YAKITY YAK, PLEASE TALK BACK : Inside the Intense and Screwy World of Talk Radio and the Search for the Next Larrykingrushlimbaughhoward- sterngordonliddyWhomever

Terry from her car phone: I have several bones I’d like to pick with you because I am REALLY upset.

Larry Elder: OK, bring out those bones, Terry.

Terry: First of all, I’m getting kinda angry with this black-bashing by you--

Elder: (chuckling) I deny it. Strongly deny it.

Terry: --Let me finish. I’ll make my points and then I’ll listen to you . . . . I’m tired of hearing the Martin Luther Cochran syndrome here. You’re--

Elder: I’m not bashing blacks. I’m bashing Martin Luther (laughs). Pardon me, Johnnie Cochran, who happens to be black.

Terry: You’re saying that racism doesn’t exist--

Elder: I never said that Terry, not even close.

*

It’s 9:35 on a Wednesday night, and the switchboard lights are all blinking in the KABC studio where Larry Elder--the self-proclaimed “Sage from South Central”--presides each weeknight from 8 to 11 p.m., preaching his black conservative gospel. It’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps doctrine that advocates abolishing welfare and the minimum wage, opposes affirmative action and gun control and wouldn’t waste a dime on public TV.

You can hear this rightward-ho vision echoing all across America on talk radio, a medium with such magical powers that a failed rock deejay named Rush Limbaugh could be transformed into a right-wing powerhouse who helped engineer one of the most sweeping electoral victories in American political history. When a listener named Ruth calls one night to say that Elder sounds like “a very angry black man,” the host retorts: “It’s not anger, Ruth, it’s passion.” Whether it’s anger, passion or just good theater, it’s this fever pitch of emotion that fuels talk radio, the megaphone for the new voices of America.

The heat is on all across the dial. Talk radio has pumped up the volume of our public discourse and created a new political language--perhaps the prevailing political language. In New York City, WABC’s Bob Grant calls Bill Clinton “the sleazebag in the White House.” In Cincinnati, WLW’s Bill Cunningham targets liberals as “loathsome dogs to be exterminated.” In San Francisco, KSFO’s Michael Savage dubs homosexuals “Nazis trying to steal our freedom.” When Limbaugh fumes about anti-smoking ordinances in New York City, he denounces the laws’ supporters as the “anti-smoking Gestapo.”

Call it Hot Talk. “In talk radio, everyone is equal as long as you can shout louder than the next guy,” explains Boston-based talk-radio consultant Donna Halper. “It’s become a giant hockey game.” Half participatory democracy, half cheesy show-biz theater, talk radio has proved all the pollsters wrong: Americans are interested in politics, just so long as they can argue about it at the decibel level of “Die Hard 3.”

Once considered a sedate, old-folks medium (even today, 70% of KABC listeners are over the age of 65), talk radio came of age as a political force in 1989, when hosts around the country fueled a “tea-bag revolt” that forced Congress to roll back a proposed 50% pay raise. When the 73 new Republican congressmen gathered to toast their landslide victory, the guest of honor wasn’t Newt Gingrich--it was Limbaugh, who was made an honorary member of the House and given a dartboard-shaped plaque that read: “Rush Was Right.”

Though Limbaugh’s influence derives largely from his shrewd rhetorical skills, he and other hosts owe much of their current stature to technology--in particular, the satellite dish. As recently as the mid-1980s, syndicated radio shows were still sent out over copper-wire overland telephone lines, useful for brief network newscasts but lacking the audio quality for live syndication broadcasts. Once satellite technology swept the country, stations could receive syndicated shows from anywhere. “That simple technological change brought talk radio into the modern era,” says New York-based consultant Walter Sabo. “Ten years ago Rush would’ve been a big star--but only at one station, not at 650.”

With national scope came clout. If you tuned into KABC the morning after the Oklahoma City bombing, you could hear a woman caller advising Michael Jackson: “You’re a leader, Michael. Whether you like it or not, people listen to what you say the same way they listen to what a political leader says.” It wasn’t any ordinary listener either--it was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

But do people really listen to Michael Jackson--or Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy--the same way they do a political leader? Or do they listen to Limbaugh because he’s a gifted storyteller, a commentator who gives the same type of performance interpreting the news as Barbra Streisand gives interpreting a show tune? Once you view talk radio as a form of show business, its emotional swagger starts to come into focus. It has the comic exaggeration of sitcom TV, the inflammatory language of gangsta rap, the immediacy of live theater, the obnoxious huckstering of TV advertising and the fantasy fulfillment of an escapist Hollywood action film.

