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The Magliozzi brothers reu uO
Public
Rad'l1o
Naliyayl
wtlh "Car TaLk"
Hh3ii.-'r' Yt;f
}ii'
"iril
from Connecticut has this problem with
his'85 HondaAccord. For help he has cal1ed
ave
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of Car Ta1k, the
most unlikely hit on National Public Radio. Dave
explains that the Honda's wheels "make a rhlthmic
sor.rnd sirnilar to the squeaking of brakes."
TOM AND RAY IN I-INISON:
Eee-eee-eee-eee-
eee-eee-eee.
DAVE: it's higher pitched than that,
TOM: Wait till I adjust my jockey shorts.
RAY Your brake pads are wearing out. Ifyou were a
dolphin you would understand the sound to mear-r
'Replace me, replace me.' If you don't the ne>.t sound
you hear
TOM:
waflet.
-
- will be the sound of $100
leaving your
Sure, 'Car Talk' appears to be a show about
automobile repair. In actuality, Car Talk is a
meditation on the relationship between man and
machine; it's a way to confront our helplessness in the
face of technology; it's an explosion of the m),th that
Americans worship cars. It's Cars and Catharsis. And
the reason CarTaLk.ttarscends the advice-show genre
is that at the wheel are Tom and Ray }i{aglrczzi
[pronounced "mal-i-OT:zee"], a pair olMlllgraduate
brothers from East Cambridge with accents thicker
than the sludge in Boston Harbor This is the age of
camp sendups of popular culture, and the Magliozzis
themselves seem to find the idea that they host a carrepair call-in show lairly absurd. ("You've endured
another hour of CarTalk" is a frequent sign-offl But
try
as
they might, they can't hide the fact that they
are more nice guys than wise guyq or that they have
logged more time under the hood than behind the
microphone.
The brothers have been dispensing advice from what
they call Car Talk P1aza, actually the decidedly lowrent studios of public radio station \AEUR-FM, since
1976. Often calling themselves the tppet brothers
automotive humor for the noise a malfirnctioning
-valve makes they have been, until recendy, 1oca1
cult ffgures. In the early Eightieg the station manage4
Jane Christo, thought that with Car Talk she had a
program all America was begging for Not begging for
it, she discovered, were the executives at NPR. "lt
was hard," she says. "l'd say, I've got this great show.
It's a couple of italian brothers talking about car repair."
Ftnal1y, Car
Talk
was saved
by the Garrison Keillor
phenomenon. Back in the Seventies, Minnesota
Public Radio tried to persuade NPR to distribute an
offbeat variety show ca11ed A Prairie Home
The Tappet brothers, Tom (left) and Ray Magliozzi, in the Good News Garage
Companion, hosted by a guy named Garrison Keil1or.
The NPR executives listened to the demo tape and
concluded such an offering would never catch on
outside of the Midwest. So the Minnesota station
became part of a new netrvor( and National PubLic
Radio has been lookhg for the nert Garrison Keillor
station managers had to be convinced that these two
brothers talking about cars was the greatest thing
since Lake Wobegon. Says Car Talk producer Doug
Berman, "The stations said,'Yeah, wel1, we've got the
Pittsburgh Symphony on the air right now, and if
they ever go out of businesg we'11 get back to you."'
Car
ever silce.
Tall debuted on 25 stations; withilr
a year
it was
on 150 stations, and six months later 210 stations.
In 1986, NPR was creating a new Sunday-moming
show for host Susan Stamberg when a tape sent by
the persistent Christo made its way to some
producers. Among them was Jay Kemig then the
executive producer of weekend programming, who is
now with CBS's This Moming.
I actually deserve
enorrnous credit." When he heard the sample tape,
he says his immediate response was "Let's not make
anotler Garrison Keillor-type mistake. Let's put the
car guys on with Stamberg." He adds that he had
another stroke ofgenius: "One ofmy great decisions
was 'Don't mess with it. Just put it on the air and
don't ruin it."' He is not surprised by Car Thlk's
success. "lt's a per{ect public radio offering," he says.
"lt has wig intelLigence and usefirlness. On that first
tape, there was a question, and one of the guys
answered, 'lt's time to change the fuzzy dice.' That is
the existential answer to most of our problems."
that Car Talk is a success. But
a 1980
is Jan
calling from Ithaca, NewYork. I have
AMC Concord wagon"
RAY Already I know one problen you have.
The Brotlers spent almost a year being the car guys
on the Stamberg show, Weekend Edition; then, in
October 1987, NPR agreed to take a one-hour
version of Car Talk national. Now hundreds of
By Emily Joffe from Rolling Stone, 1l/16/89. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1992.
information
but as an afis and
performance
broadcast. "lt's our most popular arts program,'r says
According to Kemis,'A 1ot of people take credit now
"Hi. This
The show is now approaching saturation on the NPR
network with 237 stations and has an estimated
750,000 listeners. in the strange world of public
broadcasting Car Talk is classiffed not as news and
A11
NPR's director of program marketing, LesLie Peters.
