BRETT: Before I was working as a screener on the program I worked in the syndication office, essentially, the original syndication office for EIB with the great business trio there at the time, Ed McLaughlin and Stu Krane and John Axten and so many wonderful people that I got to work with every single day. And that group of people was wonderful. But when I got to go over to the studio and spend time with Kit and Maimone and Rush, I said, “Oh, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to be working every single day.”

But it was a remarkable journey for me personally. I first started listening to Rush in 1988, like everybody else, I was a kid growing up in the far west Texas town of El Paso, and I was a fan for a very, very long time, and when I had the opportunity to be a part of this very special journey, the special program that Rush put together, I leapt at the opportunity. And it has been the highlight of my life, and on and off 25-year journey of watching all the great stuff that Rush did with an amazing team. And that is going to continue because he was so prescient and so dialed into the culture and he understood what was going on out there in this crazy, crazy world.

But the reality is that Rush Limbaugh, who’s also known as being a jokester and a prankster, loved to have fun. Sometimes it got him in trouble. Remember he told you he’s been fired seven times. But people loved his humor. It was often tempering the serious discussions of the day. He also had a gift for explaining things in such a unique way that you couldn’t help but laugh at the creativity as well.

He got a lot of requests, song requests in July of 2020. Here’s a song request from a longtime caller hearkening back to the early days of the show and some of the memorable bits that Rush did. Two popular EIB song requests dedicating one to Rush and one to Kathryn. It’s Annie checking in.

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RUSH: Here is Annie. Annie in my adopted hometown, Sacramento, California, great to have you with us. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I have been listening to you since before you ever aborted your first phone call. When does a call become a call? That was brilliant. That was you. But I haven’t been listening to you long enough to ever hear you as a music deejay.

RUSH: Ahhh.

CALLER: And I wanted to ask if you would play two songs for me.

RUSH: Requests. Requests, I love requests. What are the songs you want to hear?

CALLER: The first one I would like to dedicate to the EIB family, of which I am very much a part, and I would like for you to play Thank the Lord Rush is on the EIB. The second song I would like to dedicate to you and Kathryn, and that’s the opera singer singing God Bless Rush Limbaugh.

RUSH: That would be Barbara Chenault Law from Texas. She’s from Dallas. Well, yeah, I love getting requests. You know, we don’t get requests much. I would love to play these two tunes for you. Let me tell you something, Annie. You are so sweet and so nice and so perceptive because I was a smoking deejay. I was ahead of my time. I kept getting fired for playing music I liked instead of adhering to the boring programming format.

I kept getting fired for making political comments. The management, “You don’t get to say that, management says that.” Well I said, “You never say it. We don’t do editorials here.” Anyway, yeah, those were fun days, but here we go. It’s the Rush Hawkins Singers and Thank the Lord.

(playing of song)

There you have it, folks, the Black Lives Matter singers.

(continued playing of song)

RUSH: On loan from God. The Rush Hawkins Singers. I was just kidding about it being the Black Lives Matter Singers. I don’t know that they know how to sing.

We had a request for a couple of tunes from a caller in Sacramento. By the way, she might have said something you were like, “What? What was she talking about?” She said she had been here since before I aborted my first call. Perhaps it was the creative bit that put the program on the map after we had gone national.

Abortion was a big, big deal 30 years ago, the debate was hot and heavy, as it always has been. So I thought rather than just tell everybody what I thought, which I’d been doing and doing well, why not illustrate it? Why not illustrate what actually happens using phone calls? I don’t have time, it took two hours to go through this whole thing and I’m not gonna do that.

But it started with the premise, “When does a call begin? Does a call begin when you dial? Or does a call begin when I answer or when anybody answers?” And I called the phone company and I said, “When does a call begin? When do you actually start charging for calls? When somebody dials a number or when it’s answered?” And they hem-hawed around and so forth, and then I compared the blinking lights of people on hold to unviable tissue masses in the womb and whether or not I would be giving them birth.

And then — I’m really shortening this — and then what happens if I get a call that I don’t want? You know, I went out there and I invited people to call. I assumed the responsibility, and then all of a sudden I got somebody on the air, and I don’t want to talk to ’em, I wish they hadn’t called. Like, gee, I wish I hadn’t gotten pregnant.

So I just decided to abort the call, and I did it with vacuum cleaner sound effects. And said, “See? It never existed, folks. Because I just decided I didn’t want it. That call was worthless. I could tell that call wasn’t gonna amount to anything, that call was not gonna help this program, a mistake was made in accepting that call, it’s not my responsibility,” and so I just Hoovered the thing.

Because it was so well done, it was — if I did it today, even if I went back, got the tape, just the replayed what we had done, intolerable. It was seen back then for the brilliant creativity that it was. It was also seen as highly controversial and insensitive and so forth. The left didn’t like it because it blew up every point they had ever made. But today the creativity would not be acknowledged. Anyway, that’s what she was talking about.

The second tune she requested was — she wanted to dedicate it to me and Kathryn — Barbara Chenault Law, a soprano, world-renowned opera singer from Dallas, Texas. My mother met Barbara Chenault Law and loved her. And it is gorgeous, and here it is.

(playing of song)

RUSH: Barbara Chenault Law. We had no idea it was coming. It just came in one day. So did Thank the Lord Rush Limbaugh’s On, it just came in one day. People were deeply moved, deeply attached, loved the program, were sending their work in. And Barbara Chenault Law went to her own expense to record that in the studio and it just blew me away. And that stuff is now itself 25 or 27 years old. I’m honored to have those two requests and be able to play them.

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BRETT: That’s the connection, folks. From the days in Sacramento up to the current time. God bless you, Rush Limbaugh.