Had Beck joined most of his classmates at Bellingham High on college campuses, he might have been exposed to that era’s roiling campus political debates: the arms race, the Contras, apartheid. It’s possible Beck might have been politicized and started his talk radio career on a college station, as Sean Hannity did after living and working in Santa Barbara, Calif. Or maybe he’d just have smoked a lot of dope, listened to music, and majored in marketing.

Beck’s first stop as a high school graduate actually was a university town, but one almost completely devoid of confrontational politics.

In Seattle, Beck worked for one of several stations owned by First Media, a Mormon company based in Washington, D.C., and run by the hotel empire scion Dick Marriott. Among First Media’s growing portfolio of FM frequencies in 1982 was K 96, a small adult-contemporary station in Provo, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City.

Provo was not what the young disc jockey had in mind when he left Washington state. Provo might be the least fun city of its size in America. It hosts both Brigham Young University and Utah’s largest missionary training center. With its 90 percent Mormon population, the town would have been a disappointment for any ambitious teenage “Gentile,” as Mormons refer to non-members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, but Beck, not yet a religious conservative, was a partyer. He smoked pot and drank beer at home; he smoked clove cigarettes and drank coffee at work.

The K 96 studios offered no refuge from the surrounding Mormon culture. The station played religious music on Sundays and maintained a G-rated playlist. The Mormons who staffed the station openly objected to Beck’s coffee and cigarette habits. He happily returned fire. “The first day I went to the radio station, I pulled out a cigarette and everybody said, ‘Oh … I thought you were Mormon,'” Beck later wrote. “And I said, ‘Oh … I thought you were normal.'” Beck openly called his Mormon colleagues “freaks,” quickly souring relationships with everyone around him. Years later, Beck would politely tell the Salt Lake City Deseret News, “I lived in Provo for six months [and] didn’t fit in.”

The shining Mormon city may have been a young Gentile’s purgatory, but there was career logic to paying dues at K 96. First Media’s other properties included WPGC, a respected Top 40 AM/FM powerhouse serving greater Washington, D.C. The station had “blowtorch” power, defined as 50,000-watts or higher, and in 1983, was famous in the industry for being among the last of the big old-style Top 40 stations to resist format fragmentation. As niche formats became the norm, WPGC stayed relatively free-form and inclusive, a last bastion of rock ‘n’ roll, broadly defined, past and present.

When a job opened up at WPGC in February of 1983, Beck seized it. More than just an escape from Utah, the transfer was a professional leap forward. The station didn’t look like much — the cramped pre-digital studio was housed in a dingy building by the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — but the transmitter reached a large urban market, crisp and clear. Just as important, it was staffed by hip, ambitious young radio pros. There was even a tinge of celebrity glamour at the station. Among the members of the WPGC morning team was Joe Theismann, then an active All-Pro quarterback for the Washington Redskins, fresh off a Super Bowl victory.

Beck soon gained a reputation at PGC for three things: punctuality, a serious demeanor streaked with mordant wit, and a closet full of skinny ties. “Glenn had a very dark sense of humor. And he sort of lurked. You often got the sense that he was observing us, soaking everything up, trying to learn the craft of radio,” remembers Dave Foxx, a morning colleague of Beck’s. “He never talked politics back then. He even used to chide Theismann for his political rants, telling him, ‘Well, don’t sugarcoat it, Joe.'” Which isn’t to say the young Beck was mousey. “He was a brash, outspoken guy off the air,” remembers a former member of the WPGC news team. “He was always smoking these really funky-smelling foreign cigarettes.”

Beck often says that he ran with a “bad crew” during his time at WPGC. It’s a strange judgment, considering that the center of his social life in Washington was Claire, a pretty redhead from WPGC accounting who would become his wife and the mother of his first two children. The other major figure in Beck’s social circle was a hard-living young DJ named Bruce Kelly. Arriving at WPGC from Miami around the same time as Beck, Kelly also met his first wife at the station. The four frequently double-dated and would remain friends for years.

The close friendship between Beck and Kelly began during a massive blizzard on Valentine’s Day weekend. Both new to the station, they were the only two people working an overnight shift. To kill time, they passed joints back and forth in the office of the station president, a strict Mormon. Throughout the night, the two struggled to keep from laughing on air and warned drivers to be careful on the roads. “When the manager came in that morning she thought we were laughing out of exhaustion, but we were just really stoned,” says Kelly. “She told us to go home and get some sleep.”

Like Beck, Bruce Kelly was precocious. (And also like him, he was a partier who would clean up a decade later.) Unlike Beck, Kelly had already mastered both the art of the publicity stunt and the marketing side of the business. As a 20-year-old DJ in Virginia, Kelly had donned a white tuxedo and dived into a 20,000-gallon tank of Jell-O. During the late ’70s, he had flown on private jets, toured Europe with Led Zeppelin, and partied with Bob Marley. In short, he was Beck’s first hip radio friend. It was at Kelly’s side that Beck began his decade-long relationship with cocaine.

Kelly not only gave Beck his first lessons in marketing and publicity, he also saved his life. During a softball game in the spring of 1983, Beck and Kelly were passing joints under their gloves in the outfield, beers at their feet. When a fly ball cruised out toward Beck, he ran for it and slipped. Upon hitting the ground, Beck swallowed his tongue and started to choke. “I had to reach all the way back into his throat to pull his tongue out,” remembers Kelly. 

