Dave Ryan's Morning Dish

It’s six in the morning at Dave Ryan’s house in Chanhassen. It’s still dark, but upstairs, Dave’s wife, Susan, is already coiffed, impeccably made up, and ready for work in a business suit. She’s moved on to getting the two kids—8-year-old Carson and 17-year-old Allison—ready for school. Dave is down in the basement, and he’s still in his pajamas.

KDWB’s Dave Ryan in the Morning Show will be in Chanhassen all week as part of a broadcasting stunt called “Dave’s Basement.” Dave’s second family—Morning Show castmates Steve-O, Lena, and Crisco—will be couch surfing down here in their sleeping bags for five days, living on pizza and junk food. It’s Monday morning, and somehow it already smells like a fart joke. Engineers are tweaking mounted webcams so that listeners can log on to KDWB.com and cyberstalk the cast throughout the day, even after the show, when they’ll play Jenga and watch The View and Live with Regis and Kelly. The cast crowds around the island in the small basement kitchen. They’re live on air, and Dave, Lena, and Steve-O are reading job descriptions they’ve found on the internet to Crisco, who was fired the week before from his second job as a mailroom clerk at a downtown law firm.

“Crisco” (real name Adam Zalusky) has been a Morning Show regular since he was a KDWB intern in 2002. He got his nickname after he lost his sandwich-artist gig—his manager at Subway fired him for impaling an aerosol can of artificial shortening in an impromptu knife-throwing contest. “As soon as the knife punctured the can I knew I was gonna get fired,” Crisco told me in an earlier interview. “So I made five sandwiches and walked out the door.”

Crisco is an overweight tech-school dropout who lives with his sister and her kid. Like everyone on the show, he is outspoken when it comes to his loser credentials, but Crisco’s loser street cred is more intense than the show’s other three personalities—he’s almost like the loser mascot. He seems to be perversely proud of getting kicked out of St. Agnes Catholic High School with the second-worst GPA in school history (“.72—an A in Home Ec and a B in Gym saved me from making history,” he notes). And he is open about his bad luck when it comes to both work and women. Two years ago, when he lost his virginity to his then-fiancée, he couldn’t help himself from sharing it with Dave on air. “On my way in I told myself, Some things are private. Some things are private. But when I got there, I don’t think my smile could’ve been more ear-to-ear. I couldn’t not tell them.” His fiancée ended up breaking off the engagement.

Back in the basement, prompted by Dave, Crisco lists his entire résumé.

“I’ve been fired from Arby’s, Subway, Target, and TCF,” he says. “I get bored.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Steve-O says as Dave and Lena cackle in the background.

Dave starts in on the job descriptions.

“CEO,” Dave says. “Okay. Need 10 to 15 years’ experience. The ability to process large amounts of data. Qualities: leadership, self-confidence, decision-making skills . . .”

Steve-O and Lena interrupt: “NO!”

Dave moves on. “Electrical installation.”

Steve-O and Lena preempt: “NO!”

“Okay, post office employee.” Dave pauses. “I took the postal exam once. But I walked too fast and smiled too much. Crisco, you might be able to pass that one.”

“Sounds too boring,” he says.

“Forest and conservation administrator,” Dave continues. “Must be physically fit and strong.”

Steve-O and Lena: “NO!”

It goes on like this for a few more minutes until Crisco says what he really wants to do is cook. “My favorite job was as a fry cook at Perkins,” he says. “I was really happy.”

“That’s a great goal, Crisco,” Lena deadpans.

After the show, Crisco makes everybody scrambled eggs with scallions.
Dave Ryan has been hosting KDWB’s morning show for 16 years. Behind Tom Barnard’s juggernaut at KQRS and the morning show at WCCO, Dave’s show is the third-most-listened-to in town. But among females, especially the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic, it is the most-listened-to morning show in the Twin Cities. Does Dave rule simply by negation—because his is the only morning show on a station in the female-favored Top 40 format? Or is there something more substantial to his success—a strategy behind the tone and topics he chooses, one that taps into the almost archetypal need women have for a friend who understands them? Because it’s not just teenyboppers who are tuning in—some women have been listening for the entire 16 years he’s been on.

Dave admits that his longevity contributes to the occasional awkward encounter. “It can get a little weird,” he says. “A gorgeous 25-year-old will come up to me at an event and say, ‘I’ve been listening to you since fifth grade!’ It’s great. It’s flattering. But it’s weird.”

