Private Parts (19 page)

But the thing that got me the most notoriety in Washington was the famous Fourteenth Street Bridge incident. This event has been so distorted over the years by the press that I want to set the record straight, once and for all. It started when that Air Florida flight crashed into the bridge in February of 1982. The plane crashed because they didn't de-ice the wings. I was outraged that people lost their lives because of this stupid airline fuck-up. So I made believe I was calling Air Florida and I said, "What's the price of a one-way ticket from National to the Fourteenth Street Bridge? Is that going to be a regular stop?" I was seriously coming out against this negligence. I didn't make jokes. I didn't actually call and speak to someone from the airline. But that riff became legendary. In fact, six months later, when I was leaving Washington to go to WNBC in New York, a reporter from
The Washington Post
wrote that I had been fired from DC-101 for that call. That bullshit article still haunts me. Everybody says I got fired over this incident. It's not true. In fact, no one ever complained about it.

Anyway, after a year on the air, we had quadrupled our audience. It was insane. We were real celebrities in Washington. We'd go out to do public appearances and we'd be mobbed. People would come up and press coke or pot into our hands and we'd politely refuse. We did an appearance at the big department store Woodward & Lothrop and it was out of control. They set us up in a little booth in front of the store window and I was supposed to greet people. Well, it was a rainy day and the mall was packed with people. Thousands and thousands of people showed up and they were lined up outside and when they finally let them in, they almost tore the store down. We had to

be escorted out of there because the people just rushed in and trampled over all the merchandise and knocked over the racks and started stealing everything in the fucking store. They had to evacuate the mall. It was unreal.

That was the last public appearance I ever did, except for one right before I left Washington, when my album
Fifty Ways to Rank Your Mother
came out. Fred and I went down to a record store to promote it and a young girl came up to get her album autographed. She said, "I want your autograph for my mother."

"Your mother? Where's your mother?" I asked.

"She's out in the car waiting for me," she said.

"You should bring her in. Is she nice-looking?" I asked.

"Don't you talk about my mother like that!" she yelled and
wham,
she kicked me right in the nuts and went running out of the store.

But with all that popularity do you think that our general manager Lebhar would be happy? No! He was pissed that I had made his station successful! This guy was reaping all the rewards of my success, he was making about half a million a year because of his deal, and I was still pulling in about forty thousand. And
he
was pissed. Meanwhile, Robin and I went to a party at his house one night and he was living in some huge, tacky house with one of those stupid naked kid sculptures that pee into a fountain in the middle of his foyer. It was so disgusting it looked as if it should be in a mausoleum. I was sitting there eating my heart out that this character was making a half a mil a year and living in a big house because of my success. Meanwhile, I was driving a 1970 Valiant.

Then he pulled me into his office and he said, "Why don't the newspapers mention me? They only write about you."

This guy was giving me shit because I was getting credit for my accomplishments.

"Why don't they mention
me?
I was the architect of this station's success."

He was one of those guys with dry mouth, and as he was talking, I was watching this little piece of white spit get caught on his lip and go up and down like a cobweb. And I realized that this guy was angry at me for being successful. I asked him for more money and he said, "Absolutely not."

So I knew it was time to move on. I had my sights set on New York. I had gotten a lot of other offers, even an offer from WPLJ in New York to do nights, but I didn't think that was the right move.

Meanwhile, Goff got wind of my offers and he tried to nail me down to a contract. All that time he didn't want to give me a contract, now he said if I didn't sign one within a month, I'd be fired. But he didn't want me to be represented by a lawyer. I was whining that I wanted to be represented; he wouldn't let me be represented. While this was dragging on, he got sick. He was home, he was missing work. He was getting sicker. They didn't know what it was, but it looked as if he was going to die. I couldn't believe my good luck.

"He's going to drop dead. We're going to get our wish," I told Robin.

All of a sudden, his wife came in, all smiles.

