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Bob Lassiter (September 30, 1945 – October 13, 2006), also known as "Mad Dog," was a controversial and highly influential American radio talk show host in the 1980s and '90s. He worked in several markets but is best known for his long stint in the Tampa Bay area.

Contents 1 Career 1.1 Early career 1.2 Tampa: WPLP (1985-87) and WFLA (1987-89) 1.3 Chicago (1989-91) 1.4 Return to Tampa: WSUN (1993-95) and WFLA (1996-99) 2 Retirement/Death 3 Style 3.1 Callers 3.2 Monologues 3.3 Stunts 3.3.1 The $50,000 Giveaway 4 Christmas Show 5 On-Air Blunder 6 Airchecks 7 External links

Lassiter was born Robert Glodowski in Camden, New Jersey and raised in Collingswood, where he lived until dropping out of high school in the middle of his junior year and running away to New York City. He then wandered the United States doing odd jobs until arriving in 1970 on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

A sales representative from a beautiful music radio station heard Lassiter's voice in a bar one afternoon and immediately suggested he apply for an on-air job. Lassiter was soon hired as a music disc jockey at the salesman's station, WESP-FM, signing on on September 1, 1970 under the air name of "Ron Scott." [1]

He would move from there to beautiful music and progressive rock stations all over the country: WOUR-FM in Utica, New York; WOWI-FM in Norfolk, Virginia; WEZS-FM in Richmond, Virginia; and WJOI-FM in Pittsburgh. [2] At some point during this period he legally changed his name to Lassiter.

In 1981, Lassiter was working as a country music DJ at WKQS-FM 99.9 in Miami under the name Bobby Clifford when he heard talk-radio giant Neil Rogers on WINZ (940 AM). Rogers became Lassiter's mentor and idol, whom he followed into talk radio by taking a late-night weekend slot at Miami's WGBS-AM (710) in 1984. (Lassiter apparently intended to continue as Bobby Clifford on WGBS, but in preparing for his debut the station prepared promos and announcements using the name "Lassiter" without asking; Lassiter was forced to use his real name on the air.) Rogers heard Lassiter on WGBS and liked what he did, urging his own station to hire the newcomer. WINZ did hire Lassiter as a weekend host, but fired him in late 1985 when he uttered a profanity on the air.

In September 1985, Tampa Bay's first all-talk station, WPLP-AM, lured Lassiter to Tampa with his first (low-paid) fulltime position on weeknights. (At the time he was still working weekends on WINZ; the station intended to move Neil Rogers from nighttime to day and were grooming Lassiter as his replacement until he was fired.) Lassiter recalled on the air that the station initially offered him $12,000 per year, which he turned down, eventually accepting a comeback offer of $18,000 when Rogers suggested he take the job as training for doing talk radio every day. (He later admitted faking his resume to get hired at WPLP, claiming to be a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania [3].)

Although Lassiter's Miami career was not to be, he soon took Tampa by storm with his confrontational and deliberately offensive style, quickly rising to the top-rated talk program in the market by an enormous margin. He was, in fact, the second-highest-rated radio show in the market, bested only by Cleveland Wheeler and Scott Shannon's Q-ZOO on WRBQ. [4]

Lassiter redefined AM talk radio in Tampa Bay, asserting himself as an on-air bully who targeted Christians, conservatives, the elderly, and virtually everybody else. As he himself would one day describe:

“

When I came to this town, talk radio was...basically old men talking to older men. Some exciting shows I heard in this market were things like, "If you know anybody famous, give me a call." And that was it! And the guy just repeated it over and over and over again, and got one call in an hour from somebody who knew one of the Harmonicats! Another show that I heard in this market was "What's your favorite vaudeville theater?" Another...was "I own a Corvette. Do you own a Corvette? Give me a call if you do. What do you think about Corvettes? Would you like to own a Corvette? Did I mention I owned one?" And he got two calls an hour. And I came in and sat down and said "Ronald Reagan's a moron! And an idiot! You'll piss on his grave one of these days!" And the old people went berserk. Absolutely berserk!" [5]

”

Instead of a market for the retirees who formed much of the area's population, Lassiter made talk radio a young listener's medium: kids and young adults would listen to hear Lassiter torment the old people.

