If you had tuned to talk station WFLA-AM Friday, August 2, you might have heard nothing, for ten minutes. It wasn’t a mistake, or a power outage. It was a showdown.

Normally, more than a second or two of dead air would be disaster– the surest way to lose listeners. But on the Bob Lassiter Show, which isoften a little more, or a little less, than a call-in radio show– the silence was riveting.

Lassiter has built a career on pushing the limits of radio, and his mischief has made him more successful, and more disliked, than most talk show hosts. His nightly call-in show garners a larger audience share than any other on Tampa Bay radio.

And sometimes it ain’t pretty. When he decides to pick a fight with a caller, and he does quite often, he can be vicious, sarcastic, or hang up with great gusto. Yet, if he deems a caller especially annoying or lame, he might just clam up and let the person make a fool of himself, and hang up in surrender.

This time a caller turned the silence into a dare.

“I can outwait you, Bobby.”

Lassiter lit a cigarette.

“I’ve got a 120 minutes on this cell phone.”

All listeners could hear was a five thousand watt transmitter broadcasting the ambient rustle and whir of a man driving his car and a talk host lightly tapping his fingers on the console.

“Come on, Bob,” the guy pleaded after three desolate minutes.

Four minutes later, Lassiter lit another Winston and exhaled. The man had been ignored for over eight and a half minutes when he capitulated: “All right Bob, I’m not worthy. I’m pulling into my house.”

No reaction.

“I’ve gotta drop. You win . . . You’re the king.”

No answer.

Then after remaining mute for 9 minutes and 52 seconds, Lassiter did what he had to do– he pushed two buttons, one to hang up the phone, and another to start the recorded station ID/news intro. It was 8:00 after all. On the other side of the headlines, weather, and some commercials, Lassiter explained: “What the hell could I do? He challenged my manhood. . . Don’t call up and play games like that with me!” Five nights a week there is a continuing drama on WFLA, and Bob Lassiter is always the hero.

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By the time Lassiter left town for a million-dollar deal at WLS in Chicago in 1989, he was the biggest talk show host in town– in both popularity and sheer mass, weighing in around 320. During his six and a half year absence from WFLA, he lost 90 of those pounds and a little momentum in his radio career. In that time talk radio exploded around the country, much of it driven by right-wing political showmen like Limbaugh, Liddy, and WFLA’s Mark Larson.

Lassiter calls the trend “support group radio,” and says he hears too much of it on WFLA these days. “The vast majority of their core listenership wants to hear Clinton bashing. There’s no debate, no discussion on that radio station.” Which sounds noble, even political, but he doesn’t pretend his program is forum for ideas. The debate on Lassiter’s show is as likely to be a petty argument as a real discussion. “I’m not a political animal,” Lassiter admits. “I’m not trying to make a point. I’m just trying to get provocative calls . . . It makes no difference if I change anyone’s mind, or influence anyone to do something. It’s not the point of my show.”

So what is the point?

Lassiter has said on the air that his only purpose in life is “to deliver a lot of people to listen to the commercials,” and more often than not, he does that by irritating the hell out of people. “The secret to my success is that the people who despise me listen to me,” Lassiter says. “Probably no one has more listeners that hate him than I do.”

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At 50, Bob Lassiter is a radio veteran, for half his life he’s made a living as a personality, a voice . . . and what a voice, a magnificent baritone that seduces and taunts with equal authority. A high school dropout from a Jersey suburb of Philadelphia, Lassiter spent early adulthood wandering the country and working odd jobs. Radio discovered him at a crowded happy hour on the island of St. Thomas in 1970. A salesman from a beautiful music station heard his rich speaking voice, and soon the future Mad Dog of radio was playing sides of Mantovani in the Caribbean.

After years as a music DJ around the eastern U.S., he longed to break into talk. In ’84 he got his chance on a low rated Miami talk station, where he caught the ear of talk monster Neil Rogers. In Miami, Lassiter tutored under the lashing wit and acidic irreverence of Rogers, who at the time was one of the few big city pioneers who were making it big by bending the rules of talk radio– by being outrageous, vulgar, and often mean. Lassiter became so adept at it that after a grueling succession of air shifts he hollered at a caller: “You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown!” Which cost him his job.

Then at Tampa Bay’s first all talk station, the now defunct WPLP, Lassiter perfected his trademark monologue. “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.”

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As a radio bully, Lassiter’s biggest weapons are his mouth and his often misanthropic mind. Most nights he opens his show with a bit of oratory– a story, a lecture, or maybe a complicated question. Within his words he typically sets a trap with outrageous statements or ideas that dare listeners to pick up the phone and challenge him…

While he’s full of haughty bluster and vulgar as the FCC allows, Lassiter’s approach is surprisingly intellectual for talk radio. “I do a 2-tier show,” he admits. “I do a show for half the audience that understands what I’m doing, so the half that don’t can amuse the other half.” It’s the callers that don’t understand that often makes his show entertaining. “Nobody listens to hear intelligent callers,” contends Lassiter.

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“I approach my show in pretty much the same way that a lawyer approaches a trial,” Lassiter says. And when he’s particularly prickly, his show resembles a kangaroo court where Lassiter is prosecutor, judge and jury. “If the caller is saying things you don’t want said, you basically just let him keep on talking . . . ” Lassiter explains. “And sooner or later he will say something that is inaccurate and then you destroy him on that one issue which shakes his credibility, and allows you to go away looking like a star.”

His adversarial stance often leads him to take the side of societal underdogs– minorities and the underclass– but don’t call him a liberal. “I have no left-leaning feelings,” Lassiter says. “I don’t believe government is the answers to our problems.”

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While he ain’t no bleeding heart, he’s worlds away from the right-wing yuppie perspective of WFLA’s late-morning guy, Mark Larson. Typically, Larson’s callers don’t challenge him much. Most agree that adults that earn the minimum wage are losers, folks on welfare are barely human, and that imprisoned criminals deserve outright torture. When Larson does tussle over the phone, it’s not usually with liberals, but with racists, Jew haters, or anti-government wackos. Although he’s forced to censure some of the hatred he attracts, there is one minority that is always fair game on his show– homosexuals, specifically gay men. Each Wednesday on the show is Hump Day, reserved specifically for gay bashing and chuckle-packed homophobia. Larson and his callers engage in cliché imitations of effeminate men and mean spirited juvenile

humor. Larson constantly refers to gay males as “fudgepackers,” and suggests that many AIDS victims deserve their fate. During the recent GALA festival, a huge gathering of gay and lesbian entertainers from around the world, the persecution rose to a fevered pitch.

“It is absolutely inexcusable,” says Lassiter. On his show he’s countered the weekly hatefest by openly wondering why Larson spews abuse on a harmless minority, and says he’ll keep it up until he shames him out of it.

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“It’s not a public service, it’s a business,” acknowledges Lassiter. “You don’t have a right to radio, or to good radio.”

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