To take talk radio’s inflammatory politics more literally, as critics have in recent months, cranks up a new series of contradictions: If liberals denounce syndicated host G. Gordon Liddy as a dangerous crackpot for advising listeners to shoot hostile ATF agents (“Head shots, head shots--kill the son of bitches!”), then how can they defend rap hero Dr. Dre, who serenades millions of young record buyers with such lyrics as: “Rat-a-tat and tat like that, never hesitate to put a nigga on his back”? And if Sen. Bob Dole is serious about shaming Time Warner for promoting songs with mindless violence and misogyny, then shouldn’t he and fellow “culture counts” conservatives take a stand against Liddy’s ravings as well?

*

It should come as no surprise that the liveliest debate over toxic speech has occurred on talk radio itself, where Larry Elder and like-minded hosts around the country have devoted innumerable hours to wrangling over the issue. Heated words over heated words--it’s a perfect topic for a medium where everyone loves a good brawl.

“There’s a lot of entertainment value in people arguing with each other,” says Sabo. “What’s the pay-TV event people will pay the most money to see? Boxing. Two grown men fighting until one them is knocked out or a bloody mess. So there’s a great cathartic pleasure in hearing people call up and say what they really think. You can’t do it with your boss at work, but you can do it on talk radio.”

To use Sabo’s term, the best talk-show hosts seek “polarity.” It’s their job to tick people off. That’s why radio programmers are delighted when their host incites a storm of listener complaints. If people complain, the host is doing his job. Of course, by that definition, G. Gordon Liddy is just doing his job by laughing about using pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton for target practice. Is that good radio or Hate Speech? It depends on whether you believe Liddy is trashing the presidency or simply acting out an Arnold Schwarzenegger fantasy.

“Gordon believes in what he says, but it’s a shtick,” explains Radio & Records magazine columnist Randall Bloomquist, who interviewed Liddy when his show first hit the airwaves. “When you saw him go home [after his show], he almost literally shriveled down from the fearsome G. Gordon Liddy to little old Grandpa Liddy. He’s a shtickmaster. Liddy was trained as a singer when he was young, so he knows how to put on a show.”

Even Rush Limbaugh, who now wields such influence that he gets briefings from the head of the Federal Reserve Board, is the first to admit that talk radio is less about content than style and performance. One of the host’s favorite expressions is: “Folks, you can get the news anywhere, but there’s nothing like getting the news from me.”

Limbaugh’s point is that he’s an invented character. Talk radio fudges the dividing line between politics and show business. It’s like turning on the TV and seeing Watergate counsel-turned-actor Fred Thompson playing a White House adviser in the film “In the Line of Fire” and then switching the channel, only to find him standing outside the White House, being interviewed in his new role--as a U.S. Senator.

The politician who was most prescient about the power of talk radio was another former actor--Ronald Reagan, our first talk-radio President. In 1975, when he left the California governorship, Reagan was offered his choice of two commentary jobs--one with the CBS Evening News, the other with Mutual Radio. He chose radio, sensing that it had more credibility with Americans than network news. To hear ex-Reagan media adviser Michael Deaver tell it, the experience was pivotal in creating Reagan’s presidential persona. “Ronald Reagan got elected,” Deaver says, “Because he was on the radio every day for nearly five years, talking to 50 million people a week.”

*

Ron from Tustin: You complain when Maxine Waters calls somebody a racist or a fascist, yet you just said “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” trying to make a point that it’s communist Santa Monica. You throw around--

Larry Elder: Wait a second! First of all, I was being light. And Maxine Waters was not being light when she called George Bush a racist. She was not being light when she called Newt Gingrich corrupt, so for you to equate the two statements is unfair.

Ron: OK, if you want to call the Left socialistic, go ahead, but don’t get mad when the left wing calls you guys fascist and Nazis. Be consistent!

Elder: What have I said, Ron, that makes me a right-winger? Name something! Name something!

Ron: OK, you have said that government programs are no good, they’re inefficient and they don’t work, and therefore--

Elder (laughs): That’s right!

