The charmed life of Paul Lambert

You've got to admire Paul "Meatsauce" Lambert.

I don't know the full story behind the rise of Lambert, but it's a great story. (I've heard the story behind his Meatsauce nickname, but I don't quite remember how it goes, and I have no interest in hearing it again.)

Here's my assessment of Lambert's schtick: You take a guy with mediocre, at best, broadcasting skills, add a dash of pudginess and top it with a little self-deprecation and somehow you get a success story that's too good to be true.

I don't remember how long it has been since Lambert found his way onto the KFAN airwaves, but he started as a bit player on the station's morning show, as best as I understand it. (I can't tolerate the morning show, so I rarely listen for more than 10 minutes.) Desperate for whatever minimal hourly wage the station was willing to pay him, seemingly, Lambert would show up anywhere and everywhere he could. Whenever there was a job to do later in the broadcast day, Lambert would stick around and fill the seat. He seemed to end up sitting in on Dan Barreiro's show most often.

As time went on Lambert became a prominent player on the KFAN morning show, despite the fact he seemed to play the fool most of the time. He has never developed a polished, competent on-air persona, but that doesn't seem to slow him down. It's as if people want to listen to a guy who sounds as if he has no business on a major market radio station.

As I noted, Lambert was a bit doughy. Nobody would describe him as debonair. But a few years ago he decided it was time to stop looking the part of a slob as he played the role of the doofus, so he started to lose weight. That hardly explained what happened next.

His improbable career in major market radio wasn't enough, evidently. Lambert pulled another horseshoe out of his rear end. He married the easy-on-the-eyes female sidekick of the local top 40 radio station this spring. Yep, a doughy guy with male pattern baldness is a cult figure in Twin Cities radio and married the cutesy sidekick at the neighboring station.

It's a fairy tale, I tell you.

Obviously I'm not in awe of Lambert's skills. Love them or hate them, most personalities on the radio have a quality and skill set that tells you they're a radio personality. Not Lambert. He continues to sound like a guy who is struggling through his first semester at a college radio station. And yet people seem to love him for it. If he's giving what the people want, there's nothing wrong with that. Those who don't enjoy his work can easily change the station.

I can appreciate the role of the dopey sidekick on a sports radio station, but the latest announcement about Lambert, via City Pages, can only make me laugh. He's going to be one of the on-air personalities for the horrible new "alternative" station KFAN's parent company, Clear Channel, is launching at 93.3 FM. So far the station is a painful joke of an alternative station, and having Lambert try to fill the role of one of the jocks should only cement my opinion of it.

I suspect Lambert will double dip. Clear Channel will likely pay him a few dollars over the paltry salary he receives for his work on KFAN and expose him to the non-sports audience. Perhaps those that love the milquetoast flavor of 93.3 will enjoy Lambert's bumbling, stumbling ways. Or perhaps Lambert will become the broadcast professional he presumably wanted to be all those years ago when he was a bit player on KFAN. Time will tell. Good luck to him. I won't be tuned in to 93.3, so it won't matter to me if he succeeds or fails.

Lest you think I simply want to slap Lambert on the back for his good fortune, I will note that the guy has skin as thin as Jeff Dubay. Lambert has no problem playing the fool or dishing out a heaping helping of self-deprecation, but as soon as somebody suggests anything mildly unflattering about him via social media, he'll be quick to cut you off at the knees, at least when it comes to Twitter. That receding hairline is further exposing awfully thin skin. There's a good chance this blog's Twitter account will be blocked by Lambert if he even thinks one critical thing has been written about him.

It will be interesting to see where Lambert is in 10 years. His schtick seems to play well, but radio is a fickle mistress. As soon as Clear Channel is done with him, he'll be tossed aside faster than Chad Hartman. Will there be another radio station ready to embrace him if Clear Channel decides to untether him? Only time will tell.

I'm at a loss to explain the aura of Lambert, but you can't hate a guy who lives a charmed life, even if you don't root for him.

