Private Parts

by Howard Stern

  And lo and behold, as soon as I graduated, I got a job at WNTN, doing daytimes at this progressive AM rock station in Newton. This was an unbelievable coup. No one got this. So I was doing the job and three days later I went in for my paycheck. No pay. I guess the station was having financial difficulties.

  In fact, the station was being run by some guy who just got out of Boston University and was a really strange guy. One morning he was making a public affairs tape and he accidentally said, "Aw, fuck." He figured that he had erased it but when the show played, the "Aw, fuck" went out over the air. Big fucking deal, probably three people listened to that show. Nobody called, nobody complained, but this guy went into a panic.

  "Oh, my career's over," he moaned. "Help me compose a letter to the FCC begging their forgiveness."

  "Why? Maybe nobody heard it," I said.

  "It's better to turn yourself in," this moron said. So he wrote this letter:

  Dear FCC,

  I have made a terrible error. As you know, I'm a broadcaster, in charge of this station, and I was making a tape ...

  He went into this whole story and he sent the letter and he was shitting in his pants, waiting for the FCC to show up. I can't imagine that anyone in the history of radio had ever reported himself to the FCC except this dude.

  I didn't last long at that station. I wanted to be in radio, but not for free. But at least I had a tape I could send around. Soon enough, I got called in for an interview at this station in Westchester County, New York.

  This was great. I wanted to stay in New York, because Alison and I were quasi-living together at this time and she was getting her master's in social work at Columbia. So this program director wanted to hire me as the evening guy at ninety-six dollars a week.

  I freaked out. I got real nervous that I wasn't good enough, and I turned him down. I rationalized it by saying the money was shit. I wanted to get married and all my friends were getting out of school and making twelve grand a year. I turned down my first legitimate job and went to work for Benton and Bowles, an advertising agency. I lied and told them I loved math to get this bullshit, pencil-pushing marketing job. It was terrible. I had to wear a suit every day, and my boss said, "Don't worry. I want you to come in on Sunday, but you don't have to wear your tie." I was miserable. And I've got to hand it to my mother. She really helped me here. She said, "This job is not for you. You're a wreck."

  I quit without giving notice. I had already applied to their creative department, to run the AV equipment, some entry-level job. The day after I quit I got a call and they hired me in creative. I wasn't there for more than three hours when I got fired again, because their personnel department realized that I was the guy who just quit the other department.

  Then I went to work for this place in Queens that I had read about in the paper. It was a barter house and I was going to sell radio time -- you go to a company and you trade advertising time on stations

  for an equivalent value of what they produce. And they paid me for this. So I went into two Chinese restaurants, and I made two deals. They didn't even know what they were doing. "You mean I get radio ad?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  As I was closing the deal, I realized that the guys I was working for were crooked. The IRS was after them, their funds were frozen by the bank, and the guy who owned the place would take off his shirt in the middle of the office and spray himself with fucking deodorant. It was crazy. So I went back to the restaurants and said, "I think I'm working for crooks, don't even get involved with them." They said, "No, no, how about if we pay cash money for the advertising time?" I was a great salesman. I couldn't get rid of them.

  All of a sudden I realized I had turned down a job in radio, and I could've killed myself. What were the odds that I could get a job in radio again? And here, I really owe all this to Alison. She turned to me and said, "Why don't you pick up the phone, call that guy in Westchester, and say that you're really sorry that you turned the job down. Tell him to keep you in mind if anything comes up in the future." I have one of these minds that says you don't call someone back if you turned down a job. That I could do this was a mind-blowing revelation to me. So I picked up the phone and called the guy. It was right before New Year's and he was working at KTU, doing overnights, in addition to being the program director of this dumpy radio station WRNW.

  Bingo, he had an opening, some fill-in work, middays, ten to two. The reason the guy offered it to me was that he couldn't get anybody for New Year's Day, and I would be his fill-in guy. I said okay, nothing permanent, but at least I'd get a shot. He wanted me to work because he had to do this overnight shift at KTU and he didn't want to be woken up the next day.