Lassiter's ratings and reputation were such that the biggest AM radio station in the market, WFLA, hired him away from WPLP for substantially more money in mid-1987. At FLA Lassiter joined the ranks of the Golden Age of Tampa Talk Radio, with such personalities as Dick Norman, Tedd Webb, Liz Richards, and The Lionel Show, and maintained his ratings supremacy to that local competition. Indeed, while Lassiter had pulled 4 and 5 shares at WPLP — which by itself made him the Number One talk show in Tampa Bay — at WFLA he rose to 8 and 9 shares, at a time when the entire talk-radio audience in Tampa Bay was roughly a 10 share of the market.

By 1989 Lassiter had become something of a sensation in the broadcast industry, appearing on national television and creating a demand for his talents in the largest markets in the U.S. New York's WABC made an offer in 1988, but WFLA would not let him out of his contract. Ultimately he was won over by WLS, the ABC radio affiliate in Chicago, who offered him a five-year, $1.05 million contract for the afternoon drive timeslot.

The pairing of Lassiter and WLS was uneasy from the start: the network executives who controlled the station were anxious to cultivate a friendly, welcoming, inoffensive image, which ran completely counter to the type of radio that Lassiter did best. Members of management were waiting outside the door of the studio on Lassiter's first night at WLS (August 23, 1989) to give him a laundry list of things he had done that they did not want on their airwaves. Lassiter, however, felt that since the station had known his work before they even asked for a job interview, they knew perfectly well what kind of on-air personality they were getting.

Rather than change the style that had attracted WLS to him in the first place, Lassiter asked to be let out of the contract. The station refused, touching off "open warfare" between WLS executives and their new employee. Their attempts to censor him only intensified his efforts to insult and infuriate his audience (and employers) on-air, and led Lassiter to walk out in the middle of staff meetings off-air. One journalist wrote that

“

he was at odds with management from the first day. "They'd scream everyday and I'd scream right back at them." Even worse, they put the Mad Dog on a short leash, but he kept breaking the chain. When told to curb his usual vulgarity and verbal abuse, he developed a code of secret insults which sounded like glowing compliments, and made the list available to listeners. When he was forbidden from saying he'd ever lived or worked anywhere other than Chicago, he'd coyly carry on in mock ignorance with the callers that remembered him from Florida. "Tampa? Can't say as I've ever worked there." "Oh, Sure you did, remember WFLA?' "WFLA? I can't say as I've ever worked there." It confused listeners who knew better, and drove management insane.[6]

”

By late 1991, both parties were exasperated; unimpressive Arbitron ratings did not ease tensions. Lassiter's five-year contract had an escape clause that gave WLS the option to terminate it at the end of 1991, and Lassiter was openly predicting that the station would do exactly that. In fact, they didn't even wait for the end of the year, removing Lassiter from the air following his afternoon broadcast on September 20.

Although he would remember his time in Chicago as "a two-and-a-half-year nightmare," the job did raise Lassiter's profile significantly; in 1990, he appeared on CNN's Crossfire as a representative of left-wing political talk radio. [7] In December 2005, Lassiter would later point out that - more than fourteen years after he was thrown off the air - he was still on the FAQ page on the WLS website. Indeed, as of January 2007, Question 7 on that page is "Why don't you bring back Bob Lassiter/Larry Lujack/etc.?" [8]. "Maybe you don’t know much about Lujack, but to be mentioned in the same sentence with him and WLS is more than an honor," Lassiter said. "It is and always will be the highlight of my career." [9]

Lassiter then moved to Davenport, Iowa with the intention of retiring from the radio business. After a year and a half, however, Tampa came calling again; the venerable WSUN was experimenting with a non-topical talk-radio format and offered him a hefty sum for its morning-drive slot. Lassiter accepted the job and moved back to Tampa, returning to the air on February 1, 1993. The morning time slot was a bad fit for his style, however, and in January 1994 he moved to the mid-afternoon; Sharon Taylor, the newscaster for his morning show, became his on-air sidekick. These circumstances forced him to change his approach drastically; in his final month (November 1995), Lassiter famously bantered with Sharon about her Thanksgiving turkey.

Despite his adaptations and his ratings (he regularly routed WFLA in his afternoon day part [10]), Lassiter’s relationship with WSUN ended bitterly when Cox Broadcasting fired him but refused to release him from his non-compete agreement. Once the issue was settled in spring of 1996, Lassiter returned to WFLA’s night shift and reclaimed his Arbitron ratings throne.

