It has to be funny. This is the winning philosophy of the Power Trip Morning Show on KFAN FM 100.3 in Minneapolis. With double-digit ratings in their back pocket, you can’t argue with the approach. Their success speaks for itself.
There are three main hosts — Chris Hawkey, Cory Cove, and Meatsauce [Paul Lambert] — as well as a rotation of about 15 people that join the show every week. Cory describes the show as having a “big kind of Howard Stern feel with nonsense and stupidity and really bad improv and crap like that.” If you have any sense of humor at all, it’s impossible not to laugh along with these guys.
For well over a decade, Cory, Hawk, and Sauce have prepped separately before shows. This way the jokes are fresh and the reactions are genuine. They refuse to pretend something is funny. Hawkey says, “If you’re hearing something for the second time, you’re pretending that it was as funny as it was the first time. I think these two guys are hilarious. When I laugh at them, it’s a genuine laugh. I think that’s important.”
These guys are all funny and smart. Sure, they tell sophomoric jokes, but at the same time, they’re also thinking about maintaining profitability. They’re a work-hard, play-hard bunch. They’ve found ways to avoid the fun stuff getting in the way of the serious stuff and vice versa. Like I said, funny and smart. Enjoy!
Brian Noe: How long have you guys known each other?
Hawkey: We all met through the show. Cory became an intern at the radio station. Purely by luck when it came to me because he didn’t want to be a part of the Power Trip Morning Show.
In fact, I believe Cory you’ve said a bunch of times, you were never awake to hear the show and you wanted to be a part of the PA and Dubay Show, which was everybody’s favorite show at the time. That opportunity was no longer available, so they offered you the Power Trip Morning Show and you were like, I guess I’ll give that a try.
Cove: That’s true. The show started 22 years ago and I missed the first like four months. And Chris is right, I was a college kid at the time, so I had never been up that early to hear it. I didn’t even know the show that I was starting to intern for. I had no idea who Chris Hawkey was, or at the time Mike Morris was when the show started.
That was kind of feet to the fire and I met them the first day I interned. Now 22 years later, Chris and I have been here the whole time and Sauce joined, I don’t know what it was, six or seven years after that. The three of us have been together for 15+ years, give or take.
Hawkey: It’s interesting too because Sauce came on board, and he had been a board op at a couple of different radio stations. I remember meeting you during Vikings broadcasts because you would come in and hang out and help anyway you could, and basically you’d go out and get the pizza. That’s how you got to the nickname Meatsauce, right?
Meatsauce: Yeah, my whole gig was to get food during the Vikings games. And my whole bit was like, if I can’t bring them food like a normal person, if I screw that up, why would they want me around the radio station? And yeah, that’s how I got the nickname Meatsauce. I think that was ‘06 or ‘07. So yeah, I’ve had that nickname for almost 18 years.
Noe: Wow, man. Some people wouldn’t roll with a nickname like that. Why did you choose to just roll with it?
Meatsauce: Oh, I don’t know, I think it’s kind of endearing. I love the nickname. Cory has gone away from the one he had when he first started. I just love it. I don’t know, man, I just like the way it sounds. A lot of people call me that who I’ve known for like 30 years. My dad calls me that, which is weird.
I just love the nickname. I think the nickname has helped immensely. It’s a morning show nickname. It’s an idiot’s nickname. It’s a frat guy’s nickname that’ll smash beers with his head and has been there for 10 years but has nowhere else to go kind of a nickname.
Noe: [Laughs] What’s one of your favorite bits from over the years that you thought was hilarious?
Meatsauce: One of my favorites, and it’s not really like a bit, bit, but I mostly am there to get Chris Hawkey to hick laugh like he did when he was a kid. We had a moment recently where I just almost pissed my pants. He made a Crackhead Bob reference from the Howard Stern Show, and I nearly fell out of my chair laughing about it. It’s stuff like that.
We joke all the time like it’s radio for five people, where there’s sometimes too many inside jokes. But every once in a while, there’ll be one that’ll just catch me right between the eyes. I think when the show is the funniest is when we’re all laughing together at something. That’s when I think it’s the most fun. These guys literally make me laugh like every 10 minutes.
