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Tommy Smith's Reckoning

With a career spanning 40 years, The Buzz radio host holds on to sobriety

Tommy Smith has battled his own vices over his 40 years in radio. Once fueled by booze and drugs, he is now clean and sober.
Tommy Smith has battled his own vices over his 40 years in radio. Once fueled by booze and drugs, he is now clean and sober.

Tommy Smith wants to know what your vice is.

It’s not an odd request, given his history in Little Rock radio, one steeped in his own vices — mostly off the air, but a share of them (usually) broadcast, to the delight of his listeners. He’s had some laughs at other people’s expense, told some jokes of dubious taste, presented objectifying babe rankings, talked smack about politicians and personalities with whom he didn’t see eye to eye. After all, Smith was a pioneer in the state for shock-jock radio, and while he may never have quite equaled the bleep-worthy antics of Howard Stern, an acknowledged influence, he pushed boundaries few others in this market had the nerve to approach.

And for most of his 40-year career in radio, Smith approached those boundaries while bolstered by booze and drugs. From his earliest days at legendary rock station KMJX-FM, Magic 105, through his first stretch on The Show With No Name on KABZ-FM, 103.7 The Buzz, Smith had an uneasy relationship with sobriety.

That’s not an unfamiliar plotline for anyone who’s watched a Lifetime movie special, and sure, this story has a happy ending. But it’s not about soft focus and fuzzy, feel-good moralizing. Nope. This is about how Tommy Smith did his damnedest to sabotage his career, lied to those who loved him most and rode his addiction all the way to ruination.

In the end, he failed to get there. And that is what this story is about.


Smith’s drinking started well before he became a household name in the Little Rock radio market. It’s what ended his first marriage in the late ’70s to the daughter of a radio station owner he worked for in Colorado. So he headed back to Arkansas in 1980.

“I couldn’t get a job,” says Smith, sitting in a booth at The Mean Pig Barbecue in Cabot and talking over a pulled-pork sandwich (regular size, medium sauce, with slaw) and iced tea. “I was painting houses.”

Smith’s 60 now, though he’d probably chafe at being called an elder statesman of these particular airwaves. His black hair does show more than a touch of grey, though, and his expressive face shows some creases that can’t entirely be accounted for by smiling or frowning. He’s not a man who sits still well, even in his favorite barbecue joint, and he makes these little motions with his hands and his facial muscles. He doesn’t seem to notice.

He’s always taking in his surroundings, a guy on the lookout for, well, anything — an interesting story, somebody he knows, things that will kick his thoughts into gear and wind up coming out of his mouth on the radio the next morning. And through it all, he never drops the thread of the conversation. He’s a natural talker, and back in the ’80s, that’s what was wanted on the radio.

“I didn’t have anything to record on, so I couldn’t get my voice out there,” he says of that frustrating job hunt in the sweltering heat of 1980’s summer. “Luckily, my sister had a friend, Sandy O’Connor, who knew Tom Wood at Magic 105. And after about three months of calling him every day, he let me come on there and do nights, then afternoons.

“Since we were the new kid on the block, we had a lot of listeners among young people. Next thing I know, I’m doing morning drive and I’m thinking, ‘Jeez, this is where I want to be. This is what I want to do in life.’”

It was a good start, and it led to a brief departure from Arkansas for bigger markets — such as Memphis and flirtations with Boston and Denver. But in the mid-’80s, he came back to Magic 105, and the whole thing just went crazy big, with Smith the leading edge of that wave.

“Boom, it took off,” he recalls, sandwich mostly forgotten, tea half-finished. “Having been exposed to some Stern-style radio … I’m pushing the envelope right up to the edge. We were lightning in a bottle, the right place at the right time. I was one step ahead of everybody because I knew I could get away with murder.”

Embracing his nickname, “The Outlaw,” Smith became the voice of that generation and wrapped himself up in the hard-partying, rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of the ’80s. More booze, more drugs, more crazy stunts to keep his listeners coming back.

“We were doing fat guys sitting on blocks of ice,” he says. “I had a sidekick who buried a mannequin in lingerie at an intersection in front of a church. The state police came, and we got into trouble, but the boss believed all press was good press.”

And more booze. And more drugs.

“When I was at Magic 105, that was the lifestyle,” offers Smith, not as an excuse but an acknowledgement. “In the ’80s, that was the lifestyle.”