At 46, Dave Ryan is old enough to be a father figure to most of the women in his largest demographic. And he doesn’t hide the ways in which he’s out of touch with his audience. He’s used to being uncool because he has a teenage daughter who is dead certain about his uncoolness. He’s a history buff—a nerd who collects General Custer memorabilia in his basement. He doesn’t know any of the songs on his daughter’s iPod. And unlike many morning radio hosts around the country, who would be freaked out by this grim lack of cool, Dave accepts it and, in turn, incorporates it into the show—call it anxiety and vulnerability by design.

One morning, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt of The Hills are scheduled to call in for an interview. To many teenage and 20-something girls, “Speidi,” as the couple has been nicknamed, are the Boris and Natasha of the most-watched MTV show ever (The Hills gets higher ratings than any season of Real World or Road Rules ever has). But Steve-O is the only one who seems to be genuinely excited about the prospect of the interview. Lena thinks they’re jerks, and Dave . . . well, Dave just doesn’t buy the hype. “How are they celebrities?” he asks of the reality-show stars. “Do they have any talent?” He muses about dragging out an old radio gag where the host asks a question and then keeps talking himself, never letting his guest get a word in edgewise. He claims to have tortured a few guests in this way, and Steve-O and Lena seem to be game.

But Dave ultimately decides against it. “It’s too mean,” he says during the commercial break. “And the publicists get pissed off and it makes it harder to get guests. But it really is funny.” When they come back from commercial, Speidi comes on, and they are speaking from separate cell phones (maybe even from separate cities). Dave does the interview on autopilot, the way you would make small talk with a neighbor you’re not too fond of or a coworker whom you secretly despise. But for me, hearing Dave’s off-the-air mystification at how these people got to be famous followed by his rote let’s-get-this-over-with tone during the actual interview—the cognitive dissonance begs a question: How phony is too phony for a Dave Ryan in the Morning Show listener? How much real do they want or need?

I admit: I’m not a typical Dave Ryan listener. And reporting on a radio show is much different than having a long-term relationship with the show. Approaching the show like some dorky cultural studies scholar, poring over full three-and-a-half-hour programs as if they were texts teeming with symbolism, is far different than the way everybody else listens. Most listeners don’t take notes as the show cycles through 10-minute blocs of Rihanna’s new song/news/gossip/traffic/comedy segment . . . to Beyoncé’s new song/news/gossip . . . and repeat. To most listeners, Dave is the disembodied voice in the background while they’re putting on their makeup in the morning. Or they get 20 minutes with Lena and Steve-O on 394 while they drive their Grand Am to the office park in Eden Prairie. Or they catch muffled snatches of such regular segments as War of the Roses or Cheater’s Club from a coworker’s cubicle a row or two away. And these moments recur on a daily basis over the course of many years. To the daily listener, the Morning Show characters are part of the narrative of daily life, and they share a bizarre sort of intimacy—an invisible radio connection that might seem baffling to some people.

Many women don’t just love the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show; they become attached to it. After telling some of the females in my life—my sister, some coworkers at the magazine—that I was doing a story on Dave Ryan, they began to call or text or come over to my desk just to ask me if I’d heard what happened on the show. “Did you hear Christmas Wish this morning?” a coworker would ask. “I couldn’t. Stop. Crying.” Christmas Wish is a segment in which, after Dave and company coax every woeful financial detail from a family struggling to make the holiday ends meet, Crisco will crash through the front door shocking a (usually single) mother and her brood with a windfall of items, from flat-screen televisions to gift certificates for Cub Foods and American Eagle Outfitters.

As soon as another popular segment, War of the Roses, goes to commercial, I’ll get a call from my sister: “Are you listening to this, Steve? Oh. My. God.” War of the Roses is a prank in which Lena, masquerading as a cell-phone provider conducting a one-time-only promotion, calls a might-be cheater and informs him that he’s won a dozen roses and he’s free to send them to whomever he chooses. He’s unaware that his girlfriend is eavesdropping along with KDWB’s listening audience—until Dave butts in either to congratulate or humiliate him.

Before Dave hired her to replace Corey Foley in October 2007, Lena Svenson listened to KDWB every morning. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2004 with a theater degree, Lena worked as a temp and then as a wire specialist for Wells Fargo. Her coworker at the temp agency would have the show on, and even with the volume turned low, Lena claims Dave’s voice had a soothing quality. “Even when I couldn’t really listen to what was happening on the show,” she says, “I could hear his voice, and it’s very comforting.”

