Private Parts (16 page)

What I didn't know was that Detroit was going through one of the worst economic crises in its history. The auto industry was in the toilet and everyone was getting laid off. The whole town was depressed! Including the staff of the station, who were all pissed off that I was making at least ten grand more than they were. So I figured to get noticed I'd riff on the hard times. I tried to think up some bits. I decided to call the Kremlin and apply for five billion dollars in foreign aid for Detroit. I called other countries and tried to sell off New Jersey to raise money. We had a big promotion and I led hundreds of people who donated $1.06 (our call numbers) to smash the shit out of a Toyota, then we turned around and donated the money raised to Chrysler. I started to get national coverage on some of these stunts.

I did all sorts of crazy things. I had contests where I gave away sixteen cents, which was my pocket change. I called dentists' offices on the air and begged them to change their reception room radios to our show. I called the governor and tried to get Ted Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" declared the official state song.

We had Go Back to Bed Day where we got bosses to let the lucky winners go back to bed, with pay. I did a lot of Dial-a-Dates, which I started in Hartford, but this time I got
Penthouse
pets as contestants. That presented a problem once when we found out one of the winners was a convicted sex offender who had served time for one offense and was awaiting trial on a similar charge.

I began to assemble what would later become our famous Wack Pack. This woman Irene called up one day and I found out she was a real-live leather-clad, whip-carrying dominatrix. So I dubbed her Irene the Leather Weatherlady and every day I'd call her for the weather and she'd say outrageous stuff, like "Bitch, this is the weather and if you don't like it I'm going to come over and beat the crap out of you." One time she even recommended that people buy their mothers a red leather enema bag for Mother's Day.

I did anything to get noticed. I entered a local Dolly Parton Look-a-Like Contest. I wrestled women (and lost!) on the front lawn of the station at 8:00 A.M. in front of two hundred screaming maniacs. When the Republicans came to town for their convention we organized a protest in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. It was "Burn your B-R-A for the E-R-A" and again, I humiliated myself in front of hundreds of people, parading around in a bra and then collecting a few dozen others and burning them.

But the worst had to be the public appearances outside the station that we had to do. Let me tell you, promotion people at radio stations are usually assholes. They're always talking as if they have their finger on the pulse of the public, when, in fact, it really makes little difference what you do out on the street. If you put on a good radio show, people are gonna listen. They couldn't give a shit where you're showing up. But the promo people had this idea that you had to do promotions -- promotions, promotions -- and they got you so crazy with it that you had to go do them or you're considered "an enemy of the station."

Now, to me, promotions reeked of these bad djs who go out and do bar mitzvahs. I always felt disc jockeys were lowlifes. When I worked in Westchester I used to see some of the old WMCA Good

Guys, who were now working up in places like Westchester, and it was depressing. They'd do these appearances in blue blazers with their big dumb voices. They looked about a hundred and fifty years old and sad. And they had been the biggest radio personalities. They used to be the WMCA Good Guys! If they were once at the top of the radio profession, and this is what happened to them, what did the future have in store for me? I was really frightened of the whole business.

I was in Detroit and I was the morning man for this failing radio station, and I had no listeners to start with, so every weekend I had to go out on a wacky promotion. I was the moron my father always said I was, I agreed to this stuff. So Halloween night they dressed me up as Dracula and I was supposed to appear at three or four different showings of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I had to get on stage and introduce the movie. Well, first of all, nobody knew who I was. Number two, if you've ever seen an audience for
The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
they don't want anything interfering with the movie. They're all in costume, they got their toast, they know the friggin' movie by heart, they live for this movie. Plus, Detroit's a very angry city to begin with. Everybody's unemployed.

So I went to do the introduction and all these lunatics were marching up and down the aisle. I felt as if I was at some kind of PTA meeting in hell. I started to speak and all of a sudden toast and garbage started flying, I was booed unmercifully; people were screaming, "GET THE FUCK OFF THE STAGE, YOU FAGGOT!" They were going nuts. This happened four straight times.

The next weekend, they sent me to Windsor, across the border in Canada, to a little punk club. I took Alison with me. Again, I was supposed to do the introductions for the bands. So I got up on stage and said, "HI EVERYBODY! MY NAME IS HOWARD STERN AND I'M FROM W-4 IN DETROIT ..." Now, I'd been in Detroit maybe a month, nobody knew who the fuck I was, so again, everybody started booing. Then this one imbecile kid in a mohawk ran up on stage and
boom!
He smashed me in the face with an egg. Everybody cheered.
Boom!
Smashed me with another egg. I stood there stunned.
Boom, boom, boom!
Three more eggs. I was drenched in egg. Alison was sitting there, she couldn't believe it. I just said, "HEY! FUCK THIS!" I threw the mike down, and we split.