*

Bill McMahon is trying to describe the undeniable assets of the morning talk-show host at KSTP radio in Minneapolis, one of the stations that uses the San Diego-based talk-radio consultant to help recruit and coach its on-air talent. “He’s incredibly likable, very endearing and he’s got tremendous charisma--he jumps out of the radio at you,” McMahon explains. “Yes, he’ll mispronounce big words and have to correct himself, but he’s a real person.”

The host in question: Jesse (The Body) Ventura, who has found that the theatrical demands of talk radio have a lot in common with his previous line of work--professional wrestling.

A decade ago, talk-radio hosts had radio in their blood. They were either aging news hounds with a gift for gab or rock deejays who were getting a little old for the Top 40 racket. Today they come from more exotic backgrounds, ranging from law and education to journalism, pro wrestling and politics, which has rewarded talk radio with a stream of failed candidates, including Patrick J. Buchanan, Oliver L. North, Ross Perot and especially Liddy, the Nixon White House’s failed Watergate burglar.

Having decided that Jesse the Body needs a sidekick to lend a little more weight to the proceedings--”a Bud Abbott of news to team with our Lou Costello” as KSTP’s program director puts it--McMahon has been interviewing several candidates, including a business journalist and a state department of education research planner. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and personality can play the talk-radio game.

“A trial lawyer is a perfect fit,” says McMahon. “They’re articulate, they’re persuasive and they’re drama kings and queens. We look at journalists a lot, too, because at least writers have a brain. And I’ve always looked to education, because I think great teachers are articulate.”

Of course, most station managers are looking for a simpler formula--a host with great ratings. When McMahon would play tapes of new talent for radio programmers, they would hem and haw and finally confess, “You know what I really want--do you have someone who sounds like Rush Limbaugh?” Eager to have a more substantive discussion, McMahon now hands out a memo outlining the “13 Common Traits of Successful Talk-Radio Personalities.” It includes such categories as broad life experience, superior intelligence, intense curiosity, passion-emotion and reasoned opinions about damn near everything.

The traits offer a profile of today’s best talk-radio hosts, including KABC’s Larry Elder. Born in South Central Los Angeles, Elder went to Michigan Law School and practiced law in Cleveland before launching a professional search-consultancy firm. Last May, KABC general manager George Green heard him as a guest on Dennis Prager’s show. After a one-night audition, Green offered him a job. Elder jumped at the chance, even though he had to take a hefty pay cut and give up his business. (One treasured relic from his pre-talk-radio days is a cream-colored Mercedes 560-SL convertible, which still has its Ohio plates.) Though he’d hosted a weekly cable TV show, he had no radio experience. It was, to use his analogy, like a rookie joining the Dodgers starting lineup without having ever played in the minor leagues.

But KABC desperately needed an infusion of new talent. With the exception of the early-morning team of Ken & Barkley, the station’s hosts have lagged badly in the ratings, especially with under-55 listeners who have defected to KFI, lured away by the station’s younger, more aggressive hosts. Elder’s South Central roots lends an extra dimension to KABC’s “L.A.’s Only Local Talk Station” slogan, while, as an ardent conservative, he allows the station to tap into the growing legions of Limbaugh dittoheads. The strategy has reaped dividends faster than anyone at KABC imagined. After less than a year on the air, Elder had an impressive Spring Arbitron book, besting his nighttime talk-radio rivals in virtually every key demographic category.

It hasn’t taken long for Elder to absorb talk radio’s shoot-from-the-lip attitude. As a listener puts it one night, Elder is a guy “who debates the way Sugar Ray Robinson used to throw a left hook.” There are no gray areas: The death penalty is good because “it’s a worthy goal to have revenge.” It’s a “bunch of crap” to say that poverty stems from racism. Thirty years of liberal social spending has “conspired to create children without parents who prey on men and women in their own neighborhood.” Opening his show with “Way Back Home,” a breezy Jr. Walker & the All Stars instrumental, Elder grandly pronounces: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Night Court is now in session.” Following an opening monologue devoted to a topical issue, he concludes with his signature kicker: “This is Larry Elder and you’ve just heard The Word.”

Like most talk-radio hosts, Elder believes that newspapers and network news programs are liberally biased. But of course, they’re exactly what he relies on for his monologue material. When he arrives at KABC, his carrying bag is full of stories from The Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Jet and the Wall Street Journal. He is not impressed by Washington power brokers. When a staffer with Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called to see if Elder wanted to interview his boss, The Sage from South Central responded by saying he found Reich’s views “abhorrent,” warning “I’m not going to kiss his butt.” (Reich took a pass).

