‘Mark and Brian Show’ DJ Mark Thompson revisits the KLOS-FM years in new book

The Mark and Brian Show ended in August 2012 after 25 years on KLOS-FM/95.5. A decade after its conclusion, Mark Thompson, one-half of the radio duo, realized he still had a story to tell.

Lots of stories, actually, and ones Thompson wanted to share before more time passed and the history of his wildly successful on-air partnership with Brian Phelps faded further, he says.

“Our beginning in Los Angeles, for the next five or six years was just meteoric,” Thompson says before the Dec. 6 arrival of his memoir, “Don’t Bump the Record, Kid: My Adventures with Mark and Brian.” “It was bigger than I could have imagined.

“I remember thinking at the time, ‘We’re going to be in the Radio Hall of Fame,’” he says. “This is the kind of thing I’ve never seen or heard of.”

If you were listening in Southern California at the time you remember. The Mark and Brian Show shook up the morning drivetime landscape with the duo’s willingness to say and do almost anything.

Insult Neil Young’s voice in their first minutes on their first day on the job at a classic rock station? Done! Get lowered by a crane into a giant vat of melted chocolate to celebrate their first Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles? Why not?

And listeners loved it. Before long, The Mark and Brian Show toppled Rick Dees as reigning king of L.A. morning radio, parking their show at No. 1 in the ratings for those first few years.

“So when I finished my run and was leaving, I really thought the Hall of Fame process was going to be like the NFL,” Thompson says. “You step away for five years and then they put you in. And five years roll by, six years, seven, eight.”

A grassroots vote campaign finally got Thompson and Phelps inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2020, but the delay made Thompson worry that all the successes and eventual failures, all the lore and legend of their show was endangered.

“It felt to me like the legacy that we built, especially those first five or six years, was being forgotten,” he says. “So instead of getting a giant megaphone and standing on the street corner yelling, ‘Hey! What about Mark and Brian?’ I decided the sane way would be to write the book.”

Looking back

Thompson had never written a book so his first job was to figure out how to organize the many stories he wanted to tell. What he decided on was to go mostly year by year through the nearly three decades he shared a studio with Phelps in Alabama and L.A.

“I decided – so I wouldn’t miss anything important – to do it chronologically,” he says. “I’ll start at the beginning when I got the phone call that presented me the idea of working with a partner, and I would literally take it from that point all the way ’til the last day of Aug. 17, 2012.”

Occasionally, he gave himself permission to jump outside the structure for a bit of background or context.

“I would run up on something like Mark and Brian playing the brass,” Thompson says of a bit the duo used often on the show. “I would play the trombone, Brian would play the trumpet. We played it badly and it was really funny and we were well-known for it.

“But to tell that story I wound up having to take the book back to 1978 when I was Knoxville and I literally stole that idea from a guy named John Boy who did nights,” he says.

“I’ve always hated a book that starts out, you know, ‘I was born on a cold December morning,’” Thompson says. “I would rather just be on fire than to sit through that. So the only times I went back into my solo career or my childhood was to explain something that was happening currently.”

Stern warnings

Dredging through memories was mostly fun, Thompson says. When it wasn’t, it shocked him how fresh old hurts hit him.

“We all have memory banks that we experience life, and we put them away in a file drawer in our head,” he says. “And in many of those times, we don’t revisit them whether they’re happy or sad. We don’t go there. And I was forced to go back to 1985, to that first year, and when you dust off the memories it’s amazing how sharp they are.”

Sometimes that was benign, he says. Like the vividness of the “god-awful wallpaper that we had in the control room in Montgomery (Alabama),” Thompson says. “I could literally see it as I was opening up those memories. And the joyous times, the wonderful times. The self-involved times. Those were just wonderful to open up and go back.”

Not so great were the feelings as he dove into 1992 when Howard Stern’s syndicated show reached Los Angeles. It eventually bumped the Mark and Brian Show out of the top spot in morning radio.