As for Dubay, do you think he hates Lambert? Dubay's tenure at KFAN had a similar track as Lambert's. Dubay was Meatsauce before Lambert was Meatsauce. Dubay might not hate Lambert, but I'm sure he's bitter he threw away his career and opened a door for Lambert to walk through.

Jeff Dubay: The 11th most fascinating person in the Twin Cities

There have to be at least 10 people more fascinating than Jeff Dubay here in the Twin Cities, right?

Although when it comes to City Pages, once a relevant weekly news source, Dubay is hanging in there right around No. 10.

City Pages produces plenty of Facebook and internet traffic by regurgitating news stories from other sources or poaching online postings and adding a dose of color and commentary to its presentation. Train wrecks like Dubay are ripe for the picking, and City Pages loves it whenever Dubay turns the spotlight on himself, as he has a couple of times via Facebook since his broadcasting career ended.

Besides City Pages, it appears the primary source of Dubay news right now is the Pioneer Press. I'm not sure why the stepchild of daily newspapers here in the Twin Cities deems Dubay's online jousts with his former colleagues to be worthy of actual news treatment, but que sera sera. I guess that Bob Sansevere's dissecting of Dubay's career via his Pioneer Press blog made it newsworthy.

A post mortum on Dubay's podcast history by the Pioneer Press and a random collection of tidbits by City Pages provided plenty of insight into Dubay's world. Throw in a few other random sources and I'm still not sure what to believe. Here are tidbits I gleaned in the past 12 hours. None of this is groundbreaking material.

• Everybody is lying. Dubay will claim comments about him are lies. Tom Barnard's nephew will refute any claim Dubay makes. Nobody has said one truthful thing since Dubay's podcast went silent.

• Dubay's co-host, Di Murphy, appears to have been plucked from the online world because she's a woman who is really, really, really into sports. She has blogged on sports in the past, and laments the lack of a female host in the local sports radio market. It's hard to disagree with some of her observations about the local scene. Whether she was cut out for broadcasting in any form is hard to say, as I have never heard her work. She was awfully difficult to work with, according to Dubay.

• Murphy and Barnard's nephew seem to be holding back in revealing something crucial about the sequence of events that brought us to today, and seem to suggest that perhaps it is necessary the Dubay-obsessed public see and/or hear what it is.

• The domain that hosted Dubay's podcast, jeffdubay.com, now redirects to Barnard's podcast site. Although Dubay stripped himself of a Twitter and Facebook presence in the aftermath of his tirade against Team Barnard, he has since restored his Facebook presence.

• Dubay ain't wealthy. This doesn't come as a surprise. It's hard to know how much anyone in broadcasting makes, but there are a few things that we know. It doesn't pay all that well for most folks, despite the public profile it provides. More on this another day, a lot more. For now, we have claims by Barnard's nephew that Dubay has no cash of his own and the startup costs for the podcast were fronted by the Barnard machine.

While Dubay once had a Clear Channel salary, allegedly owned a boat on Lake Minnetonka and may have had some sort of "cabin" north of the the metro – as well as a younger wife who fancied herself a cheerleading coach – his years of not working between radio gigs, (as far as we know,) combined with his time in rehab programs and/or jail settings and his legal bills certainly can't leave him with a lot of personal wealth, unless he was independently wealthy to begin with.

Allegedly Dubay took the bus to work at 1500ESPN each day because his driving privileges are suspended. If so, that's saves him hundreds of dollars per month, but not enough that he'd have built a nest egg to live off of since being dismissed by the Hubbards.

Nonetheless, it would seem unlikely that it's in Dubay's best interest to bite any hand that feeds him, no matter how tiny the morsel.

• Dubay would fly off the handle in his business dealings with those he worked with during his podcast career. Whether he did or didn't, we don't know, of course, but given his short temper and seething anger whenever he read something he didn't like on Twitter, the idea that he was difficult to deal with is not far fetched. Armchair psychologists seem to think Dubay has some sort of mental condition that is not being fueled by chemical stimulants.

So there you have it, the world of Dubay in the final days of March 2014. How will it all end? Will it end? Will Dubay finally just fade away, leaving his fans to wonder, "Whatever happened to that guy?"