The Voice Booming from the High Desert: Art Bell Is Back
ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE
Art Bell’s baritone voice blasted across the airwaves once again tonight, and oh was it sweet. His new show, Dark Matter, is exactly what I was hoping it would be. The music, the content, and best of all, the same old classic radio operator.
I had my speakers turned up to ‘death metal’ volume so I could take in the full vibration of Mr Bell’s voice pealing throughout my studio apartment. His rolling laugh. His astonished gasp. Or when Bell says, “Caller, you’re on.” Or the bafflement in his voice when he asked the theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, about how humanity might be scorched off the planet when a nearby star called WR 104 explodes and unleashes a gamma-ray burst.
As a longtime Coast to Coast fan, I still think the ideal time for Art Bell is 10pm-2am, as those hours hold a windy freewheeling magic that feels so appropriate for the subject matter. Because he doesn’t want to kill his creation, he didn’t want to compete with Coast directly. I remember I’d lay in bed back in the glory days of Coast to Coast, and listen to Bell orchestrate the most intriguing interviews I’d ever heard.
But, despite the earlier hour, Bell’s fans are rejoicing. Having the man on the airwaves at all, no matter what time, is a pleasure. Perhaps we’ll have a resurgence of the mystical late-90s era of Coast to Coast AM, when the show, according to the Herald-Tribune, hit its stride.
Coast to Coast AM’s current host, George Noory, has been described by Art Bell as being not ‘edgy enough’. Noory is not the radio interview artist that Bell is. I don’t know how many nights I’ve heard Noory derail a guest’s fascinating story by saying, with what seems like a mouth full of chewed peanuts, “Say, what caused you to get into this subject, anyway?”
And you can almost hear the millions of listeners shouting, “George! No! What about the rest of that story?”
So Art Bell is back on Sirius XM’s Indie channel. It’s a blessing. We’ll need him to help humanity navigate through its wacky growing pains in this rapidly unfolding 21st century.
On Halloween, I blast Art Bell’s show (past episodes)loudly out of the front of my house. It scares the crap out of the kids. I get zero trick or treaters.
If Art Bell could hear that he’d have a long, hearty laugh that would end in a series of scratchy cackles. “Caller, I like that,” he’d say.