As a black conservative, Elder draws two distinct audiences. He has credibility with African American listeners who admire his achievements (even if they disagree with his message) while serving as a soothing presence for white callers, who know they won’t be portrayed as racists for advocating stiff prison sentences or opposing affirmative action. One minute Elder is playing “Shake” by Otis Redding, the next he’s reminding his black listeners that it’s time they abandoned the “warm, comforting cocoon of victimhood.”

“It’s so unexpected,” explains one listener, a white woman who works for a cable-TV station. “One night I heard him argue with callers about whether blacks get stopped more often by the cops, and I thought--this guy has a lot of nerve--until I realized, ‘Hey, he’s black.’ He could argue the issue as a brother and argue it as a Republican. It gave him a unique point of view.”

After a similarly barbed exchange one night, Kathy from Sherman Oaks gently chides Elder: “I want to change what I said about you, calling you a right-winger. You’re an extreme right-winger.” In the studio, The Sage grins with delight. He has connected with someone. It’s testament to the hypnotic intimacy of the medium that instead of hanging up on Elder, Kathy stays on the line, eager to keep the conversation going.

*

Gina from Altadena: Larry, your show sucks, but I listen to you anyway.

*

Whether it’s Kathy from Sherman Oaks, Big Money from Inglewood, Ken from Tustin or Debra from Los Angeles, Elder’s regular callers share one trait: They want to argue with him. And not out of ill will. They argue with him because they like him. Like great actors, successful talk-radio hosts create characters that spark the emotions and fantasies of their audience. It’s a key paradox of talk radio. When we hear Rush Limbaugh, we hear a carefully orchestrated character. But what makes the character work is that it’s real. Consultants call it the power of personality.

“Look at Rush,” says monologuist Eric Bogosian, who wrote and starred in “Talk Radio,” a 1989 film inspired by the murder of Denver talk-radio angryman Alan Berg. “If we saw him in person, we’d size him up as some disgruntled fat guy acting like a jerk. But because he’s on the radio, we fill in the rest of his personality with our imagination. We project it onto the character we’re hearing.”

KABC’s George Green, who doubles as general manager of sister all-talk station KMPC, believes that Elder has the potential to someday achieve Rush Limbaugh-style stardom. “Larry’s a magnificent young talent who’s saying things that no one has said,” says Green, who has been at the station since it launched the nation’s first all-talk format in 1960. “He’s the future of where we’re going in talk radio.”

Unhappily, as a prognosticator, Green doesn’t have such a hot track record in recent years. KABC wouldn’t be mired in such a ratings slump if Green had reacted differently when former ABC Radio Network president Ed McLaughlin called him in 1988, trying to sell him on the talents of Limbaugh, then an unknown host in Sacramento. Having just signed longtime morning host Michael Jackson to a new contract, Green turned down the opportunity.

Five years later, Limbaugh was a national phenomenon. Before Rush, there were about 200 all-news and talk stations. Post-Rush, there are about 1,000, including 650 that carry Limbaugh’s three-hour program. Limbaugh holds sway in virtually every market he airs in, including Los Angeles, where he has swamped Jackson, propelling rival station KFI past KABC in the ratings. Green admits that if he had to do it all over again, he’d have found a way to put Limbaugh on the air. “He gets credit for single-handedly exploding the medium,” he says. “Since Rush, we’ve had to completely reassemble ourselves to compete.”

Clearly, Elder’s strong nighttime ratings represent a key piece of the puzzle for KABC. But graduating to national syndication, talk radio’s major leagues, is a tall order. Just ask Larry King, Ross Perot and Michael Jackson, who all stumbled in various attempts at syndicating their shows. Despite his comparative lack of experience, Elder projects an intelligence and a strong personality that are key traits for successful hosts.

“I like the guy,” says Bill McMahon, one of three consultants who critiqued Elder after listening to a 90-minute excerpt from one of his programs. “He’s intelligent, well-prepared and very comfortable with himself. You don’t feel he’s acting out a part.”

Consultant Donna Halper was impressed by Elder’s rapport with his listeners. “He’s very good at bringing you into the conversation,” she says. “He takes what one caller has said and relates it to what an earlier caller said, so that both the active participant and the passive listener remain involved. It’s a way of making the listener feel welcome.”

