I can’t even describe it. But if you know, you know. Rick & Bubba have been a backdrop to mornings in the South for all of my adult life.
No, I can’t describe it, but this is the closest parallel I can draw: Have you ever been to a church fellowship in a cinder block basement, and because you’re visiting, they let you go down the line first? You fill your plate ‘til it’s caving in with cornbread, butter beans, and seven-layer salad. And then what?
You look around for a seat, and the room’s wide open. You don’t know any of the unwritten rules – you’re a visitor – so you sit down at, what everybody else knows is, the men’s table.
The Rick & Bubba Show is exactly like that. Sitting at the men’s table. They talk politics and Uncle Leonard’s hog calling catastrophe without anyone realizing they’ve changed the subject. They laugh at the crass without ever entering the vulgar, and pretty soon somebody’s rewriting the lyrics to a Bon Jovi song.
Sitting at that men’s table, you’re pretty sure you’d feel a lot more comfortable if you just got up and walked over to the women’s table, and talked a little less about tractors and armpits and a little more about Broadway and leggings. But at the same time, something keeps you there because you’re just a little spellbound by the atmosphere, and a little curious about what could come next.
That’s Rick & Bubba. They own a good back 40 of southern expressions. They started “monkey grass”; they own “green acres”: and I don’t think anyone else would take the credit if they could for “we be big.” If you know, you know.
I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way, they went from a two-man show to a room full of men named things like Adler and Speedy. It’s kind of like when your 12-year-old is gonna have a friend over to play Crash Bandicoot, and pretty soon the room’s full of fuzzy upper lips you’ve never seen before. With that much testosterone, you kind of stay clear because something’s either going to blow up or get some serious ninja damage.
That’s the best way I know how to describe listening to Rick & Bubba & other assorted males. Part of you wants to stay clear of it and opt for the standard one male, one female morning show with top forty music and bottom forty information.
Oh, Rick & Bubba have the info, too. There’s always a conversation about what’s going on in the news, but it’s not exactly David Muir. The Rick & Bubba experience is like a high school current events assignment gone wrong.
But interspersed are games like Pawpaw Password, which was originally Drive-Thru Password, but again, something went badly wrong here, and games like spinning the Wheel of Meat. There are less newsworthy stories like Big Jo and the Car Wash, and I do feel like I would have been cheated in life if I had missed out on Willie and Wanda. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, you might oughta google it.
But now, as all of Alabama and the bulk of the Balkan Peninsula know, Rick & Bubba announced Thursday that their show would come to an end in December of this year. So a bitter goodbye, Rick & Bubba. Goodbye to callers who start with “Monkeygrass” and end when the timer dings. Goodbye to the warning that “this program may be found offensive to “pencil pushing, bean counting, research loving radio programmers”; goodbye to my husband coming in and telling me what happened on the show on days when the girly side of me just couldn’t listen to it another day. No more Bubba, inventor of pizza in a cup. No more studios cluttered with a pinball machine and taxidermy. No more jabs at the far left. No more “Making radio great again.”
The backdrop might sound a little more sophisticated on the drive to work from here on. But there’s just a little something that whispers to me in Birmingham dialect …
We be sad.
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