Keeping it together on the air

He says many listeners still don’t believe it’s true, but half of the Southland’s top-rated morning radio team is so uncomfortable with the area that he no longer lives here.

Thirteen years after it debuted on KROQ-FM (106.7), the irreverent “Kevin & Bean Show” topped the most recent Arbitron ratings for morning drive, in the poll of listeners 12 and older from January through March. When the cast found out, Gene “Bean” Baxter was at his home on an island off Seattle, where he maintains sheep, pigs and solitude.

“I never really cared for L.A. I just never really dug it,” said Baxter, who, along with his wife, finally moved from his farm in Santa Clarita in 1999. He says he never liked the pace and show-biz culture of Los Angeles, and though the same year he moved the duo received the prestigious Marconi Award from the National Assn. of Broadcasters as major-market personalities of the year, “The Kevin & Bean Show” almost became extinct.

To keep the program alive, KROQ proposed having Baxter broadcast remotely from his new home. He agreed to try but was prepared to look for work in Seattle if the experiment failed. Co-host Kevin Ryder said he was “kind of blind-sided by it.”

“When it happened, I thought, ‘We’ll try it for a couple of months.’ We figured we’d give it a shot,” he said. “I’m shocked at how well it works. I don’t give him very many compliments, but I don’t know how many other people could pull that off.”

So now every morning before the start of the 5-10 a.m. show, Baxter ambles to a room in his guest house where he has a sound mixing board, recording equipment, a video monitor showing his cohorts in the KROQ studio in Los Angeles, a computer and a microphone attached to a high-quality phone line. Ryder and the other Los Angeles crew can also see him on a monitor in their studio.

“It sounds like we’re in the same room,” Baxter said. He flies down to the area as necessary for live appearances and concerts, but some listeners still don’t believe he’s not in L.A. full time. “They can’t really get their heads around how it’s possible. People thought it was some elaborate setup for a joke.”

Unlike many morning shows that rely heavily on bathroom or bedroom humor, Ryder and Baxter and their accomplices -- in between songs by the Foo Fighters or Beastie Boys -- mock every lame movie or TV show, marvel at the latest blockbuster film or local sports triumph and skewer every pseudo-celebrity or fading star, hoping that their listeners enjoy the gags as much as they do. It’s a formula that jibes with the iconoclastic image of the station and with an audience that has an appetite for the alternative.

But KROQ program director Kevin Weatherly said the station isn’t about to put the pair’s faces up on billboards around town, touting them as “the most-listened-to morning show in L.A.”

“The appeal of Kevin & Bean is they’re the anti-slick,” he said.

Laid-back sensibility

In the laid-back atmosphere of the studio, Ryder, clad in corduroy shorts and a polo shirt, wanders in and out of the booth when he’s not on the air, even when traffic reporter Lisa May is reading her dispatches. The show defies the conventional mania for silence and soundproofing and to-the-second precision found at other stations. Instead, the easy banter during the program is almost indistinguishable from that off the air. Mistakes and ad-libs are welcomed as much as the planned bits, as long as they’re just as funny.

The show is famous for its outrageous April Fool’s Day stunts, such as causing a traffic jam last year at Ontario Mills by purportedly broadcasting a live concert from the shopping mall. Or the on-air fistfight that sounded like it erupted between Baxter and Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke.

But the humor sometimes backfires. Only six months into their job, in 1990, Ryder and Baxter got into trouble with their station and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department by airing a fake murder confession. And in March, entertainment reporter Ralph Garman, while impersonating Jerry Lewis, called the office of French President Jacques Chirac.

After a few minutes of not getting anywhere, he and the others on the show were about to scuttle the gag when someone claiming to be Chirac got on the line and bantered with the ersatz Lewis for several minutes on Franco-American relations and world events. Station and company executives have since imposed a gag order about that incident.

“If you’re going to have any kind of edge at all,” Baxter said, “you can’t be in a mode where you’re trying to make everybody happy.”

Another staple of the show is the morning concerts with various bands, with small audiences of invited fans. But they also feature guests that might seem unexpected for a comedic morning show, such as Adrien Brody, before he won a best actor Oscar this year for “The Pianist,” and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, to talk about his movie dealing with Armenian genocide.

They also spend a good deal of time mocking each other, with Baxter often taking the brunt of the jokes. Last week he commented that Nicole Kidman was “50% less attractive” to him once he found out she smokes; Garman took the line and mocked him with it the rest of the program.

Their fifth Beatle

Though the show is named after Ryder and Baxter, Garman is the third leg of the stool. Ryder said the three of them vote on what bits to include in the program, and Baxter praised not only Garman’s writing and creativity but also his facility with celebrity impressions and his ability to ad-lib while in character.

During a recent program he impersonated Michael Jackson, saying that Elizabeth Taylor scared him one Christmas because she has “a much more full beard than Santa does,” cracking up everyone else in the studio. And though he’s billed as the entertainment reporter, the news nuggets in his updates mainly serve as straight lines for his jokes. He reported that actor Tom Green and the ‘80s band Twisted Sister would be performing at USO shows for U.S. soldiers in England. “They expect record numbers of American servicemen to go AWOL,” he said. Then he reported singer Sinead O’Connor’s plans to retire. “Upon hearing the news, the president of the Sinead O’Connor fan club said, ‘Is she still alive?’ ”

“Ralph has been fantastic,” Baxter said. “He’s taken us to a whole new level.”

