Gary Burbank’s one-of-a-kind radio career will be remembered with a five-hour celebration of life show starting at 5 p.m. Saturday at Covington’s Madison Theater.
Many of his famous characters — commentator Earl Pitts, befuddled old man Gilbert Gnarley and evangelical huckster Rev. Deuteronomy Skaggs — will be featured in audio and video clips from his archives, says daughter Tracy Songer, an assistant professor in electronic media and broadcasting at Northern Kentucky University.
She’s producing the tribute to her father, who died last August at age 84.
Burbank — arguably the funniest person in Cincinnati radio — came here to WLW-AM from Louisville in 1981 intending to stay a year and return to Kentucky. But he stayed at WLW-AM until 2007, filling the airwaves with a crazy cast of characters: Blues player Howlin' Blind Muddy Slim; children’s host Ranger Bob; Siamese twins Eunice and Bernice; The Big Fat Balding Guy with A Stubby Cigar In His Mouth; the Synonymous Bengal; former Reds owner Marge "Saint CEO" Schott; Bengals owner Mikey Brown in the daily All My Bengals soap opera; and Gnarley, Skaggs and Pitts.
“No one in radio ever worked harder than Gary Burbank, including Don Imus and others,” says J. Kevin "Doc" Wolfe, his longtime sidekick, writer and producer.
“He did 30 minutes of recorded comedy material a day, in addition to the live stuff during the show. Nobody today is doing anything close to what we did, and we’re not going to see anything like this again,” Wolfe says.
Wolfe will co-host the evening with Bob Moody, who worked with Burbank at Louisville’s WAKY-AM. They will acknowledge Burbank’s writers in attendance.
The evening will be “a combination of the Burbank radio show, and the music he played with bands around Greater Cincinnati after retiring” from WLW-AM in 2007, Wolfe says.
- Part of the proceeds will benefit Cincinnati’s Play It Forward, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which Burbank created to support local musicians in crisis needing financial assistance.
- Proceeds also will go to the Good Samaritan Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit at the Virginia-based Sunrise Senior Living, which supported the caregivers, nurses and aides who assisted “Gary and our family during his final days,” Songer says.
There also will be a silent auction and split the pot “to benefit two causes close to Gary’s heart,” she says.
Sonny Moorman, the Bluebirds and the Recreational will provide the music — including some of Burbank’s songs.
“People who went to Burbank’s Real Bar-B-Que (restaurant) in Sharonville will recognize the bands. Sonny Moorman and the Bluebirds played there a lot,” Wolfe says.
Songer and her brother Sean Purser, who lives in Indiana near Louisville, will be part of the program. “We’ll talk about family stuff, to get to know the man behind the mic,” she says.
Burbank — born William Purser on July 29, 1941, in Memphis, Tennessee — often boasted that “we do more material in a week than a stand-up comic can imagine in his life.”
He often wrote satirical comedy bits late into the night, and Wolfe started writing at 6 a.m. “And then we’d get into the studio at 10 and record and edit until he went on the air at 2 p.m.,” Wolfe says.
Sometimes a Gilbert Gnarley phone call would take 45 minutes to get several minutes of funny material, says radio executive Randy Michaels, his former WLW-AM boss.
Burbank’s unique talents were recognized nationally many times. He is the only person to win back-to-back Marconi Radio Awards for “personality of the year” from the National Association of Broadcasters in 1991 and ’92. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2012. (Read more about his career in my tribute, Gary Burbank, the funniest man in Cincinnati radio, dies at 84.)
Tickets for the event are $25 in advance plus fees at this link, or $30 at the door. The doors open at 4:30 at the Madison Theater, 730 Madison Ave., Covington, KY 41011.
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