"You aren't going to believe how lucky we are. They found a tick in Goff's head. He has Rocky Mountain spotted fever." They took out the tick, he got completely better, he was coming back.

So Goff came back and we worked out a one-year contract with a nothing, shitty raise, which I signed. A few months later I signed a contract to go to WNBC in New York after my Washington contract expired. Well, this pissed Goff off and they started to make my life miserable. They took away my office. They harassed me in a million different ways.

In August of 1982, with two months to go on my contract, they hired this no-talent jerk called the Grease Man and they gave him all the money I had been asking for. Another disc jockey getting a boatload of money off my hard work. The day they hired him, they decided to fire me and get me off the air right away. They made up some excuse, saying I had violated station rules by talking about other disc jockeys. That made no sense, because I had always talked about other disc jockeys. They really just wanted not to pay me for the last two months of my contract, but I took them to the union and they were forced to pay anyway. I was thrilled. I was getting away from Lebhar and I was finally getting my shot at working in New York.

I was going to work for the world-famous, first-class National Broadcasting Company. This was my dream come true, I thought. Little did I realize it was more like "Welcome to My Worst Nightmare."

Pig Virus

It Sucks at NBC
Chapter 6

I had done it. This was the culmination of all my dreams. This made all the shit I ate in Westchester and Detroit and Washington worth it. I was on my way to New York, the nation's number one market, my hometown. I was the afternoon drive-time air personality for WNBC. I thought back to all those commutes I had made with my dad. Now I was going to be the guy who could come out of your car radio and make that drudgery magical. I was jazzed. I wouldn't be for long.

There were hints even in the first meeting I had with the NBC people. NBC's management came to Washington to meet with Robin, Fred, and me, and at one point in the meeting they asked Robin and Fred what they would do if they weren't hired by NBC. At the time I ignored it and focused on the positive aspects of the meeting, but later I was to find out that the dickheads at NBC had a systematic plan to break up my morning team. Years later, Bob Sherman, the executive vice-president of the NBC radio stations, admitted to
New York
magazine that they had developed a strategy to tame me before I even came to New York.

"We wanted Howard without his aides-de-camp, so he'd be as naked and vulnerable as possible to good management," Sherman said. "Naked and vulnerable" -- this sounds like he's talking about a bondage video. Little did I know that wasn't far from the truth.

For starters, they did succeed in busting us up. They refused to hire Robin after they told me they would. I assured her that I would keep trying to get them to bring her up, but she got really mad at me and she went back to an all-news station in Baltimore. So it was just Fred and I going to New York, but before we even got there another asshole intervened to make my life miserable. This scumbag also worked for NBC, but he was one of the network's television news talking heads. His name was Douglas Kiker, a name that, to this day, summons up my vomiting reflex.

This story started in Washington. Douglas Kiker contacted us and said he wanted to do a favorable report on the Howard Stern phenomenon. I thought, "That's cool." I had already done a few good interviews with Charlie Rose for his television show and Kiker's piece was going to appear on "NBC Magazine," which was a national show. Great publicity, I thought. At that time, we were doing a lot of live shows and they decided they'd bring their cameras down to Garvin's comedy club where I was scheduled to do the next one. Those shows were a whole story in themselves. I would come out in a bathrobe and we'd all be sitting behind tables and we'd do our normal morning show in front of an audience of rabid fans.

So Kiker and his crew came down and filmed us. They interviewed me later. While they were preparing the piece, I signed with NBC radio in New York. Fine. Now Kiker and I were working for the same corporation. A few weeks later, the piece aired. I sat down with Alison to watch it and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The piece was called "X-Rated Radio" and it started with Kiker saying this:

What you're about to hear is going to shock you because ifs vulgar, even obscene. A warning: If there are any children in the room you might not want them to watch this report. Ifs X-rated radio, barnyard radio, and there's more and more of it on the air because kids love it.