'A lot of listeners don't even own cars. Even our
classical stations are picking it up, though Mvaldi and
Car Talk don't seem to go together. Like most hit
thingg it's just a phenomenon. It's driving the sales of
our arts and performance package."
As successful as Car Talk has been, it has also
backlred in a few places For instancE the entire
South Carolina Educational Radio Network seceded
from CarThlk. "The show only ran for a few months,"
says Shari Hutchinson, network deputy director.
"Listeners who were interested in a car show found
the people who did it very condescending and
obnoxious. Maybe the problem was our listeners
didn't get their sense of humor." But the Magliozzi
brotlers have been given another chance: The show
was reinstated in South Carolina in October
Something r.mfortunate happened to the '84 Mazda
GLC owned by John of Pot Neches, Texas. "l was
driving ig and the front end was hit pretty hard by a
road barrier."
TOM: Wai! wait, wait. \t/hat do you mean, 'It was
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission
MOTORMOUTHS
hit?' You hit the road barier. Call a spade a spade.
JOHN: I didn't realiy have it a1l repaired, but I had
front end realigned and new tires put on, and now
when I go over fifty-five, the car shakes violently.
t-he
something they loved and so opened Hacker's
Haven. The idea was that for a fee, they would
provide tools and space for skil1ed amateurs like
themselves to repair their own cars. The problem
was that the customers would come in and
disassemble their cars for two hourg at the end of
which they would come up to Tom or Ray and say,
"Can you show me how to fix this?"
RAY
You Texans are used to the John Wayne
philosophy just tie a tourrfquet on i! and you're
In due course, the brothers were no longer amateurs.
They renamed the business the Good News Garage,
got rid of the do-it-yourselfers, hired some other
all set. You didn't have the tires balanced properly.
professionals and found they had become mechanics.
TOM: You also need to thoroughly check out your
front end. There's a lesson here. If the car is in good
shape, then
the person working on it feels
an
obligation to be careful and do a good iob. \Atren you
show up with a heap, as you did, they don't care,
because they figure you don't care about your caq
either
The 'Car Talk' callers who get on the air are screened
in advance;Tom and Ray are not. About 2500 cal1s a
month are logged on the show's answering machines,
and an equal number of letters come in describing
tales of automotive woe. From these, producer
Berman lines up about a dozen callers for the
Sunday-night taping. (Berman advises letter writers
not to include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
"Tom peels off the stamps and uses them to pay his
bills," he says.J Ber:rnan looks for geographic diversity,
an equal male-to-female ratio and a range of
problems. The brothers' prebroadcast preparation
seems to consist of showing up. To keep Car Talk
spontaneous, they are given no information on the
questions they
will be asked. A crucial pat of the
show is known officially as the R and R segrnent.
This stands for Rant and Rave, and during it one or
both brothers take offon topics near and dear to their
spleen, topics often having nothing to do with cars.
[Sample from Tom: 'lMe were discussing what has
happened to to the world as we know it today, and
the two problems are the proliferation of lawyers and
finance people. Both of whom give people the
feeling that you can make money doing nothing.")
The Magliozzi brothers did not intend to become
radio phenomenons, nor did they intend to become
automobile mechanics. Then again, long-term
planning does not characterize their approach to life.
The sons of a home-heating oil executive and a
housewife, Tom, 52, and Ray, 40, both attended MIT.
This fact has colored their recent success
at 1east,
as they tel1ig in the eyes of their mother "My mother
keeps saying, '\A4-rere did I go wrong?"' says Tom.
"'Everyone else is making high-tech stufi my sons are
on the radiq making fools of themselves."'
But again Tom became itchy. "You had to show up
every day, work all day and hurt yourse[" he says. He
1eft the garage to Ray, went on to pursue a PhD in
marketing and now teaches business at Suffolk
University. Ray is content. "I enjoy the garage
and
I rvouldn't know what else to do," he says.
Jean
from Austin, Texaq is not happy with her '82
won't keep the right time, and
Cadi11ac. The clock
the radio keeps switching from FM to
I
AM.
ought to
te11
ertinguisher down the hood."
RAY Jean, buy
a
glue-on digital clock and get yourself
aWalkman.
After a recent taping the brothers go for dfurner at
one of their favorite Chinese restaurants with
producer Doug Berman and a couple of staff
members. "We should just order our regular
the
waiter can tel1 what that is by looking at our shirts,"
says Ray. Berman scans the menu, then asla, "Have
you ever had the Chinese leeks?" Ray raises an
eyebrow. "Yeah," he replieq "that's what I was having
a minute ago when I excused myself from the table."
