by Howard Stern
I wasn't playing hard to get, Howard. I was at my third job in less than a year and I didn't want to move again. Baltimore was my home. But Denise started wooing me, taking me out to lunches and dinners. Finally, she said, "Let me play you a tape of the morning guy I want you to work with." I was thinking, "Right, like this'll make a difference." She put this tape in the machine and here came this voice and I thought, "Oh, my God." Howard was interviewing a prostitute on this tape and I had never heard anything like it in my life. You know how people immediately take on a sort of adversarial position when they're talking to someone like a prostitute? Like, you horrible person, you must have been abused in your life. Howard
wasn't like that at all. He was asking stuff like, "How much do you charge? How many people do you service a day?" He was like a giddy kid, just curious about this other person. It wasn't condemnation, it wasn't "We're up here and we look down on you, you poor dear." He was just treating this prostitute like everybody else.
I immediately lost all reservations and I just said, "Where do I sign?" He blew me away. I said, "I gotta meet this guy." So I was taking a job just to meet him. Then she said, "Wait a minute, I don't know if this'll work." So she put me on the phone with Howard to see if we could talk to each other and he started talking to me as if he'd known me all my life. I can't describe what that's like, for a total stranger to be instantly familiar with you. I thought, "He's nuts. I just agreed to work with a crazy man. What have I done?"
I knew Robin was the partner I'd been looking for that first day we went on the air together in March of 1981. I was going to open my show with a bang, as usual. I remember I called the mayor's office and asked them for a police motorcade and a parade for me to honor my first day on the air and I got some mayoral aide on the phone and I started screaming like a lunatic about Washington's mayor, Mr. Marion Barry.
"WHAT KIND OF GUY CALLS HIMSELF MARION? THAT'S A GIRL'S NAME!" I ranted.
Then I pulled out my other standard opening ploy. I would tell my audience how to get women and I'd give them tips from some cheesy paperback book about picking up girls. I got guys on the phone, I'd interview them about women. When was the last time you nailed a girl? Robin came into the studio, it was right before her newscast was about to begin, and I turned to her and said, "So Robin, this guy who wrote this book must know what he's talking about. He's slept with a ton of women. And his tip to get women is you have to wear tight pants."
Robin gave me this look like that was crazy.
"No, it's true," I insisted, "it's tight pants."
Robin looked at me and said, "This guy has slept with a ton of women?"
"Yeah," I said.
"If he slept with a ton of women, when did he have time to put on pants?" Robin said.
I reeled back in my chair and thanked God. She could talk!
We went to commercial and Howard was saying, "That's wonderful! That's brilliant! You're great!" And I was saying, "What did I do? Leave me alone -- you're making me crazy." But that was the way he was. If I farted it was "Oh, that's wonderful." I just thought thank goodness I was in another studio when I did my broadcasts because he would say, "Oh, please, do this, say that." He wasn't putting words in my mouth, he just wanted me to react. And then they finished construction on the studio and I was now behind glass in another studio behind Howard. So we couldn't even look at each other unless he swung all the way around.
So I'd be in the other studio and Howard was on the air doing his thing. I'd listen to him and laugh out loud, because he was so crazy and outrageous. First of all, he never rehearsed anything. He didn't tape anything, he didn't prepare, he just hit the button and talked to whoever was out there and made something hilarious out of it. It's hard to realize how revolutionary that was because everybody else in radio then was rehearsed and prescreened down to the last letter. And he didn't care at all about format. We were constantly breaking format.
And the content was hysterical. Howard wasn't telling jokes, it was life happening in front of your eyes. He was catching people with their pants down. People would get up in the morning and call and they would think that they weren't going to be the fools and, invariably, they would be the worst fools. The people who thought "I think just like Howard," or "I know exactly what to say," Howard would drive them nuts. He'd take a wild right turn and do exactly the opposite of what they expected. Then he'd scream at them or he'd hang up on them. Nobody ever did that before on the radio. You can't yell at your callers, you can't treat them bad, you can't hang up on them. You can't take too many women callers because this is a rock station. You can't mention the other stations' call letters. Howard would break all the rules and I'd just be in there cracking up saying, "Oh, God, here we go again!" Then Howard started saying, "Robin, you have the greatest laugh. I love it when you laugh on the air. So when you come in the studio, turn on your mike as soon as you get there. Just say whatever comes into your mind." I told him, "You're so sweet," but I wouldn't do it. I had control of my mike. But he kept at me and at me and at me and he finally wore me down. He got me to do it.
The only thing holding me back was, again, I had to start from square one with management. I had to educate the general manager, educate the program director, talk them into letting me do little things. I kept pushing the envelope just a little further every day, just a little bit, then a little bit more. And what a pair of management types I had at that station.
First, there was Denise Oliver, the program director. Denise was a real nice-looking woman with huge breasts. Now right off the bat, I have trouble with women as authority figures, especially if they have huge breasts and come in wearing jeans and a tight work shirt. How the hell are you supposed to concentrate in a meeting when she's leaning over, showing you a memo or something, and those melons are staring you in the face? And she was always in the meetings. Right away, she didn't like Robin and me talking to each other. I couldn't believe it. She'd go over to Robin and say, "Should I stop him from interrupting you?"