That was just the friggin' introduction! I was going out of my mind. Then they went to a close-up of a radio and coming out of that

radio was the voice of, you guessed it, me! "I hear your pappy is so disgusting that he takes a bubble bath by farting in a mud puddle." Okay, so it was a fart joke. Big fucking deal. But then we saw a hand reach into the frame and shut off the radio; the camera dramatically pulled back and we saw the hand belonged to Douglas Kiker and he was sitting in his living room with a six-month-old baby that looked as if it came from Ivory Soap central casting! Give me a break! And now Kiker spoke again:

This is my home in Washington. It's secure enough. I've got locks on the windows, locks on t
he doors, even an alarm system...

What's the matter, Dougie? Afraid of the schvartzes breaking in? Show us your Uzi, why don't you, you big jerk.

. . . What I cannot prevent entering my home are the sounds that come over this radio. The idea for this story originated a few weeks ago when I heard my seven-year-old son, this one's older brother, coming down for breakfast saying the same things you just heard this DJ say.

Hey, his son was quoting me! He should be thrilled! What's wrong with a seven-year-old kid into fart humor? Is that a crime? Asshole. Okay, then they cut to me on the stage at Garvin's and I was singing "Fifty Ways to Rank Your Mother," to the tune of Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover."

My friends always enjoyed your mom they said to me

She was so generous, she did so much for free

Until they found she gave them all a social disease

There must be Fifty Ways to Rank Your Mother

Then this jerk Kiker came back:

His name is Howard Stern. His station is DC-101. He's on the air from six to ten in the morning when grownups are on their way to work and their children are off to school. And he is hot.

Back to me onstage, singing:

I heard she's frigid tho' she might just be hard to please But if that's so why does she douche with antifreeze? She says she likes it 'cause it also kills her fleas There must be Fifty Ways to Rank Your Mother

I liked this song! But Kiker didn't. Then he said that when "word got out" that he was doing this piece, a group of "concerned parents" contacted him and requested to be part of the show. Yeah, right. "Word got out." Who's he kidding? Anyway, they assembled a group of these mutant parents and here's what they had to say about me:

"I don't consider it humor at all, adult or child. I think it should be completely off the airwaves."

Oh, this housewife was a comedy critic? And she wanted to ban me from the airwaves? Thank you, Mrs. Hitler.

"Kids are looking for rock V roll music and they get a guy pandering smut to kids."

"Kids call in with their own rankouts on mothers and I'm a mother!"

But my favorite one was this guy:

"Vietnam at dinnertime was bad enough, but this stuff over my Cocoa Puffs is driving me crazy! It just doesn't need to be there."

Great, he was comparing me to Vietnam. Who were these people? And what's more important, why were they giving these people so much time to propound their theories when they hardly mentioned the fact that I was number one! People wanted this kind of radio. And you, Kiker, you big jerk, you didn't need bars on your windows. You weren't being invaded by your radio. He sounded like one of Alison's mental patients. IF YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING, TURN THE FRIGGIN' RADIO OFF!

The piece went on and they showed some other no-talent disc jockeys in other markets who were doing naughty humor. But the real kicker was the ending to the piece. After they ran the report, Kiker was in the studio:

That is X-rated radio. And you could be hearing it next in your hometown. This is a story with a little twist to it. While we were in the process of producing this report, Howard Stern was lured away from his Washington radio station by a New York City station which offered him a big increase in salary. That station, you guessed it, is WNBC-AM, which is owned by NBC. Dom Fioravanti, the station general manager, told us that WNBC-AM, and I quote, "is mindful of its responsibility to present programs in accordance with acceptable public taste."

Great way to start a new job. I couldn't even get the NBC guys in New York to return my phone calls after that piece. That one piece poisoned my entire relationship with NBC for the next three years and all because Douglas Kiker didn't like his son going around telling fart jokes. Man, I was happy when I heard that Kiker kicked the bucket. Big jerk!