I vowed never to do these appearances again. But the following

weekend they booked me to race another disc jockey at a racetrack. And the Leather Weatherlady showed up, too. By now, she really had the hots for me. She frightened me because she was a real dominatrix who really wanted to dominate me sexually. I mean, I had never seen leather people before this. She really came on strong, and quite frankly, it was pretty exciting. But she was really living the lifestyle. Even her little daughter had a whip. This was a sick crowd.

So they decided I was going to race another disc jockey. Now, I don't race cars, I can hardly drive a regular car, I didn't know what the fuck I'm doing. And they got me in this dragster and I was racing this other guy in front of thousands of people. This was such a dumb promotion that I got really pissed off and I grabbed the loudspeaker and I was yelling, "WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT THESE FUCKING CARS!" I was out of my mind.

I got a ride back to town from another dj and the Leather Weatherlady was sitting in the backseat next to me. Now she was always attacking me with lots of sexual innuendo, always coming on to me, the whole thing. I was sitting back there and she started going "Oooh, I want you, I want you."

I had had enough of her bullshit, too.

"You fucking want me?" I said. "My cock is right in these pants. If you fucking want me, go in and take my cock out and do something."

Now, I never do this kind of shit. All of a sudden she was unbuckling my pants and was starting to move her hand down. The disc jockey who was driving was watching all this from the rearview mirror and couldn't believe what was happening. She was looking at me and she couldn't believe I was letting her do it! I finally called Irene's bluff, because it was just getting out of hand. I never thought someone could be this fucking annoying; every minute she was coming

on, grabbing my ass, taking the whip, hitting me, and I couldn't take it, I was so angry. So as soon as she had an opportunity she goes, "Oh, I don't believe you're gonna let me do this," and she never laid a hand on me again.

After a few months my show in Detroit became really wild. I was taking no prisoners. I had whole biker gangs in the studio. One of the gangs came in one day and whipped out coke and started snorting it, and I said, "You can't do coke," and they said, "Oh, yeah? What're you gonna do about it?" I couldn't stop these guys. I was thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm going to lose the station's license." But I'd rather lose it than my life. And I got wilder with Dominatrix Dial-a-Dates with the Leather Weatherlady. One time, in the middle of another Dial-a-Date, I decided I was gonna drink and I got so loaded I passed out on the air during the show. I woke up an hour later, and these people were still talking.

So I was plugging away at this job, the station was going downhill fast, but I was getting some major attention. I won the
Billboard
Award for best AOR disc jockey, I won the Drake-Chenault Top Five Talent Search, and one of my bits went out on a record to everyone in the industry. So I was starting to get well known. I was getting some job offers when, overnight, the station went country. I looked at Alison, told her to start packing, and I ran out to get a copy of
Radio & Records,
an industry trade paper with lots of classifieds. It was time to hit the road again. Somehow, I couldn't see myself as Hopalong Howie.

NEXT STOP: THE FUNNY FARM

One of the job offers I got was from an album-oriented station in Washington, D.C. -- DC-101. Again, it was Dwight Douglas who wooed me to come to D.C. I was considering offers from Chicago's WXRT and a station in Toronto. I told Douglas I wasn't sure about the D.C. station because the general manager seemed slow on the phone and not really aware of what I did. He told me not to worry. I should have. Between the time W-4 went country and our move to Washington, I was holed up in my office in our second bedroom at home and I plotted out my show. After a few weeks of deep thought, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

First of all, I decided that whoever worked with me on the air must be simpatico. Then I decided that I was going to kill my competition.

I was going to say whatever the fuck I wanted to say. I vowed that I wasn't going to blow this chance in Washington because Washington was the Northeast and my eventual goal was to make it in New York. I know it sounds corny, but when I was still in college, I was so totally focused on winning that when I flew over New York, I'd look down at the city and say, "One day everyone will know my fucking name in New York City." I wanted to be famous partly because I wanted to get back at all the women who rejected me in high school. In my warped mind I thought they would feel bad that they rejected me. Bad girls! They needed to be punished.

So Washington was a step toward New York, and there was no way I was going to lose. I decided that the Washington show was just gonna be off the wall. The first step was to put my team together. It was time to find my newsperson. I realized how important the news segment was to my show. Since so much of great satire is topical, I wanted to find a newscaster with a good sense of humor who could riff with me on the current stories. I wanted to tear down that artificial wall between the show and the newscast. I found my ideal partner in Robin Quivers.

Robin had been a nurse and had just broken into radio. She was doing consumer reports for a small station in Baltimore. She'd been in radio less than a year, but Denise Oliver, the program director of DC-101, played me a tape of Robin and she sounded great. So I said, "Go get her." But for some reason, Robin was playing hard to get. Right, Robin?

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.