Suggestaholic!

 In 1996 I moved from Atlanta to southern California, and was forced to learn a slew of new phrases; things like “sig alert,” “looky-loo,” “tri-tip,” and “earthquake weather.”

Almost immediately I was also awarded a speeding ticket (who knew there were places where speed limits are actually enforced?). And I found out I could keep the points off my record if I attended a so-called driving school, where the instructor was also a professional impressionist(?!), and told us about freeway merging and whatnot in the voices of Jimmy Stewart and Johnny Carson.

So, needless to say, I was a tad disoriented.

I worked a lot of hours then, and would often find myself driving home after dark. On one of those nights I was doing the radio version of channel surfing, and finally settled on a talk show that sounded promising.

The host was interviewing a man who’d written some sort of outrageous book (I can’t remember the details), and the longer I listened, the crazier it got.

When I arrived at our apartment I couldn’t turn off the radio, and sat in the parking lot as this unknown program devolved into full-on anarchy.

At one point it sounded like three or four people were talking at the same time, there was merry-go-round music playing in the background, and someone kept scratching himself into a phone receiver. Or possibly with a phone receiver.

This shit went far beyond looky-loo.

I went inside and told my wife about what I’d just heard, and she didn’t care. She had a crying baby on her hands, and fixated on the wrong part of my story. She kept saying, “You were sitting outside for the past fifteen minutes - listening to the radio - while I was dealing with all this?” Completely missed the point.

Over the next few weeks I found myself seeking out this “Phil Henry,” or whatever his name was. And by the second or third night I began to suspect things weren’t exactly as they seemed. I decided it was some sort of comedy troupe, or improvisational team, or something. But still appealingly absurd…

I think I read in a newspaper article that Phil Hendrie, in fact, did all his guests’ voices. I didn’t understand how this could be true, but that’s what the article said. It seemed like host and guest would sometimes talk over each other, but upon closer inspection I realized they never did.

Amazing.

As incredible as it was, however, the vocal acrobatics wasn’t what turned me into a Hendrie obsessive. It was the laughter. I mean the show was almost dangerously funny…

I can remember driving on the 405 freeway at night, heading toward LAX, and one of Phil’s “guests” said something that caused me to nearly black-out. No exaggeration. I was laughing so hard I got lightheaded, and was on the verge of losing consciousness behind the wheel. For a few seconds it was literally touch-and-go.

One of my wife’s friends also tells a story about nearly crashing her SUV into a bridge abutment while listening to Phil Hendrie, and having to stop in a fast food parking lot to pull herself together. She warned other mothers to NEVER listen to the program with kids in the car, because it was far too dangerous.

Indeed, I have little doubt people have died because of the Phil Hendrie Show, and that’s not a joke. In fact, I think it might be a compliment.

So I became a huge fan. I learned the characters and their personalities, and the whole thing just kept getting better and better.

When I moved with my job to Scranton, I promptly subscribed to the Hendrie website, and began listening to the previous night’s show every day at work. And every day I marveled at the sustained genius of it all. How did he do it, night after night??

Then it ended. With no warning Phil Hendrie retired from radio. And we not only lost Phil, but also the entire crackpot universe he’d created.

I was nearly despondent. How could we continue without regular visits from Bobbie Dooley, and Lloyd Bonafide, and Vernon Dozier, and all the other regulars? It was like a bus full of my favorite people had gone crashing through a guardrail, and everyone was lost.

I couldn’t believe it; I was genuinely sad.

Then I switched to hoarding mode (I think it was my way of coping), and found myself on a mission to own copies of every show I could get my hands on. I now have thousands of hours, all housed on a dedicated Phil Hendrie hard drive, and backed-up at an off-site location.

I listen to the program as much as I ever did (my iPod is essentially a Hendrie Show delivery device), and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. And mister, I’ve heard a lot…

Phil, of course, eventually came back to radio, but his new show isn’t quite the same. It’s still good, and he does the characters now and again, but it’s mostly current events and (God help us) politics. The spell, it seems, has been broken.Luckily for all of us, however, huge caches of the old program remain available in mp3 format. The official Hendrie archive is still in operation, and well-worth the $6.95 per month it costs to subscribe. There are also several good mailing lists, where collectors can share audio files. Sign up with any of them, and it’s possible to build an impressive collection in short order.

Just be careful listening while driving. ‘Cause you might end up on the roof of a Best Buy store, naked, on fire, and holding a steering wheel. …And still laughing your smoldering ass off, of course.

Phil Hendrie Show website