Good Lord, I Found an Episode of Art Bell with Merle Haggard
This sounds like a parody of something I would post specifically. You’re completely right. Spiritually, I made it up. But it’s real somehow: I found an episode of Coast to Coast AM where Art Bell interviews Merle Haggard. And that undersells it. Merle sits in for the entire five hour broadcast.
Story goes like this. I’d been thinking about Merle Haggard a lot. Not as an artist, but as a local mascot, a window into what it felt like to grow up in the California Central Valley. A shorthand for how the region shapes a person.
To summarize, there’s an outsize sense of individualism that borders on being a brain disease. You have to do everything yourself. Not only is nobody going to help you, but they may be trying to sabotage you, so make sure you arm your perimeter. Any version of any government is a scam and you shouldn’t vote because it leaves a paper trail. The military is doing something unspeakably evil at Edwards Air Force Base. You’re always looking over your shoulder a little bit. You cannot trust another person ever, and that lack of trust will make you and break you at the same time. You don’t care about crime per se, but you know where the famous prisoners are and where the famous crimes happened. When you drive through Corcoran you think about Charles Manson. When you’re in Vallejo you think about the Zodiac. It occurs to you, even if you never do it, to stockpile water. You know way too much about the politics of water in general. The world is going to end very soon, and not the Christian way.
In other words, you’re the ideal Art Bell guest. You are the perfect combination of cynical, conspiratorial, and apocalyptic. One night I remembered Merle calling into Art Bell when I was a teenager, something about black helicopters. I started poking around to see if anybody archived it, then I almost immediately hit the jackpot.
Hold on a second. Nobody I know who is younger than me knows who Art Bell is. Art Bell is this: a late night talk radio host who talked about conspiracy theories and the supernatural in hypnotic hushed tones. He had lots of crackpots on, lots of radio theater, let you know he didn’t believe any of this stuff per se, just asking questions. It’s a kind of show that would become explicitly political, but we weren’t there quite yet. It actually was about aliens and ghosts and remote viewing and cryptozoology and really anything that can make you hallucinate in the desert. It was a show for people who had some conversational knowledge of electrical engineering or physics and really liked the movie Contact. If this reminds you of anybody working today, they’re ripping him off. Anyway.
Merle isn’t just interviewed on this episode. It’s not particularly important that he was one of the best songwriters who ever lived. He’s not a celebrity guest, he’s a straight-up second mic. He could have co-hosted this show. He could have filled in on weekends. Merle clearly listened to the show as much as I did (nightly).
He’s just an effortless Art Bell character. He covers everything. UFOs are real and he’s seen a couple. Aliens exist and they might be interdimensional beings or they might be from Europa. A 9/11-sized domestic terror attack is probably about to happen. All drugs should be legalized. The president is a pawn for unknown dark forces. We are all going to die. He even racks up some bonus points by talking too much about weird dietary supplements. It’s one of the best episodes of Art Bell I’ve ever heard, a trip back in time to a world where late night talk radio was good as hell. There’s unfortunately not a better word for this, but it makes you remember that late night radio is a lost art.