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Outside Magazine, June 2008
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Action-sports DJs
And You Thought Shock Radio Was Dead! (cont.)

On the Friday before our visit with Hawk and Ellis, I met up with Pendarvis in New York so we could drive together to an evening taping of Radio Bam at Margera's home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Pendarvis, behind the wheel of a rented SUV, was wearing camo pants, a black T-shirt with flames up the arms, and yellow sunglasses that he'd just purchased for $12 at a rest stop.

As we sped down the Jersey Turnpike, his dueling Sidekick and BlackBerry were buzzing nonstop with calls and e-mails, many from MTV, which was pursuing Jason Ellis to star in a reality show. Some producers there liked his habit of getting injured, as he had two weeks earlier, when he challenged BMX icon Travis Pastrana to do a backflip on a snowboard. Both men tried and failed badly, and Ellis tore a ligament in his knee on the landing.


FACTION HAS SOUGHT TO BUILD A FOLLOWING OF YOUNG MALES SUCKLED ON HOWARD STERN AND EAGER TO EMBRACE AUTHENTIC VOICES FROM THE ACTION-SPORTS UNDERWORLD.

Margera's estate, set in the woods, is a gothic Xanadu of colorful dinosaur statues, skate ramps, graffiti, four-wheelers, and Lamborghinis. Margera was outside when we arrived, sitting barefoot on a homemade swing in cutoffs, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He was surrounded by some 13 friends, most of them men and all wearing black.

Having made his millions with the sick-stunt Jackass franchise and the MTV vehicle Viva La Bam, Margera clearly revels in the no-censorship land of satellite radio. Like Hawk and Ellis, he's a former competitive skater and is using Faction more to grow his fan base than his bank account. (Nobody's sharing numbers, but Sirius officials concede that Faction hosts aren't given monster deals.)

Bam eventually led his entourage into his home studio, which includes a dentist chair, a winged pumpkin, and a butler mannequin wearing a fright mask. He kicked off his show with the announcement that his wife, Missy Rothstein, probably ought to get a pregnancy test, based on his estimation of her menstrual flow. There was a story about Bam falling out of a car, then getting a ride to a bar from the police. The group discussed whether one of the women in the room had allowed the most private part of her digestive system to be compromised for sexual pleasure by her boyfriend on a recent camping trip. Her boyfriend, sitting next to her, is nicknamed Shitbird.

Not surprisingly, Margera is the one Faction host that Pendarvis has unplugged, as the two explained to me after the taping. "Novak was going into rehab," drawled Bam, referring to his childhood friend Brandon Novak, "and I was like ‘I want to do something for you. What would you like?' And he was like ‘I want two hookers to have sex with me.' And I was like ‘OK.' So we got two hookers in, and we were live, and they started to go down on him and Pendarvis cut us out."

Pendarvis doesn't relish this story. "It was more of a joke than anything," he explained. "We went back and forth and I was saying, ‘I'm gonna do it,' and so I did it. Sirius isn't censored. I just don't want the guys to do anything they might regret."




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