  So I went up there and the radio station was in an old house in the middle of a residential area of Briarcliff Manor. One of the bedrooms was the radio station studio, the other was a production studio. I was doing this show and I was fucking nervous and my voice was hoarse and I was croaking "WRNW" and talking soft like an FM disc jockey. I was no more than ten minutes into the show, playing a Crosby, Stills & Nash song, when I hit the microphone and there were two little stop/start buttons. The buttons got jammed. That meant the microphone was permanently on. I couldn't turn it down. When you

  have the microphone switch depressed, you can't even hear to cue up a record. You're fucked.

  Now this was a music station. You were just supposed to say, "WRNW," and go on to another song. So as I was saying, "WRNW," I was trying to think fast. I took the record, and I got the needle on the outside of the record, and I was playing the first track and panicking. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to wake this guy up, he was going to fire me.

  Finally, I called him up at his house. He had obviously just gotten to sleep after doing his shift, and he said, "What the fuck are you doing? Why are you calling me? Call the engineer!" I told him I didn't even know how to call the engineer, I didn't know his number, and he screamed, "OH, I'LL DO IT!" and hung up the phone.

  Meanwhile, I couldn't change records, so I opened up the mike between cuts, saying, "We're tracking a whole album here at WRNW." I was doing anything to kill time until the next song. You weren't supposed to play a whole album side. So I was trying to make it sound natural; you weren't even supposed to talk between the cuts. This was a disaster, and I knew all the other jocks were listening to me. I was so fucking embarrassed. An hour into this, another jock showed up, and I didn't know what to do. I was almost in fucking tears, because I knew I blew it. The guy was going to hate me, and he was going to fire me. So the engineer eventually showed up, and he started blaming me because I didn't know what I was doing, and I was not supposed to hit both buttons at the same time, and I was a schmuck.

  The next day I went out to the station to see the program director, and I groveled. "Please forgive me, I didn't know what happened." I really apologized and he didn't fire me. The guy has since told me that he wanted to fire me after that first show. In fact, the only reason he hired me was because I had a first-class radio license and I had short hair. That was ironic because I had just cut my hair for the interview. I had a broadcasting teacher who told me, "Always go in a nice outfit and cut your hair. Even though you're interviewing at these hippie stations, you should really dress nice." So I had gone up there real professional-looking, and the guy told me he hired me because he was so sick of these long-haired motherfuckers coming in giving him shit and never showing up for work on time. Hey, I showed up on time, I just couldn't work the friggin' microphone.

  Anyway, he didn't fire me and I hung around and eventually

 

  My radio school diploma. I had to take physics, which was a nightmare. Miraculously, I passed.

  became the regular midday guy. Meanwhile, the other jocks started talking about getting raises and forming a union. Again, my father gave me good advice. He said, "It's great you're making ninety-six dollars a week. That station's a training ground. Those announcers are nuts trying to get a union and benefits. The
station is charging six dollars a minute for advertising; the place'll go out of business with a union."

  So I was doing middays and soon they made me production director, too, because I became really good at cutting tape and coming up with creative commercials. I did some spots for a local guy called the Cheese Wheel. Now this doesn't sound like much, but you have to understand that this was FM and everyone was too cool for the room and here I was doing commercials for the Cheese Wheel and I was calling the owner on the air and putting him in the spots. This was mind-blowing to everyone there. Plus I put sound effects and all kinds of wacky stuff into the spots. This was the only way I could be creative.

  Meanwhile, the station was sold and new owners came in and they made this Israeli guy the general manager. This guy was a little bit cocky, a little overconfident, the kind of guy who would come up to me and say, "You know, my sign is Capricorn. Thees ees the best astrological sign!" And I would say, "Hey! Whaddya mean the best astrological sign?"

