Cover Story: Jimmy Baron grows up

Remember the "M*A*S*H" episode where a young soldier startles Winchester by leaping off the operating table and saying, "He made me do it"?
Remember him?
If you've got that kind of memory, you might also remember the scene in the movie Risky Business where Tom Cruise is being interviewed by a Princeton admissions officer while a party rages around them in his house. There's a knock at the window behind Cruise, and the moon face of a boy with dark, arched eyebrows vaguely reminiscent of Eddie Munster floats against the pane for about 30 seconds. "Hey," Cruise says, "this is my cousin Rueben from Skokie. Can you get him in?"
While we're playing obscure movie trivia, we might as well dig up a scene from The Sure Thing (another '80s teen flick) where the limo driver gets one line: "He drove 3,000 miles just to get laid. I have to respect that."
If you remember the limo driver — which, like the soldier and the kid, you probably don't — you might remember that he looked very authentic, comfortable, even. That's because he was a real limo driver. And, before that, he was a kid from Skokie, Ill.
That was Jimmy Baron, as 99X listeners have known him since 1993, or James Baron, as it's written in his 1979 senior yearbook from Niles West High School in the Chicago suburbs. The name is printed next to a handsome, inscrutable face that doesn't immediately remind one of the face that appears on 99X billboards advertising "The Morning X."
Baron will celebrate his 39th birthday Nov. 13. It's an unfortunate but inevitable development for someone who's made a career out of being a kid.
Kids worry a lot about being liked. They do things to get attention, often resulting in exactly the kind of attention they don't want. But any kind of attention is better than none. Some people never outgrow the need for the spotlight. Without them, there would be no entertainment industry.
"I think people are attracted to professions like acting or being in radio because they want attention," says Baron, whose Woody Allen-like neuroses, absolutist opinions and provocative productions bring plenty of attention to "The Morning X."
"The Morning X" was one of five nominees for best morning show on the nationally televised Radio Music Awards last week. Earlier this year, Radio and Records, a national industry magazine, picked "The Morning X" as best personality morning show for 2000, and just last month CL's own readers and critics tapped "Morning X" as the best morning drive-time radio show in Atlanta. The show's ratings hit their highest mark ever in August, four points behind urban powerhouse V-103, in its target 18- to 34-year-old demographic.
For Baron, producer of "The Morning X," it's a watershed year. Thirty-nine hovers just under the chronological Great Divide of the American culture — and just above the upper edge of 99X's target demographic. Despite the growing generational gulf, it's Baron's job to figure out what an 18- to 34-year-old would get excited about between the hours of 5:30 and 10 a.m. He works hard at it.
After Baron and co-hosts Leslie Fram and Steve Barnes get off the air, Baron sticks around until about 5 p.m. trying to take the "alternative rock" audience's pulse. He watches television, reads magazines and newspapers, and chats with a cadre of twentysomethings who staff 99X's offices on Piedmont Road near the Buckhead Loop. It was Baron who had himself shipped in a box to Dallas, Texas, in 1995 and it was Baron who, earlier this year, put together the biggest promo in the station's history: an Atlanta version of the immensely popular television show, "Survivor." "The Morning X" culled 10 listeners, stuck them in a hotel room for 24 hours a day, 10 days in a row, and let them eliminate each other. The prize of $10,000 went to the last one left.
If he seems to have a bead on exactly what his audience is thinking, it may be because he doesn't feel much older than them. In fact, he says, most of the time he feels like he's 12. That would be in tune with his 99X character, the Irritant ("I have never called myself that," he says. "That was only used once, by Barnes, and it stuck.").
But, Jimmy Baron is growing up. If you wait long enough, that's what happens. One sign of that was buying a three-bedroom house in Brookhaven in 1995. It seemed like a much too permanent thing to do at the time, but, with encouragement from his dad, he bought it.
