No.
The desire to serve the public interest with interesting and informative broadcast programming, like the license says?
HHAHAHAHAHA....HOOOOOHOOOOHOOOOOHOOOOO....LOL! Now THAT'S funny!
No, it's all about Chickenman.You heard me right. Chickenman.
Mark told me this story a couple years ago. We were in the hot tub of the Sinatra Suite at Bellagio in Vegas during the NAB (it's huge, and holds the whole Board of Directors). We'd sent that guy who used to handle acquisitions (I can't remember his name - since he went to work for that little troll at the newspaper company, he's been wiped from my memory) to go acquire us some Dominos pizzas and he was in a reflective mood.
He said "you know, John, it's all about Chickenman, don't you?"
"Chickenman?" I asked, dumbfounded and in italics. I wasn't really "dumbfounded," I didn't really give a crap about what he was saying, I've just never used the word "dumbfounded" in print before.
Knowing I'd probably regret it, I asked him what he meant, and he told the story.
I'm not going to tell the whole tale here, because if I did, you'd be at least as bored as I was, and probably a little weirded out. But in a nutshell, here goes.
When Mark was a litte kid, like most of us, he had his own little radio station in his bedroom. Of course, being a Mays, it was connected to a 35,000 watt non-directional at 950am. That Christmas, Mark was hoping for an FM, but he was only 10, and Lowry thought owning an FM might put him on the road to using drugs, so he ended up getting a clear channel 50,000 watter at 570 that year. Pretty nice, since most of us had to make do with a close-and-play record player, or at best, a CB radio with the mic button taped down. Still, I don't think Mark ever forgave his father for that disappointment.
About that time, there was a syndicated serial on the air that parodied superhero crime fighters called Chickenman, that played on the panty-waist "ecology, save the earth" theme. It was produced and voiced by Dick Orkin, who, after failing in radio, went on to create a very successful pest control company. Good for him.
Well, Mark LOVED Chickenman, and the character became his very first idol. While other kids were emulating and pretending to be Batman, Superman or (like Randall) the Six BILLION Dollar Man (even at that age, Randall thought big), Mark wanted more than anything to be Chickenman. After several fights at school, Lowry realized he had to do something. One day, after a particularly nasty brawl where one of Mark's bodyguards, a former Green Beret, dislocated the shoulder of one of the bullies, his father knew the time was now. Or, then, actually.
He told Mark that Chickenman wasn't real.
It was a bad scene. Mark had taken the news about Santa Claus pretty well. When Lowry had delivered the truth about the Easter Bunny, his son had just nodded, giving up a little bit of his childhood innocence without a fight. But to hear that "The Winged Warrior" was a creation from the mind of some future bug-gasser was just too much, and he retreated to his room (his "wing," actually) and sulked for 3 days.
When he emerged, his family tells me he had changed, and at the core of that change was a pure hatred for Chickenman, and all things chicken for that matter. That hatred is still so fresh, when you're at company meetings with a catered meal and eating something you think is chicken, think again. It may look like chicken, but it's not chicken, my friend. Trust me on that. Anyway, making phone calls from his room during this sequesterment, Mark had discovered that Chickenman ran on hundreds of stations all over the country, and was a very successful enterprise. Mark vowed to change all that, and from that moment on, was driven to create a radio empire so large that Chickenman would have no stations to run on and spread the filthy lie of the "Winged Warrior," infecting other children with the deception that had destroyed his childhood.
Thus, the company was born.
And before you scoff and say "what a waste of time," think about this:
Is YOUR station running Chickenman?
"He's EVERYWHERE, he's EVERYWHERE." NOT.
I'm done with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment