Art Bell joins the Gabcast with Onan, Curtis Thornton ("Mud King"), and Eddie Dean amid SiriusXM’s non-compete clause, which he legally challenges after six weeks. He reveals streaming tests on his site handled tens of thousands but was blocked by Sirius, later forced to allow pirate streams due to technical failures. Bell criticizes Premier Radio for ignoring his decade-long absence and George Norrie for inviting a hostile guest, calling him no longer a "nice guy." Without legal representation during negotiations, he now considers suing, prioritizing streaming over terrestrial radio. Despite chaos and criticism, his return signals a fight for paranormal content’s future—undeterred by corporate control or fading standards. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, when I hear B-Dub's intro music, I don't know.
When I hear B-Dubb's intro music, I don't know whether I'm on the set of Sanford and Sun or I'm having some sort of a neurological event which is the result of a lack of potassium.
So the last broadcast we conducted was a spec sheet episode with Curtis and me.
And while we normally talk about technology on that show, we dedicated that entire show to talking about what was happening with Art Bell and the fact that he had left his show Dark Matter.
And there's just so much continuing to go on in this regard that we naturally on the Gabcast are going to talk about the same thing this week.
There have been so many developments that I don't think you'll find it to be a stale broadcast.
I don't feel like we're going to do a lot of repetition in terms of what we said last week.
There are some things that are kind of axiomatic, perhaps, that applied last week that still continue to apply.
I think probably the most interesting development was that as we read the Art Bell Quits dark matter thread, one of the themes that started seeping its way into the conversation was this veiled suggestion on Art's part that there are forces unseen in the background that are preventing his return or at least any form of a smooth return, if any return at all, to SiriusXM.
He wanted to essentially operate as an independent broadcaster and stream from artbell.com while at the same time giving SiriusXM exclusivity on carrying his show.
And they essentially didn't respond to the offer.
And in the meantime, I guess waiting in the wings was Coast to Coast AM, which is now airing on SiriusXM 104, as discovered by everybody last night by surprise, as the McLaughlin group would say, your thoughts?
They seem to be happening over and over again, too.
Every 50 pages or so, or the next announcement or the next post by Art or George actually came in and posted last night, too, after I think it was like 11.15 or 11.20, something like that.
But it seems like every 50 pages, the stages of grief keep repeating themselves and cycling over and over.
Well, it's kind of you're like in the ocean, and you can float around from point to point, but you're not just necessarily going to hit one of them only once.
Just imagining myself finding out I've got a golf ball growing inside my brain, and okay, I've got to go to this website to figure out what my stages are going to be.
Well, can I read Art's two last posts, the first of which was submitted at 3.50 p.m. today Central Time?
First of all, my sincere congrats to Premier Radio.
They made the right move.
Business is war.
And I would have done the same exact thing and did in my day.
Second, given the same circumstances, I would make the same decision again today about dark matter.
There is much you do not know, and I will not talk about it because it was given in confidence, and I am kind of old school, so I will not talk about those things, even though it would help you to understand my decision.
I won't talk about it, but I'll talk around about it so that I'll make you interested and curious, but then I'll shut you down from asking any questions.
It seems to me the nuclear bomb's already been dropped, and that's in the form of Coast to Coast appearing on XM 104 as of 12.06 p.m. Central last night.
SiriusXM in late July, early August, started cleaning shop.
They pushed a lot of their talent out the door, and nobody really knew why.
They were just doing it.
And then a couple of weeks went by, and you started to get these hints, and then I don't remember exactly when Coast went off, but it was sometime in August where they yanked it.
And quite honestly, I was like, well, I don't listen to it, so it's no big deal.
Anyway, then it became clear that art was going to take over.
And I was like, well, this makes perfect sense.
They're getting rid of no talent.
They're getting rid of a bad product to offer their customers a better product with Art Bell.
But I guess some management was in there somewhere saying, you know what?
Art's got a track record, so we're going to leverage this.
If he doesn't work out, we're going to be able to plop somebody right back in.
In the chat room, there's a debate going on on whether George is a liar or not, which fits right into this.
