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Bob Lassiter dies at 61

T

tparadio1

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From All Access

Condolences to family and friends of veteran talk host BOB LASSITER, who died FRIDAY (10/13) after a long illness at 61, according to postings at his blog. LASSITER was best known for his stints at Talk WPLP-A, WFLA-A and WSUN-A/TAMPA and WLS-A/CHICAGO; he also worked as a DJ at several stations like WOUR/UTICA, WOWI/NORFOLK, WEZS/RICHMOND, WJOI/PITTSBURGH, and WKQS/MIAMI before turning to talk at WGBS-A and WINZ-A/MIAMI.
 
You went out your way, Bob, In style. Hope you are having those deep discussions where ever you are....
 
I'm so mad right now, I can't explain it, but the way 970 is reporting this makes me feel sick...

I never met Bob, but I'm really gonna miss him...

Cedric
 
The context of Lassiter....

When he arrived in this market (1985), talk radio was entirely for senior citizens -- the World War Two-era
generation and people even older than that. Anybody under 40 had left the AM band years before, and fortysomethings and fiftysomethings were starting to follow them. WPLP, Lassiter's first station, suffered especially with unattractive demos. WFLA had the same problem but not as severe because they had a better signal in Hillsborough county where more younger people lived.

There were people in many markets who were hired to "drive off the old people" as talk stations tried to modernize for a younger audience (the baby boomers). Neil Rogers transformed himself into such a person. David Paul did the dirty work in Atlanta. Others, like Freddie Mertz and Ed Tyll, used shock and crudeness to scare away the seniors as "U-Haul" talk show hosts moving from market to market. Except for Rogers, these names are mostly forgotten. Lassiter did far more than rile up the oldsters. By injecting so much of himself and his unique wit through those radio speakers, he brought an entire generation (back) to AM radio. In most markets that development had to wait for the arrival of Rush Limbaugh. Thanks to Lassiter and the buzz he generated, it happened here a year or two before Limbaugh's arrival.

The twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who got turned on to Lassiter hanging up on the old people and religious types in the 80's became the base of 970's audience for the next fifteen years. Limbaugh inherited Lassiter's audience and time slot when he left to go to WLS. It's not so strange that Limbaugh held on to much of that audience. Back then audiences didn't expect a station to be all one flavor, and back then Rush hadn't started believing his press clippings.

I'm so mad right now, I can't explain it, but the way 970 is reporting this makes me feel sick...
Click to expand...

Lassiter's career would be lost on Beckheads and Schnittheads anyway... it's just as well...
Just be grateful that sites like wfmu.org and boblassiterairchecks.com are bringing his talent to a new generation...

Am I the only one who sees irony in Lassiter passing the same day Air America filed for Chapter 11? Anyone want to imagine what the infant "progressive talk radio" format would be like with a snarling, healthy Mad Dog at the mic?

Think also of the "progressive" hosts still in the biz today who were influenced by Lassiter or by having to compete with him... including Lionel, Cary Harrison of KTLK Los Angeles (Harry Dangler/Carroll Sudler to Tampa folks), Jay Marvin (who was the target of Lassiter's merciless scorn at WTKN and used it as a motivator).
 
Who took over from Lassiter the last time he was on WFLA? Brian James? The guy that still does their imaging?
 
Glenn Beck was Bob's last replacement.

Bob was such an important part of my life. His show, his blog.

He once said that he thought the reason his show was so successful was that when he walked in the studio he took out a razor and sliced his tummy from one side to the other and put all his guts on the table. You saw all the good and all the bad.

For such a private man, he certainly took us on many of his personal journeys and for that I was touched in more ways than he could ever have imagined.

Thank you Bob,… Thank you so much.
 
Having worked with Bob at the James Street studioof WFLA..I was constantly amazed at his apparent lack of ability to associate with others in the station. He was one of the most brilliantly dis-connected men in broadcasting. He detested radio "types" and suits, and upstarts, and hangers-on. He loved his wife..and his life (usually) but not always willing to let many see his backround with any clarity. And because of that he was more able to relate to the listener. He was less business and more entertainer.

On the air he said what most of us in the business would have wanted to say (if we had thought of it..or had the stones to do so) off the air he reluctantly confided that one of his favorite things to do was watch birds outside of his home. He liked home. He liked roots.

What a talk station they have where he is now..Dick Norman..John Eastman...David Fowler...Bob..and yeah even Tim Coles.

Thanks for being unique, and a part of our lives.
 
...Bob Lassiter was a talented broadcaster. Bob Lassiter was also a person who chose to use his talents as a broadcaster to be one of the most abusive jackasses the world has ever celebrated. There even came a time that I was a specific target of Lassiter's viciousness. It was in early 1994, when I was still a subscriber to Prodigy and posted on a forum there that I had admired the then-syndicated New Jersey talk radio host Jack Ellery, whose program
followed mine on the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, station I worked for at the time. I had not known that Lassiter was also a member of the same Prodigy forum, nor that Lassiter and Ellery had both worked on WFLA at one time and Lassiter had created such a hostile work environment for Ellery that, as I understand it, it led Jack to leave WFLA and take the job on the network that fed my station Jack's show. For three weeks, Lassiter tagged every post I made on the forum with his own abusive posts, various allegations about Ellery that Jack personally denied to me, and a couple of namecalling
rants aimed at Jay Marvin. Marvin, now the morning host at KKZN in the
Denver market and occasional pinch-hitter for Ed Schultz on his
syndicated show, had worked for both WFLA and WLS after Lassiter had
but, significantly, had a level of success on WLS that Lassiter never
achieved. Lassiter once boasted to me in that Prodigy forum that his
ratings in his time slot at WLS were higher than Larry Lujack's had been
in the same time slot (an outright lie), a claim that brought Ellery
himself into the posting fray...

...Lassiter was indeed like Muhammad Ali in that, wherever he went,
things didn't happen to him so much as he happened to things. Most
certainly unlike Muhammad Ali, however, he used his talents for social
evil rather than good. And for that, the life of Bob Lassiter became a
tragedy of Shakespearean proportions (and not in the manner Lassiter
himself hoped)...
 
In a strange way, it is a tribute to Lassiter that people are motivated to violate the old rule against "speaking ill of the dead" when his name comes up. No doubt he could be mean or vindictive toward those who "didn't get it", or who did things to people he considered his friends.

I won't contest or confirm the events you describe. I'm just one of those people who knew the Lassiter-Ellery feud from the perspective as a listener. As I recall, WFLA was going to can Ellery when they hired Lassiter but kept him on as a part-timer, and that was the source of the friction.

Before he came to WFLA, Ellery was the program director of WWDB-FM in Philadelphia. He proudly stated to
a trade publication that his station did nothing to seek younger demos, despite its being the first talk station on the FM band. WWDB was and became what Tampa talk radio was before Lassiter. Its demos aged out of sight,and it isn't around anymore. WFLA is still around, partly because it didn't follow the path Ellery helped set for WWDB. By all indications, Ellery didn't understand the need to add fresh blood to the talk radio universe, and his shift on WFLA treaded water during his tenure there.

There's also the question of how Ellery could work for the Sun Radio Network for years and not realize, or perhaps not act on the realization, that it was run by a bunch of crypto-Nazi holocaust deniers.

Unfair questions perhaps, but Mr. Ellery is still around to defend himself.
 
...Ellery's association with Sun and People's Radio Network (my station at the time picked him up from PRN) was probably as a result of his personal friendship with Chuck Harder, who also was a WFLA alumni. It was one of the earliest ISDN-fed shows, as I recall, allowing Ellery to return to his Princeton, New Jersey, home after the WFLA gig soured. Soon after I left the station in Oshkosh that was carrying PRN, Chuck Harder pointedly turned against Ellery on-the-air and Ellery quit. He subsequently would be heard filling in on WOR (most frequently for Bob Grant, another odd combine) in the months after quitting PRN...
 
Uh, Just to set the record strait, Jack Ellery did NOT quit working for Mr. Harders network. He was shown the door.

When He came to Tampa, he was a ratings success for a brief while at FLA, his stick soon wore off. As memory serves me correctly, Dick Norman showed him the door.

I had the displeasure of working with him briefly at the Sun Radio Network (before the Nazi group owned it). I recall NO ONE there who liked him even a little bit. The highlight of my experience with the hack was when during a break in his show he ran out of the studio to go to the main office in another building and fell in a swimming pool that was between the buildings.

I am sorry you were the butt of Mr. Lassiter’s keyboard. I would have loved to read what he wrote about you. I am sure I would have been amused.
 
Ultimajock, I find your timing to be utterly despicable. I hope you feel like a really big man...

I managed to catch AM Tampa Bay this morning. I wasn't surprised to hear that Jack was completely clueless... talking about his friend David Fowler, only to be reminded by Teddy that he passed away two years ago!

His response??? Something to the effect of, "...oh, really?"