Dave considers his voice an asset, but he doesn’t believe it’s as distinctive as some of his competitors’. “People will recognize me in restaurants, but it’s not like Tom Barnard’s voice,” Dave says. “Tom has an average voice, but it has a lot of character—he sounds like Home Depot. If I try to talk like that, I sound like an asshole.”Dave considers the subjects he picks to be much more important than the timbre of his voice. After graduating from a two-year technical school in his hometown of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of his first radio jobs was at a Top 40 station. It was explained to him early on how a Top 40 station’s bread is buttered. “My first program director told me not to think about women at large,” he says. “Instead, think about one specific woman. Put a picture of her on your table—say, a 28-year-old woman—and talk to her.” Just before I can envision Dave talking to a blow-up doll in a Rocky Mountain studio, he interjects, “I don’t know if I ever did that, but the message is pretty clear.”

Unlike Barnard’s KQ Morning Show, which consists of comic skits and impressions blended with racy topical conversation on sports and news, Dave Ryan in the Morning Show takes a much more feminine approach. It has gone away from what Dave calls the “underwear on the head morning zoo” format to a more touchy-feely concept. The three major chemical compounds comprising the Dave Ryan formula seem to be (1) celebrity gossip of the Perez Hilton/Superficial.com ilk, contained in a segment called Dave’s Dirt; (2) sentimental empowerment delivered in segments like the aforementioned Christmas Wish, or another called Group Therapy (which is exactly what it sounds like—callers getting into heavy stuff, such as relationship talk, family issues, and eating disorders); and perhaps most potently, (3) a reality television-esque celebration of feminine victimhood. Along with War of the Roses, there is a segment called Cheater’s Club, where a boyfriend’s infidelity is exposed in detail via a number of extraneous lovers who call in to out the cheater.

Dave points out that Lena, as the lone female voice in the studio, might have the most important role on the show. Each of his past female sidekicks brought a specific point of view to the program—Lee Valsvik was the grown-up woman, Angie Taylor the party girl, Corey Foley one of the guys. Lena is the neurotic younger sister. “And sometimes I have to play mom,” she says. Dave and Steve-O constantly tease her for not being able to hold onto a man and for being dependent on her anxiety meds (she suffered a nervous breakdown three years ago and has talked about her anxiety openly on the air). They even joke about how surprised they are that she made it through her first year. For a while there, it really was unclear whether she would make it—the female listeners hated her.

The listeners’ emotional connection to the show can cut both ways, and the female listeners missed Corey. “Women are loyal,” Lena says. “And they can be mean.” The Morning Show had a hard time replacing Corey—Cassie, their first attempt, flamed out after a month, forcing management to expand their search to women with little or no radio experience. Lena sent in a homemade reel and Dave decided to take a chance on her. But in the first few months, she was inundated with nasty calls and e-mails. “They would say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ” Lena tried to keep it together by calling her mom and her sisters when things got particularly nasty, and she even put together a “happy folder,” filled with only the positive feedback, but the bile still got to her.

“On radio, you’re putting your own personality out there, so when somebody attacks you—says you’re not talented or stupid—it is personal. And it hurts.” Lena says she’s in a better place now—her writing talent has been recognized to the point where she now has her own recurring segment, Lena’s Diary, during which she talks about train-wreck dates and her mouse-infested Uptown apartment. She even says that she understands how the haters feel. “Look, I had a hard time with the transition from Angie to Corey,” she says. “And women want somebody to make them look good and feel like they’re represented, especially on a show that’s all men. Women are smart and they want to be represented by somebody who’s smart.”

As I mentioned before, I did not become acquainted with the characters on Dave Ryan’s show in 5- to 10-minute increments over the course of a decade, and I didn’t listen to him while doing my hair in the morning. But the opportunity to absorb the show in solid three-hour blocks did allow for some modest metaphysical excavation of the sort that may help shed some light on the curious appeal of the show to young women. If there is one salient philosophy of the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show, one thread holding all these gossip segments and relationship talk and tales of infidelity together, it is this: an assured belief that there is a feminine aversion to swagger.

It’s strange when you think about it, because the music KDWB plays is so full of swagger—whether it’s T.I. promising us we can have whatever we like, or Britney defiantly directing the womanizers of the world to talk to the hand, or Lil Wayne exalting himself in the third person as a rock star. These are the most popular songs in the country, and they’re all about swagger. But Dave Ryan is most definitely not.