Elder also gets good grades for his engaging manner. “He doesn’t shout at you, and he doesn’t insult you,” says Bruce Marr, a Reno, Nev.,-based consultant who helped discover Limbaugh in the mid-’80s. “He doesn’t shoot from the hip. A lot of hosts use emotion and anger. But what wins people over is if you win your debate with logic.”

Some of the consultants believe that Elder’s biggest obstacle is his preoccupation with affirmative action and other race-related issues. “I get a ton of audition tapes, and this one would’ve stood out in a dramatic fashion,” says Marr. “But I thought he was very one-issue-oriented. Is he always playing the race card? If so, it might limit his appeal.”

Elder is going up against long odds if he expects to play the national stage. “Everyone keeps looking for the next Rush,” says John Mainelli, the former program director of New York’s WABC radio who built that station into a talk-radio giant. “But he’s a phenomenon. A guy like him comes along once every 20 or 30 years. Everyone who has followed in his footsteps has failed.”

So consultants preach patience for local personalities like Elder. “The woods are full of people trying to syndicate national shows,” says Halper. “But I don’t think he’s built himself up yet--Rush and Howard Stern were in the public eye in their markets for years before they were ready to go national. I’d wait until Elder has a story to tell, until people get to know him better.”

When consultant Walter Sabo interviews aspiring hosts, he warns them that if they need phone calls to give them something to say, they won’t get any phone calls. “I tell them to imagine they have a six-hour shift with no commercials, no news, no music and no cartridge machines,” he says. “And I ask them to tell me a story. And the ones that have it, they can tell a story. They find everything interesting. They won’t shut up!”

*

Radio has always been full of people who talked, but whether it was Jack Benny or Edward R. Murrow, it was always a one-way conversation--the performer communicating with the listener. Hosts rarely took live calls, preferring to paraphrase caller’s questions on the air--in part because stations were fearful of wackos or enraged listeners cursing over the airwaves. In 1958, an engineer at New York’s WOR radio concocted tape-delay, which allowed an obscenity to be erased before it was broadcast and gave birth to the modern talk-radio era.

In 1960, Ben Hoberman, the young general manager of New York’s WABC radio, was dispatched to Los Angeles to revive the flagging fortunes of sister station KABC. Seeing a city crowded with cars, all equipped with AM radios, Hoberman took a revolutionary gamble, transforming KABC into the first all-talk radio station. By today’s standards, it was tame stuff. Back then? “It was completely off the wall,” says Hoberman, who is still active as a radio consultant. “I remember our salespeople trying to explain it to the ad agencies, who’d all ask: ‘How do you run a radio station without playing any music?’ ”

What really put the station on the map was a deejay from Montreal with a wooden leg and a mouth that roared: Joe Pyne. As much of a rabble-rouser as Howard Stern or G. Gordon Liddy are today, he was the first radio personality to tap into the howling-at-the-moon spirit of talk radio. “Look lady,” Joe would growl. “Every time you open your mouth to speak, nothing but garbage falls out. GET OFF THE LINE, YOU CREEP!” His signature salutation: “Go gargle with razor blades!”

Outraged by Pyne’s wild-man act, listeners bombarded ABC’s corporate headquarters in New York with mounds of angry mail. When Pyne started attacking his own station management, KABC yanked him off the air (Rival station KLAC hired him the next day.) But modern talk radio was born. Little has changed since. Walk into the KABC studio where Elder broadcasts his show and you’ll see a layout remarkably similar to a Pyne-era setting: one soundproof studio for the host, another for the engineer, who racks up audio carts for commercials and screens incoming phone calls. The biggest innovation is a computer screen that displays a one-line summary of each caller’s comments, offering hosts an opportunity to pick the order of the calls they want on the air.

What’s really different is that talk radio has become a legitimate political weapon. Nine talk-show hosts ran for Congress last fall. Only one of them, J. D. Hayworth in Arizona, won. But in many races, talk radio framed the debate. “If you want to talk clout, look at Howard Stern,” says Sabo. “All the candidates Howard has pushed for have won--Christine Whitman in New Jersey. George Pitaki in New York and, back in 1992, Bill Clinton. Everyone made a big deal out of Clinton going on MTV, but Howard has far more listeners than MTV has viewers, and most of MTV’s audience isn’t old enough to vote anyway.”

