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Radio Killed the Telegraph Star: EN, WACchampions and The Famous Ralph Visit the Sports Byline Studios for a Bit of Live CT'ing

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A true face for radio on a night of true adventure.

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I played in the 1952 Freedom Bowl with Frank Gifford,
and you will let me in this studio immediately!


I still cannot believe this happened, but Thursday night Bryan (wacchampions), Ralph (the famous Ralph) and I, Claudius went to score some boxes from my friend at The Container Store in San Francisco, and ended up having quite the adventure. No, "boxes" isn't code for drugs or those miniature vibrators everyone's talking about! See, we're moving in together -- into a house owned by a certain 67MARQUEZ -- in Hayward in February and you'd all better be at our housewarming on 2/26 or Ralph is surely gonna cut you. Anyway after some grub at Pancho Villa (eat there every day until you see Emiliano Zapata staring back at you in the mirror, cuz it's that good) and a stop at the Food Not Bombs headquarters on 16th Street to catch some of a Mozart recital that my friend's flute-virtuoso partner was playing in (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and feeding the homeless should always go hand in hand, right?), we somehow ended up (not mentioning, of course, the half-hour spent looking for a gas station with only a dysfunctional GPS unit that may as well have been an Etch-a-Sketch to guide us) at the studios of Sports Byline Network -- also the home of KTRB -- and did the better part of a full hour of live radio with Chris Townsend and his producer, Gerrie Burke. Gerrie is a great guy and looks exactly like the late writer Jim Carroll... he regaled us with extensive tales of baseball legend Bill Lee, whom he has known since he was a child, and he even lent me a DVD all about The Spaceman. Chris was in his home studio in San Jose and we were live with Gerrie -- who was very, very glad that Ralph had a full pack of cigarettes -- on Broadway, where the Lambs often Lie Down.

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Come to our housewarming... don't make me have to cut you.

It was quite a lot of fun and will hopefully be the first of many more instances of we AN blogfolk descending upon sports-talk radio in force this year and into the future. Topics ranged from Chris Carter -- Uncle Towny had spent most of the day at the Coliseum participating in A's media day, and got to hang out and talk with A's players ranging from CC to Rich Harden to Josh Outman as they modeled their brand-spankin'-new alt-gold tops and met with the press -- to the upcoming Super Bowl between the Packers (please win, green and gold team) and the Steelers (please lose, Ben Rottensberger). Also discussed at length was Bryan's college football career (he played with Trent Dilfer, you know... no, not that way, silly) and the propensity of Robert Buan -- who had preceded us on the air with Chris talking about the upcoming installment of his Country Fastball show, where he is gonna play the favorite songs of several ballplayers he just interviewed including Josh Hamilton... I'm guessing it isn't "Heroin" by The Velvet Underground, but I've been wrong before -- to co-habitate with licensed, professional strippers exotic dancers.

Anyhow it was a total blast and I am still a little spun that it really happened, but if you want to hear it I managed to grab the whole thing when it was rebroadcast at 3AM... you can download an mp3 of it right here and yes, I edited out the commercials so no one will find out that we were all cooking up LiverGARD in a Bunsen-Burner-and-spoon type setup and injecting it directly into our veins the whole time we were on the air. Apparently this is required of all guests, and had I known this I'd have brought my own "works," but what the heck? It was still gangs of fun. Although we'll see what the hangover is like... I've heard it doesn't kick in for a day or so, but it's a doozy and the only thing that stops the agony is massive ingestion of Bill Romanowski's legendary supplements and Herb Blossom.

One more thing: one of the coolest things about the studios is that the walls of the offices are covered with messages and signatures from literally dozens upon dozens of (mostly Bay Area) sports legends, ranging from Jim Otto to this little message from the aforementioned Spaceman, Mr. Lee. But that's just the icing on the cake. Have a listen to the mp3 of us if you like and tell us what you think -- hearing it after the fact I was struck by just what a fantastic radio voice Bryan has -- and I'll be back Monday with a front page post about Rich Harden's previous lifetimes as both an orthopedist to French-Canadian soldiers in WWI and a prototype full-body cast in ancient Egypt.