Stern hits Satellite
Howard Stern is a free man – or at least that’s how he sees his escape to satellite radio after two famously chaotic decades on the terrestrial airwaves. Stern, whose final morning show on network radio was broadcast Friday, will reappear on Sirius Satellite Radio starting Jan. 9. As part of his five-year, $500 million deal with the subscriber-based company, Stern will oversee two Howard-centric channels that air 24/7. They will carry not only his show but also a menagerie of programming dedicated to everything his enemies – chief among them, the Federal Communications Commission – hate: kinky gags, prurient skits, potty humor, strippers, drunks, weirdos, sickos, wackos, sex talk and language that perverts minds. Sitting on a cushy couch in a luxurious suite on the 38th floor of Manhattan’s upscale Le Parker Meridian hotel, Stern talked about his plan for a media empire in the new, niche-dominated world – where specialized content is king and his cast of characters, from the “jolly dwarf” Beetlejuice to the Scores club strippers, are the demented, drunken players.
QSo what’s the deal? It looks like you’re trying to become the next Oprah with this empire you’re building.
AI’m a bit of a mogul now. Well, I can honestly tell you radio’s been beating the (life) out of me for so long with the FCC and the religious right and all that stuff, and I’ve felt so dead creatively. I didn’t even realize how dead I was ‘cause there’s so much I can’t do on the radio now.
I’m the guy who got famous for warts-and-all programming: just doing my thing, being very excruciatingly open, even at the expense of the people in my life. And now I can’t even play the same material I could just a year ago. I started to realize that 1987 was the first time that I held an anti-FCC rally. I was being hassled for so long.
QWasn’t that part of your appeal, though? It seemed to add to this idea of this guy who pushes buttons.
AYou think about how brilliant Chris Rock is or Sam Kinison was when they first came on the scene on HBO. There’s a reason all comedians go to HBO anymore. Could you imagine if you took that first Chris Rock special and put it on my radio station? They’d cut it down to 12 minutes from an hour. Everything funny – all of the concepts, languages, content – would be edited out.
QThat’s everywhere, though – not just when it comes to being censored for language. That’s what the mass market is all about.
A What happened to me is I started to go numb. The owners of Infinity (Broadcasting) would tell me, “Don’t worry, once we go to court … it will all be temporary.” But the FCC just kept tightening and tightening the clamps. The very thing I became popular for I’m no longer doing.
I’m operating at a 30 percent level. I’m not moving forward. I’m moving backward.
Q So would you have quit radio altogether had Sirius not come along?
A I would’ve quit at any time over the last five years, but I honored my contract and stayed on the radio. Infinity came to me a year and a half ago, before I signed with Sirius, and they said, “You want to extend this?” I said, “There’s nothing here for me.”
I’m getting fired in markets. I’m in less and less markets throughout the country. I can’t do any of the jokes I want to do. They’re running 21 commercial minutes an hour.
Q The downside is this whole thing has made you bitter. Honestly, the last couple years, especially around the election, your show has been crusade radio. I couldn’t listen to it.
It didn’t matter what triggered it or what was going on behind the scenes. Something changed; you became bitter, and the show suffered for it.
A I’m always hearing … people say to me, “Gee, you need the FCC to rail against.” All that whining is annoying. Man, I’m about being funny. I’ve got great ideas. All this (stuff) I’m planning on my channels, all these great shows we have coming up, it has nothing to do with the FCC. …
My show was designed for someone driving to work in the morning and laughing and having fun and discussing all the weird (stuff) that goes on in our lives that we’re afraid to discuss. And guess what: I wasn’t doing it anymore.
Q What did you listen to as a kid?
A When I was a kid I would go with my father to work. He was a recording engineer at KROQ, the station I work at now.
Q So you first experienced radio in the car. …
A My father didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to me – without getting too analytical. I would watch him when he would listen to the radio in the car, and he’d go, “Shh, shh.” He had to hear everything that was going on, whether it was news or talk or whatever.
I’m sure the reason I wanted to go on the radio since I was 5 was to get my father’s attention – very basic.
But as a kid I didn’t listen to much radio. I wasn’t that into it, believe it or not. I was more into watching my father listen to the radio.
Q You talk about your decline. What about the decline of rock ‘n’ roll radio?
A It’s really sad. How can satellite radio not succeed? You can’t find music on the radio anymore.
Go to satellite, and there’s every kind of music narrowcast to you. Sirius just started a Bruce Springsteen channel. Bruce himself is endorsing anyone who has bootleg tapes of his concerts to send them in and he’ll play them – which is brilliant because if you’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, now you have these one-of-a-kind performances that kids recorded on their home equipment.
Never before could you hear that. There was never a place to congregate to listen to this stuff. This is what the promise of satellite radio is.
Q It sounds like you aren’t just selling your show, but also satellite radio as a concept and Sirius as a company. So, are you just signed to do two channels, or are you promoting the company – or is this some new crusade?
A What I love about it is, for the first time in my career, you have all these different channels and ideas working together. I can go to the gay channel, the Martha Stewart channel, the Eminem channel, the Bruce Springsteen channel, the ‘90s channel. I can say to you, for $12 a month – in a universe where it costs $20 for a CD or a DVD – I can give what you want.
And if I suck some day, I can tell you, “My show sucks today. Go to the right-wing or left-wing talk channel. Go to the Little Steven channel and hear some great rock ‘n’ roll.”
Q So you see yourself as a promoter of something bigger?
A Absolutely. Some mornings on my show I’ll say, “Let’s go check out what the gay guys are up to.” This is all about content – with Sirius and with the two channels I’m programming. I have a 17-person news department reporting on all things Howard. This goes on all day on the channel.
I’ve got a new show debuting next week called “Meet the Shrink.” Jeff the Drunk from our show is going to have a real psychiatric session on the air.
Q So you are building an empire, just like Oprah. Do you have time to do all this?
A Hell no. But I’ll do it anyway. Because I’m on fire. And I’m a nut.