As their bond deepened, the two started thinking aloud about hitting the big time together. While cutting up lines in Beck’s D.C. apartment, the pair talked about teaming up to do a show. Fame. The big money. “Glenn clearly had it,” says Kelly. “I wanted to work with him and we started making plans.”

It was not to be. Before the end of 1983, Beck’s biggest booster within First Media, a rough-edged Mormon and former Marine named Jim Sumpter, became vice-president of the Malkan radio chain in Texas. Among Sumpter’s first moves was to lure Beck southwest with the promise of his own morning show at Corpus Christi’s KZFM, the city’s leading Top 40 station. It was here, in southern Texas between 1983 and 1985, that Glenn Beck fought his first ratings war. In the process, a new Glenn Beck was born. It was a person Bruce Kelly would not recognize when the two friends were reunited in Phoenix in 1987.

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Beck rolled into Texas in 1983 driving a blue two-seater Datsun 280Z sports coupe. On the bumper, a Reagan-Bush ’84 reelection sticker. At his side, his wife, Claire. And taking form in Beck’s mind, an invisible character named Clydie Clyde who would define the next 10 years of his career as a Top 40 morning DJ.

Beck’s arrival in Corpus Christi coincided with a sea change in morning radio. It was known as the morning zoo revolution, and it is the key to understanding Glenn Beck’s career, both in Top 40 radio and beyond. Before the X-rated in-studio antics of the shock jocks, there were the skit-writing shlock jocks of the zoo. In it purest form, the wacky, zany, fast-paced zoo formula consisted of an ensemble cast employing fake voices, loosely scripted skits, adolescent pranks, short topical rants, and spoof songs, backed by a Top 40 soundtrack and peppered with news and traffic reports. Beck was not a pioneer of zoo radio, but he was a member of the founding generation. The influence on his approach to broadcasting endures.

If the zoo revolution had a Lenin and Trotsky, they were Scott Shannon and Cleveland Wheeler. The formula as envisioned by the two Tampa Djs was a mash-up of “Saturday Night Live,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Gong Show” and outrageous talk radio. The idea was not completely original. During the late ’70s, the “Ross and Wilson” morning team on Atlanta’s WZGC had built a reputation by performing pranks and acting out skits between songs and news reports. But Shannon and Wheeler sped up and built on the “Ross and Wilson” template. In the weeks before their first show, the duo formed a high-energy ensemble cast of the funniest, most creative people in Tampa.

“I was broadcasting my sports show live at a bar, and Shannon came up to me and tells me I’m going to quit my job and work for him,” remembers Tedd Webb, a founding member of Shannon’s zoo crew. “When I balked, he doubled my salary on the spot and told me it was going to be something very hot.”

It was. Within four months of launching the Q-Zoo, Shannon and Wheeler owned every demographic in Tampa Bay. The show was a phenomenon: No. 1 across the board, it produced unheard-of numbers and became the most talked about development in radio. Within a year, the Q-Zoo was earning the biggest share of adult listeners of any station in the country. The success was so complete and unprecedented that the impact was global. DJs from Australia and Europe made pilgrimages to observe Shannon and Wheeler live in-studio and take notes. They returned to spawn copycat zoo shows back home.

It is appropriate that the zoo was born in the age of cocaine. The essence of successful zoo radio was speed and rapid-fire creativity, creating a nonstop on-air party. Even when DJs were talking, Top 40 hits were playing in the background. Zoo DJs, often fueled by that decade’s iconic powder, pushed morning radio from peppy to manic. “We’d be out all night partying, then go straight to the studio at dawn, cut up some lines and start brainstorming skits based on news clippings from the early edition,” remembers a veteran of Shannon and Wheeler’s zoo. “It was a blast, but you had to be fast and you had to perform. Sometimes we’d sketch out a four-hour show in 30 minutes on no sleep.”

Another part of zoo culture, also reflecting the ethos of the era, was the DJ as high-flying and hard-partying local celebrity. Promotional events featuring morning zoo teams grew extravagant as the ’80s progressed. Bloated salaries and gilded perks fed egos. By the early ’80s, it was common for morning DJs to appear at station events in full-stretch limousines.

The zoo revolution that transformed morning radio in the 1980s is key to understanding Beck’s present-day shtick. Many of the audio and visual tropes Beck employs today — the Muppet voices, the outrageous statements, the props, the stunts, the fawning and giggling supporting cast — can be traced to the zoo and post-zoo radio culture that sustained him professionally for years.

“You can see the influence in everything Beck does,” says zoo pioneer Scott Shannon, now boss jock at New York’s WPLJ and the official voice of “The Sean Hannity Show.” “The timing, the voices, the inflections, the whole approach — so much of it is from the old Top 40 morning style.”

Brian Wilson, one of Shannon’s original inspirations for the zoo idea, likewise notes Beck’s successful adaptation and carry-over from 1980s morning radio. “His performance in talk radio and television is full of hangover of basic Top 40 elements, formats and principles,” says Wilson, now a libertarian talk show host. “The sound drops, the effects, the ‘wackiness’ — he’s doing the same thing, only minus the music.”

“The first time I heard him do talk radio, I knew he was updating what Limbaugh did when he brought Top 40 tricks into talk,” says Barry Kaye, who competed against Beck in Corpus and Houston in the ’80s. “Everything he does is basically a morning show. He was always great at it.”