1-On-1: with Beef Vegan

Roadrunners In-Game Host Beef Vegan joined Jonathon Schaffer and Kim Cota-Robles on this week’s Happy Hour Show. For the complete conversation and to hear what Beef thinks of mullets and mustaches, download this week’s show below. 

Listen to “BEEEEEEEF” on Spreaker.

You have your show called “Beef Vegan Presents,” give us listeners a little rundown of that and as an in-game host?

I do a thing that old people call radio, which is a podcast you could hear for free in the car and has music in it. I’ve been doing that down here in Tucson for about eight years, the entire run of being with the Roadrunners, because I started as an arena host at the tail end of the inaugural season, and then I’ve been with the team ever since. The reason why I wear 17 is that is the year that I started with the organization, 2017. I love the interaction with the fans, and I am most recognized inside the Tucson Arena, both for the radio show and the Tucson Roadrunners, and it feels great. I always love going to the arena and chatting it up with the staff and all the fans that come out for the games and being able to make sure that they’re having a good time. I genuinely enjoy helping people have a good time at these games and getting them introduced to hockey, and then just taking care of them. You might notice me doing this. Pretty much each and every game, if I’m interacting with somebody and it’s their first time and if I notice their seats are a little high up, I’ll grab them, I’ll pull them down as close to the ice as possible and see if there’s any kind of swag or giveaways that they could score to make sure that they leave there thinking they had one of the best nights of their life and can’t wait to go back. That’s been my secret mission of being the arena host for the Roadrunners these a few years.

How did you get into radio? How did you get in with the Roadrunners?

I got into radio in Phoenix, I answered a Craigslist ad and started on a nonprofit station, LPFM, which stands for low power. It was a radio station that nobody was listening to. You couldn’t get it beyond like a three-mile radius, but I looked at that as like my “in” to the industry because I had always wanted to do radio. So, when I started, I was a co-host for the morning show for a little bit and then the guy who brought me in had to step away to get a full-time job, because he had a wife and kids. I took over the show and I set it up in my living room, like Wayne’s World, the movie. Yeah. Then I did the show every day for free for seven and a half years and the first year and a half, like literally nobody was listening. I was working late at night doing my side gigs so I could pay my bills, waking up early in the morning and doing a radio show to an audience of none, with the prospect of trying to build it up and get better at the craft and eventually the ball started rolling. I started getting a lot of notoriety and garnering success amongst the community up in Phoenix through the radio show. Then eventually I got the opportunity to move down and get paid to do radio at KFMA when Shmonty hired me. He was the morning show host of the station, and Shmonty was the one who lobbied to be the arena host because he grew up on the East Coast. So, he was a rabid hockey fan and sports fan and he knew about the position of arena hosting for hockey and the importance of that and hockey teams always having an arena host to do Chuck a puck and intermission stuff. So, he lobbied and got the listeners behind him to get a petition going and an audition for the part of in-game host, and he got it. He was the most qualified person there, so he was working the games, and everything was good, but then his wife got a job in Washington, DC and he had to move away. When he moved, Mark Allison, our original game ops manager, met with me and realized that this is the kind of stuff I’ve been doing my whole life, arena hosting MCing. I’ve done this since I was like 12. He was like, “you’re going to be really good at this.” I said “yeah, no, I am really good at this.” So, he said OK and brought me in.

What was the moment when you knew that you wanted to do radio?

I have a story that I call the $100 story. Now, at this time I think I was pretty much committed, but I was at a fork in the road. So, I was hosting my own show for like a year and I wanted to see if anyone was listening. They say the “magic hour of radio” is between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM. That’s when the most people are listening because they’re on their way to work if they work at nine to five. So, I said at like 8:15 in the morning, “here’s the deal, I have a crisp, brand new $100 bill, and I will give this $100 bill away to the first person who calls this phone number,” and I threw out my phone number and I said, “not only that, but I will also drive to you and give you this $100 bill. All you have to do is call this number.”  Nobody called. So, it was surefire that I had 0 listeners. I’ve been doing this every day without a day off for a year, not getting paid to do it, it’s 8:15 in the morning, and my show technically doesn’t end until 10. So, I had to make a decision right then and there, do I just say screw it? I tried, but it didn’t work. Should I walk away or do I finish the show and continue to play music and do my bits all the way until 10 and try to get better and then do it again. So I decided to finish the show and that was my moment of the fork in the road, where you could say it’s over, it didn’t work or try harder, work harder and keep going. So, I just kept going, it took a while, but fast forward a year to that day, I’m getting recognized by the Phoenix New Times, I’m starting to get good guests, Tempe Improv started working with me, my podcast started blowing up. So, all these things started to happen, and it happened through persistence, a little bit of ignorance and a lot of bit of confidence. You have to be dumb enough to believe you can make it. I was dumb enough to think I can do this, all I have to do is just work harder than everyone else, and I did work harder. I still have goals that I aspire to be. Definitely for those who know me from back then, they’ll say I did it, and I mean, they’re not wrong, I got a big sign with my face. So, I did it, but, that moment will forever be with me. That was the moment when I had to make the decision if I was going to try to see this through or not. It worked out.

Do you pick the music you play on your show? It seems like your kind of music.  

Sort of, I like a lot of it, but I don’t pick any of it. I picked all the music on my show in Phoenix and that was more my vibe. It was more indie, but that was more hip like 10 years ago as well. I mean, I grew up with all these bands for sure, but I also grew up liking west coast rap and hip hop, so my musical tastes are all over the board, I tend to gravitate towards new stuff and I don’t necessarily thoroughly enjoy the older classics because it’s old to me. Like Pearl Jam, I love Pearl Jam, I’ve seen Pearl Jam live a bunch of times. I don’t listen to Pearl Jam in my free time. I’m always listening for new stuff, new artists and something that would get me excited. But the playlist is all scientifically picked and through surveys to see which songs test the best, and then they only put the safest songs in my playlist. So, it gets a little repetitive, but that’s what people want to hear and the 15 minutes that they’re going to be listening to the radio on the way to work, they want to hear something they’re familiar with they want to laugh, and they don’t want to be inundated by too many commercials. That’s kind of like the science of morning drive radio that I’ve come to figure out. Honestly, through these eight years, because I came in here knowing a lot, but knowing nothing about how the business worked, I knew how to be a broadcaster, but I didn’t know the business end.