The Four-Hour Stan Bunger Farewell (Ego) Tour on KCBS Was Kind of Weird; Friday Open

IS IT OVER YET?

I MANAGED to hear almost three hours of the Stan Bunger 2021 Farewell (Ego) broadcast before enough was enough and left the blather patrol to write this and give you a review in case you weren't invited to the party. It was sort of like a wake without the body intact. I don't know where to start.

Bunger, who is retiring on KCBS after 20 years (there) was in perfect Stan-tone going back and forth with tributes from mostly people you've never heard of unless you worked in radio. Frankly, I'm surprised we didn't get many A-list guests to call in other than folks like Ted Robinson and Paula Drake, the latter, a Texas/SF anchor voice who spent almost eight minutes lauding Bunger as if he were The Pope. At least Robinson was cool and entertaining.

I would hope after the 8 AM hour things got a little more interesting. After all, when you have to rely on a Susan Leigh Taylor visit in studio for entertainment value, you've got trouble. Save for Willie Brown and Phil Matier (also in studio) it was a rather boring affair and that may have saved the day. KCBS put out the full yenta patrol; while Bunger did a forced newscast (why bother?) Holly Quan and Kim Wonderley volunteered to MC the proceedings. It was more a giggle-a-thon. I couldn't tell if I was listening to the news (allegedly) or witness to a low-brow cacklefest with occasional traffic and the usual 10,000 weather reports (Stan couldn't retire without his weather embellishments, as usual). It wasn't all oy-vay-ville as I thought it would be but it did get its predictable bouts of OMG's. Why Bunger had to play his own play-by-play broadcast (from 1978 when he was a high-scholl kid) was completely useless and not even corny funny. It did have a good use: it wiped out the 7: 15 sportscast of Joe Hughes, some obscure guy I've never heard of and just as well. Hughes has nothing to say, ever, and was about as useful on this show as an Eskimo pie on Alaska radio.

Bunger's farewell sounded disjointed. Dare I say, forced and contrived? I do. I was expecting more VIP and instead I got a sloppy CBS Radio business anchor, Jill Schlessinger falling over backwards to heap praise on Stan as if she were going on a date with Donnie Osmond in his prime. It was sort of (I hate this word, but it fits the crime scene: weird) I would have further gagged on hearing old news boss, Charlie Seraphin, but Seraphin was at least funny and besides, he hired me in 1982 at K-101.

On-air farewell shows are perfectly fine and dandy and Stan Bunger deserves his, nobody disputes that, even me. But a two-week tease? No. It's not funny or charming and it's detested by listeners and insiders alike. KCBS had an obligation to give Bunger his farewell, I get it, but it could have had a more powerfull, compelling, and most-important, memorable broadcast: a one-hour condensed broadcast (say, 8 AM) with celebrity call-ins, in-studio guests, some quickies from the mayor and sports teams, etc. But instead, we got the full EGOcast and it was basically dullsville.

Oh well. See ya Stan.