Although Lassiter ruled the talk-radio airwaves, the business had changed dramatically. Rush Limbaugh had transformed the AM band; not only was it now a forum for conservative pundits, but listeners and callers had become used to having their beliefs echoed and reinforced by the radio host, not challenged. In addition, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had deregulated station ownership, leading the industry to trend towards national syndication and away from local personalities with diverse points of view. The liberal Lassiter increasingly found himself an anachronism, even as he garnered unprecedented market shares of listeners who both loved and loathed him. He rolled with the punches as best he could, provoking his audience more furiously than ever and taking on-air potshots at WFLA’s own conservative host, Mark Larsen, but it often seemed that his real nemesis was the very institution of commercial radio.

In 1999 WFLA, which had been owned by Jacor, was purchased along with all of Jacor’s holdings by Clear Channel. At the time Clear Channel was building its radio empire and employing a variety of cost-cutting techniques, such as relying heavily on centralized, syndicated programming and eliminating local personalities and technicians from its payroll. Lassiter, disgusted by the changes Clear Channel was making and knowing that his time in radio was not long, began expressing open hostility to their policies on the air; at one point he was even describing memos circulated inside the offices. (“Essentially it says, ‘By signing here you waive your right to sue us at any time or for any reason; we, of course, can sue you whenever we feel like it.’”) Finally on December 1, 1999, four weeks before his contract was set to expire, Lassiter opened his broadcast with a monologue aimed directly at WFLA’s business office:

“

Management gets very, very, very distraught when I deal with internal things publicly. But for a month now, meetings get postponed, calls don't get returned; little things like that, you know? So we'll deal with it publicly. My contract expires December 31st, 1999 at 12 midnight. I inquired a month ago as to whether or not they had any interest in renewing it. As I said, phone calls don't get returned, lunch engagements get postponed, "Uh, give me another week on that, would ya?" Yesterday I had people saying goodbye to me. I had to read on a local bulletin board that yesterday was going to be my last day. Well, I'm tired of making phone calls and not having them returned. I'm tired of all this kind of crap, so here's the bottom line: as far as I am concerned--and there will be no further discourse on this--as far as I am concerned, I will do my last show on December 23rd, because I have a week's vacation coming to me and I'll be damned if I'm gonna get screwed out of it. So that settles the matter. You don't have to hide behind closed, locked doors anymore; you don't have to avoid me when I'm pulling into the parking lot; you don't have to look the other way when you're walking past the windows; you don't have to fail to return phone calls; you don't have to beg for another week; you don't have to bail out of luncheon meetings. That's it. And there will be no further discussion. This sucks! It sucks big time! I'll bet you're mad at me for talking about this on the air, aren't you? "Why does he do that?" It's real simple. Treat me like I don't exist, and you don't exist. Thank you ever so much, WFLA. Thank you ever so much. [11]

”

Predictably, he was told the next day that he need not bother to return to work at WFLA that day or any other. “Most men would have been devastated upon losing a six-figure, cushy job,” Lassiter said later. “I was relieved.” He officially retired from radio. His slot was filled by future radio star Glenn Beck.

Shortly after his retirement, Lassiter experienced a serious downward slide in his health. A lifelong and unrepentant smoker, he had long ignored the advice of his physicians, and after he was diagnosed with diabetes in about 1990 he had ignored the problem until the disease had advanced considerably. Between 2000 and the present, he would lose 40 percent of his foot, receive treatment for bladder cancer, experience slow decline in kidney function, and slowly lose his eyesight.

During his retirement, Lassiter devoted himself to his longtime interest in futures trading, and in 2002 he started a public journal of his trades on Elite Trader, a popular web site for financial traders. He posted on ET under the username "Tampa" and his journal titled "Tampa's Short Skirt Trades" would go on to become one of the most popular journals on the site. The journal retained Lassiter's wit, wordplay, and love of playing with his audience. Between 2004 and early 2005, Lassiter also maintained a trading blog (now deleted) under the alias of "The Big Cheese."