And it all began to come to a head. After the infamous Janet Jackson nipple incident during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004, everybody who answered to the Federal Communications Commission got gun-shy. Soon, Clear Channel, which had purchased Magic 105 by then, sent a guy from Memphis to fire Smith, and other stations he’d “been flirting with” backed off.

“I was damaged goods. I was the bad boy,” Smith says. “At that time, I wanted to prove I could reinvent myself.”

He got the chance with Philip Jonsson, owner of The Buzz, where he was joined on the air by former Razorback footballer David Bazzel, a clean-cut hunk whose smarts matched his looks. They were the “odd couple,” Smith laughs, but they clicked on air. The T&A went out the window in favor of the Hogs, though Smith convinced Jonsson to let him try some other topics — polls and politics and the like — during the dog days of summer when “I didn’t want to be talking about the Razorbacks in June.” Everything was different.

Except: “I didn’t think I had a drinking problem, but I did, and it was a bad drinking problem,” Smith says. “It got so bad; I started having health issues. Bazzel warned me. My wife warned me, and I agreed one New Year’s Eve we would stop drinking. Of course, she quit cold turkey, and I went through two years of hiding bottles in the closet, hiding bottles in the garage, still thinking I didn’t have a problem. I just didn’t want her to know about it.”

Smith wasn’t an obnoxious drunk, he says. He didn’t get rude, didn’t punch anybody in the face. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t obvious.

“I’ve been around plenty of my buddies who were drinkers,” says Bazzel, Smith’s close friend and longtime co-host. “I’ve never been through anything like I saw with Tommy. I could see it happening. He got into a pattern; he would leave the show and go home and drink.”

In fact, Smith admits, he could hardly wait for his shift to end at 10 a.m. so that he could drive to a liquor store in a rough part of North Little Rock, where nobody knew him, and buy a pint. He’d drink it as soon as he got home, so when his wife got back from work at 5 p.m., he’d have sobered up.

Things came briefly to a head Sept. 24, 2010, when Smith had a seizure on air while broadcasting live on location and had to be taken to the hospital. The next morning, Bazzel recalls, Smith came in and acknowledged to him and his now co-host Roger Scott that he had a problem and needed help. They checked him into rehab, and he came out “saying all the right things.” But …

“I knew he was in for a battle,” Bazzel says, “and frankly, I didn’t know if he could win.”

It took until the next May for things to really come to a head. Smith was busted for driving while intoxicated after he crossed the median on Interstate 430 and Colonel Glenn Road, sideswiped another car and kept on driving. No one was hurt, but when he was arrested a short distance away, Smith owned up to having drunk two pints of liquor and taken Xanax. Seven charges and a $17,500 bond later, Smith was looking at the end of his career.

So he went away. He took up the offer of auto magnate and hotel owner Frank Fletcher — a friend and an advertiser on the radio show — to go to the Betty Ford Center in California.

“I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do,” Smith says. “I didn’t go to work that day and called my boss and said, ‘I guess I’m going to get help.’ He said, ‘That’s a good first step.’ I said, ‘Do I have a job when I get back?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

That boss was Steve Jonsson, son of Philip and, by then, president of Signal Media, which owned The Buzz. Steve joined the company around the same time Smith did, and he had a clear understanding of just what Smith meant to the ratings and the success of the show.

“Tommy has one of those unique kind of mystical abilities,” Steve says. “He can really watch the room and control the show. Radio is a magical thing; some people just have those abilities, and it’s impossible to teach it. Tommy’s one of those, [KTHV-TV, Channel 11’s] Craig O’Neill is one, and [KMJX-FM, 105.1 The Wolf’s] Bob Robbins is one.”

So it wasn’t taken lightly that Steve acknowledged to Smith that, no, he might not get his chair in the studio back.

Smith was at Betty Ford for a month, and the show went on while he was gone, anchored by Bazzel and the addition of Scott, a voice artist who’d been a frequent guest in the past. Scott had also been one of Smith’s party friends — they’d gotten drunk together, but when faced with losing his wife in 2007 over the habit, Scott got clean. And early on, that caused issues between him and Smith, who had been instrumental in inviting Scott on the air as a frequent guest and then a regular contributor to the show. Scott makes no bones about who he owes his radio career to: Tommy Smith. And his own sobriety turned out to be a pressure point in their relationship.