Specifically, when he called into the show, do you think he was lying in that moment about the things he said?
Because he spoke in some form of something that fit into reality for me compared to what I had seen from Art on the Forum, which seemed to live outside of reality.
Is George really that good of a liar and salesman?
Yeah, I think I don't have to go to the heart of it, though, because if George is conniving, then Art really was going to succumb to all of this regardless because he didn't have a counter attack.
I always thought that maybe George wasn't privy to some of the backroom deals or some of the bigger deals or things that they were pursuing in the corporate world.
And he was just doing his own little thing.
Well, I don't know if he, I guess we really don't know, but I don't know if this effort came specifically from George or came from just a vacuum opening up when Art left.
He says, third, I would love it if SiriusXM would waive my no-compete, but they said no.
Okay, wonderful.
There's the first fucking confirmation I've seen of that.
God damn it!
You know, the people in this office building must really think I'm nuts because they have no idea I'm doing a radio show in here, and I'm sure they're walking down the hall right now.
I do have Tourette's, but it's not that bad.
I swear to God, it's not that bad.
But I will tell you that as I walk the halls in this office building during the day, there are people who give me strange looks, and I feel as though perhaps as they look at me, I have the appearance of some sort of a wasting disease on my skin.
There's some sort of a bacterial just wasting disease, and they start away from me.
What this proves to me is that press people, they really do have a place in this world because none of those posts would happen on either side, the George or the art side, if they hadn't just pressed through.
I can remember the years when we would, years went by where people on the forum were asking themselves and others, do these people that we refer to on this forum, George Nouri and Art Bell and the rest, premier radio, I mean by the rest, do they even know that we're here, that we exist?
And so here they are both posting regularly on an almost daily basis and people are just sort of like, meh, art's here.
They just sort of got used to it.
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That really is balls out that they both post there.
Now SiriusXM has a show that will be mostly commercials and seems much less a good fit than Dark Matter with a host who thinks a typhoon in Vietnam causes rain in Hawaii.
It seems to me, I mean, this many people cannot be wrong while one guy is right.
Everyone, everywhere you look, is consistently saying he should have just stuck it out.
I mean, six weeks is not enough time to go to an unfamiliar platform and expect to have a listener base there just packaged and ready to go.
I mean, yeah, they may have blown a lot of smoke up Art's ass about the 27 million Sirius XM subscribers that would just be waiting with bated breath to listen to his show.
But you obviously, and Art's not a stupid man.
He knows that not all 27 million of those people are going to be there just ready to go.
I think Art, for some reason, thought that this was his only move.
I mean, he did say something about he's been trying to work on this stream dropping thing the entire time he's been on the air at Sirius XM.
But maybe for some reason, Art thought that taking the show off the air would get quicker results, or that was the only amount of leverage that he had.
And maybe his impulsiveness got the better of him this time, sadly.
Instinctively, my instincts, I just feel the same way as you do, Eddie.
I don't quite have the cynical view that Curtis has that this was just some sort of an out to get out of the show because Art just didn't want to broadcast.
I know everyone wants to have the interesting perspective in the room and be the first person to say something.
That's what you see when you watch Fox News or any other news channel, the Talking Heads.
They're all trying to be the first person to have a certain perspective on something.
If you think that Art's show just simply wasn't good, and that's what this all boiled down to, A, you're just trying to get a rise out of people, and B, you're just simply not an Art Bell fan to begin with.
I don't know what else to say to someone who says that because it just wasn't true.
Art did come on the forum, though, and say something along the lines of, hey, every show can't be a winner, kid, when he was talking about one of his first shows, and he said, oh, it was the EVP people, and we had Jimmy Chung as opposed to Brent or whatever her name was.
I think the reason he sounded so beaten down previously, back in 2010 when he was still doing occasional shows for premiere, is because he was beaten down.
He knew there was just so much stuff happening in the background that he obviously wasn't going to talk about or couldn't talk about that he just didn't want to be there anymore.
I mean, for Christ's sake, shortly after the guy stopped doing Coast to Coast, he began publicly requesting that they stop airing Dark Matter.