The biggest kingmaker was Limbaugh, whose show reaches 20 million listeners each week. When the conservative Washington Times reported on the discovery of a lost pad of confidential notes outlining plans by Democratic party strategists to rebound from their recent election losses, the mainstream press was mum. But when Limbaugh gleefully read excerpts on his show, the New York Times put the story on Page 1 the following day.

Empower America, a conservative political action group run by Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, faxes a weekly tip sheet to some 300 or so conservative hosts, giving its spin on various topical political issues. Politicians in turn emulate talk radio’s flamethrowing rhetoric, labeling their adversaries Nazis, eco-Gestapo and “enemies of normal Americans.” Angered by an opponent’s calls for an investigation of harassment of federal officials, House Speaker Newt Gingrich responded with a talk-show-style roar: “Would he like to bring in people who urinated on the Pentagon? . . . people who insulted American soldiers in uniform?”

It’s the sort of fuel-injected oratory that would do Joe Pyne proud. Even when talk radio was in its infancy, Pyne knew the formula for success. Conflict, not consensus. “The subject must be visceral,” he told Time magazine in 1966, not long after he celebrated the Watts riots by pulling a gun in front of a black guest. “We want emotion, not mental involvement.”

*

Fred from Inglewood: It’s time somebody your equal takes you apart. You spoke that you came from a modest background. So how’d you get the money to go to college?

Larry Elder: Do I have to answer that?

Fred: Well, why not? You’re on the air.

Elder: I borrowed some. My parents paid for some, some of it was loans and some were grants--

Fred (dripping with sarcasm): You got government loans?

Elder (defiantly): Absolutely, Fred!

Fred (triumphantly): Oh, we got a little affirmative action there?

*

When Larry Elder was a 15-year-old student at Crenshaw High School, one of his teachers asked the class to pretend that they were alive in 18th-Century America and write a letter back home, describing their daily lives. Elder recalls composing an upbeat account, saying things were going well as he described his work clearing the fields and harvesting the crops.

When he turned in his paper, one of the most popular kids in the class announced: “Watch Elder. I bet you he wrote his paper as a white man.” And he was right. Everyone else had written their letters as if they were slaves. “I should’ve been far more sensitive to the plight of blacks in that time,” Elder says now. “But that wasn’t the way I saw it. I always felt I had no limitations on my opportunities.”

It’s a story Elder finds somewhat embarrassing, but it’s not so different from the stories he tells on his show, monologues that establish his on-air character--the black conservative who preaches the anyone-can-make-it-in-America gospel. It’s a gospel Elder has wholeheartedly embraced. In talk radio, sincerity is part of the shtick. “If a host says to me, ‘What do you want, liberal or conservative?’ I don’t want them at all,” says former WABC programmer John Mainelli. “They have to believe what they’re saying.”

Elder’s political consciousness was shaped by his father, Randolph Elder, who for decades operated a South-Central cafe. The elder Elder viewed the 1965 Watts Riots as an excuse for “a bunch of jerks” to rob and loot. “I was never angry at the world,” says his son. “I was a nerd, a geek--my friends called me ‘poot butt.’ The kids who were in the forefront of our Black Is Beautiful movement were the screw-ups in class. It was 90% just trying to be hip.”

Elder had his eyes on his prize. He went away to college at Brown, then Michigan Law School--and concedes that affirmative action played a big part in helping him get in. Elder doesn’t see see himself as hypocritical for campaigning against social programs only after he’s reaped their benefits. “I would’ve been successful regardless of affirmative action,” he contends. “The key to upward mobility is education. Talent is way down on the list. That’s life. If you’re born into a family where your father beats you or someone’s an alcoholic, you’re in trouble. That’s what the YMCA and the Boy Scouts are there for. I don’t believe in a government-provided safety net.”

This message grates on many of Elder’s black callers, who label him an Uncle Tom. When he leaves KABC one night, a burly black security guard teases him, saying with a grin, “G’night, Uncle.” Some detractors aren’t so good-natured. One listener--who even signs his name--regularly faxes Elder vitriolic letters denouncing him as a “Nigger Bitch spokesperson for white society.” Elder says he receives so much hate mail that he varies his route home each night to avoid being followed. To hear Elder tell it, his listeners are simply blaming the messenger. “Here I come, growing up in the same circumstances, with a father who worked as a janitor, and I’m saying the way out is hard work. And that’s a very disquieting message for someone who’s spent their life in the culture of victimhood.”