Not bad for someone who had never heard the show before he started working on it. Garman was an aspiring actor working nights as a bartender; he usually didn’t wake up in time to hear the program. But his roommate, comedian Adam Carolla, himself once a sidekick on “Kevin & Bean,” recommended him to the station.

“I never had any radio interest. I thought I’d take it on for a couple of months,” Garman said. “That was five years ago.”

A listener might hear the show as nothing but a five-hour bull session, a bunch of people goofing on pop culture. But the informality that comes out of the speakers belies the planning and research that go into each program. So they can joke about the latest film or TV show or current event, Ryder, Baxter and Garman said they spend hours devouring magazines and newspapers, previewing movies and television shows, remaining alert for any tidbit that could be used on their program.

“It’s always hanging over your head,” Ryder said. “It is exhausting and it is time-consuming. But I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, because it’s a great job. And it’s fun.”

Program director Weatherly said that when he came to the station in 1992, his goal was to increase “Kevin & Bean’s” ratings to a 3% share of the audience. They hit that milestone and kept going -- in the first quarter of this year they reached 5.3% of the listeners.

“The ratings help,” Ryder said, especially when it comes to fending off executives at the station and its parent, Infinity Radio, whose meddling is a running joke on the program. “As the ratings get better, they tinker less.”

But they still step in when they feel the shtick gets out of hand, such as after the Chirac call. Following that, Jerry Lewis’ attorney threatened to sue -- joining a crowd of people annoyed with the program’s humor over the years. Such as the niece of actor Robert Stack, who complained when they joked about him after his death recently. Or model Rachel Hunter, who confronted Ryder when he ran into her the day after the show made a joke about her weight. Or the entire population of the 909 area code, when the show derides the Inland Empire as the home of nothing but dirt and methamphetamine labs.

“Obviously we can’t say one single thing without getting complaints,” Baxter said. “Everybody has a different button. They want you to make fun of everything else, except their one thing.”

So they try to entertain themselves, and hope the humor resonates with the audience as well. “You have to do the best show you think you can do,” Ryder said. “Ratings, let them go where they may.”

They landed in the top spot in part because the man who had a stranglehold on the position moved to afternoons. Renan Almendarez Coello took his wildly popular Spanish-language radio show on KSCA-FM (101.9) to afternoons in February, after six years of far outpacing all competition in morning ratings. But Ryder and Baxter have long been among the contenders that jockeyed for primacy among English-language morning shows.

“It all runs in cycles,” Baxter added, noting that Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps on KLOS-FM (95.5), Rick Dees on KIIS-FM (102.7), Howard Stern on KLSX-FM (97.1) and Steve Harvey on KKBT-FM (100.3) have all occupied the top slot in recent years, at least among English-language morning shows.

“We’re in an upswing right now. None of us believes it’s going to last forever,” Baxter said, but “it’s better than not being No. 1.”

The start of something

Ryder and Baxter met in the late 1980s when both were working at rock station KZZP in Phoenix, Baxter on the afternoon shift and Ryder at nights. But they teamed up Saturday nights for the Party Patrol, a van with a mobile transmitter that they drove to parties around the metro area to broadcast live.

“It was wild. We just had a blast doing it,” said Baxter, who doesn’t recall where the childhood nickname “Bean” came from. He supposes it’s simply just a rhyme with his first name, or a reference to his height -- he’s 6-feet-6.

“We enjoyed working together,” he said, and realized that the guys doing the morning shows were the ones who got all the money, attention and cool interviews. They began contacting radio stations and offering their services, hoping to get a shot by moving to Albuquerque or another smaller market to debut their act. Then “the world-famous K-Rock” called from L.A.

But in 1990 the KLOS morning duo Mark & Brian were enormously popular, and many listeners accused Ryder and Baxter of ripping off their act.

“Neither of us had ever heard of Mark & Brian,” Ryder said. “You get a tough skin pretty quickly.

“In the beginning, we were terrible,” he added. For one thing, as regular DJs in Phoenix, they weren’t required to say much between the songs -- quite the opposite duties of morning-show hosts. “If we could make it to two minutes talking, we were high-fiving,” he recalled.

Before Baxter ever left for Seattle, the program already had experience with having one of its members off-site. Until just a few months ago, traffic reporter Lisa May contributed to the show from her office at MetroTraffic Networks, where she did traffic for four other shows. She now works exclusively at KROQ.

“I think I represent the females. The ones who say, ‘You guys are stupid. Shut up,’ ” May said cheerfully.

“We thought she wasn’t going to like us,” Ryder said. “We didn’t know we weren’t going to like her.”

Weatherly said they knew they could accommodate the technical aspects of having Baxter broadcast from off site. The biggest question was whether their comic timing would suffer.

“With as many people as they have on mike, it takes a certain chemistry to get that timing down, a familiarity with each other,” Weatherly said. “We knew pretty quickly it was going to be OK. The two of them have worked together long enough they can anticipate each other, and see where each other is going.

“They actually all get along better than they ever have,” he said.