Cove: It’s kind of what I said earlier about just bad improv. That’s what we pride ourselves on doing. We’ve joked over the years that 90% of our show is waiting for one of us to f–k up so the other two can bury that person for making a mistake. It’s like, if somebody says something ridiculous or wrong or stupid, it’s how many jokes can we make off of that one screw-up that can fill up the next three-and-a-half hours.
That’s how we win more so than arguing about who the Vikings quarterback should be, or some Dallas Cowboys reference. It’s let’s see if we can make the four or five or six people in the room laugh and hopefully, there are tens of thousands of people in the Twin Cities that are laughing too. That’s kind of the goal.
Hawkey: I always tell people that my job is to try to make my friends laugh every morning. We’ve mentioned it a lot lately, we talk about radio for five people because there’s so many inside jokes. But I think the underappreciated part of that is the fifth person is the listening audience. Most of them have been listening for so long that they get our inside jokes. And if they don’t, my gosh, I’ll tell you, the emails and the tweets and all that, it goes crazy. People want to know what the inside joke is.
We could go on and on about the radio improv. I think that is the key. We always also talk to each other about how we finish a segment. Something hilarious has just happened, but we have to do the next segment. We can’t sit around and say, wow, that was really great. I’ve already moved on to what we’re going to do next. I know the other guys have as well.
I feel like that’s one of the things that I have failed at in our careers is keeping tabs on the really, really good things because you always have to be thinking about what’s next. That’s also kind of what improv is all about, moving on to what you think is going to work next or what happens by chance next. I love that aspect of it.
Noe: Your ratings are unbelievable. Do you feel any pressure to maintain the level that you guys have reached?
Meatsauce: Before I started, and Cory brought it up, about the Tom Barnard thing where he was crushing this market. And what did they tell you guys? They’d be happy with a three-share? So there is pressure to it because this magical carpet that we get to ride for three-and-a-half hours a day is wonderful. The pressure for that not to end is daily. The pressure of everything else that goes with the high ratings is always there.
I seek it out every week. It’s not something we ignore. It’s something that I look forward to good or bad every week. And it’s something that we’ve all earned. Mostly those two, but we’ve all earned those ratings over the years. We’ve worked really hard at it to get to that point. So the pressure once you get there, you can’t just go, well, that was great, and then just pull off the gas. I think you always have to keep your foot on the gas.
Hawkey: Yeah, the answer for me is twofold. I try not to worry about that too much because there’s two schools of thought. If something’s working and the ratings are huge, then keep doing what you’re doing. But that leads to staleness and never trying anything and never changing anything. I would rather operate as if the ratings are great, and we just need to continue to strive.
Our bosses, specifically Chad Abbott, has been wonderful from the very beginning about not putting that kind of pressure on us. I can remember sitting in [Gregg] Swedberg’s office when he said, if you guys ever get a three share to start, we’ll be really happy. We passed that pretty quickly. I feel really good about that. The only time I ever worry too much about ratings is when I’m told I have to. And those are the worst times for me.
Here’s the bottom line, I’m going to try to do the best radio show I can do every day whether we have a 50 share or a three share. Honestly, I am. I don’t see myself working any harder when the ratings are down than I do when the ratings are up. The good thing about knowing the ratings, especially when they start to falter, is that it does remind you from time to time, hey, you know what?
Maybe it is time to shake things up, maybe you need to kick in the afterburners a little bit, or maybe you’ve gotten complacent. So I do pay attention. I do care. I hope we’re number one every show for the rest of our lives, but I try not to let that be my overall factor in whether or not I do a good radio show. I want to succeed because I love to succeed with these guys.
Noe: With double-digit ratings, you guys are on the same level as The Sports Hub, The Ticket. I hear about them all the time. What’s it like when you don’t get that same attention?
Cove: Yeah, it’s frustrating. We had an After Party podcast a couple of years ago. Not just our normal podcast numbers, which are also insane. Our Power Trip repurposed podcast is one of the biggest iHeart podcasts in the country on any medium. Our numbers are crazy. But we did an After Party podcast; it was 40 minutes of just basically our show but on steroids. Same kind of stuff. We would just wing it, swearing, it was much dirtier.