Of course, being a talk-show host, Elder feels obliged to make that point in a more dramatic fashion on the air. When he accuses callers of blaming their problems on discrimination, he plays his favorite sound effect--the kind of organ crescendo you’d hear in a silent movie when the villain appears in the doorway. Then Elder hisses in a stage whisper: “Racism!”

It’s a device that often infuriates listeners, but hey--if people complain, the host is doing his job, right? “The purpose of talk radio is to get a reaction,” says Walter Sabo. “This isn’t like working in a sales department, where the customer is always right. In talk radio, there’s nothing wrong with a negative response. The problem is when you get no response.”

Even away from the mike, Elder still needs to rile up his audience--even an audience of one. One day over lunch, he finds a way to steer the conversation to a favorite topic: Bill Clinton and his liberal transgressions. Finally, his visitor can’t contain himself. Talk radio’s thorny magic has cast its spell--he has to take up the debate. “To be fair to Clinton,” he hesitantly suggests, only to be cut off in mid-sentence. Larry Elder grins as he throws a quick left hook. “Fair?” he says with scorn. “Why be fair?”

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6 things you should know about talk radio

No. 1: Talk radio is MTV for middle-aged people. Compared to the consumer groups who set trends in film, fashion or music, talk-radio listeners are--in a word--old. The age of the average talk-show listener is about 53, a number that hasn’t significantly changed despite the huge influx of new talk-radio stations in recent years. According to Arbitron survey numbers, 63% of Limbaugh’s Los Angeles audience is over 50. It’s one reason talk-radio hosts have such political clout: People over 50 vote in much higher numbers than any other age group.

No. 2: Talk Radio is audio caffeine. The format originated in Los Angeles because it was a freeway town. Back East, commuters traveled three to a car. In L.A., people drove alone--a captive audience. “When you’re in a car, you’re in this aggressive mood, and you’re pushing the accelerator down--the attitude fits talk radio perfectly,” says monologuist Eric Bogosian, who wrote and starred in the 1989 Oliver Stone film “Talk Radio.” “Could you imagine sitting on a beach with a little radio next to you and wanting to listen to Rush Limbaugh? It fits better when you’re drinking coffee, driving to work and pissed off.”

No. 3: Talk radio is a local medium. “A guy like Rush comes along once every 20 or 30 years,” says former WABC Radio program director John Mainelli. “Everyone who’s tried to follow in his footsteps has failed.” For example, G. Gordon Liddy has a high media profile, but few of the 262 stations that air his show are in Top 25 markets. Radio only has four nationally syndicated successes: Rush, newscaster Paul Harvey, “Top Ten Countdown” legend Casey Kasem and Howard Stern.

No. 4: Talk radio is conservative because conservatives are entertaining. “Rush is successful 90% because of his talent, 10% because he’s a conservative,” says Radio & Records “Talk” columnist Randall Bloomquist. “He’s a once-in-a-generation talent.” Talk-show consultants point to Patrick J. Buchanan and Oliver L. North, who are equally conservative but have failed to connect with audiences. “It’s about communication, not ideology,” says talk-radio consultant Rob Balon. “If Newt Gingrich runs into trouble and assumes the bogey-man status Clinton now has, you’ll start seeing a wave of liberal Limbaughs.”

No. 5: Talk Radio is a political divining rod. “These guys don’t have the power to invent issues,” says Bloomquist. “But they can act like a laser device, focusing the beam of public opinion on Washington.” Mike Harrison, publisher of the “Talkers” trade journal, calls talk radio a bellwether of American social attitudes. “The hosts amplify and articulate public opinion,” he says. “If they take Liddy off the air, someone even more outrageous would take his place, because he’s just mirroring the feeling of disgust and frustration that’s already there.”

No. 6: Talk radio is a magnet for kooks. Experts say that of all talk-radio listeners, only about 3% to 5% actually call a program. Even with the arrival of car phones, which brings in more affluent professionals, an alarmingly high-percentage of callers are oddballs and conspiracy buffs--Bogosian labels them “zipperheads.” On one recent night, Elder, who rarely attracts nuts, had one guy claiming that John Lennon had been assassinated by Stephen King and another who insisted that Ronald Reagan wasn’t shot in 1981 but was involved in an faked assassination attempt masterminded by anti-gun zealots.