For starters, the legendary host, also known as the Old Grey Wolf, left his post voluntarily four years ago. Although it was a surprise move, catching pretty much everyone off guard, Rhyner departed from 1310 The Ticket, the station he built and led into powerhouse territory, while he and the rest of the station were on top and had been for decades. There wasn't anything you could tell Rhyner about the talk radio industry that he probably didn't already know, at that point at least.
He wasn’t sure what was next for him, nor was he in a hurry to figure it out. For quite some time, it didn't seem as though another job in local radio would be Rhyner’s next big thing. He dabbled in podcasting, bouncing from one podcast network to another, but Rhyner found himself in unfamiliar territory. These were scenarios in which he was creating in an unfamiliar environment and was under the control of business and managerial forces he had little sway over.
But in October 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, the popular radio man returned to the dial in Dallas. Billboards across North Texas for the reformatted, all-talk 97.1 The Freak, formerly rock station 97.1 The Eagle, announced his return with his face, looming large next to the words “I’m Back.”
Rhyner would be joined on 97.1 by other expats of The Ticket: Julie Dobbs, Michael Gruber, Mike Sirois and, eventually, Danny Balis, along with Ben Rogers and Jeff “Skin” Wade. Each had been beloved voices on 1310 over the previous many years but had left the station long before Rhyner did for an assortment of reasons, including issues with pay and upward mobility.
The new radio station and its staff made waves online, if not in the ratings. Some current The Ticket personnel expressed shock and even hurt feelings at Rhyner taking his talents to a different frequency. Listeners of The Ticket took to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to pick sides and pledge allegiance to one channel or the other.
The Ticket had been built on infectious chemistry formed through an addictive blend of sports, crude humor and tribal comradery. The new station aimed to do something similar. In its earliest days, The Freak hosts stressed they would talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and that sports would be just one of the many topics broached on the air from day to day. If the rivalry between Rhyner’s old station and his new one ever truly began, it didn’t last long.
On April 26, Rhyner and most of the rest of The Freak staff were let go as the station reverted to its old rock music format under the old name. Just three months after The Ticket celebrated its 30th anniversary, the local radio experiment that was The Freak barely got off the ground before being grounded for good.
When Rhyner left radio this time, he did so involuntarily, but it hardly came out of nowhere. To hear the Old Grey Wolf tell it, he “saw it coming from the New Mexico state line.”
There were other differences too. This time, he was leaving a company he hardly knew, and the industry he’s in the Hall of Fame for never felt familiar to him this time around. Life in a station that wasn’t the dominant force that The Ticket still is was also a culture shock of sorts. The security that Rhyner earned as the godfather of 1310 was not a part of his employment package at 97.1.
At least part of the reason is that when Rhyner left The Ticket, he did so just weeks before Americans would start wondering if this thing called “the coronavirus” would cause any trouble here in the States. Rhyner now acknowledges that the pandemic changed the industry in ways he hadn’t anticipated, primarily because he wasn't a part of it when stations big and small laid off staff and slashed budgets after advertisers stopped paying big bucks in the summer of 2020.
Another key difference between radio departures, however, is that this time, he had a pretty quick idea what his next move would be, and listeners wouldn't have to wait very long to hear him again. Indeed, he had decided to go bigger than he had the last time when he was calling his own shots.
Gruber, now part of Your Dark Companion, has listened to Mike Rhyner on the radio since he was 8 years old.
Kathy Tran
A New Mothership Taking Off in a New Direction
In his days at The Ticket, Rhyner famously referred to the studio as “the mothership.” Now, the mothership is a home in a cozy, tree-filled neighborhood near Uptown. The walls are a Dallas sports and music lover's dream museum. Framed pictures, posters, magazines and mementos galore festoon nearly every wall inside the house. Also inside the new mothership is a room that likely costs nearly as much as the 1310 studio he used to work in.Your Dark Companion is the reason for all the expensive gear. It’s the podcast venture that’s been keeping Rhyner — and the group of people who help him put it together — busy for the past three months or so. To be clear, this isn't like the podcast of the same name he produced in 2021. Rhyner thinks that what he’s doing now is very much a Your Dark Companion 2.0.
“If I was going to do this again, then I was going to have to really put my back into it, which I didn’t do before because it was really just something for me to do. No more, no less. I did it just to occupy myself,” Rhyner says from the home studio with his partner, Becca Moore, sitting nearby. “And while I think I did some pretty good stuff up there, had a lot of good interviews and things like that, it all just sort of went out into the netherworld and died. I didn't have any real idea of what to do with them.”
An early decision, and perhaps his biggest after his Freak days came to an end, was that Rhyner opted to start from scratch rather than join up with an existing media outlet the way he did when he podcasted for The Athletic and the now defunct Vokal podcast network in the past. Even when he was the public face of The Ticket, he wasn’t ever fully in charge the way he is now.
At the age of 74, Rhyner is embracing a new medium in a still-young industry, but he’s not doing it by himself. Come on, did any of you think the Old Grey Wolf was making his own TikToks? To be fair, Rhyner’s never been a lone wolf, and now he has a new pack to roam around with.
Moore tends to the business side of YDC with the help of friend Gordy Connally, whom Rhyner describes as “the fixer.” Connally also helps arrange things on the business side with Moore. As for those TikToks and the video and audio footage, Rhyner hired Ashlea Bullington of Bullrose Productions to cover such technical elements.
come see Your Dark Companion in action Fri 23aug at CBD House of Healing, NW Hwy/Plano Rd, northeast quadrant, 4p-6p…if you need to get your head right, they gotcha…if you hurt, they gotcha…if it’s fun you’re lookin’ for, we gotcha pic.twitter.com/QxkxFGV8jV
— Mike Rhyner (@theoldgreywolf) August 21, 2024
Not only does Rhyner have help behind the scenes in making YDC move, but he’s brought in “Grubes,” more formally known as Michael Gruber, as a co-host of Your Dark Companion. Gruber spent a few years with Rhyner on The Ticket as an audio engineer, and again during The Freak’s short life. Gruber has made his way through the radio world as a master of “drops,” tiny bits of audio, employed at just the right time for optimal comedic effect. But Rhyner has long seen “Shoopy,” as he often calls Gruber, as someone ready for more than just drops.
“Number one, he’s very good at whatever he does,” Rhyner says. “Whatever he does, he really puts his heart and soul into it, and if he’s not really good at something at the start, he certainly will get good at it soon enough, and then he gets really good at it. Number two, the vibe of the guy is just unsurpassed. You look at the guy and you just get a good vibe off of him, and that’s just the way he is.”
Gruber is a bit shocked about where he finds himself now. He took the folding of The Freak in stride, simply glad to have gotten to work with a bunch of friends again for a short time, but he by no means expected to be the one talking into the mic and in front of the camera a few months after The Freak went down. He also now co-hosts another podcast, Shippy and Grubes, a sister production to Your Dark Companion, with Jonathan Shipman. To be working so closely with someone he’s been listening to since he was 8 years old is a trip for Gruber.
“Not only is hosting a show with ‘Rhynes’ weird to me, just because of who he is,” he says. “But just hosting a show with my name on it is even weirder to me. I never expected to be able to put ‘podcast host’ down as my job title, but it’s pretty cool that I can now.”
Podcasting has been the go-to option for other former Ticket and Freak hosts. Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp started The Dumb Zone shortly after leaving 1310 in 2023. Jeff Cavanaugh recently announced his inclusion in a new local sports podcast network called DLLS, and Dobbs has amped up her efforts on The Mom Game, a podcast she has co-hosted with Texas Rangers TV reporter Emily Jones since just before the pandemic.
Dobbs, a veteran of multiple local radio stations and roles in local sports television, is bullish on the prospects of one medium while decidedly less so when it comes to another.
“Digital media and podcasting is just picking up steam,” Dobbs says. “But we’ve seen traditional radio has been dwindling for a while now for various reasons. People are tired of long commercial breaks and it not being an on-demand type of thing. Most stations are run by giant corporations with competing priorities and interests. At The Freak, we had a vision for what we wanted there that made a lot of sense to us, but that didn’t align with the people who were paying our salaries.”
Ah, yes, salaries. Paychecks. Podcasting is all fun and games until someone can’t pay their rent. Being your own boss may be priceless, but someone needs to pony up for there to be a business and not just an audio file.
“It’s for sure a whole lot more encompassing to do it the way we’re trying to do it now,” Rhyner says. To that point, Gruber’s duties include a combination of sales, booking guests and production to go along with podcast host.
To the masses, and especially to Rhyner’s many fans, it might seem that his high profile and fine reputation are enough to turn a new podcast venture into a golden success, but that’s not the case. Even a Texas Radio Hall of Famer has to be diligent in his approach when it comes to establishing himself in a new way in a new medium.
“First, if we can get someone to decide they like the podcast enough to listen or to subscribe, that’s just not enough by itself,” he says. “If we’re lucky enough to win them over initially, we still have to do something to keep us at the top of their mind to where they’ll seek us out again. Otherwise, what we do will just waft away and mix in with everything else out there.”
Dobbs gets more specific when talking about what even a well-known personality must face when entering the podcasting realm.
“It’s a good start to have a large following or to have the name of someone, especially like Mike [Rhyner],” she says. “That name might result in some early interest, but I’ve learned it's not enough to succeed in the big world of digital media. You’ve got to have so many other pieces in place. You got to have a video component, you got to have operations people who will help run the production. A social media following will help, but if people aren't going from your social media accounts to download your podcast, it’s hard to grow.”
Perhaps the most obvious hurdle to replicating the listenership Rhyner enjoyed at The Ticket is the fact that he’s not at The Ticket anymore.
“In this form of media, you don't have that one station for someone to tune into and stay on,” Moore says. “When someone is listening to a radio station, they might not like one segment, but they still listen to the other shows and will probably listen again the next day. But with podcasting, it's an immediate reaction that might end up with the listener saying ‘cool story, bro’ and not being interested.”
A Hard Line From the Past
It’s not all going where no wolf has gone before for Your Dark Companion. For the most part, the guests who have appeared are names that are likely familiar to The Ticket listeners or to those who follow local news and entertainment. Dobbs and Cavanaugh have appeared on YDC, as has WFAA meteorologist Jesse Hawila, FM radio luminary Kellie Rasberry and Bally’s Sports anchor John Rhadigan. But one guest, far more than any other, just might represent a hope to bring the past into the present in order to build a future for YDC. Greg Williams, perhaps still better known to DFW radio fans as “Greggo” or “The Hammer,” and Rhyner once seemed inseparable. The pair starred together for the insanely popular, ratings-dominating The Hardline from 1994 until 2008, when Williams left The Ticket under controversial, soap-opera conditions involving his drug abuse as well as hurt feelings and burned bridges on both sides.
The former co-hosts and friends didn’t appear together in public again until a 2020 screening of Not in This Town: The Improbable Rise of The Old Grey Wolf, a documentary about Rhyner’s life. In December 2022, it was clear the two had rebuilt a bridge when Williams joined Rhyner on his afternoon Freak program.
These days, the YDC episodes featuring Williams and Rhyner palling around are alone worth the price of whichever subscription level you might choose. Rhyner’s signature gruff eloquence, combined with Williams’ country-soaked voice and trademark phrases, are the stuff of radio chemistry gold. It takes only a quick peek around the YDC mothership to see that Rhyner still holds many memories and accomplishments tied to Williams.
The July 28 edition that showed the two taking in the MLB All-Star Game festivities together, along with Gruber, was especially heartwarming, as baseball had always been the topic the former co-stars seemed to bond over the most before their fantastic radio run ended.
So, what changed? After years apart, how did this reunion come about in time to help propel YDC?
“There’s one thing you should know about me, and maybe it's the one thing that is the key ingredient to all this,” Rhyner said. “As much as I may huff and puff and try to blow your house down, give me a little time and it’ll all be fixed. I’m just not real good with grudges. There are other people in my past where something’s happened and we got over it and we went down the road and that’s what happened here.”
Rhyner adds that he didn’t restart YDC just so he and Williams could reunite more regularly. And he admits that he understands whom he “is dealing with” and will continue to keep his “guard up with him.”
A New Ballgame
As was the case when he sneaked away from The Ticket more than four years ago, Rhyner isn’t saying he’ll never return to radio, even though he’s immersed in podcasting now. But at the same time, he doesn't think there’s a place in radio anymore “for a guy like [him].” He has a long list of wants and needs that would have to be perfectly aligned for him to even consider a radio job offer, and he’s pretty sure no one’s going to go that far to make him budge. Overall now, he likes being involved with one of the forces that has come to be a chief disruptor of traditional radio.
In his radio days, Rhyner knew that success was measured by ratings, plain and simple. He was at The Ticket for 26 years thanks to high ratings, and he was at the Freak for less than two because of low ratings. But that was the old way, which has little to do with the world where Rhyner now works. Measuring success as the founder of a new podcast company isn’t so black and white.
“In the beginning we did say, OK, if we can pay the bills without us having to make more capital contributions, then we’re winning,” Rhyner says. “But I don't really know how successful this is defined right now. I will tell you this, though, I have enough people coming up to me and telling me they dig what we’re doing. That lets me know we’re on a good path.”