We were getting like a million downloads a month. We were getting crazy numbers. Then we were told by a couple of people in the podcast world that we were too big for our market, but we weren’t well enough known for the country. That we were kind of stuck in no man’s land, that our numbers were too big for our market and they didn’t know how to sell us. National advertisers were like, we’ve never heard of these guys. Local advertisers were like, we can’t afford those guys.
So our podcast, honestly over the last three years, faded away. We just quit it six months ago because we couldn’t get anybody to pay for what it was worth, so we just said eff it then. We’re not wasting our time chasing this imaginary goal. That’s a long-winded way of saying it’s been frustrating to be in flyover country putting up numbers that are national level and not getting more recognition.
The pressure that frustrates me the most is the pressure to maintain profitability. I know how big our fan base is, and I know how big our reach is. But as you know, how flawed the ratings systems are currently, and as we’re slowly fading away from that and getting more towards downloads, more trackable numbers, I feel the pressure more as an industry to maintain profitability.
It sucks because we’ve been a living, breathing case over the last three years. We gave the world a profitable product and couldn’t find a way to profit off of it correctly. And I’m not trying to throw a sales staff under the bus; I think it’s more of an industry issue. It’s how do you have monster numbers and find a way to keep profiting off of them when advertising is changing?
Meatsauce: It’s the whole station. The station as a whole is a huge deal. We had a comedian on the other day, Paul Mecurio, who writes for Colbert. He was like, do you know how many stations I go to where it’s like, oh, so and so quit, or so and so got fired? I’ve been there since ’06, Cory has been there since ’02.
Hawk’s been there longer, and so on and so forth. This is a monster of a radio station and there’s so much more they could have done with all of it. But I don’t come home and be like, well, you know, I wish we were talked about like that Boston station. But I think the station as a whole and the morning show, yeah, there’s parts of me where it’s like, man, this could have been like a syndicated situation. You never know, but it’s probably long forgotten.
Cove: It’s flyover country, man. I think you nailed it, Brian. This station and this show is never going to get the credit we deserve and that’s fine because we crush in this market. I think all of us are pretty comfortable living with that. We don’t need Marconi’s or national attention. It would just be nice if we could get some advertising dollars on a national level. But in terms of recognition, I don’t think any of the shows on this station truly care.
Noe: What are your goals? What would you like to accomplish, or if you were able to choose something within reason, what would you choose to accomplish?
Cove: I would just say sustainability, honestly. I think the show still has another 10 or 15 years in it. I think as we truly transition to digital, where everybody’s going to be either streaming or podcasting every show, local radio is going to live. People are still going to flip on their cars and still check us out live. I just hope we can continue to hold people for the next 10 or 15 years. After that, I don’t really care.
I’m not at this point, to Sauce’s point, trying to get it to go national. I think we’ve all moved on from the giant podcast dream because that just pissed us off for three years and it wasn’t worth all the stress. When we were absolutely crushing and not getting any advertising dollars out of it. [Laughs] It was just super frustrating. So honestly, I don’t necessarily have a long-term goal outside of just expanding this window as far as possible. I do think we have at least another decade to go but we’ll see.
Meatsauce: I would love to do this for 15 more years. I think that could be great. When I was six years old, this is all I ever wanted to do. I grew up listening to Tom Barnard. I grew up in that era of radio where it was funny, radio was entertainment, morning shows are there when we started this as a distraction. You get a lot of people who work really shitty jobs that they don’t like, and I like being a part of that.
I wanted to do this and I’ve accomplished that. I would like to continue doing what we’re doing in a world where people love it. As long as people like and continue to listen and support what we’re doing, that’s good enough for me, man. Eventually, when Cory and Hawkey move on, I don’t know if they would keep me around or what they would do with me.
Cove: [Laughs]
Meatsauce: But I think 15 years from now, when I’m probably working at a gas station, I’ll just look back on this and be like, that was the best time of my life, man. That’s what I wanted to do as a kid. I got to do that. I cherish every moment of this. I’ll never take it for granted. I wake up at four o’clock every morning going, this is the greatest job of all time and I’m lucky to be doing it.
Brian Noe is a columnist for BSM and an on-air host heard nationwide on FOX Sports Radio’s Countdown To Kickoff. Previous roles include stops in Portland, OR, Albany, NY and Fresno, CA. You can follow him on Twitter @TheNoeShow or email him at bnoe@premierenetworks.com.