"And now it feels almost too small for me," he says, sitting in an overstuffed chair in his living room. His shoes are on. His shirt is tucked in. When he got home that day, swinging into the driveway in a white Jeep Cherokee, he opened the door and apologized that the maid hadn't come by. If he hadn't said it, no one would ever have known. Everything looks orderly.
"I just can't stand it when things pile up," he says, taking the four cooking pots stacked neatly in the sink, one at a time, and rinsing them meticulously before putting them in the dishwasher. He opens the freezer, slam-packed with Healthy Choice frozen dinners, and pops one in the microwave. He apologizes for eating, but then he doesn't eat, adjourning, instead, to the living room.
Baron, who just that morning posited on the air that women with tattoos are more promiscuous than their unadorned counterparts and then shut down every caller who disagreed with him ("You're wrong. My cousin has tattoos, and I know that she's not," said one hapless would-be defender of virtue. "Your cousin's putting out," Baron replied knowingly.), is nervous. Understandably. The writer, he says, is only about the tenth person who's been in his home since he bought it five years ago. He's just not the type of person to invite people into his space. But, gamely, he goes on.
He went to Hollywood when he was 17. He'd just graduated high school, and he couldn't see himself sitting in school for four more years. He wanted to be an actor.
"We were the butch guys in drama in high school," says Bob Levy, a former executive at NBC and Baron's most long-term friend. (When this is relayed to Baron, he says "Great. Way to go, Levy. Jesus Christ. 'Butch?' He said 'butch?' He's making it sound like we were ... Look, we were the straight guys in drama, that's what he means.")
"I don't remember the specific evening," says Levy. "I just remember that it was the summer of '79, and we were all getting ready to go off to college like good Jews in the suburbs. I was going to Brown and Jimmy was going to Syracuse, and Jimmy looked at me and said, 'I'm not going. I'm going to Hollywood.' To me that was completely unacceptable. You went to college. Not going did not happen in that world. I was completely shocked, but I completely respected his maturity. I was in awe that he knew what he wanted to do."
Baron's high school Spanish teacher, Roger Stein, now the principal at Niles West, says he understood Baron's decision. He describes him as a kid whom everyone liked.
"But he wasn't a student," Stein says. "Not everyone should go to college. He knew what he wanted to do. He really bucked the system."
Baron took the $2,000 he'd saved from working at a pizza parlor and put it all into traveler's checks. He got an apartment where he lived alone in L.A. At first, he drove a taxi. Later, he became the taxi dispatcher, prepping his voice for the screen roles he hoped would come his way. Then, he drove a limo. He didn't know his way around, relying instead on The Thomas Guide, the Angelenos' where-the-hell-am-I Bible. Levy remembers that Baron would surreptitiously refer to it while reassuring passengers that he knew the streets like the back of his hand.
After years of doggedly taking up space in the crowds of extras that clump along the blurry margins of the screen, he landed the "M*A*S*H" scene. Then, there was an episode as a friend of one of the girls on "The Facts of Life."
"He could never really make a living at acting," says Levy. "He was always driving a taxi or limo."
Baron persevered for nearly a decade. Finally, he says, "I was getting too old to do the kid roles." If the realization tore him apart, even Levy didn't know.
"It must have hurt a lot to let go of the dream he'd taken such a big risk on," Levy says. "But if it did, he didn't act as if it did."
Baron would sometimes sit in on a friend's radio shift. In radio, he realized, the baby face wasn't necessary. He got a job at a station in Simi Valley that was broadcast out of a private home.
"I have to hand it to him," says Baron of that first radio employer, smiling. "For working out of his house, he had excellent equipment for that time and he ran a side business, too."
Baron's smile breaks into a messy, crunchy laugh that has become a virtual prop on "The Morning X." "There was always this big pile of weed on the kitchen table."
He left to take a job at a real station in Ventura. He was, as the bits of tape he plays occasionally on 99X prove, awful. Horrible. Not funny.
