Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Larry King, the Radio GOAT

Epigraph:

“I listened to the radio / I waited all night long…”
— Radio Radio, Elvis Costello

Note: This piece reflects my personal memories of listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with later impressions from television appearances, interviews, and conversations with people who knew him. It is written in the spirit of appreciation and nostalgia rather than media criticism, and emphasizes the uniquely loose, humane, and unpredictable quality of King’s radio work, which for me remains the defining core of his legacy.

I grew up listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show between roughly 1988 and 1992, and in my opinion — which happens to be correct — the radio show was much better than the television version that later made him famous. The TV show was good, even great at times, but radio was longer, looser, freer, and far more unpredictable. It had weird guests, weirder callers, and the feeling that anything might happen at two in the morning. That’s where Larry really lived.

I would listen in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Spokane, Washington, the volume turned low, the house quiet, insomnia hovering. The Spokane AM station — KGA 1510 — carried the show from around 9 PM Pacific time, and then, wonderfully, they would run it again. So I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, wake at two or three, and hear the same segment again in a half-dream. The effect was surreal. Didn’t I just hear that caller? Didn’t Larry just say that? It created a strange loop of late-night déjà vu that only made the whole thing more atmospheric. The show felt less like programming and more like a continuous nocturnal conversation.

My friend Kelly Rudd loved Larry too. When we were in high school we were both big fans of the radio show, and we talked about it constantly. There were a couple of things that we especially liked. The first was that Larry famously did no preparation. He knew a huge amount about the world, of course, but he didn’t read guests’ books ahead of time. He wanted to come in cold. If his guest was a firefighter, he’d ask, “So what’s it like to be a firefighter?” It sounds lazy, but it was brilliant. By staying open and getting out of the way, he let the conversation go anywhere. This way the show became eventful.

Another thing we loved was what happened after the guest left. Larry would open the lines and take questions about absolutely anything. Most of the time he was generous and patient, but when callers went off the rails he had a signature phrase. He’d cut them off gently: “Cold compress, ma’am,” or “Cold compress, sir.” Basically: lie down, ice your head, regroup. It was hysterical, especially because he used it sparingly. When “cold compress” dropped, you knew things had gotten weird.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry so much that when the station suddenly dropped the show, Kelly proposed we drive to the radio station and protest. So we skipped school, drove across town, and rang the intercom demanding to speak to someone about the cancellation. The station manager eventually came down and heard us out. We knew we weren’t changing anything, but it felt right to try. Larry never came back to Spokane radio, and the show faded not long after, but the whole episode captured what the show meant to us. It wasn’t just background noise. It felt alive.

Larry’s on-air style was the key. He was unbelievably relaxed. By the late ’80s you could tell he had done thousands of hours. Nothing fazed him. Weird guests, drunk callers, eccentrics — all the same to Larry. He absorbed everything. He had pet phrases — “cold compress” chief among them — and he deployed them like a veteran reliever, only when needed. He famously did no prep, and he leaned into naïve questions. He’d ask something simple and let the guest do the work. The effect was disarming. People opened up. He also had real humanity. He listened. He didn’t mock callers. He didn’t rush them. There was compassion there, and I think that’s what I loved most.

And the show could get wonderfully out of control. In one story Larry told from his old Miami days, an adult actress he was interviewing suggested they just have sex during the commercial break. Larry, amused, asked the producers to clear out — but there wasn’t enough time. That kind of anecdote captures the looseness of late-night radio. It wasn’t polished. It was alive.

Larry left the overnight Mutual Radio show in 1994 to focus on television. By then I had already drifted away, but I still caught Larry King Live on CNN over the years. I remember watching during the O. J. Simpson trial while at Otago University in New Zealand, when the show became part of the nightly noise. Later there were the Vladimir Putin interviews — classic Larry, conversational and oddly disarming. And of course there were the great comic moments, like the interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Larry suggested the show had been canceled and Seinfeld snapped back in disbelief, and the Norm Macdonald appearance where Norm kept repeating, “I’m a deeply closeted homosexual,” and Larry tried earnestly to parse it. “So that means you’re gay?” “No, Larry,” Norm replied, “it means I’m deeply closeted.” Pure Larry: sincere confusion meeting absurdist comedy.

Larry’s personal life was famously complicated. He married eight times, had several children — including sons Chance and Cannon later in life — and lived in a kind of perpetual romantic improvisation. The marriages came and went. The last ended painfully and publicly. He once joked he’d never leave his wife unless Angie Dickinson came along — and when she did, he married her. That was Larry: impulsive, affectionate, slightly chaotic. Despite decades of success, he didn’t leave the kind of massive fortune people assumed. The money came and went, as did the marriages. It was a life lived in motion.

My friend Sergio Mandiola actually knew Larry in his later years in Los Angeles. Sergio was running an independent studies program at Beverly Hills High School, and Larry’s sons Cannon and Chance, and he taught his sons for three years. Larry would come by for open nights or just to chat.

Sergio Mandiola: “Larry would come in from time to time and we would talk. He was lovely and open. He talked about his family and his career. One time he told me, ‘Sergio, you should totally have a radio show!’ I was flattered. One thing about Larry is his politics were more to the left than he let on on air. He had strong views and wasn’t afraid to share them in person. Larry was a true mensch and I’m glad I got to spend time with him. I miss him.”