Although on the radio the brothers blend into a
uniffed front of snappy asides and maniacal laughte4,
it shordy becomes clear tl'rat they have tapped
different aspects oftheir gene poo1. Tom is the cynig
given to sweeping pronouncements; if he cou1d, he
would tum the whole show into an hour of Rant and
Rave. Ray is the voice of reason, the calming
influence; Berrr-ran counts on him to remember to
take the nert call. At dinne4 apropos of nothing, Tom
announces, "\A4rat we need is a philosopher-king. I
nominate myself" Ray respon&, "They made the last
guy who had that job drink hemlock."
A
discussion of fe11ow mechanics reveals their
different worldviews "Mechanics have a bad image
because they're covered with grease and they've got
tattoos that say FUCK YOU, and MOTHER," says
Ray. "They look like stereotypical s1eazeba11s."
"Because they are," responds Tom.
After graduation, Tom played it straight for about
"I attribute more mistakes to stupidity,"
twelve years, working
don't
marketing and engineering
executive for a manufacturing company, until one
day in 197 t he dediced he'd had enough. He quit his
job and started hanging around Harvard Square with
no plans to do anlthing e1se. Ray, who had served as
Antonio, was by that time
an unsatisfied junior-high school teacher in Vermont.
He took it upon bjmself to rescue his older brother
["From my happiness," as Tom puts it].
a
MSTA volunteer in
as a
San
The two had been tbkerers since childhood, with
special affinity
for cars. They decided to
a
do
She adds,
you this. One day the car
started smoking, and I shot a chem.ical fire
"Maybe
tlink
says
Ray. "I
people are getting ripped off so much
as
the people who are working on the cars don't
understand what they're doing."
This doesn't convince Tom. "Every time someone
does an investigative report on car mechanicg they
find mechanics rip them off" he says. "They are
sleazeba11s."
Then again, car owners often bring their misery on
themselves. One guaranteed way to amuse the
brothers is to reveal that you possess an AMC of any
model or year. "Nerds used to drive AMCq" Tom
says. "Now thatAMCs are gone, it has left a gaping
hole in nerd-dom." Another is having a friend work
on one's car. To a ca11er with transmission trouble
who said a friend worked on the ca4 Ray once said,
"Oh, a friend. Does this guy install nrgs on weekends
and thought he'd like to get into transmissions?"
Tom's advice on the subject of mechanical friends is
to remembe4, "This is your lifel" They are also
astounded by the dangers people will risk to in order
to put offthat trip to the mechanic. "So many people
call in and say they have horrible vibrations," says
Tom. "You ask for how 1ong, and they say six months.
Their wheels could drop off" Adds Ray, "The typical
NPR listener is not impetuous. They like to conduct
a survey fust and call twenty people before they
conclude their wheel can fal1 of[" But to really get
the brothers going on the irrationality of car ownerq
just ask what's in their driveways. "I orm a Dodge
pickup," says Ray. "\A4ren I was in Texas, everyone
had one. So I always wanted one, even though I have
nothing to haul around and it only seats three and i
have four in my family. Got anl,thing you want
moved?" Tom's 1974 Cher,y Caprice is the subject of
much discussion on the show. Regular spore counts
are taken from the car's interiol, and the progress of
the family of raccoons hving in the back seat is
monitored closely. "l had a Toyota oncg but it was
too reliablg" says Tom. "With my '74 Cher,y, I never
know if it will get there. If I do, it's a cause for
celebration."
Susan from Washington, D.C., has a Job-like tale
conceming the thousands she has sunk into her '81
Olds Delta BB. Now the dealer is telling her she
needs a new carburetor and new kingpins.
TOM: Your car doesn't have kingping that's how
bad your luck isl You don't even have them, and they
have to be replacedl
It's a Monday moming at the Good News Garage in
Cambridge. \A/hile the glamour of show business is
close to none)ristent at the \4tsUR studios, it is
completely absent here. Yet the garage is remarkably
clean and airy and Ray, dressed in dark-blue work
clotheq sings along to the radio. Up to his elbows in
car innards, he seems utterly comfortable. There are
nine cars awaiting attention, everything from a WV
Bug to a Cadillac. It takes about three weels to get
an appointment at Good News. While the show does
draw customers, the business has been successful for
a long time. Ray's celebrityhood, in facg has made it
harder for him to eam his Living
callers track him
dor,rn from around the country to ask for free advice.
A doctor drives in with her ailingVolvo and te1ls Ray
to do whatever he has to do. "My husband found
these guys when he was a student here eight years
ago, and he's loved them ever since," says the doctor,
Linda Emmanuel. "They do great work. They're
honest. That's like go1d." Ray listeng embanassed.
"We paid her off" he says.
The brothers have recently branched out from
to writing a nationally syndicated
newspaper column. Under discussion are car-repair
videos and other projects. Does Ray ever think of
broadcasting
putting down the wrench for good? "This is my
livelihood," he says, looking around t1le garage.
"Sooner or 1ate4 the show will end. And the way we
do it, it may be sooner. But I know when I come in
in the moming, there will always be cars to ffx."