  One day he came to me and he said, "I listen to your radio show. You are terrible. You will never be a great disc jockey. You're okay with the commercials, you do nice job. So why don't you become my program director?" This guy was so insulting, I swear, the day he said that to me, I told myself I was going to be the fucking greatest morning man this country ever had because I had to prove this prick wrong.

  At the same time, he was offering me twelve thousand dollars a year, instead of my measly ninety-six dollars a week -- twelve thousand dollars a year! This was unbelievable. So I went to my father and he told me to take the job as program director but stay on the air as a disc jockey because program directing is a shit job and on-air is where the action is. Good advice.

  So now I was running the radio station. And the Israeli said, "Look, I can't make any money with this progressive format. Why don't you just get rid of all the records and play fifty of the same songs over and over again, like Top Forty does?" Hey, I just wanted the two-fifty a week, I couldn't give a shit about the music. I said to someone, "You're the music director, you pick the fifty fucking records." I couldn't believe I was getting a paycheck.

  A couple of days went by and the Israeli said to me, "You're in charge of public affairs now, too, because you're the program director."

  "What do I have to do?" I asked.

  "See those records over there?" He pointed. "Religious broadcasters pay us to run those shows. And every week they come in and you open them up." I realized I had seen the old program director doing all this shit, and it was a whole involved library system, and I'm totally disorganized. Plus, I didn't give a rat's ass about the religious programming. So I figured I was going to get these religious programs and I was going to throw them in the garbage because nobody could possibly be listening to the Maryknoll Theatre with all the nuns on Sunday morning. I took one show and told the Sunday engineer, "Here's your tape. Just play the same fucking show over and over." I was right. We didn't get one complaint.

  I soon started to realize that this was ridiculous. I was the program director, but I wasn't into it. Yet they loved me, they thought I was a great program director! I didn't give them any shit. If I lost a disc jockey, I'd take a college kid and throw him on the air. In fact, Bree Walker once asked me for a job there. She was on WYNY, a big station in New York, and she left the station. I met her at a party,

  My resume and business card. I was so proud of my meaningless job and my meaningless accomplishments.

  I went to shake her hand, and she didn't have a fucking hand. Then she asked me for a job.

  "Bree, we pay four dollars an hour. It's beneath you. You worked at WYNY!" I said. I wouldn't hire her, because I felt that she would intimidate all of us. She was a professional! We were not professionals,

  we were idiots, we were assholes! We were the worst assemblage of disc jockeys on the planet, and I put together the worst of them, because if I heard a tape and the guy didn't stutter I hauled him in and put him on the air.

  So here I was, the new program director, and one of the jocks told me someone in the station was stealing from her pocketbook.

  "What am I supposed to do?" I asked.

 

  Now that I was making that big twelve grand a year, I married Alison.

 

  "Hey baby, spend the rest of your life with a guy with a bad mustache."

 

  "My father and I share a slow dance.

  "Do something," she said.

  "We'll set a trap for them," I said. "We'll put out your pocketbook, and I'll stand in the other room, and we'll see who's stealing from your pocketbook." Sure enough, we found one of the jocks stealing from her pocketbook. He took twenty bucks. He was making ninety-six dollars a week, he had to pay rent and help out with his family's bills. He was taking twenty from her pocketbook because he was desperate.

  So I went to the Israeli and told him what went down.

  "If you want to truly be management, be a man, and fire him yourself!" he told me. "You go fire him! Be a man!"

  I got it in my mind that, holy shit, if I was really going to be the manager, I really do have to fire this guy. And I was like pukin' over this, I was sick to my stomach. Even though he was stealing from the pocketbook, I felt really bad for the guy, but I had to go fire him. That's when I made the decision: I wasn't going to be in management. I probably could have done that whole trip and been a program director, but it was bullshit. I knew I had to get back to what I had wanted to do since I was five. I had to become a wacky morning man.

