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Art Bell has died (Coast to Coast AM)

C

crainbebo

Sad news coming out of Pahrump tonight. What a legend! His show was the reason many of us listened to the AM band late at night - all the paranormal, UFO and alien stories. The Nye County Sheriff's Office confirmed he died at his home in Pahrump; from what I know an autopsy will be done very soon. RIP! (And I listen to those Somewhere in Time Saturday repeats once in a blue moon as well - love when they talk about ghosts and EVPs.)

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/radio-host-art-bell-dies-at-72/
 
I think Bell should be considered among the great radio broadcasters of our time, up there with Stern, Rush, Larry King, Paul Harvey. His franchise, even without him, is on the biggest AM station in nearly every market in the U.S. On many of those stations in the West, the show starts at 10pm, goes four hours, then gets re-run till 5 a.m. Can you think of any show that runs seven hours, seven days a week? Some iHeart stations on Saturday nights even run an old Art Bell show, renamed "Somewhere in Time," three hours prior to "Coast to Coast AM." So on Saturdays, some stations are running these shows for 10 or 11 hours at night!

I'm not a big believer in the paranormal but Bell's talent was his TOTAL belief in all his guests. Even when a drunk guy from Kansas might call at 3:30 a.m. saying there are little green men running around his farm right now, Bell would ask how many there are and whether they are friendly. He also had a great expressive voice.

He started working in the early 1970s on a couple of radio and TV stations in California. In 1978, KDWN 720 Las Vegas had just gotten FCC permission to run with 50,000 watts around the clock. (Till then, clear channel stations like WGN Chicago had no other powerful stations on their channel at night, not even in the West.) Bell got hired to do an all-night show, which he called "West Coast AM." "West Coast" because KDWN could be heard quite clearly, not just in Vegas but in LA, San Diego, San Francisco, etc. And "AM" since it ran from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. At first, he discussed everything, mostly politics. But he had an interest in the paranormal and as he did more of these shows, he got more buzz. Eventually the show got picked up for syndication, where it got renamed "Coast to Coast AM."

Sadly, some of Bell's inner demons stopped him from continuing his show. He quit the network show at one point because of back trouble. He returned then quit again to move to The Philippines. He returned to the U.S. and signed up to do shows on Sirius XM, which I thought were terrific. He was live four nights a week and got replayed the other nights. But he had a dispute about audio quality and a few other issues with Sirius management and quit that show after a couple of months. Then he started his own show on the internet, which he allowed some radio stations to also air. But then he claimed someone fired shots at him at his home in Nevada, so he quit that saying he feared for his family's safety. And that was the last Art Bell show we would have.
 
Very sad news. I wasn't an all-the-time listener but he had some interesting stuff on and it wasn't all paranormal. I remember Art interviewing the New York City fire chief shortly after 9/11. Also remembering him saying he didn't neccesarily believe all the stuff his guests believed in, but he was all about letting them have their say.

Presumably, the "Somewhere in Time" replays will continue tonight and some time to come on Premiere affiliates.
 
Phil Hendrie‏Verified account @realphilhendrie · 4h4 hours ago
Art was something our business had few, if any, of.
He was an original.
He did everything the book said you shouldn’t do. 40 minute phone interviews, led segments with commercials, took the paranormal & UFOlogists seriously and gave them a forum. Rest In Peace Art Bell.
I always felt Art had difficulties that were private and made things difficult for him. Before he left the scene I hope he was ok.
 
Art Bell is worthy of all the praise. He thought outside the box on programming and execution. Everything he developed came from thin air. He had to write the book on doing it as he went because that book had never been written.

Thinking about this guests and callers, Art knew being gracious was the key to his success and that by treating his callers with respect fueled his success. One can question if any of the callers and guests spoke of things he believed. If so, great. If not, at the least he was amused. At worst he let them drive their route to see just where they were going. For all of us that listened, we enjoyed his journey and I think we can say it ended all too quickly. One could say his time frame was simply filler for any station needing overnight content but I feel the program reached way beyond that as a desired, listener producing show that likely could have enjoyed a more desirable daypart. With no discredit to George that has successfully taken the reigns without skipping a beat, if not taking the show to greater popularity, it likely never would have been without Art Bell being brave enough to bet on the path never traveled.

While you have gone on, Mr. Bell, you live on through radio and those you influenced.
 