But Jeff McMurray, who was his boss, liked the fact that Baron would work the shifts no one else wanted. He had a hunch that his young protégé just needed another person in the booth with him. McMurray became Baron's on-air buddy. Although Baron says that helped, the tapes tell a different story: He still was abysmal.
Example: During one segment, he reads, or rather, tries to read, a story about New York City's worst taxi driver. Obviously, this is something Baron knew a thing or two about; the private joke is painfully apparent as he completely breaks down in helpless giggles that leave McMurray non-plussed.
Yet Baron snagged a job with a station in San Diego in 1990 and another with the legendary "Loop," WLUP-AM in Chicago, in 1992. What happened that propelled that goofy kid into the big leagues?
"Honestly, the longer you do it, the better you get," says Mara Davis, the queen of Z93's popular "Out to Lunch" and an admitted fan of Baron's. "I can't stand to listen to my tapes from just five years ago. It does make it easier if you have someone to work off of, but really, it's just that you get better with time."
Baron has gotten so much better that Davis says he's the only reason she ever listens to "The Morning X."
"He's almost too good for the show," she says. "He works his ass off. You can tell he gets there early and leaves late because he puts so much into it."
It was his willingness to work and his ambition to work with a "great" that got him the job at WLUP. Once there, however, things did not pan out. Jonathan Brandmeier, who was to Chicago what Howard Stern is to New York, wasn't what Baron expected.
"It had been a dream to be able to go home to Chicago for a cool radio job," he says. "But I got there and this legendary guy was an asshole. I learned a lot about how not to treat employees from him. I know what it's like to be screamed at and have tapes thrown at your head."
Brandmeier — who admits that he screams and throws tapes at employees — has a different recollection of Baron's time at the station. He says he fired Baron after a brief stay.
"The first week he was here, he was asking interns to go get him lunch," says Brandmeier. "And that was not their job. He's the kind of guy who likes to drive with the top down. He's a show guy."
Brandmeier says another employee overheard Baron saying, "The Big Guy's not going to like this," while trying to persuade someone to be a guest on the show.
"I didn't like that," says Brandmeier. "I'm not 'the Big Guy' and I don't want people to think of me that way. You know, as celebrities go, radio people are really pretty low on the food chain. We're not movie stars."
Baron categorically denies that he's ever asked an intern to get his lunch or that he tried to promote himself as a big shot.
After leaving WLUP, Baron got a contract with another Chicago radio station, this time as producer for a show with Minneapolis radio personality Steve Cochran. But after the deal was struck, the station's management informed them that the format had changed: They would have to do sports. Cochran and Baron balked and sat on their contracts until they expired.
"I sat there for three months reading magazines," Baron says.
Finally, Cochran interviewed at 99X and mentioned that he knew this great producer in Chicago. He raved about Baron. Cochran was offered the job but turned it down, he says, because the money wasn't right. Baron agreed to join the fledgling station in 1993.
"I liked him immediately," says Fram, the station's program director. "We hit it off."
He was hired to produce the morning show with Fram and Sean Demery. Demery later flipped to a different shift and was replaced by Steve Barnes.
Baron became the provocateur, scraping raw nerves first thing in the morning with topics like trailer-park women, women who smoke, the stupidity of meeting someone in a bar, the significance of being invited in at the end of a date and other youthful curiosities. He's created acrimonious confrontations between unwitting guests (Remember the saga of "Harry," the guy who had a girlfriend and was getting laid all over the city until Baron busted him by patching him through to one of his conquests while his heretofore unsuspecting girlfriend listened in?), and he's reminded people like Jane Fonda of stuff they'd rather forget (her days as Hanoi Jane).
In August of this year, he earned the ire of some gay listeners and a quote in Southern Voice newspaper when he said he didn't agree with Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher's decision to have a baby. The on-air conversation was about the lesbian couple's decision to split up.
"Jimmy is a person who I constantly have concerns about because of his continuing anti-gay remarks," says Kevin McClelland of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "He obviously speaks from a lack of education and a lack of contact. At least once a month, I get a call in the office from someone saying, 'Turn on your radio, here he goes again.'"