  HERE'S THE LEATHER WEATHERLADY

  I picked up Radio & Records, which is a trade publication in radio, and I saw that WCCC, a station in Hartford, Connecticut, was looking for a "wild, fun morning guy." I had fantasized about working for this station many times because it was right between Boston and New York, and every time I drove back to college I had picked it up in the car. This was a fifty-thousand-watt FM station and it had a sister AM station that simulcast in the morning. So I put together a tape. I knew that deep inside I wanted to do wild stuff, but you can't do wild stuff sitting by yourself in a room.

  The craziest thing I did on that audition tape was say, "Okay, let's listen to some Robert Klein!" and boom, I played something off a Robert Klein album. Then I played some Cheech and Chong. Those were the only two comedy albums we had at the station. And I mixed in a couple of one-liners that I'd written. Other than that, it was mostly Robert Klein being funny. When I finally met Robert Klein, I told him I owed my career to him.

  So I sent this tape off to CCC and they called me for an audition. I went up there, I was shitting in my pants. The guy said, "Go in that room, put on the mike, here's five records. Go do a radio show."

  I went into the other studio, and I was in shock. I didn't know what to do. I just felt weird. But I did it and I gave the guy the tape, and it really pissed me off that I fucked up, so I called him up and said, "I haven't heard from you. What'd you think of the tape?"

  "Your tape is great," he said to me, "but that shit that you did for me in my studio was terrible! You didn't do anything."

  I told him that I had felt very uncomfortable, I wasn't prepared. So I went back up and I did another tape for them, and this time I just let loose, I went wild. I nailed it and the guy hired me. They hired me for twelve grand a year, so I was maintaining my salary, but I needed money to move. I called the owner and I asked him to help me out.

  "I've got to move me and my wife to Hartford. Where am I gonna live till she moves up?" I asked. "I have no money."

  "Well, all right. I won't pay for your move but I'll give you a hotel allowance of sixty dollars," he said.

  "All right, sixty dollars a night..." I said.

  "No, sixty dollars for the week."

  "Where am I gonna find a hotel for sixty dollars a week?" I complained.

  Well, it seemed he knew a place right there in Hartford. So I moved up there. First night I was there, there was a shooting at this hotel. They we
re shooting right through the fucking walls and I was going out of my mind. I was scared shitless.

  Plus, I was alone. Alison was convinced she should keep her job in New York. She had this good social work job. We were actually going to live in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I tested it out but it took an hour and a half of solid driving. By the time I got to the station, at five in the morning, I was exhausted. And this job was fucking torture. From six to ten I was on the air in the morning. From ten to two, I had to do commercials. Not just voice commercials -- I had to produce finished commercials. And if the sales guy didn't like it, I had to go in and produce it all over again. It was like a torture chamber. It was just an unbelievably exhausting job. There was no way to explain how bad it was.

  I was up there every day. I worked Saturdays from six to noon, trying to be funny. Then from noon to three, I had to be the production

  guy. Plus, I was the public affairs director. I had to do half-hour interviews on Sunday morning. But I would tape those during the week. It was funny because my public affairs show was the most interesting thing about the job, because at least I got to talk for a half hour straight with no music. I would interview local people, such as the head of the ASPCA.

  But I would get into these bizarre lines of questioning. I'd ask them about their dating habits, whatever. I can't tell you how bizarre this was, because nobody was doing anything like this in radio at this point. People have told me that Imus was doing amazing stuff on the radio back then but he wasn't doing shit! He got on the radio, and he used to say: "Quack-quack, who loves you, baby?" I don't know how he got that irreverent reputation. But he had it because nobody was doing anything. Anybody who sounded a little different was irreverent.

  But there was one good thing about Hartford. I met Fred "Earth Dog" Norris there. Fred was going to college and he was the overnight guy. He was a funny guy and a good writer and he had a knack for doing impressions. After his shift he hung out with me in the studio while he put away his records. He was half asleep and I'd say, "Fred, in thirty seconds, you gotta be Howard Cosell."