So his opinion of his involvement with the show, with the brand, couldn't have changed all that much from December 31st, 2010 to the point at which he started asking that Dark Matter be taken off the air.
You guys are much more invested with this than I am because, quite honestly, I never noticed the difference because I only listened to maybe three or four shows a month.
Yeah, it started off with a little bit of a stutter that first episode.
And then he quickly got, it's like after he made his first mistake, he was back.
And I've always said I was late to the game for Art.
I didn't listen to him live until the late episodes that he was filling in on.
So that was the art I knew other than the people who are out there streaming old episodes of him.
So I got to experience him being somewhat frustrated with callers and just the whole experience, it seemed like, and then listening to these classic episodes where he was awesome.
I mean, there was nothing else like him on radio.
So I was yearning for something I didn't get to be a part of when he came back to Sirius and I got to experience that with Bell Gab and Live.
There was one post that he, I don't know, it was five or six days ago where he was, it sounded like he was beating himself up.
Oh, woe is me.
I guess I'm all washed up and all that kind of thing.
And that was totally tongue-in-cheek that most people missed.
As did I, you know, until he posted a follow-up saying, well, see how you feel when your words are thrown back at you or something like that, you know?
You remember the show he did immediately after Ramona died and someone heard him doing the show and they called the police on him because they said that he was possibly going to harm himself.
And so Art had to literally walk away from the microphone because the alarm was going off and he had to tell the police, no, I am in fact not going to commit sepiku.
And then he had to walk back to the microphone and tell everybody what happened.
If that show got a call to send the authorities to his house, I can't believe that post didn't.
If you just read that at face value and didn't understand the sarcasm that might be behind it or the context behind it, you would say to yourself, holy shit, Art Bell just announced his imminent suicide on a forum.
Well, if you want to call the show tonight, you can do that.
We had a lot of calls on the previous broadcast we did on this subject, which was during the spec sheet last week.
This is the Gabcast, by the way.
I want to make that clear.
George Norrie did not call into the Gabcast last week.
That was the spec sheet.
This is the Gabcast.
And if you would like to be on the show, if you were unable to get through on the previous broadcast, there were a lot of people who just didn't get through because we had too many calls.
Number to call is 573-837-4948.
It's 573-837-4948.
Actually, as I sit here, I'm a little bit surprised that nobody's called in yet.
And I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there's perhaps a problem with our phone system.
Is there anyone in the chat room commenting on not being able to get through on the phone?
I always have the feeling that when you hear these shows where everyone's sitting around henpecking everything you're doing and the things that you're talking about publicly, that it's probably annoying for you.
I'm wondering if my perception on that is correct.
Well, I guess I'll say I'm so supremely depressed with the fact that we can't hear your radio show anymore, and I don't care in what capacity we hear it, from where, what the platform is, just the logistics of how it happens.
Is there anything you can say to make me less depressed?
I turned on the show for just a few minutes last night, and I heard George ask somebody, I swear to God, if the typhoon, which is now in Vietnam, was causing the rain in Hawaii.
Now, the only question left in my mind is the non-compete.
And there is a non-compete.
And yes, I did sign that.
And, you know, a lot of people don't understand that with radio or television or motion pictures or whatever, anytime you sign an agreement, it always contains a non-compete.
Always.
I mean, that's standard.
So I'm left dealing with that.
And what to do?
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Well, initially I thought, eh, you know, why fight it?
And I'll do what I said I would do and stream and stream for free at that.
I kind of find it ironic, somewhat hypocritical, that during the time that I was in negotiations with SiriusXM to simply allow me to stream because the streaming wasn't working over there well at all, they ended up going with somebody who did exactly what they said they didn't want to do.
Well, Art, I have a question, and my instinctive take on this was: I'm tired of people saying that there were no streaming problems and that art's just blowing smoke up everybody's, but I had the problems.
There's post after post after post after post on the form of people having the problem.
So my question is this.
Does a contract of the nature of what you signed, does it typically contain a provision that requires your boss, the company, the platform through which you're broadcasting, to transmit the show to the listener in an appropriate, reasonable fashion?
