In daylight hours, his show has become more topical. Joe, the drunk, doesn't call anymore. Undertaker Fred is dead. And the pranks that made his nighttime show such a private thrill are now out of the question. He spends five hours in preparation for each day, a practice that Vogel, who died of cancer in 1995, scorned. The pockets of dead air have now been caulked by a vastly expanded bank of daytime callers. And though his show still clatters like a caboose going too fast around a hairpin bend, Mischke admits that the change was inevitable.
"It's like a guy playing football in his 20s and 30s," says Mischke. "In his 50s, he's not a great football player anymore. But maybe people shouldn't be looking for him to run 90 yards for a touchdown. Maybe he's not an athlete anymore. Maybe they should be looking for him to write a book. I started radio in my 20s. I'm in my 40s. I'm just not the same guy."
Nick Vlcek
courtesy of Tom Mischke
Mischke in the making: As a rebellious St. Paul schoolboy
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http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2008/11/reporters_noteb_5.php
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It's September 2008. Mischke sits beneath a Dubliner umbrella, and autumnal clouds are rolling in on a cold breeze. He is in a beige cargo jacket. His hair is a graying, Seussian tuft, stirred by the wind.
"All of us in radio are generally people who didn't get enough attention growing up," he says. "We're probably not all mentally well. We're probably pretty thin-skinned. We probably have an incredible need and desire to be liked. We'll say we don't, and we lie when we say that."
The intimacy that exists between a host and his audience is a perilous intimacy, and it has a curious habit of leaving a host empty, falsely romanced by an ethereal brotherhood that hardly exists when the dial is turned off.
"In a lot of ways," he says, "we reserve our intimate self for the strangers listening. You're in this room and you don't see them. You begin to think you're with another part of yourself. Even if you do think you're talking to somebody, it's not an audience of thousands, it's one person. And that person is alone in their room. And who cares what one person says to another person? No one's listening."
But it's that very intimacy that Mischke prizes, that gives radio its edge on the other media and shelters it from the internet, from television, from Twitter feeds and blog loads that descended on the AM band like a pack of assassins. "What else is like that?" Mischke wonders. "Does a painter paint a painting and think of that one person looking at it alone at night in the dark?"
"When I drive in the country in Wisconsin," he says, "there'll be nothing but nature, farm fields, and corn. And then I'll pass a tiny little church. Next to the church are 24 headstones. And I think, that really holds up humanity as important. Just 24 people, and nature. Then you get to something like Arlington National Cemetery and it starts to feel like we're all just ants, and these guys all just got stepped on. The idea of radio addressing just one person makes that one person really important. All of a sudden, being a human being is a big deal."