Stern was not kind about it, holding a mock funeral for Mark and Brian in Hollywood as thousands of fans flooded Vine Street at Hollywood Boulevard to cheer Stern and jeer the vanquished Thompson and Phelps.

“When I had to open up the period of time when we lost the No. 1 position viciously to Howard Stern, and what we went through in a very short period of time, it was shockingly brutal,” Thompson says. “That shocked me that it could be that hurtful after all this time.”

The memory of getting booed by thousands of fans at an annual event where Mark and Brian had been cheered for years also hurt, though now also angered him, he says.

“I got pissed off and I said it in the book,” he says of the thousands of fans egged on by Stern turned on the duo. “What did we do to deserve that? All we did was try to entertain you. Howard came in and beautifully repositioned us. And we got violently booed at an event that we were always welcomed at.

“That just shows you, when public opinion turns, it can be very, very ugly.”

Echoes and feedback

Thompson married his wife Lynda in 1981. He started working with Phelps in 1985. Naturally, they were the two people whose opinions on the book he wanted most, though neither were quick to do so.

“I told her, ‘Look, I need you to read this because I’ve written quite a bit about you and if there’s anything in here that bothers you I can either change it or take it out,’” Thompson says. “And she was, to a degree, relieved. I don’t know what she thought I was going to put in there.

“This is just my opinion, but I think that she was worried I was going to talk about some of the darker times between Brian and I because we were together for 27 years,” he says.

Thompson says he’d never considered writing a tell-all that might reveal the kinds of tensions that arise in any relationship.

“I was very honest in saying that there were difficulties with Brian and I,” he says. “I didn’t paint a picture that we were holding hands skipping down the yellow brick road. I was honest in saying there were periods that we didn’t speak or couldn’t speak or didn’t want to speak.”

When the book was finished, Thompson also called Phelps to tell him he’d written a memoir, and also that 100% of the proceeds would go to the Eastwood Ranch Foundation, an animal rescue organization founded by actress Alison Eastwood, the daughter of actor-director Clint Eastwood.

“He congratulated me on both, and then I sent the book to him and invited him to the show that we’re doing at the Saban Theater (in Beverly Hills) on Saturday, Dec. 3,” Thompson says. “This was back in March, and at this point, I have not heard from him, so I don’t know how he felt about the book.”

Sharing the struggles

Stories in the book tend to be upbeat. When you’re a morning DJ doing your best to entertain listeners you tend to see things in a light, funny way. But there are points in the story where Thompson talks about tougher moments, sharing stories that listeners likely never heard, such as the crippling anxiety he struggled with for years.

“At the time I was going through it, not knowing at the beginning what it was, and how bad it got, my biggest fear was that people would find out,” Thompson says. “Because I think a lot of people, when it comes to any form of mental illness, people are terrified that other people will know.

“But I felt this was the time to tell it,” he says. “And the way to tell it. I talked about what it was like to go through. How I fixed it.

“One of the main reasons I did it, No. 1, it’s a big part of the story. But I know that there are millions of people that suffer from this, and I think I’ve always found it encouraging when somebody has the guts to share something personal like that. I thought that maybe that could help some people.”

Lighter moments include many of the starry encounters that a top-rated DJ in Los Angeles gets to experience. Sometimes it was gabbing on air with guests from favorite boyhood TV series such as Tina Louise who played Ginger on “Gilligan’s Island” or David Cassidy who played a version of himself on “The Partridge Family.”

Other times it might have been lining up artists such as Barry Manilow, the Gap Band and Kiss to play the annual Mark and Brian Christmas show at the Hollywood Palladium.

There are photographs of many of those moments in the book. There’s also photographic proof right on its cover that in ’80s and ’90s Thompson wore one of the most remarkable mullets to ever walk the streets of L.A.

“That is the mullet,” Thompson says. “I would go to the hair salon and spend hours getting the perm in the back, the highlights up top, the business haircut, and the styling.

“And I would drive around Beverly Hills with that hair flapping in the wind,” he says. “As I said in the book, I would deny it, but there are pictures.”