Ken Reagan, a member of Northlake Association for Gays and Straights notes, however, that Baron apologized for his remarks and seemed genuinely sorry.
It wasn't the first time Baron has apologized for something he said on the air. He also apologizes copiously in person. In one hour-long interview with CL, he apologized more than a dozen times. The next day, in another interview, he said he was sorry several more times. And the apologia has continued. On deadline day for this story, he apologized again — this time wondering if something he'd said had made the writer dislike him.
"He doesn't let a lot of people in. I think he has a hard time opening up," says Jonathan Silver, one of Baron's best friends. "Sometimes, I say things that he reacts to and I have to say 'Dude, lighten up, it's a joke.'"
Silver introduced himself to Baron after Baron described, on air, a woman he'd gone out with, and Silver thought the description fit someone he'd just stopped dating. It was, in fact, the same girl.
Now they play golf and talk golf. Silver likes to talk about relationships, but Baron, he says, doesn't talk about the details of relationships as easily, preferring instead to talk about girls with a little distance between himself and the subject.
Silver recalls accompanying Jimmy to one of 99X's Chinese New Year shows that coincided with Valentine's Day a couple of years ago. "I remember thinking 'Here we are, a couple of schmucks without dates on Valentine's Day, but he's a local celebrity, and we're at this great show. ... What's wrong with this picture?'"
Silver then answers his own question. The schedule that Baron and other morning show personalities keep is brutal. Baron himself says that he has very little energy in the evenings, something that has wreaked havoc with women who wanted to go out and do things and be more like "normal" couples. There was someone, up until several months ago, who managed to hang in despite the crazy hours and the fans who feel it's OK to interrupt a private dinner at a restaurant to say hello to him. But the show needed Baron to sink even more time and creativity into it at the same time that the relationship needed to be taken to a deeper level. Baron let go of the relationship. Life works that way and no matter how philosophical anyone tries to be about it, when a person loses an important relationship, it's traumatic.
"I can tell you that in that situation, a woman has to be extra supportive and it's easy for her to be a burden," says Silver. "But she was definitely not a burden. He cared about her and respected her and it was tough on him."
Baron is fiercely adamant about protecting his former companion's privacy. He flatly said all interviews were off if she was going to be exposed to scrutiny in this story. She is not a celebrity, not a musician, not some glitzy girl who was ever a guest on "The Morning X." Her name wouldn't ring any bells with the general public, but it makes Baron flinch.
The truth about Baron in this area of his life is in stark contrast to the image he is expected to project on "The Morning X."
"I'm married, and Barnes is married," says Fram. "That leaves Jimmy to represent single people. It's his job to pant over the female guests and people see him that way, but it's not really the way he is."
That role has gotten Baron a lot of attention, but most of it hasn't been the kind he wants. It has contributed to nasty, anonymous chat-room rumors that Baron hit upon this girl or ogled that one's cleavage. He's puzzled but not surprised. He's been getting hate mail for six years. He wonders who these people think he is.
"Right now, I'm dating and I'm meeting people but I do admit I sometimes question whether my standards are ridiculous, or I'm looking for things that don't exist or whether or not I'm just any good at being in relationships," Baron writes in an e-mail. "If there's one big area of self-doubt that I have it's in the relationship department. In theory, I love being in them, but in reality, they often seem like way too much work and require an extraordinary amount of compromise. I'm working on improving those skills — and I do think I've improved — but it doesn't get any easier the older you get."
In 1995, Baron drove around I-285 naked. It was a stunt for the station. He says he doesn't think he'd do that now. He's become more religious and sometimes attends Orthodox synagogue Congregation Beth Jacob, although he's not so observant that he doesn't play golf on Saturday.
"I was with Levy in California not long ago, and we saw these little old Jewish men playing golf and putzing around and Levy says, 'Can you imagine being like that?' and I thought, 'Well, yes.'"
stephanie.ramage@creativeloafing.com