“The Making of Glenn Beck”

It is appropriate that the zoo was born in the age of cocaine. The essence of successful zoo radio was speed and rapid-fire creativity, creating a nonstop on-air party. Even when DJs were talking, Top 40 hits were playing in the background. Zoo DJs, often fueled by that decade’s iconic powder, pushed morning radio from peppy to manic. “We’d be out all night partying, then go straight to the studio at dawn, cut up some lines and start brainstorming skits based on news clippings from the early edition,” remembers a veteran of Shannon and Wheeler’s zoo. “It was a blast, but you had to be fast and you had to perform. Sometimes we’d sketch out a four-hour show in 30 minutes on no sleep.”

Another part of zoo culture, also reflecting the ethos of the era, was the DJ as high-flying and hard-partying local celebrity. Promotional events featuring morning zoo teams grew extravagant as the ’80s progressed. Bloated salaries and gilded perks fed egos. By the early ’80s, it was common for morning DJs to appear at station events in full-stretch limousines.

The zoo revolution that transformed morning radio in the 1980s is key to understanding Beck’s present-day shtick. Many of the audio and visual tropes Beck employs today — the Muppet voices, the outrageous statements, the props, the stunts, the fawning and giggling supporting cast — can be traced to the zoo and post-zoo radio culture that sustained him professionally for years.

“You can see the influence in everything Beck does,” says zoo pioneer Scott Shannon, now boss jock at New York’s WPLJ and the official voice of “The Sean Hannity Show.” “The timing, the voices, the inflections, the whole approach — so much of it is from the old Top 40 morning style.”

Brian Wilson, one of Shannon’s original inspirations for the zoo idea, likewise notes Beck’s successful adaptation and carry-over from 1980s morning radio. “His performance in talk radio and television is full of hangover of basic Top 40 elements, formats and principles,” says Wilson, now a libertarian talk show host. “The sound drops, the effects, the ‘wackiness’ — he’s doing the same thing, only minus the music.”

“The first time I heard him do talk radio, I knew he was updating what Limbaugh did when he brought Top 40 tricks into talk,” says Barry Kaye, who competed against Beck in Corpus and Houston in the ’80s. “Everything he does is basically a morning show. He was always great at it.”

An extended excerpt from Alexander Zaitchik’s masterful three-part profile of Glenn Beck, over at Salon. Personally, I had no idea Beck came from “zoo-crew” radio, yet as indicated above, he’s brought the tropes of that genre so thoroughly into his role as Fox News’ enfant terrible.

Zaitchik cites the “ratings wars” between stations in Beck’s adopted hometown of Corpus Christi, during which networks would stage incredible stunts to boost their listenerships, as another fundamental point in Beck’s “evolution” as a public personality. Which explains Fox News’ entire strategy now, from tea-partiers to birthers on down–it’s stunt news, built only to draw attention to itself and gain the network validity through participatory viewership.

But looking at the whole thing from a “zoo crew” perspective makes me wonder about the motives of the viewers. Are they really simply psychotic citizenry, as the left wants to make them out to be, or is the truth more nuanced? Are they doing with politics and Fox what so many on-air personalities have done with regional show-biz and radio? Are people with Obama-as-Hitler signs, inter alia, not so much trying to make political points as they are vying to be the “wackiest” viewer, the one guaranteed to get on the air of their favorite station?

(The “ratings war” angle also clears up for me Fox’s strange penchant to cite viewership statistics when questioned about the validity of their reporting, or the quality of their news bureau in general. I always thought it was rather juvenile and beside-the-point, but now at least I know from where it emanates.)

(All of this remains exceedingly depressing, of course.)

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