How Buck’s Big Showbiz Break Was Almost Silenced

BUCK: I was gonna tell you all a little story here because some of you may recall this listening to this show. The first time I ever was on the EIB about seven years ago I think it was now, I had the honor of being a guest host for Rush, and it’s just, there is no greater honor as a radio host, right? This is — it couldn’t be anything bigger, cooler, more important in your radio career; so to say I was super excited about it is an understatement. And I still remember, and may he rest in peace, a great man, Kit Carson calling me, Rush’s chief of staff, I get thought it was someone playing a joke on me. I’ve never had that in my life where I thought somebody was messing with me.

I actually thought it was someone pretending to be Kit Carson saying, you know, “Hi, Buck, would you like to fill in” I whoa, wait, what? So of course I said yes. I tried to be cool too about it, yes, I think that, and, you know, I was doing mental back flips. We get a couple of days out and this is why I’m thinking this, scratchy throat and feeling a lot off. We get a couple days out from the first ever fill-in I’m gonna do for Rush’s EIB here, and I have a little bit of a cold and I knew I figured I’ll be okay, you know, maybe I’m three or four days out, it will mostly be passed by then and I thought to myself, I don’t care. You know, what caffeine and Tylenol concoction I have, I’m gonna do a great job, gonna get through it. Get 48 hours out and I’m telling you, this is the truth. I have never had total laryngitis before in my life. I don’t mean my voice — you guys heard me do the show recently.

I mean, I, you know, had to get covid tested, I had a cold, I felt like crap, my voice was all messed up. So, I’ve done radio sick as sick can be many times. I did radio when I had covid ’cause I was doing it from home. So I’ve done radio sick many times. But when you have actually no voice, when all that’s coming out is this, no matter how much you push or try, that’s about the worst nightmare somebody who’s about to fill in on the biggest radio show in the country for the first time ever can possibly have. Because we all know, you can imagine you’re me, you’re young Buck and you get this opportunity and this was when I was working at The Blaze for Glenn Beck, and I’m thinking to myself, oh, this is amazing, right, this is a game-changer, I’m two days from it, what am I gonna say? Oh, I can’t fill in I have laryngitis? Yeah, that would, that’s gonna go over really well. Would say, oh, wow, cold — I’ll tell you this, you know, there are — I have my flaws like everybody else and I have my flaws in this business. Fear is not one of them. Right? Being nervous is not one of them. Never has been, never will be.

So, I mean, I want the ball, I’ll take the shot, I mean, hopefully I make it but I always want the ball, right? And that’s an important thing I think in life, winners want the ball, and you gotta take your shot. So, I remember thinking to myself, what the heck am I gonna do? You imagine you’re me, right? You’re going into — you’re going into what should be the sort of radio debut on the biggest platform. You have no voice. You cannot speak. And I don’t want to tell everybody this really ’cause I don’t want them to cancel on me, and my mom, God bless her, I mean my mom is a supermom. I mean, truly she should have a cape, she’s a supermom ’cause that’s when like there’s no hope and no one can fix anything I’m sure you all have people like this, mom is like the commando center of the Sexton family. So, like I call the command center. She can hear, I can’t talk, like I cannot allow this opportunity to — what do we do? And she got into the research and all the stuff.

We found in New York the morning of the fill-in ’cause I was like I’m just gonna show up and throw myself on the mercy of the EIB audience ’cause they’ll hear that I have no voice but at least then they’ll know I’m not a chicken! At least then they’ll know that, you know, I love and respect Rush and his audience and this is like being in — you know, this is like being invited to Valhalla like I’m showing up even if, you know, my sword is a little dull and my shield is cracked, you know? So I say I’m gonna go, and my mom figures out that that morning there is a doctor who specializes, specializes in opera singers who have to have vocal cord treatment of some kind, right. Or have to have something done because they’ve got a flu or the cold and they’ve gotta go on, the show must go on, you gotta go on stage, my mother reaches out, convinces this doctor to — she was actually on her way to her country home, okay, convinces her — and I still don’t even know how this conversation went. My mom’s very persuasive.

She goes, look. My son’s — I’m like, this is amazing that she’ll open her practice just for me in the morning, the morning of the fill-in at about 10 a.m. And you all know this show goes on at noon Eastern time. So I’m gonna see this doctor two hours before and basically tell her, you know, I don’t care if you have to turn me into Frankenstein but whatever you got, I know Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster. Everybody, you know what I mean, you know what I mean, okay? I don’t care what you have to put the bolts in my neck and, you know, electrocute my voice, I don’t care, I gotta do this show. She goes, all right. There’s only one there’s only one thing we can do. But you gotta understand something. It’s only gonna last about three hours. Like, wait a second. You gotta be kidding me. There’s only one thing we can do, it’s not gonna be perfect, and it’s basically going to fade over the course of me doing a three-hour radio program? She’s like, that’s it. That’s what we got.

So, she gave me a nice, big, old injection of cortisone ’cause she said your vocal cords are so swollen and inflamed not only will you be unable to do the show without this, but you could actually do real damage and scarring to your vocal cords if you try to push through this, so I’m glad I didn’t do that. I said, all right. So she gives me the shot. And so I sit down for the first time ever, 2014 EIB, and at the Golden Mic, and the whole time I’m trying to do the best show I can, and it was not my best show, but, you know, under the circumstances I was pretty proud of myself just for getting through. But the whole time I’m thinking, at any moment my voice could disappear. At any moment this could basically — ’cause it wasn’t a scratchy voice. It was whisper. It was no voice. And I will tell you the last 30 minutes of that show on this platform on the biggest radio show in the country my first time ever out, most of you — some of you heard that show, I’m sure, by the way, probably a pretty good number of you did.

The last 30 minutes I could actually feel my voice going and by the time I got home about 30 minutes after 3 Eastern time when the show ended, my voice was entirely gone. So we managed to get the vocal cords open for just the window on the EIB to do the show and thankfully was good enough but all of you are kind enough listening and the response from you was strong enough that then they had me back many, many times to fill in for Rush over the years. But that was about the most stressful live performance I ever had to do, and thank you, Mom. Merry Christmas, love you, the best. She, you know, it was amazing how it all worked out. But I guess that’s my way of saying, Christmas miracles are possible and the show must go on, friends, the show absolutely must go on.