The Forgotten Shock Jock Who Paved the Way for Rush Limbaugh

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This is the On the Media Midweek podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone with part two of the radio documentary series where airing courtesy of radio diaries about three radio personalities who had huge audiences in their time, but today are largely forgotten.

These days, we're used to media that amplifies the most outrageous voices in the room.

It's something we often trace back to shock chocks like, you know, Howard Stern or in-your-face talk shows like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh.

But long before those guys, all of them, there was Joe Pine.

At the height of his career in the 1950s, the New York Times called him the ranking nuisance of broadcasting.

Our guest is one of the most controversial men in recent American history.

This is Joe Pine, and the action starts in just a moment.

My name is Ed Pine, and Joe Pine was my dad.

I mean, if you were a Broadway play, you'd be a flop.

I'm not a Broadway play, but you're a flop.

Not your holy premises of flops.

He just was a very opinionated guy on air.

It wasn't like.

What's your thought on that, sir?

It was just

no, why the hell do you think that?

Why do you want to be a corruptor of other human beings?

Well, I certainly wouldn't want one of you people to marry my daughter, I'll tell you that.

And he got such a following from it.

I just couldn't believe that people could be so enamored.

In fact, this is such an absurd show.

I'm leaving the studio.

You're leaving the studio.

Yes, he's really leaving.

This is Joe Pine.

I'll be back with another guest as soon as we comb the streets.

And now,

let's get on with that number one record.

When Joe Pine came into radio, he was a disc jockey back in the late 40s, early 50s.

My name is Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, and I've been writing about talk radio for the past 35 years.

Radio DJs back in those days were very mild-mannered, very genteel.

You know, hello, how are you?

It's a beautiful day, and here's the latest song from Pericomo.

Some and Saturday evening.

But Joe Pine would sometimes make commentary during the course of his show.

And the story goes that one day the station manager, the station owner at one of the stations that he worked, said, stop playing records, just talk.

And

people responded.

I guess from that moment on, he was a talk show host.

A phenomenon has swept the country in the radio telephone call-in type show.

My program, which is all talk,

almost invariably will beat out rock and roll.

My name is Tim Harrell.

I produced the Joe Pine local radio show on KLAC Radio in Los Angeles.

This was the 60s.

I mean, this was the era of the hippies and free love and all that, which Joe was absolutely opposed to.

I think that we've put up with enough.

We've allowed our cities to be disgraced.

We've allowed certain areas of cities like San Francisco, for example, the Haight-Ashbury district, to become literally cancer cells.

He was a staunch patriot.

Of course, the Vietnam War was going on,

and he really hated the anti-war protesters.

You call my country the aggressor, and yet what is the country?

My country is the aggressor.

I'm a citizen.

This is my country.

You're a traitor.

You've already explained.

I am not a traitor to the Americans.

You're a communist, and you have to call it.

The facts are that my country is at fault in this situation, that my country should withdraw its troops immediately.

By what right do you call this your country?

We would go on the air, and he would go on on a monologue.

That's generally what he did for, I don't know, 20 minutes or a half hour, and we'd get the audience riled up and we'd start taking calls.

I would say, you know, 90% of our callers were supporters of Joe and agreed with his political viewpoint.

He was sort of a darling of the right-wing conservatives.

But sometimes we'd get some people on there who disagreed with him and had fight with him.

Actually, he liked that.

He'd make fun of them.

He'd berate them.

You know, he would just say, oh, go, gargoyle with razor blades.

The interesting thing is, off the air, he was a totally different person.

When the microphone went out, when it was just you and him, he was nice.

My name is Nicole Hemmer, and I am a historian of conservative media.

As Joe Pine got bigger and bigger, over the course of a few years, he's suddenly on 100 and then 200 and then more than 200 radio stations across the country.

And then he becomes a television star.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Good evening, everybody.

And that's when I first became aware of him as a kid, watching this mean guy sitting there smoking cigarettes behind the desk

and seeing the characters that he interviewed, bohemians and beatniks that he would lambaste and attack and insult and just totally chew them up and spit them out.

I found it to be just outrageously entertaining.

I'd like you to meet our first guest of the evening, who won't be a stranger to you.

Seated here with me now is one of the most controversial figures in America.

In the mid-1960s, Joe Pine had on his show James Meredith, who was the black student who integrated the University of Mississippi.

And you can hear just how aggressive Joe Pine was.

It was quite hostile.

Mr.

Meredith, have you said this?

Just as the law always works against the Negro, it always works in favor of the white man.

That's just absolutely the case.

Now, don't you think that you're being a little bit ungrateful when you consider what this country did and what we all went through to send you into college?

Think that went over?

I mean, I remember the troops down there.

I remember hearing what it was costing.

Do you remember the figures?

They were published.

You must have kind of memorized them.

Yeah, but I remember other figures.

I remember 400 years of Negroes being denied.

I remember.

Well, James Meredith, I'm not going to dispute that.

And if you want to, I'll give you a thousand years of denial by your own tribes throughout Africa if you want that.

You know, I mean, we don't want to get it.

Well, I'll tell you what, if you think I'm going to pat you on your back, you and all the rest of them, I'm not going to do it.

People who were conservative, they felt extremely marginalized by the mainstream media.

So when someone like Joe Pine came around, they felt a certain kinship to him.

And there were a lot of people that didn't like Pine, but they watched him anyway because they thought it was amusing, entertaining, sensational, different, you know, not boring.

Pine really demonstrated that not only could outrage get people to tune in, but it could get them to care about issues, could get them to listen to political content.

And I don't know how you get to somebody like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and those big names without going through Joe Pine.

I'm often asked whether or not I think talk show hosts who are controversial

actually believe what it is they say.

And I always answer, I don't know.

And I don't know whether Joe Pine really was that way or he was a showman

who had a thick skin and didn't care what people thought of him because it worked.

I remember, I think I was just under 17

and we got on the Santa Monica Freeway

and I see a billboard that has my father's face on it.

And it says, opinionated but lovable.

He told me many a time: it's just a shtick, it's a thing.

We're making a show here.

And he would say, Don't ever worry if people are taking shots at you.

If you want to worry, it's when people stop talking about you.

In 1970, a few years after his show went national, Joe Pine died of cancer.

He was 45 years old.

This story was produced by Elisa Escarce and the team at Radio Diaries.

Go to radiodiaries.org and check out their incredible archive of 30 years of radio documentaries.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.