In the end, I’ll say it plainly: for me, Larry King is the radio GOAT. There was no one like him, and there probably never will be. It wasn’t just longevity. It was the curiosity, the looseness, the humanity, the love of people, politics, baseball, and life. He trusted the conversation. He let the night unfold.

And then there was that absurd, wonderful USA Today column, which read like a diary gone completely outta control. Mets lose 6–4…Rain in Baltimore…Clinton flies to Ireland…You’d read it and think, Larry, baby, WTF is this? And also, Mr. USA Today, WTAF are you doing paying for this? But somehow it worked. It was pure Larry — fragmentary, observational, intimate.

And that’s how I remember him most clearly: late nights in high school, the radio turned low, insomnia hanging in the room, Spokane quiet outside.. Sometimes I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, then wake again to the rerun, half-dreaming, half-aware, caught in that strange déjà vu — didn’t I just hear this? — while Larry kept talking, calm as ever, taking calls from truckers and insomniacs and eccentrics. My listening years were brief, but they stuck. And when I think of Larry now, that’s where I go back to: the low hum of AM radio, the half-fade, and the sweet sounds of his voice in my ear.

Dedication:

For the one and only GOAT, Larry Motherfucking King. RIP baby.

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Shotgun in Seth’s Ford Explorer

Note: This piece takes place in Spokane, Washington in the fall of 1991, during our senior year at St. George’s School. CDs were still a relatively new luxury item for teenagers, Zip’s runs counted as real excursions across town, and a hunter green Explorer in the school parking lot could serve as the center of an entire small social world.

Epigraph:

Out with the posse on a night run
Girls on the corner, so let’s have some fun
Donald asked one if she was game
Back Alley Sally was her name
She moved on the car and moved fast
On the window pressed her ass
All at once we heard a crash
Donald’s dick had broke the glass

Ice T

Seth drove a green Ford Explorer, which meant two things: he was always the driver, and John Innes almost always called shotgun.

Ours was a class of twenty-eight boys at St. George’s School, which meant the social landscape was less a battlefield than a small archipelago of cliques. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone more or less supported everyone else. Still, there were natural groupings. Seth, Innes, and I spent a good deal of time together, with Kelly sometimes orbiting the car and Richard Barkley frequently around as well.

The Explorer usually lived in the SGS parking lot behind the lower school. During the day it sat there waiting for the moment seniors could leave campus, which we could do whenever we wanted. When that moment came, Seth’s Jeep became a kind of small republic on wheels.

There were rules, or something close to rules. Seth drove. Innes called shotgun. He cared about it the most and therefore usually got it. Occasionally Barkley or I would challenge him, which would inevitably produce an argument about whether the call had been made properly or whether the timing had been unfair. The exact legal framework of shotgun was never fully settled, but the outcomes were usually predictable.

Inside the Explorer there were CDs everywhere. Not in a messy way—Seth kept the car pretty well—but there were dozens of them, probably stored in one of those large CD wallets that seemed to exist in every car in the early nineties. Seth would sometimes come back from Hastings with six or eight discs at a time. I remember watching those purchases with something close to disbelief. I could rarely afford a CD myself, so when I did manage to acquire something like Tindersticks or Billy Bragg’s Spy vs. Spy, it was a very big deal.

The music rotation in the Explorer was remarkably tolerant. Seth tended to favor Judas Priest and Metallica, while Innes leaned toward Ice-T. Joe Tyllia loved Cat Stevens and so Cat Stevens appeared frequently. I personally preferred Dire Straits at the time, which never quite made the regular rotation, so I generally waited for Warren Zevon or Cat Stevens to come back around. Nobody vetoed anyone else’s music. Whatever disc was in play generally stayed there.

The Explorer had a few regular destinations. State B basketball games were one. Another was Zip’s on the north side of town. Seniors could leave campus whenever they liked, and sometimes that meant simply deciding that a run across Spokane for burgers was necessary. Seth’s house was another stop, as was Hastings, where the CD acquisitions occurred.

Occasionally the driving extended further into the South Hill at night. Sometimes we would pass near Manito Park, though I remember doing those wandering drives more often with a slightly different crew—Dyche, Jonah, Karin, and Lisa. Once that group went to a show by They Might Be Giants, and afterward Kelly reported that the band had stiffed the opening act and paid them only ten dollars. Kelly knew this because his cousin was in the opening band.

The one time I ever took shotgun from John Innes without calling it came on the ride home from the state cross-country meet during our senior year. Our team had finished second by a single point, which felt at the time like the most unfair outcome imaginable. James Johnson had been our first runner, Cam Turner second, and I was third.

When we piled into the Explorer for the three-hour drive back to Spokane, I simply grabbed the seat. No call. No discussion. Just took it. And for that ride home I ran the decks.

For a while Seth’s Explorer was simply part of the landscape of our lives. It sat behind the lower school during the day, appeared at the Coleman house west of the South Hill at night, and carried us between games, fast-food runs, music stores, and wherever else we decided to go.

Then, like most small countries of teenage life, it quietly disappeared

Dedication: For my homies.