My first meeting with Jay Mackin was not in the flesh but rather in the PDX.FM/meebo chatbox during an episode of Portland Sucks, a few months before there even was a PDX.FM (if my memory is correct, this was sometime in late July of 2009 when we were still under the "Small Plate Radio" umbrella). I met him again the next day, then the next, then the next. He seemed a curious individual, content to spew some of the most tasteless one-liners while we were broadcasting, usually using a different username each day, sometimes 4 or 5 during the course of a given show. I assumed for a time that he was a lonely teenager on Summer vacation from middle school, until he won a contest on The Meat Show and Emily Gibson reported back that he was in fact an adult after meeting him to give him some movie passes to Zombieland.
I finally met Jay in person a few months later when he showed up to volunteer for Baconfest '09. On that morning he almost single-handedly set-up the entire event, or at least the PDX.FM part of it anyway, and I was left to scratch my head and wonder "who the hell is this guy?" and "what the hell does he want?"
A week or so later I received an envelope with some show demos in the mail. I rarely checked our mail at the time so apparently Jay was a bit anxious with anticipation because I took so long to get back to him. Jay told me that he had been a part of a nationally syndicated radio show that had broadcast out of Portland a few years ago (like I'd know? I don't listen to the radio) and, like all radio personalities, he eventually got the axe. I listened to his demo material, laughed, and the rest is history.
Last Tuesday I had to fire Jay from Morning Submission. I tried to accomplish this in true corporate radio form so that it wouldn't be a shock to him, which really just means that I didn't give him a chance to explain himself or beg or plead for whatever mercy I wasn't going to grant him. I put up a quick page on morningsubmission.com that announced that the show itself had been cancelled and that was that. Jay called at about 1:15 that afternoon wondering what the fuck was going on.
And then we talked. I asked Jay what he thought about doing his own show, his own way, for a full 30 minutes every day. He said "you know, I've always had this idea…"
Take a listen to the all-new and improved Unibash Radio. Weekday mornings from 9:30 to 10:00AM Pacific on PDX.FM. Think of it as the cheese in your daily trailer-park sandwich, tucked snug between the cheap white bread of Suck It™ at 8:30AM and Cort and Fatboy at 10:00AM.