And if that provision does exist and they don't do it, aren't they in breach and doesn't that cancel everything?
I just wanted to ask him, like, if he thought, like, you know, there's, you know, if he would want to do this if George Knapp was, you know, a full-time host or if, you know, someone like that caliber was the host of Coast to Coast, if he would just be okay in retirement rather than, you know, fighting the non-compete or even signing the series.
You know, I said a long time ago that if George Knapp, who is a great guy, was the host of Coast to Coast, I wouldn't have even tried to come back with Dark Matter.
If you could answer that question, there would be multitudes of art bells.
And I will say this, the genre itself and art not trying to blow more smoke, but we may never speak again, so I got to get it in.
I've never really cared about the genre enough to listen to it being discussed by anybody other than Art Bell.
I've listened to all the replacement hosts on Coast.
You can go listen to as many podcasts as you want, but there's just something intangible about Art Bell talking about this stuff that you can't, you just don't find anywhere else.
And we don't want to make you uncomfortable with the compliments, but we want you to understand that, you know, by saying, well, shit, I've said enough.
And Art, also, I'm sure there was a period of time on the forum as you announced your departure from SiriusXM.
I'm sure there was a point at which you said to yourself, holy, you know what?
I mean, these people are supposed to be my fans.
I can't believe some of the anger and vitriol and just the visceral, just the visceral nature of things that I'm seeing right now.
But you've got to understand that people are so passionate about you and the product you deliver and their desire to hear you back on the radio that that's just sort of how it manifested itself as people were in shock and they just didn't know how to deal with things.
And I'm guessing you've probably reached that conclusion yourself already without me having said that.
I mean, you were a little, you were, I don't know what the word is to use.
I'm still nervous because I'm talking to you, but you were bothered by the fact that it seemed as though your base just wasn't there, possibly because of the platform itself.
The streaming issues certainly did not help, particularly As far as getting new subscribers was concerned.
And so I'm kind of curious as to what your thoughts are, what your expectations would be if you were to just stream through your website.
Do you think that you would have an uphill battle there in rebuilding your base and getting an established audience there?
But there was not a viable future with the streaming problems we had.
Now, again, I offered them within 48 hours a proposal that we simply continue as we were, except that I would be allowed to stream either for a year or until the streaming problems were fixed.
They said no, and then turned around, what, within a week and put on a show that was an awful lot more public in terms of radio stations and streaming and all the rest of it than we were proposing to do.
We were only proposing to stream four live hours for four days.
It would not have brought the walls of Jericho down.
Well, when I look at when George obtained his new crown date-wise, it would suggest to me that these talks might have been going on prior to my leaving.
Now, I can't be sure of that, but it certainly would suggest that.
Well, I was going to say, Art, you know, something, even before you announced your return to Sirius, something that I thought would have been just so awesome is if you would have run your show directly through K-I and streamed it from K-I as a K-I-product and then somehow allowed other radio stations to syndicate with that.
Is that something that could ever be possible in the future?
I remember in the late 90s, Art having video, in the late 90s, having video of himself doing the show from the desert in Nevada.
And then, like, eight years later, Rush Limbaugh starts providing video on his website and proclaims himself to be the first person ever to have done it.
And I'm just thinking there's a big, huge elephant in the room here, and his name's Art Bell.
Art, I'm taking another question, Art, that I've heard people ponder over many, many times over the course of the years is there have been a lot of people who've popped up little pirate radio streams of your show here and there on the internet.
And people have always been curious as to what your take is on that, how you feel about that.
I'm trying to be careful in what I say here, but my ghost said, I did turn on the radio for a few moments last night at the beginning of the other show.
And the first thing I heard is the other show's host suggest that a typhoon that was over in Vietnam might be the cause of rain in Hawaii.
We've been dealing with that for a decade now and screaming in the wind.
And I will tell you, the reason Bell Gab is successful is because there's a thing called Google.
And on this thing called Google, people have a tendency to type the words George Norrie sucks.
And I will tell you that probably 75 to 80% of the people who populate that form found it as a result of typing those three words.