Art was one of the first to stream his show on the internet. Originally, he used a voice-quality Real Audio codec.
The streaming was free until Clear Channel found that there was money to be made by streaming .....
 
Art Bell tapped into a certain nerve; America's obsession with the unknown. Ghosts, UFOs, life after death. And at the perfect time (the wee hours when insomniac people are up pondering anyway.)

Granted, some of the topics were over the top (The "bottomless hole" in Eastern Washington. Nibiru, The Doomsday Planet and don't even get me started on Y2K.) But he knew who his audience were when nobody else could figure them out. They were the curious, ungrounded ones who really weren't interested in politics or average talk radio topics. But the kind of existential questions that anyone asks a close friend while looking at a starry sky together. The what-ifs of life.

Who ever thought that would work on the radio?

He was also one of the very first open national talk radio voices for the cannabis legalization movement (with guests including chairpeople of NORML and Willie Nelson.) He was the first to discuss the "men in black' theory (which inspired a blockbuster movie.) When an earthquake on the West Coast happened, he would tangent the first hour of show into something about The Big One.

It's those lingering little questions and curiosities in the back of our minds he addressed. The ones you couldn't talk about at 1pm.

Art Bell's genius wasn't in the topics he explored, but the fact he even brought them up at all on the radio. You weren't supposed to talk about those things on the radio, at least not on a local level. You'd never hear the end of it. But on a national level, it was much different. And people were ready.

Today, there's too many radio copycats from Alex Jones to Jeff Rense who pitch all kinds of theories to anyone without a logic filter. YouTube still buzzes with Nibiru sightings decades after it's first predicted collision with Earth. And don't even get me started on the current president.

But I think what people romance the most about Art Bell was how he did his show, from a mobile home radio studio in the middle of the desert with a satellite uplink to affiliate stations and was free to talk about whatever he wanted. That lone voice in the AM skywave and static "East of The Rockies, you're on the air, Hello".

RIP Art. Say hi to everyone on Nibiru for us....
 
And I'm sure a lot of Art Bell's listeners were tuning in through nighttime skywave. Probably a lot of truck drivers as well, that listened to Art Bell and some that still listen to George Noory. Not every truck driver wants Red Eye Radio and political talk. I love listening to Somewhere in Time when I have the chance; especially the ghost stories and the EVPs.
Art was also an amateur radio operator, can't remember his callsign at the moment, but he had an antenna out there in Pahrump. And speaking of that, about three years ago during an e-skip opening to the southwest, I logged KNYE/95.1 Pahrump, which used to be owned by Art himself!
 
I'm glad you bring up the litany of ways to call Bell we would hear at the start of each hour. I guess it was a combination of the practical and the boastful. In the days when we had to pay extra to call outside our local community, network radio shows had 800 numbers, including Larry King, NBC Talknet and the ABC Talk Radio Network. I guess Mutual didn't want to pay for all of Bell's calls, all night long. Long distance rates did go way down overnight in those days. But when you heard that very deep voiced guy tell us the myriad of ways to contact Bell, it made the show sound VERY important.

So there were standard toll numbers for "East of the Rockies" and "West of The Rockies." I suppose that was to give the call screeners the ability to mix the geographical locations of the callers. Then a toll free number for first time callers, I guess to encourage them. Then a way to have foreign callers phone in, by calling the Sprint operator in their country. Was that for people in Mexico and the Caribbean to get through if they were picking up an American clear channel station airing Bell? Why else would some person in a foreign country call in before audio streaming became common on the internet? I would guess Canadian listeners could just call the domestic U.S. numbers without much problem. Bell was carried by AM stations in all the major Canadian cities, because he didn't usually discuss politics.

It's interesting George Noory has a slightly reduced list of phone numbers, as he continues many of the traditions Bell started. These days most of us have phones that don't charge extra for calls in the U.S., Canada and some other countries. So listing one number that isn't necessarily toll free probably would work just as well. But it wouldn't sound as important.

By the way, I'm listening to "Somewhere in Time" right now, picking it up from WGST Atlanta's website. Tonight the show is introduced with a prerecorded message from Noory, who honors Bell at the beginning of each hour.
 
....and he was everywhere on the AM dial at night. KVI doesn't come in too well in downtown Everett, but KGA was like a blowtorch and that's where I listened. But I also had 16 other stations to hear it too.

It was a testament to his success. But it also feels like an infestation of the AM band to this night. Looking for anything BUT Coast To Coast AM is a chore in some areas. Eastern Washington is especially bad because you get all the big Midwest city AMs like KFAB, WHO, KOA, WOWO, WHAS, etc.
 