By 2005, Lassiter was largely confined to his home in the Tampa Bay area. However, his spirits remained good, and in the summer of 2005 he began a new blog—under his own name—whose readership steadily increased. In his writings, Lassiter revisited many memories, but mostly depicted a life in which he was isolated and reclusive, his computer being his only real window on the outside world. [12]

On February 14, 2006 -- his 19th wedding anniversary -- Lassiter revealed on his blog that he had been told that his kidneys were failing. His doctors, whom he had seen that day, had given him a prognosis of six months to two years. He lived eight months afterward, dying October 13, 2006. It was 13 days after his 61st birthday. His death was revealed in a final post in his blog by his wife, Mary Lassiter:

“

On Wednesday, October 11 he became too weak to get out of bed and remained in a sleep-like condition until he was gone at 9:15 am on Friday, October 13. He was not in pain . . . his life just stopped. His long struggle is finally at an end . . . much quicker than he or I anticipated. ...My thanks to those of you who have followed and shared his struggle over the past months, lending support and encouragement.

”

Although frequently funny and thought-provoking, Lassiter was always caustic, always contrarian, and often downright mean. He typically began his show with a topical monologue that could last anywhere from five minutes to an hour to a full three-hour shift; the monologue was usually designed to incite his listeners to the point of blind rage, at which point he would begin to accept calls from people who were furious to the point of inarticulacy. As he once put it, “It dawned on me that if I talked for an hour, hour and a half, by the time I stopped these people weren't rational. And then I would just rip them to shreds.” [13] In fact, Lassiter showed extreme disdain and impatience with his callers, not hesitating to poke fun at them, subtly trap them into demonstrating their hypocrisy or lies, or even to insult them outright. “Get off my phone, you subhuman pig!” became one of his most famous catchphrases.

Although he’s sometimes lumped in with shock jocks, Lassiter doesn’t really fit the category; he pushed the envelope of what was acceptable on radio, but generally not in the sense of lewdness or obscenity. If anything, Lassiter’s show was too high-brow to be considered truly shock-jock.

Lassiter had no use for callers who agreed with him, often rushing them off the line so he could find someone with whom he could have a compelling fight. In fact, after his monologue and topic setup he would often tell people who agreed with him not to call, that he was only interested in opposing viewpoints that day; if he received callers who agreed with him anyway, he would immediately hang up on them.

Lassiter was willing to give equal time to those who disagreed with him, even if he would mercilessly lambast them afterward. Frequently, though, he had to force the opposition to speak their piece, cutting off their attempts at preambles, red herrings and ad hominem attacks and demanding that they answer the question at hand. If there was an exception to this rule, it was with the cranks and extremists: when he received calls from the religious fringe, conspiracy theorists, ideologues, even members of the Ku Klux Klan--he would let them have their say, even encouraging them to make outrageously offensive and marginal statements and thus discredit themselves.

In later years, Lassiter became known for "punishing" his listeners when they didn't call in. If he reached a point in the show at which the switchboard wasn't lit, rather than riffing or starting a new monologue to fill the time, Lassiter would allow dead air to sit in. He might hum "The Anniversary Waltz," drum his fingers on the console, or even be heard quietly dealing himself a game of solitaire; the message was, it was a call-in show, so it was callers' job to carry the program. Lassiter had no intention of doing their job for them. Occasionally, though, he would reward callers who annoyed him with absolute silence: in fact, on the night of August 2, 1996, Lassiter kept a caller on the air without saying a word for 12 full minutes. [14] [15]

On the other hand, despite his unsparingly caustic demeanor and complete frankness, radio with Lassiter was in many respects a kind of free-for-all. At least once a week, Lassiter would do "open phones," letting people call in with whatever they wanted to talk about. At times, he would even bypass the call screeners and answer the phones himself, letting prank callers, and anyone who wanted to be on the radio at all, speak (although he would censor them if necessary).

Although he was unpleasant and pointedly controversial, Lassiter was a careful and engaging orator, building his monologues and telephone harassment with masterful diction, phrasing, and dynamics. It was a strategy that worked: he himself often noted that the secret of his success was that even the people who despised him (and there were many) couldn’t help but listen night after night, year after year.

Lassiter was not shy about airing his personal life on the air: he shared extremely intimate details of his own childhood (including his parents' divorce and his subsequent estrangement from his father); his first marriage, including stories of an abortion and infidelities by both parties; his own history of recreational drug use; and the ups and downs of his radio career. "You probably know more about me than you do about your own spouse, unless you have a better-than-average marriage," he once informed his listeners [16]. Listeners were also frequently treated to present-day anecdotes about himself and his second wife Mary (the former Mary Toensfeldt -- nicknamed “Muffy” -- who had been the business manager at WPLP during his tenure there), or his hobbies of astronomy, birdwatching, futures trading, and fiddling with his home computer. Often these were subjects he defaulted to when taking a break from “coliseum-style radio.” [17]

Lassiter was also famous for the hoaxes and stunts he pulled on the radio. At times he told his audiences that he would dunk a kitten into a bucket of water live on the air until the board filled with calls, or that he was now forbidden by broadcast-decency advocates from having any even remotely controversial content on his shows. One Friday in the mid-1990s, he and the entire staff of WFLA convinced listeners that he had been pulled from the air by panicky management while substituting for another host, told them that there would be a major announcement about his future during his regular timeslot on Monday, and when listeners tuned in he was back on the air to rub their nose in their own gullibility.

