Word that Randy Miller was mounting a comeback came as news to Mancow…
After all, the syndicated shock jock out of Chicago cut his teeth interning for Miller in the late 1980s. It was a time the Cow will never forget…would that he could. What made the news even odder, was that Miller would be returning after a decade off the air in Mancow’s former college stomping grounds, Warrensburg, Missouri.
“That’s where I started my radio career,” Mancow says. “I wish Randy every bit of luck. I wouldn’t deny him the ability to feed his family.”
The flip side of those goodwill tidings:
You know, Randy declared himself Christian and said he was saved,” Mancow says. “Yet he still continues to do really awful stuff. Everything I hear about him is that whenever anybody tries to help him they get hurt.
“Here’s my message to him: I wish him all the blessings in the world, I do. It’s been a long 10 years for him, but here’s the thing; Randy plays nice when he has to, but he’s like having a pet rattlesnake. He came to Chicago and auditioned for some station and spent the whole show bashing me.
“I think something happens to him when he gets in front of a microphone. He can’t help himself. I’d say it was a Jekyll & Hyde thing, but he’s not nice off the air. Look, the eagle does not attack the fly, so I wish Randy well.”
The factors Mancow thinks that lead to Miller’s decline:
“I think if he had a little bit of humility – an ounce of humility – he would have been one of the biggest stars in history. And let’s remember when I worked with him in the ’80s, he was referencing things like Leave it to Beaver and The Beverly Hillbillies. That didn’t work for me because it cast Randy as unhip.”
Speaking of which, at this stage of the game, pretty much everyone doing terrestrial radio is by definition unhip, Mancow says.
“I mean, I’m doing radio in 2014 and nobody today thinks radio is hip. So we’re in this unhip thing together now. And doing radio in 2014 is like sitting on a whaling ship and trying to sell buggy whips to the people on shore. When you think cutting edge, you don’t think radio.”
On second thought, maybe Randy doing country in a small Missouri town could work.