Well I guess you were in far eastern WA...because I've never heard WHAS or WOWO here. 840 here is dominated by another Coast affiliate, KXNT Las Vegas at night. Usually 1190 is KEX and CFSL from Saskatchewan. But when WOWO was 50KW at night I'm sure they were heard out here often.
If I want to listen to George Noory, I have my local KIT-1280 of course. The nice thing about skywave is KFI-640: they usually run his show 1-2 minutes behind from the satellite feed. So if I missed a small bit of a segment I could always tune to 640. I don't know if they did the 'delay' when Art was hosting.
He's got the Wild Card line, east/west of the Rockies, the international line (press 'option 5'), a text number and a Skype username. That's still a lot of numbers, knowing that many of the conservative talkers that dominate AM, only have one phone number to call. I still miss Ross Mitchell's voiceover at the top and bottom of the hour - the new voiceover isn't unique or deep like him. I can always hear him on KKOH doing Reno's Morning News before the sun comes up, however.
 
Even at 50kW, WOWO's night pattern made it impossible to get in Kokomo, IN let alone Washington, with the big null toward KEX. WOWO was heard all over the east, and even some places like Minneapolis, but though you can never say never, reception in Eastern Washington was highly unlikely.

What number did you call if you were IN the Rockies?
 
Most local listeners want it on locally though. We lost our Coast to Coast affiliate and there was an outcry. No, people didn't want to listen to it on skywave from Louisville or Des Moines, they wanted it so they could fall asleep to it on their bedside clock radio.



Bongwater said:
....and he was everywhere on the AM dial at night. KVI doesn't come in too well in downtown Everett, but KGA was like a blowtorch and that's where I listened. But I also had 16 other stations to hear it too.

It was a testament to his success. But it also feels like an infestation of the AM band to this night. Looking for anything BUT Coast To Coast AM is a chore in some areas. Eastern Washington is especially bad because you get all the big Midwest city AMs like KFAB, WHO, KOA, WOWO, WHAS, etc.
Click to expand...
 
>>>What number did you call if you were IN the Rockies?<<<

That's a good question. I guess the answer is you could NOT call, since you were neither east nor west of the Rockies.

The rest of the country always ignores the people in the Rocky Mountains, or in the Mountain Time Zone. So often we would hear network TV promos that said "Watch tonight at 10 o'clock, nine Central." That means the Eastern and Pacific time zones see the show at 10pm, Central at 9pm, and who really cares about the Mountain Time Zone, which may or may not run the show at 9pm? I believe I've seen stats where less than 10% of the U.S. population lives in the Mountain Time Zone.
 
RIP. I am sorry to learn this. I found his late night show very entertaining.

Given some of the listeners he had, I'm afraid wild conspiracy theories about his death will start circulating. Renegade elements of the government wanted to silence him or somesuch. I hope not. They started up regarding a doctor who hosted a show here locally, and they were very hurtful to his family.
 
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Gregg. said:
>>>What number did you call if you were IN the Rockies?<<<

That's a good question. I guess the answer is you could NOT call, since you were neither east nor west of the Rockies.

The rest of the country always ignores the people in the Rocky Mountains, or in the Mountain Time Zone. So often we would hear network TV promos that said "Watch tonight at 10 o'clock, nine Central." That means the Eastern and Pacific time zones see the show at 10pm, Central at 9pm, and who really cares about the Mountain Time Zone, which may or may not run the show at 9pm? I believe I've seen stats where less than 10% of the U.S. population lives in the Mountain Time Zone.
Click to expand...

I used to call Art's show from Phoenix, AZ in 1995. I used both numbers and he never objected.
 
b-turner said:
Art Bell is worthy of all the praise. He thought outside the box on programming and execution. Everything he developed came from thin air. He had to write the book on doing it as he went because that book had never been written.

With no discredit to George that has successfully taken the reigns without skipping a beat, if not taking the show to greater popularity, it likely never would have been without Art Bell being brave enough to bet on the path never traveled.
Click to expand...

Nice. Makes me see Art through the eyes of the Robert Frost 1916 poem "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

In the 1990's, listening to Art Bell, late into the night, was an experience. It was like entering another dimension of time and space, all by way of my Realistic DX-440.

Thanks Art! You were & are The King of Late Night Radio.
 
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