Four years ago, the hip and somewhat wacky Nashville disc jockey Gerry House moved to a California station boasting more listeners than the Tennessee capital`s entire population. He thought he was ”on my way,” he remembers.
Then, having cowritten a No. 1 country song titled ”Little Rock” for Reba McEntire, he found himself alone in his Los Angeles office one afternoon connected by speakerphone to a raucous No. 1 party being held by his friends in Nashville.
”It was at this big place with a big crowd and champagne,” House recalls.
”I heard babes squealing, small children being tossed in the air, and every once in a while somebody would come by and yell, `Hey, House! Wish you were here! What a party! We`re rockin`, baby!`
”I sat there looking out on this gorgeous California day and thought,
`I`m in the wrong town.` ”
That shock of recognition, House says, constituted ”a real turnaround for me.” He acted on it-and now seems indeed on his way.
He has the hottest daily morning show on Nashville radio, a growing Saturday night show syndicated on 140 other stations, and a just-released MCA Records comedy album that he finds is according him a national stature he says disc jockeys rarely enjoy.
”The problem with being a disc jockey is, you`re a disc jockey,” House says, with irrefutable logic.
”People tend not to give you credit for being able to do anything else. So the album somehow validates the fact that you`re funny. Plus it has gotten radio airplay and generates interest from the press and TV.”
The album is ”Cheaters` Telethon,” a collection of bits of spoken and sung humor in which House-who already has taken turns at TV talkshow-hosting, scriptwriting for Rosanne Barr and songwriting for such country names as McEntire, the Oak Ridge Boys, Gary Morris and Loretta Lynn-indulges his penchant for microphone mayhem and standup comedy.
Boasting assistance from the Oaks, Steve Wariner, Larry Gatlin and some Nashville studio musicians, the production showcases long-developed House alter egos such as near-rube Homer, country-music legend-in-his-own-mind Makk Trukk, the somewhat befuddled Old Coot, and The Inside Dope, a near-hip black- sounding sports analyst named Maurice.
Conscious of the fleeting life of jokes, House has used few of them, relying instead on his more characteristic comic dialogue and such songs as
”I Cheated On Myself” and ”The Wimpiest White Man in the World.”
Possessing an on-air sound best described as velvet-throated, House nevertheless is no wimp, especially when it comes to job-dedication.
His four daily hours at WSIX-FM in Nashville involve hitting the door at 4:30 a.m. to tape the day`s vocal bits for his characters. He goes on the air at 6 a.m. with microphone sidekick Paul Randall and is on until until 10.
After that, he writes the first draft of the next day`s script, works on country songs or the screenplay he and his wife are writing for a friend in Los Angeles. Before the day ends he spends another hour polishing the next day`s script.
”But that`s just more or less the formal schedule,” he adds. ”I`m really writing all day long. I carry a tape recorder and notepads. The way we do radio goes through so much material.”
The way he does radio is a far cry from the way it`s done by the typical country station. He has become a new recording artist by ignoring or violating most of the accepted rules for country radio success.
Nashville listeners probably hear as much of House and his imaginary and real sidekicks as they do of country music. They seldom hear two records back- to-back without interruption, let alone 8 or 10 of them.
”What happens in country radio right now,” he says, ”is, you play 10 in a row, and the guy down the street plays 11 in a row, so you play 12 in a row. You can`t win.”
House, by contrast, is winning bigtime. So why doesn`t his kind of
”personality” programming become the standard of the industry?
”First of all,” he says, ”it`s tough to do what we do. It requires a lot of work. I maintain there`s nobody who can do anything funny showing up unprepared every day.
”Also, it requires a station that will leave you alone, which they do here. They don`t say, you have to play 10 records in an hour; if we had to do that, plus the time and the temperature and all the commercials, we wouldn`t have time for more than our names and one rim-shot joke.”
His radio success seems attributable to another factor, too. The music he plays ranges across the spectrum from ultracountry George Strait and Doug Stone to rock-ish Sawyer Brown and Rodney Crowell. It doesn`t lean toward one or the other.
A native of Independence, Ky., House attended Eastern Kentucky University, where-as the first of his family to attend college-he graduated with majors in both political science and mass communications.
The radio career began, he says, when as a young `60s radical pre-law student he entered the campus radio station to read an outraged editorial he had written about the Vietnam War. The station manager told him the editorial ”sucked” but his voice was ”darn good.”
”That`s all it took,” he adds. ”One compliment, and I`m no longer a radical. I`ve joined the establishment and gone into radio.”
His new status as a recording artist is a direct result of his success as an offbeat disc jockey-and of the interest of MCA-Nashville president Bruce Hinton, who reportedly called House, rather than vice versa. Hinton told House he wanted him to do an album.
”I`ve never done anything harder in my life,” he says. ”We did it all in the studio, and all the stuff I had either done live-I used to do standup, even opened for The Judds-or stuff I had done here on the radio.
”We actually had a lot more stuff than is on the record. We would bring audiences in and then go back and edit out stuff that didn`t work. So the album is like 5 or 6 years of material distilled down to the A stuff.”
He`s already planning to record another album this fall, which he describes as ”The History of Country Music from the Cave-Man to the Present,” but in the meantime he`ll continue to gather material on the radio. Although he himself gets off some wild lines, his usual style seems to be to preside over his alter egos, to ask Paul Randall answerless questions about the meaning of life and to inspire oddball calls from his listeners.
”Like, a guy called in and said, `I watched that movie `Rain Man` with Dustin Hoffman the other night, and, you know, that movie really gave inspiration to a lot of acoustic people,` ” he says. ”And this woman called in once and said, `I really liked Arnold Schwarzenegger in that movie `Gonad the Barbarian.”`
He says his calls come from everybody, from convenience store clerks to construction workers, realtors, doctors and lawyers, and the humor is more real-life than cornpone.
Which brings up one of his pet points.
”A lot of radio people have been guilty of the same misconception everybody else has-of thinking that country audiences aren`t hip,” he says.
”I don`t know why they think just because country audiences listen to country music they don`t also watch `60 Minutes` and `In Living Color` and
`David Letterman.”`
And listen, on record or radio, to Gerry House.
