Al Franken calls about 20 minutes after his radio show goes off the air, a show that ended with him locked in a fairly heated argument with long-time friend (and resident Rush Limbaugh defender) Mark Luther about comments by Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.

By the time he calls, though, Franken seems well past that, relaxed and friendly, discussing and joking about technology, Air America's past and future, his first trip to town and a brush with a Texas law he found very peculiar.

He'll likely cover some of the same turf during his SXSW interview 3:30 p.m. March 13.

If you prefer an argumentative Al, well, his show will be heard daily locally on KOKE-AM (1600) starting that same day, an event he'll commemorate with a live broadcast from the State Theater from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.

Is Al Franken your real name, and have you ever been a paid male escort?

Yes. No.

Which came first, the SXSW gig or the live show?

I don't know. I think the invitation for the South By Southwest may have come first... and then I think we may have been at that point knowing we were probably going to be opening in Austin around that time.

Is that a done deal?

Yes.

Is it 1600? Nah. You wouldn't know that. That's for people lower down than you.

I think it's KOKE-AM. And I'm not sure I'm thrilled with that. We already are in KLSD in San Diego. Clear Channel named it that. We asked what it stood for, and Clear Channel said "Liberal San Diego," and we went, "Oh, really?" But we felt it wasn't a battle worth fighting.

But we're working for them, at least in part. All they care about is money, and people are listening to us.

So how "tech savvy" are you... and are you surprised you're being featured at a technology conference?

Yes. I'm a bit of a Luddite. I rely on the computer for my e-mail and I Google around, and I Nexis.... I use it for doing research... I don't shop so much. And I have my address book and phone number book in it.

I also carry in my back pocket an actual, physical little book with my schedule in it. Where most people have a PalmPilot, what I have is an actual little book. I also keep the cloth I use to clean my glasses in a little plastic thing in it and it's actually unbelieveable. It's very versatile, I can get to information very fast.

In the last few weeks you've broadcast from the Conservative Political Action Conference and now you're coming to Bush Country, albeit one of the few parts of Texas that went "blue" last time around. You don't seem to be afraid of going into the lion's den, so to speak.

No. Although, I have to say, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I really was glad to get out of there. I was looking forward to it, and... it was kind of interesting at first, then it just became a certain point where I really, really had to get out of there. It started out nice enough, because G. Gordon Liddy and I are friends, we had a friendly discussion, and we both hate (Bill) O'Reilly, so I just sort of played some great O'Reilly and we talked about it. It was an hour and that was fun. Then we had (R. Emmett Tyrrell) editor of American Spectator on, and he was disgusting. It was not that his content was disgusting — like an Ann Coulter book or something — he wouldn't answer things. It was like he was deliberately trying to do non sequiturs and bad radio.

Is that when you called him a jerk?

By the end of it, I was trying to figure out, either he's kinda crazy or that's what he was doing, trying to do bad radio. And it took me awhile to figure out he was just deliberately being an a------... that's when I called him a jerk.

You're about a year into this now. Air America: Better than expected, worse than expected or about where you'd have figured?

It depends at what point you're talking about. We had that awful thing happen to us at the end of a month, we lost Los Angeles and Chicago because we'd run out of money. I didn't expect that, I'll tell you that. We were led to believe we had more money.

That was awful, shooting ourselves in the foot right out of the starting gate. And it was touch-and-go until the ratings came out. In radio, it just takes a long time to get ratings. I mean, literally, to find out what your ratings are.

And the ratings were good.

One of the reasons Clear Channel is carrying us so much is one of the first stations was a Portland, Ore., station, and we more than quadrupled ratings.

We just happened to be this enormous success in Portland, next at San Diego — at KLSD. Same thing happened in Albuequerque, Denver...

Without Internet streaming, would there be any hope for something like Air America?

Obviously that was a very big part, because we were only on a few stations. I don't know what percentage of our listeners were on the Web, but obviously a lot. I think we're the fourth largest live audio streamed thing in the world. The first one is, I dunno, some kind of dance music. And, so I think as far as talk radio is concerned, we maybe No. 1. I mean, we're not in so many places. It's an odd bragging right to have something like that, rated so highly because we weren't on the air in a lot of places.

But now... with Austin and Dallas, which we're coming to, we got L.A. back a couple months ago, D.C. and Detroit... we're getting to above 50 percent of the country. We're in a much better place than I thought we'd be after that first disaster.

Before the disaster, I'd thought we'd be further along at this point. But it was very touch-and-go there for a while. The Right jumped on it, this proves there's no listenership for (Air America)... and it proved nothing of the sort. It was like O'Reilly saying the same thing: "I guess nobody wants it." But remember, Fox News Channel lost millions its first two years on the air.

And now we may be profitable by the end of this year. The next thing the people from the right-wing media will say "OK, when will you recoup what you've lost?" Screw you, c'mon! We just started!

Have you visited Austin often?

I've been down to Austin maybe three or four times. The first time I came with my daughter, just to see an Indigo Girls concert. It would've been my daughter's junior year in high school, and she was a big Indigo Girls fan, and every time the Indigo Girls were in New York, she had a huge test the next day... and it was the highest pressure year of high school if you care about where you're going to college. Finally, a couple of days after school let out, a concert was in Austin. So I took her. It was this father-daughter thing.

I remember we tried to listen to some music on whichever street you have there...

Sixth Street?

That sounds right, yeah, Sixth Street. And we go in this honky-tonk, or whatever you call it... gonna listen to some music, and first thing — they think she's my date and they're gonna card her. At the time she's 16 or something. Then I tell them (she's my daughter)... and they say, "Well, y'know, you have to stay within arm's length of her." I went, "That's the law here?" And they said, "She can drink... as long as she stays within arm's length of you."

I said, "You're telling me she can have a whiskey?" "Yes." And I don't know if this was just an odd policy of this place or state law. That's when I thought, "I'm in a different place."