Robin would say, "No way. This is great!"
"Robin, I want you to stop him when he does this. You have to take a strong stand." I have always thanked Denise for pairing me with Robin but it upset me that she wanted us to act traditionally. It got so bad that in the beginning, Robin would meet with Denise and me but soon she banned Robin from the meetings because Robin always took my side. I was frustrated because my program was being slowed down.
Denise also had to have a strict format. We were doing regular features like Dial-a-Date and What's Your Problem?, where people would call up and I'd solve their problems. But Denise would say, "Now you seem to do What's Your Problem? on Mondays, so why don't we make that official so when I wake up on Monday, I know it'll be What's Your Problem? day." I didn't want a format. I wasn't comfortable with these restrictions. Then she had these elaborate grids. The grids made me feel as if I was back in elementary school. She wanted me to fill in the grids every week in advance with what we were going to do each hour. This woman was a great music program director and really had a great sense of direction for the station. But we were breaking new ground. I think she wanted to take control, and that was her job, but the constant interference was killing me. How was I supposed to know what I'd do on the show next Friday? Didn't she realize I was a spontaneous performer?
Then she'd bring up research. I had to play a lot of music. "The listeners we surveyed don't want to hear phone calls between records. We asked them," she said. But how did you ask them? They didn't explain in the survey that the disc jockey doing the talking is a fucking mutant and he's going to take these phone calls and talk about women's tits. Of course, the research showed they didn't want talking.
She had other theories. She wanted me to memorize the names of the high schools in the area. I had to learn the goddamn street names of every neighborhood. I had to make local appearances. Again with the appearances. Rules, everybody had rules. One time I was on the air and I decided to eat breakfast. So I ordered breakfast
on the air, and it went on for eighteen minutes. Denise went ballistic.
"I can't believe you ate breakfast for eighteen minutes on the air! THIS IS INSUBORDINATION!" she ranted. "And the most embarrassing thing about it is that I didn't know you were going to do this. You're supposed to clear things with me ahead of time. The program director from WPGC, Steve Kingston, called me as soon as I got in my office this morning and said, 'Do you know your morning man ate breakfast for eighteen minutes on the air?' What's wrong with you?!"
I turned to her and I said, "Denise, a competing program director called you and told you he sat and listened to me eat breakfast for eighteen minutes. And he timed it! Do you think there were other people in the audience who couldn't believe I was doing this, too? Do you think that it's a possibility that this was compelling radio, that you all thought I had lost my mind, and just had to stay tuned to see what would happen?" She just couldn't understand what I was saying to her. Every day it was like this, me trying to educate her, and her wanting me to make a grid. But Denise didn't torture me for long. In a few months, I tripled the station's ratings, and because the station was on such a roll she was able to get a job in New York. It was a great opportunity for her and now I was free from our daily meeting routine.
The general manager was another story. This guy, Goff Lebhar, was the biggest pain in the ass I ever worked for. Well, at least until I got to NBC. Goff would pontificate every day as if he was damn Einstein. He had theories, cockamamie theories about rebuilding the station. He had a five-point plan. Number one was antenna
strength. If you had good transmission, nothing else could fail. Number two, the sales force. Once you had a good sales effort, you'd have the money forever. Numbers three and four were equally inane and number five, last, was programming. In other words, it didn't matter who was talking into the microphone or what they said, as long as the damn signal was clear.
This was what I was up against. But I kept chipping away at management's archaic approach, and we began to assemble the program I had envisioned. We did parodies like Hill Street Jews. We did Beaver Breaks, bits where Wally made love to an inflatable doll or Ward got a sex change. I introduced God and had Him do the weather. Who could be better at forecasting? Then I had God reveal that he was gay and living with a guy named Bruce. I savored every letter of hate mail and read the best ones on the air. I even called the haters up and got them on.
I formed a new Wack Pack. Somehow I got it into my head that we had to have sports coverage on the show -- but not just any sports coverage. I started auditioning people who called in. We got this guy who sounded like he was having a nervous breakdown while he was giving scores. I brought him into the studio for his reports and Robin would find him lying in a corner crying, in the fetal position.
"He's crazy," Robin worried.
"Yes, but he's great on the air," I said.
One day he got really scary and we had to reevaluate our sports team. Our guy had held it together for the first few sportscasts, but he was withdrawing more and more as he became popular. Finally, when he was balled up in the fetal position mumbling to himself and sounding suicidal, we could no longer get him to the mike.
But I had other nuts I could work with. Alison was working as a psychiatric social worker in Washington so, after work, she was always telling me about her patients. What a fertile source of material! She was working with severe schizophrenics who would burn themselves with cigarettes, bang their heads incessantly, and think that their radios were sending them personal messages. The next day I'd imitate these patients on the air. Boy, did she get pissed. She'd say, "They listen to your show and they think you're having the same hallucinations."
Once a year they had a family picnic for these kooks. I'd be cooking hamburgers and Alison would tell me to go play Frisbee with
some of her patients. Have you ever played Frisbee with schizophrenics? You throw the Frisbee to them and they make no attempt to catch it. It just hits them in the face. They won't pick it up and throw it back. I kept fetching it and throwing it and they'd just stand there and let it hit them. Finally, I quit playing and I turned away and one guy picks the Frisbee up and flings it right into my neck. That was my last picnic.
I always resented the label of "shock jock" that the press came up with for me, because I never intentionally set out to shock anybody. What I intentionally set out to do was to talk just as I talk off the air, to talk the way guys talk sitting around a bar. To me, that was always the most fun, when I would get together with guys and we'd all start bullshitting about getting pussy or that girl's tits or even political events, but doing it in a goofy way, where nobody's taking anything seriously. If I could eliminate the notion of the microphone, so that people would get loose and be real, that was the ideal. You don't know how many times I have guests on who think we're still in a commercial, and they start talking, and then they say, "Oh! We're on the air?" That's why ultimately radio is better for me than television, because on TV they never forget they're on. When that camera's in the room, everybody's on guard.
In Washington I approximated this ideal by creating the Think Tank. The Think Tank was a bunch of guys I put together: Harry Kohl, a lawyer; Steve Chiconas, a salesman; and Steve Keiger, who managed a record store. They came up every Tuesday and we went wild. Anything could happen. We were just a bunch of guys goofing on everything. It really was my college radio show all over again. In fact, out of those sessions evolved the "rankouts," which were the first things to get me in trouble in Washington.
We used to have rankout contests on the air. Listeners would call in and try to beat me in ranking out each other's mothers. "I heard your mammy is so fat that her gynecologist has to put up scaffolding to do the job." "Your mammy is like a Seven-Eleven. Open all night, hot to go, and for thirty-five cents she'll give you a slurpy." Stupid stuff like that. But immediately we got attacked by all sorts of moronic uptight PTA groups.
But I was no stranger to controversy. Hey, I was going for ratings. A large percentage of my audience in Washington was black,
and I used to watch this local militant self-help positive-thinking black guy named Petey Green who had a UHF television show on Sunday mornings. I loved this guy because he was a real showman. He was always talking about the "niggers" and the "crackers" and jiving and rhyming and sitting in this big wicker chair in his expensive fine clothes, sort of like Huey Newton meets Superfly. I always talked about this guy on my radio show, how all whites should listen to him because he was giving away the militant blacks' game plan. So Petey invites me to be a guest on his TV show.
This was my first TV appearance in D.C., and even then I always felt that whenever you have a chance to be on television, you should do something memorable. So I went out and rented an Afro wig and brought some props and went to the taping with Robin and Fred. In the dressing room I put on the Afro wig, smeared black shoe polish all over my face except for a big circle around my mouth, and went out on the set carrying a big boom box and huge Afro pick.
The audience was almost totally black and didn't know how to react until Petey saw me and cracked up. Our interview was great.
Petey then paid a poetic tribute to me at the close of the show:
His name is Howard, his last name is Stern, but there's a C somewhere and that C stands for Concern.
I don't think he's hateful, deceitful or mean, and he even gets up in the morning and watches Petey Green.
So grab your hand and make a fist, just listen to me and know this:
I'll tell it to the high,
I'll tell it to the cold,
I'll tell it to the young,
I'll tell it to the old.
I move so fast
that sometimes I burn, but tonight I'm glad to deal with Howard Stern.
I kept the pressure on Goff to constantly push the parameters of the show more and more each day. One day I said to him, "I want to do a Gay Dial-a-Date." Immediately, he said no. But I kept pushing. I told him that the
gay audience was demanding it, they were jealous of the regular Dial-a-Dates. I told him that I would handle it with class and decorum. Sure I tried all sorts of tactics to make it seem legitimate just so I could go on the air and mess with gays. In fact, I even suggested that we do it first with lesbians to ease into the whole gay area. Right. I just wanted to hear those hot lesbo stories. Finally, he relented. The Washington Blade, D.C.'s leading gay paper, wrote about it:
DC 101 AIRS GAY DIAL-A-DATE
Washington Gays may have been done a great service by a radio disc jockey. Howard Stern recently made a "Gay Dial-a-Date Game" the focal point of his popular broadcast . . . [Stern, who is twenty-seven years old and married, has been holding Dial-a-Date games on radio for three years.] When homosexual listeners wrote him suggesting that it would only be fair to have a Gay version of the game, he agreed. Stern often wields his voice on the air to mercilessly puncture the pretensions and underline the stupidity of the people who call his show. Therefore, there was concern that he would use the occasion of the Gay Dial-a-Date to ridicule homosexuals. Instead, on Friday a.m., the Gay community was treated to one of the best, most sensitive treatments of Gay themes ever to air on the mainstream media.
For the first Gay Dial-a-Date he decided it would be best to feature Lesbians because the audience would be more likely to accept them, but he promises in the future there will be a Gay male version. Stern gave "Miss X" and her three suitors -- bachelorettes numbers one through three -- the opportunity to refute the idea that all Lesbians are ugly women with hairy legs and hiking boots, and the misconception that most Gays molest children. Listeners who called up to scorn or mock Gay Dial-a-Date while it was on the air were made short shrift of by Stern.