The most famous and celebrated of his stunts became known as the "$50,000 Giveaway," which Lassiter pulled at WPLP on New Year's Day 1987. Explaining that there were to be changes in station policy in attempt to get big ratings, Lassiter announced that WPLP would be awarding $50,000 to each and every person who called that night and every other night in 1987; if they were listening before they called, Lassiter promised, callers would receive an additional $10,000. Additionally, the best caller of each hour would receive a brand-new Rolls Royce, while the worst caller would receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. Other prizes, such as vacation homes, yachts, and a penthouse in the Trump Tower, were offered occasionally throughout the show.

Every few minutes as Lassiter talked, his producer Michael Serio would cut in and whisper a disclaimer: "Pssst! Hey, he doesn't mean a word of it! So don't get any smart ideas about suing us!" Despite this, at least half of Lassiter's callers during his first three hours believed every word he told them and expressed absolute glee at having won $50,000 for doing nothing but calling a radio show. Even when Lassiter explained that to collect their money they merely needed to show up at the station in the morning (though he claimed not to know the address) and ask for it in cash, tax-free, with no need of identification, these "winners" never seemed to think that anything was fishy.

At the end of the third hour, Lassiter admitted openly to his callers that he had been lying all along, pointed out that his promises were absolutely outrageous and unbelievable, and took callers to task for taking him at his word without stopping to think about whether what they were hearing was even possible. Incredibly, even after he did so, calls continued to pour in from people who wanted to win $50,000. [18], [19], [20]

Every year on December 23 (or on the last Friday before Christmas), Lassiter’s on-air vitriol seemed to vanish; on that day, he delivered his annual Christmas show, in which he fondly ruminated on the existence of Santa Claus and the meaning of the holiday, then spent the rest of his shift offering his own Christmas reminiscences from his childhood all the way to the present. He told the same stories every year, but always had different and compelling versions of them to keep the audience interested. Regular highlights included the year in which he gave the same Christmas list to each of his recently divorced parents, resulting in two of everything he asked for, and the story of a special present (a Lady Schick electric razor) he'd given his mother when he was twelve, only to discover, when cleaning out her home after her death 26 years later, that she had kept it for all that time. Lassiter's warmth and sentiment on these broadcasts was astonishing in contrast to his usual "Mad Dog" persona, and listeners often confessed to him that they found themselves captivated by the show, tears streaming down their faces as they relived Lassiter's Christmases with him.

On January 26, 1989, he was asked to fill in for the first 30 minutes of the following WFLA shift, that of station mainstay Dick Norman. Lassiter straight-facedly informed Norman’s listeners that he had just renegotiated his contract and that because his ratings were so high, he was able to demand that WFLA fire Norman.

What Lassiter did not know at the time was that Dick Norman had been killed that morning in a car crash in Brandon, Florida. When he was informed of Norman’s death several minutes into the show, he immediately apologized on-air and filled in for the rest of Norman’s timeslot, inviting listeners to call in and share their reminiscences of “Uncle Dickie.”

Lassiter's unique and provocative style have created a high demand for airchecks of his old shows, many of which are archived online [21]. One of the most notorious of these, known as "Mr. Airstream," is a recording from WPLP on April 1, 1987. It is a phone conversation in which an irate elderly man in an Airstream trailer protests Lassiter's treatment of old people, as well as the President and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker; threatens to report him to the station management, the FCC, the Chamber of Commerce, and even the police; and ends the call by saying, "Have a bad night, hippie!" [22] Fans of the recording, as well as Lassiter himself, consider it to be the greatest moment in talk-radio history.

• Blog Lassiter - Official Site
• Bob Lassiter Memorial Thread - Elite Trader
• BobLassiterAirchecks.com - Sound files from Lassiter's radio career
• Long Live Lassiter WFMU blog entry about Bob
• Where Are They Now? - Brief Biography