“It impacted our friendship, I think a great deal, and I think maybe also I represented some harder times for him,” Scott says. “It broke my heart because I thought at one point that’s all our friendship was based on, and this was somebody I love, somebody I put on a pedestal.”

But here’s the thing: Scott had been to the bottom, and he knew that Smith had to get there himself. And he wouldn’t give up on his friend just because “he was in some deep, dark places.”

“I think God puts us all in a place, the right place and the right time, and I was there to help him, one small cog in the wheel,” Scott says. “I felt great because I was finally able to do something for him. I could never do anything for him at any other time; I didn’t think I was worthy. I felt proud I was finally able to help my friend who had helped me for so long.”

Today, four years out from regaining his sobriety, Smith is quick to name the people to whom he owes everything: Philip and Steve Jonsson, Frank Fletcher, David Bazzel, Roger Scott. And, of course, Karen, his wife. They’ve been married 33 years now and are the epitome of “for better or worse.” He met her at a party back in the Magic 105 days; they went for a walk, and he put a gardenia in her hair and told himself, “I’ve got to make this happen.” A month later, he asked her to marry him, and she stuck with him through the years of partying and addiction and denial. When he went off to Betty Ford, she’d been sober for two years herself, and while he was there, she made it clear that she’d abide no backsliding. Even when their sons got married, she told him, they’d toast them at the wedding with apple juice.

How much does Smith love this woman? “I’m like a dog at the door when she gets home at night,” he says, smiling. “It’s like, ‘Master’s here, Master’s here!’”

Before Smith could get to this happy ending, of course, he had to find out if he could get his job back. So he went to see Steve, who agreed to give him a shot.

“We did know it was a risk,” Steve says of bringing Smith back on the air. “But from our perspective, it was like, look at this guy who has done so much for Arkansas and the community. It just didn’t seem right to throw him away when he had done so much and he was having trouble. We felt like it was the right thing to do, to let him go through that process and come back and try again. We had no idea what was going to happen, but we felt it was worth the risk.”

How big a risk? Well, advertisers covet demographics like the 25 to 54 age group, and The Show With No Name has traditionally dominated its time slot among male listeners in that group. In fact, for the five quarters before Smith went into rehab, the show was in first place for that demographic with a two-point lead over the next most-popular morning show. And among all listeners 25 to 54, the show was fourth, two points behind the leaders.

There was talk of bringing in a PR expert to figure out how to best reintroduce Smith to an audience that, at best, could be skeptical of his return.

“I said I wouldn’t do that,” Smith says. “I’m going to go on the air and tell it how it is.”

Boom. There. Classic Tommy Smith. The guy who shot straight to his listeners, who played so well to the Everyman because he is an Everyman, laid it out, bare and bleeding, to the people who’d sustained his rise to fame and asked for the forgiveness he wasn’t entirely sure he deserved or would get.

His listeners responded, not merely with acceptance but with their own stories of struggles, past and present. Tommy Smith, they knew, was one of theirs, and they welcomed him back into the fold.

“I was ashamed of myself,” he says with a voice that shakes just a little, “and I’m still ashamed of myself. Every four or five months, it will come up, and I’ll say I didn’t do anything special; I’m not a hero at all. All I did was the right thing. It’s an old Lou Holtz axiom, the do-right rule. Do right, and if you never lie again, I bet you’ll never drink again.”


The ’cue is finally gone, the tea empty. Smith is ready to get home to Karen, with a stop on the way to talk with a guy who runs a fruit stand and is battling cancer. It’s an opportunity to give somebody support, something he admits he would’ve passed up five years ago, but he knows where he’d be right now if other people hadn’t given him that kind of support on his darkest days.

“There’s a lot of guys out there who have problems,” says Smith, who still sometimes hears from those guys while he’s on the air. He has advice for them: “Go tell your wife. Go to meetings. When you’re hiding bottles between towels and in the garage, if you think you’ve got [a problem], you’ve got one.”

And acknowledging that truth will set you free. That’s why Tommy Smith wants to know what your vice is. And he wants to know if it’s got you by the throat. And if it does, he’ll meet you at the parking lot outside The Mean Pig, tell you how he pried those fingers from around his own neck and how you need to do that, as well.

Because Tommy wants you to fail at throwing it all away, too. He wants you to be all right.

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