Sharon was obviously biting her tongue. I really felt bad for her, I can understand the position she's in.

Jack and Teddy went on to talk (lie) about how Bob and FLA parted ways.

Did anyone else catch this???

Cedric
 
I used to listen to Bob when I was in tampa..

To me , talk radio has lost a rare talent, a hidden gem


Thanks Bob!
 
Cedric,

Ease up on that guy. I can promise you that if this were a talkshow instead of a message board... and if this guy had called in to blast someone who had just passed away, I would have put him up and on the air first... and Bob would have gladly taken his call. (Just as I did years ago when some knuckle-dragging redneck called in to blast Rabbi Jan Breski shortly after his passing. Bob nearly blew a gasket ripping that guy apart!)

If you lived here and listened to the show, or if you've just discovered Bob from the aircheck archive sites, Bob's show thrived on the the worst elements in people. Bob wasn't that type of man himself, he just provided a radio conduit for bitter, angy people to vent. For it's time, it was great radio. He often said that all he was doing was holding up a mirror to the community, and allowing us to see just how ugly we can be to each other.

As a point of clarity... Jack Ellery was the 12-3 host at WFLA when Bob was hired away from WPLP. Jack had a contract with WFLA and was retained when Bob started, but was removed from that time slot. For the balance of his time there, Jack was used for fill-in and vacation work. Initially, Bob was very sympathetic to Jack's situation, and tried to make the best of a very bad situation for Jack. Ellery blamed Bob instead of going after the real culprits, WFLA's lame management. Eventually, Jack left and went to the Sun Radio network.

In fact, if you go to the BobLassiterAirchecks.com website, you'll find a tape (MP3) of the day that Bob took off the gloves. Jack had covered Bob's vacation and promptly blasted Bob in Bob's own time slot. Lassiter came back from vacation and was not amused, and on the very same show, Bob went after Richard Shanks and WPLP's management as well. It was terrific radio as Bob, hosting a show on WFLA, called in and sat on hold on WPLP trying to get on the air with Richard! Can you imagine that happening today ???

As the producer of the Bob Lassiter show at WPLP and during part of his first stint at WFLA, his passing has hit very close to home. I've replied to quite a number of folks last night and this morning, and feel compelled to share a few thoughts on this board.

Though we all knew his passing was coming, I'm still a bit numb at the loss of yet another friend.

He touched each us us differently. I was so damn young at the time, that I didn’t really understand who or what I was working with. At first, he was just another in a long list of talk show hosts. I can tell you the exact night when I really discovered the difference. January 1, 1987. We were both stuck working on New Years Night. (Thanks Don!) Inspired by "Joe Isuzu," he came up the concept of the $50,000 Giveway. He tapped into two of the most basic human instincts… we all want something for nothing, and, we will willingly believe someone who sounds honest and sincere even when we are faced with the bitter truth. Mesh that, with Bob's wonderful gift of creating pictures with words of the unbelievable prizes we were "giving away"... people fell for it! I still remember a TV station calling and asking if it were really true! Nothing will match the heartfelt way he ended that "bit" and explained the truth. He tied it back to the politics of the day and implored people to use their gift of reasoning. 20 years later, it remains one of the best pieces of radio showmanship ever, and I'm very proud to have been there with him that night.

I think it goes without saying that there will never be another Lassiter.

Bob came along at a very pivitol point in radio, and especially in the development of talkradio as a competitive format in this market. Everything just lined up perfectly for someone like Bob to shake up the old world order of things.

And shake it up he did. Visit the aircheck archive sites Several months ago on his blog, Bob wrote an entry about our friendship and the role I played in his show. During the 'PLP era while the Eagle were singing "Take it to the Limit," I'd hit the intercom and give him immediate feedback about the show.

You can't imagine how it saddens me to say one last time... "Great Show, Bob!!"

--

If you'll give me just an additional moment, in my opinion, there's another man who deserves a LOT of credit for all that great talkradio from that era... a guy that doesn't get nearly the credit for having a vision of what talkradio could be, and then set out to hire the people that made it happen. Don Richards. I hope y'all will remember his contributions to talkradio in this market as well. I can't imagine how difficult it was for him to read the news of Bob's death on the air yesterday afternoon.

Michael Serio
Producer - The Bob Lassiter Show (85-89)
 
But did you still think it was genius on January 2, 1987, when you had to deal with all the elderly people who parked their Buicks and Winnebagos in your station parking lot and asked for their money? ;)

I heard Lionel say something brief about Lassiter on his (national) show last night. Did somebody record this?
 
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