“A lot of people on the radio want to be cool,” Dave says. “They have swagger in their voice. They talk about how, ‘Yeah, I went to the club and I met this chick.’ Or ‘I went to a Vikings game and a friend of mine had tickets on the 50-yard line.’ ” Dave’s theory is that people don’t want to hear that. “They would rather hear you say, ‘Yeah, I went to the Vikings game and my car wouldn’t start, so I go there an hour late and then I left my wallet at home so I couldn’t eat anything and our tickets were in the nosebleed section.’ ” But what if you do have good seats? “Then you say, ‘HOLY SHIT, I had tickets on the 50-yard line!’ ”

Listening to somebody theorize about his own humility is an odd experience, but when you hang out with the guy, you realize that while he may play his insecurities up for ratings, they are still very real insecurities. When I interview Dave at his favorite local hangout, the Buffalo Wild Wings in Chanhassen, his shoulders slump when it is time to order. He tells me he is on a diet. “I was in training to run Grandma’s Marathon, but I haven’t been able to run lately because I have plantar fasciitis in my foot,” he says. “So I’ve had to watch what I eat.” He orders a salad and watches jealously when my chicken wings come out of the kitchen. “Man, a couple of weeks ago I would’ve tackled those no problem and then ordered more,” he says. “I love the mango habañero ones.”

Dave’s other insecurities run deeper: He’s a member of Toastmasters because he wanted to control his anxiety over public speaking, and his right ring finger is encased with a gigantic gold Mensa ring. “I always felt weird that I didn’t get a four-year degree,” he says. So a couple of years ago he took the Mensa test online and qualified to take the real test at the Burnsville public library. “They were really serious about it,” Dave recalls. “I did well on the analogies, but the math was kind of a crapshoot. Leaving the library, I really wasn’t sure how well I did.” He passed: Dave Ryan is officially a genius. Dave admits that the ring is gaudy, but in a way it provides him with a perverse humility schtick—a constant prop for both self-validation and self-deprecation. “I didn’t want to hang a plaque in my office. What kind of an asshat would do that? I’m the asshat who wears the ring instead. It’s my version of a diploma.”

For the last couple years, Dave also has worked with Randy Lane, a talent coach in California. Lane’s assessment is that the tone of the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show has always been swaggerless. “Dave Ryan is a host who’s not afraid to show his flaws. He’s charming about it.” Lane points out that this is an attitude shared by a lot of successful Top 40 morning hosts, and that, oddly, it’s based on the personality pioneered by Howard Stern. “When Howard came out he would talk about how he’s an ugly guy with a small penis,” Lane says. “This was new.” Lane says the modern morning-show character is actually a throwback—he’s straight out of Greek mythology, because Greek heroes were notable not only for their greatness, but for their vulnerability. “A vulnerable hero is more interesting,” Lane says. “Look at all the inappropriate stuff Howard [Stern] has said over the years. Then look at what happened to Don Imus. The difference is that Howard is very self-deprecating, and he’s humanized by his adult flaws. Whereas Imus’ attitude was ‘I’m the I-Man!’ so when he got in trouble people were reluctant to forgive him.” Lane coaches his clients to be more like Howard and Dave. “It’s amazing what openness and honesty and vulnerability will do,” he says.

Dave’s favorite entertainers might not be Sophocles and Aeschylus, but his taste dovetails nicely with Lane’s theory. Dave’s favorite television show is The Office,specifically Steve Carell’s bumbling-but-means-well character Michael Scott. Dave’s Hollywood hero is someone most of his listeners probably never saw: Johnny Carson. As a kid in Colorado Springs, Dave used to fall asleep in front of The Tonight Show, waking up when the screen turned to static. “He was the best interviewer,” Dave says. “He knew that he was the star and the show would’ve bombed without him, but he also knew how to make people look good. If there’s one person trying to stand out, it’s not going to work well.”

Dave explicitly encourages the rest of the players on the show to be as open and as vulnerable as he is. That’s why Crisco talks about getting fired from second jobs and having problems getting a date, and why Lena talks about her medication. According to Steve-O, the most self-assured personality in the studio, some of this is just good business sense. “I believe the more insecurities you have as a person, the better you are as a person,” he says. “Dave and I talk about that a lot. But it’s also just math: There are way more losers than there are winners. You know that automatically.”

He’s right—from a business point of view, it makes more sense to appeal to human imperfection and its accompanying neuroses, because they are universal. But it’s more than just a marketing tactic: Dave really is a 46-year-old who collects Custer memorabilia. He can’t fake being hip; he’s just the rare disc jockey who doesn’t try.

“Who wants to hear somebody my age go on and on about The Hills? Or go on and on about Bromance?” Dave asks. “I make fun of that stuff. I watch the History Channel and the Sci Fi Channel. I like old Twilight Zones. Most people out there aren’t really that hip. They’re not. And they want to know that there are other people out there who aren’t hip, either. If I don’t watch Bromance, somebody else on the show will. I think that’s one of the things that works on our show—you don’t have somebody on like me who’s been there forever pretending to like stuff that I don’t. Because that sounds insecure. And I think people appreciate the fact that I don’t try to sound hip.” He pauses for a beat. “I represent the people who don’t get it.”