, lured Lassiter to Tampa with his first full-time position on weeknights. He took over WPLP's afternoon drive time slot on September 23, 1985. Lassiter recalled on the air that the station initially offered him $12,000 per year, which he turned down, eventually accepting a comeback offer of $18,000 when Rogers suggested he take the job as training for doing talk radio every day.
Although Lassiter's Miami career was not to be, he soon took Tampa by storm with his confrontational and deliberately offensive style, quickly rising to the top-rated talk program in the market by an enormous margin. He was, in fact, the second-highest-rated radio show in the market, bested only by Cleveland Wheeler and Scott Shannon's Q-ZOO on WRBQ-FM.
Lassiter redefined AM talk radio in Tampa Bay, asserting himself as an on-air bully who targeted Christians, conservatives, the elderly, and virtually everybody else. As he himself would one day describe:
Instead of a market for the retirees who formed much of the area's population, Lassiter made talk radio a young listener's medium: kids and young Baby Boomers would listen to hear Lassiter torment the old people. In the process, they would join in on the conversation and find themselves lambasted as well.
Lassiter's ratings and reputation were such that the biggest AM radio station in the market, WFLA, hired him away from WPLP for substantially more money in mid-1987. At FLA Lassiter joined the ranks of the golden age of Tampa talk radio, with such personalities as Dick Norman, Tedd Webb, and Liz Richards, and maintained his ratings supremacy to that local competition. Indeed, while Lassiter had pulled upwards of 7% shares at WPLP — which by itself made him the number one talk show in Tampa Bay — at WFLA he rose to 8 and 9 shares, at a time when the entire talk-radio audience in Tampa Bay was roughly a 10 share of the market.

Chicago (1989–91)

By 1989 Lassiter had become something of a sensation in the broadcast industry, appearing on national television and creating a demand for his talents in the largest markets in the U.S. WABC in New York made an offer in 1988, but WFLA would not let him out of his contract. Ultimately he was won over by WLS, the Capital Cities/ABC radio hub in Chicago, who offered him a five-year, $1.05 million contract for the afternoon drive timeslot.
Lassiter's tenure at WLS was uneasy from the start: the CapCities executives behind the station micromanaged to an extreme degree, and were anxious to cultivate a friendly, inoffensive image, which ran completely counter to the type of radio that Lassiter did best. Members of management were waiting outside the studio on Lassiter's first night at WLS to give him a laundry list of things he had done that they did not want on their airwaves. Lassiter felt that since CapCities executives knew of his work before they even asked for a job interview, they knew perfectly well what kind of on-air personality they were getting. Lassiter deeply resented their sudden desire to rein him in.
Rather than change the style that had attracted WLS to him in the first place, Lassiter asked to be let out of the contract. The station refused, touching off what Lassiter called "open warfare" between WLS executives and their new employee. Their attempts to censor him only intensified his efforts to insult and infuriate his audience on-air, and led Lassiter to walk out in the middle of staff meetings off-air. One journalist wrote that
By late 1991, both parties were exasperated; unimpressive Arbitron ratings did not ease tensions. Lassiter's five-year contract had an escape clause that gave WLS the option to terminate it at the end of 1991, and Lassiter was openly predicting that the station would do exactly that. In fact, they didn't even wait for the end of the year, removing Lassiter from the air following his afternoon broadcast on September 20.
Although he would remember his time in Chicago as "a two-and-a-half-year nightmare", the job did raise Lassiter's profile significantly; in 1990, he appeared on CNN's Crossfire as a representative of left-wing political talk radio. In December 2005, Lassiter would later point out that - more than fourteen years after he was thrown off the air - he was still on the FAQ page on the WLS website. Indeed, as of August 2007, Question 7 on that page is "Why don't you bring back Bob Lassiter/Larry Lujack/etc.?" . "Maybe you don't know much about Lujack, but to be mentioned in the same sentence with him and WLS is more than an honor", Lassiter said. "It is and always will be the highlight of my career."

Return to Tampa

WSUN (1993–95)

Lassiter then moved to Davenport, Iowa with the intention of retiring from the radio business. After a year and a half, however, Tampa came calling again; the venerable WSUN was experimenting with a non-topical talk-radio format and offered him a hefty sum for its morning-drive slot. Lassiter accepted the job and moved back to Tampa, returning to the air on February 1, 1993.
The morning time slot saw Lassiter's combative persona reach a peak, as he began an increasingly hostile feud with his old mentor Neil Rogers. Neil would constantly deride him about his weight, calling him "Blob". Though it started out as a put down, the fans of Lassiter in Tampa area began to use it as a term of endearment. However, he was not a ratings success, and in January 1994 he moved to the mid-afternoon; Sharon Taylor, the newscaster for his morning show, became his on-air sidekick. While his numbers vastly improved, the circumstances forced him to change his approach drastically; in his final month, Lassiter famously teased Taylor about her Thanksgiving turkey.
Despite his adaptations and his ratings, Lassiter recognized that the station was failing and, as he had at WLS, began publicly predicting that his contract option would not be renewed. Again he was correct; WSUN's parent company Cox Broadcasting fired him before his scheduled showtime on November 27, 1995. Although Lassiter would later recall that no employer had ever treated him better or been more fun to work for, the end of his relationship with WSUN was very bitter: Cox refused to release him from his non-compete agreement.

WFLA (1996–99)

Once the non-compete expired in April 1996, Lassiter returned to WFLA's night shift and reclaimed his classic persona, as well as his Arbitron ratings throne.
By that time, however, the business had changed dramatically. Rush Limbaugh had transformed the AM band; Lassiter referred to his style as "Support Group Radio" — he found that listeners had become used to having their beliefs echoed and reinforced by the radio host, not challenged—and not particularly primed to call the show. In addition, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated station ownership, leading the industry to trend towards national syndication and away from local personalities.
The contrarian and often left-leaning Lassiter increasingly found himself an anachronism, even as he garnered tremendous market shares of listeners who both loved and loathed him. He rolled with the punches as best he could, provoking his audience more furiously than ever and taking on-air potshots at WFLA's own conservative host, , but it often seemed that his real nemesis was the very industry he was part of, commercial radio.
In 1999 WFLA, which had been owned by Jacor, was purchased along with all of Jacor's holdings by Clear Channel. At the time Clear Channel was building its radio empire and employing a variety of cost-cutting techniques, such as relying heavily on centralized, syndicated programming and eliminating local personalities and technicians from its payroll. Lassiter, disgusted by the changes Clear Channel was making and knowing that his time in radio was not long, began expressing open hostility to their policies on the air; at one point he was even reading employee questionnaires circulated inside the offices, and describing the deeply caustic answers he was filling in.
Finally on December 1, 1999, four weeks before his contract was set to expire, Lassiter opened his broadcast with a monologue aimed directly at WFLA's business office:
Predictably, he was told the next day that he need not bother to return to work at WFLA that day or any other. "Most men would have been devastated upon losing a six-figure, cushy job," Lassiter said later. "I was relieved." He officially retired from radio. His slot was filled by future radio star Glenn Beck.