I have never seen with such uniformity and ubiquity, such displeasure with a radio talk show host and how he maintains this control over that show that he's maintained for a decade now.
Is it a declining of standards among Americans or is it just the fact that he's malleable and corporations like malleable people?
Well, there probably are some people out there doing pretty good shows.
I don't know that they've received enough attention or wide enough distribution to be effective.
And it is tough.
You know, it's a tough road to climb.
I'm lucky because I've got a name.
I'm lucky because I built a program.
And I have to admit, you know, I'm the one who laid down the law and said, look, if we can't stream, if we can't get to my base, if we can't see the future growth of this program, then I can't continue with it.
Art, I guess that's a question for you: is what do you say to people who say, and this was my take on the matter, that six weeks in the context of broadcasting just isn't enough time to really build anything and that maybe you should have stuck it out just for that reason alone?
I would like to ask you if using the services available currently that Sirius has, and with what you've seen, people that can do things on the internet with your show and your product already, is there any viable solution out there that going forward you are seriously considering and are going to do once even if you are held to the two-year non-compete?
But as I've mentioned, there's information I was told in confidence, and I'm keeping that confidence at least up until the point that we get into some sort of legal situation, and then, you know, Katie bar the door.
Actually, I received a message from the management person who enticed me to come to Sirius in the first place, which suggested that the streaming was wide open, available in America, Canada, and worldwide.
During the 10 years that I was retired and Coast was on On a daily basis, I frequently wondered if anybody in management at Premier actually listened to the show.
You know, I'm kind of curious, just asking Art Bell-type questions rather than questions specifically about all of this business stuff.
Over the years, Art, you've taken a lot of criticism from people because you're not necessarily on board or not on board at all with the whole 9-11 conspiracy notion.
And that was one of the things I always appreciated about you because you're one of the few hosts in this genre who are not walking around with tinfoil on their head believing that a missile struck the Pentagon.
And I'm kind of curious if your position on the matter has evolved over the years.
And you're going to see a slow but sure erosion of AM and FM numbers, and you're going to see a slow but sure increase in stuff on the net.
And let me tell you, SiriusXM, which is primarily aimed at vehicles right now, is in the next couple of few years looking at internet that's going to be in vehicles.
And then Katie bar the door because everybody's going to be there.
I suppose this is a pretty small question compared to the big items we're dealing with here, but those shows, dark matter shows, were some of the best ever.
And I would love and pay dearly to get a CD of those.
Hey, Art, in the course of these decisions you've made recently that led to you appearing on SiriusXM and led to your subsequent departure, people are wondering what kind of representation you have and what kind of advice you're getting.
I mean, during the course of all of this, perhaps through contract negotiations and whatnot, did you have legal representation or do you even want to comment on that?
And that is that it seems to me that Sirius XM really doesn't have a good reason to hold me to this non-compete.
As long as I don't cross the hours, I mean, they are carrying coast to coast now, right?
So as long as I don't cross the hours of coast to coast, it seems to me that, my goodness, after six, seven weeks of working for them, I'd be more than glad to purchase the studio equipment that's here and just do a streaming show that does not conflict with coast and stream it.
And I just don't know why they would have reason to hold me to that non-compete unless there's a reason revenge and vendetta on their part, possibly.
I was going to call in and ask Art a question, and I kicked it out.
In all the years, decades that I'd listened to him, I never called in.
But I wanted to tell you, Michael, for one thing, that I thought you did a stellar job monitoring that or kind of moderating that interview with Art Bill.
But I kind of feel like, you know, if he had called in last week, not as if he was going to be able to say anything that he, you know, could have said last week, he wouldn't have had anything to say essentially last week.
But it would have definitely calmed a lot of people's nerves.
But, you know, the fact that he did call in and explain everything and was so calm about it.
And, you know, I want to comment on something that Art said about the impression that he had about George being a nice guy and how about the one quality.
There's so many things that I think are going to come out in the next few weeks.
I mean, if Art goes the legal route, there's the discovery process, which is going to expose pretty much anything that hasn't been exposed thus far on talking with foreign users.