Brad Pfirrman slaps the snooze button for the third and final time. It's just after 5:30 a.m., which means he needs to drag his ass down to the gas station around the corner from his Glendale home. On arrival, he buys a shot of Redline — an energy drink so potent most reputable stores card kids trying to buy it — and a Rockstar tallboy as a chaser. Sure, he could have bought the caffeine late last night when he made his way home from a long night working at his family's party-planning business, but the trip is another way to shake off the sleepiness before people start showing up at his house.
Brad "Beef Vegan" Pfirrman, host of KWSS' The Morning Infidelity
Local band Kinch and former MTV personality Tom Green dropped by The Morning Infidelity on the same day in January.
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After Brad gets back home, he slides behind a laptop in a makeshift studio occupying the space where his living room should be. The sky still is pitch black when the scruffy 31-year-old in an old, black T-shirt and backward ball-cap morphs into Beef Vegan, a DJ broadcasting a show called The Morning Infidelity.
Beef's officially in control when Broken Bells' "The High Road" hits the airwaves of low-power station KWSS 106.7 FM. The song starts playing on a computer at Beef's house before traveling through a central brain at the station's office a few miles away and over to a radio tower on a North Phoenix mountain. He won't actually turn on his microphone until about 6:30, when his show's sassy, pretty news girl, Lisa Short, nicknamed "Shorty," and his sunglasses-wearing sidekick "Big Buddha," (even Shorty doesn't know his real name) arrive.
The show's opening dialogue isn't quite Cronkite.
"Hey, we're on — are we on?" Beef asks.
"Yeah, we're on," says Buddha.
The Morning Infidelity is classic morning radio. If you've heard Howard Stern or one of the ubiquitous "morning zoo" shows, you get the idea. There's a light mix of music, skits, contests, and news — the stuff commuters want to zone out to while fighting traffic.
Beef sounds like a young Wolfman Jack and has an undeniable knack for delivering crude one-liners and currying favor with minor celebrities who stop by the studio, including former MTV personality Tom Green, by setting them up to show off. He starts this morning with a little good-natured flirting with Shorty and promising a great show before riffing on the sorry state of a Burger King where he ate with his 4-year-old daughter. There's more music: "He's What I Want" by local favorites and former New Times cover kids The Love Me Nots ("Garage A Go-Go," August 24, 2006) and a funny plug from a John McCain impersonator.
Next, it's time for the news — more riffing on current events. On this morning, the world is captivated by the story of Ted Williams, a homeless man in Ohio who became a YouTube sensation because of his "golden voice" then eventually scored a job as an announcer for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
"Like I said before, the good news for him is that [he got] a job," Beef quips on air. "The bad news is, if he [had gotten] a job in radio, he'd probably make less money than he made panhandling on the side of the road."
It's all standard radio fare — pretty professional, considering the resources involved and that it's broadcast out of some dude's house in Glendale. It's also the sort of thing you used to hear every morning on a dozen local radio stations. Not anymore.
There are still a few of these kind of shows around — Holmberg's Morning Sickness on KUPD, Johnjay and Rich on KISS, Tim and Willie on KMLE — but morning radio in Phoenix is nothing like it was a decade ago.
Drive-time shows used to be flagship programming for mainstream stations. The stakes were high in this time slot, since ratings hit their daily peak during the 7 a.m. hour on weekdays as commuters tuned in on their way to work. But shows like this — at least when they were done at a professional level — also had high overhead, given the manpower involved and the expenses of promoting personalities in hyper-competitive marketplaces.
So most of the big boys have bowed out of the game, including KEXX 103.9, the closest thing KWSS has to a competitor. These days, there's a low-rent reproduction of the classic morning show from the unpaid crew of Beef, Shorty, Buddha, and a fresh-faced kid they call "Emo Tom," who looks up questions Beef yells out and does minor production work. Today, Emo (real name: Tom Bogardus) is tasked with converting old songs from the MySpace page of Beef's old band, Gravy Blue, into something that can be played on the air so everyone can have a good laugh. Tomorrow, he might be settling a bet between Beef and Shorty over what some big word means or finding an unflattering photo of Miley Cyrus.
Beef's shabby home studio has four microphones, three computers, two threadbare armchairs, and a beat-up coffee table topped with a fresh copy of High Times. The show's crew interviews whatever guests they can wrangle up, including a few show-biz B-listers, like comedian Adam Carolla (who later went on a five-minute rant on his podcast about what a douchebag Beef was) and Tom Wilson, best known as "Biff" from Back to the Future. They awkwardly put seemingly every caller on the air and play five local bands every morning as part of a listener-picked countdown, even when the bands are rap-metal acts that don't fit their otherwise indie format.
