Shock Jock

By Richard Zoglin

IT'S MORNING DRIVE TIME, but there are no traffic reports, no weather updates, no chirpy deejays whiling away the minutes between hits of the '60s, '70s and '80s. Instead, the day's major issues and news events are given thoughtful consideration. Listen as host Howard Stern offers his usual running commentary.

The Navy has decided to reinstate a gay officer, reports Stern's sidekick, Robin Quivers. Stern responds with a mincing homosexual imitation, then argues that gays in the military should have separate quarters to avoid sexual promiscuity. "When I get nude in front of a gay guy, they get so hot that they can't control themselves." Russian President Boris Yeltsin has made another plea for economic aid. "Those stupid lazy bastard Russians," snaps Stern. "They're under communism so long they can't even produce anything." Amy Fisher, the Long Island teenager charged with murder, has just appeared on a TV tabloid show. "I wanted her to take off her clothes," says Stern. Former Rifleman star Chuck Connors is dead: "I never liked him. Hated that show."

And that's just the tame stuff. On any given morning, The Howard Stern Show might feature a game called Guess the Jew, in which callers try to pick the Semitic celebrity from a choice of three. Or a good-looking actress might show up in the studio and set off Stern's riotous hormones. (To Sally Kirkland: "I'm completely aroused by you . . . You wearin' underpants?") Stern demeans women, insults blacks, makes fun of the handicapped. Comedian Richard Pryor, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, should come on as a guest, says Stern, so they can "watch him go in and out of the conversation." Stern then imitates a slurring Pryor trying to remember the name of his daughter.

Howard Stern is radio's most notorious "shock jock," and a few minutes of his program is enough to show why. But the biggest shock lately is how popular he has become. Stern's morning show is ranked No. 1 in New York City, and has spread to eight other cities, with one more (New Orleans) soon to join. In Los Angeles, where he went on the air just over a year ago, Stern's is now the top-rated morning show. In Cleveland, Stern has been on for only nine weeks and has doubled his station's ratings. His hard-core fans, mostly young white males, have been joined by an increasingly diverse and sophisticated audience, many of whom have a love-hate relationship with radio's reigning bad boy.

Stern's late-night TV show, a raunchy comedy-talk program syndicated by New Jersey's WWOR-TV, was canceled in July after two years. But Stern will resurface this Friday as host of a new weekly interview show on E!, the cable entertainment channel. A movie career is threatening to take flight as well. Stern is developing two scripts for New Line Cinema; he is already, not surprisingly, promoting the one with the most offensive title: The Adventures of Fartman.

Stern and his groupies keep popping up, guerrilla-like, across the media landscape. Appearing with Jay Leno on the Tonight show during Leno's flap with < Arsenio Hall, Stern threw fuel on the flames by trashing Hall (a "moron") as well as former Johnny Carson cronies Doc Severinsen and Ed McMahon ("two of the biggest loads on two feet"). At her press conference last spring, Bill Clinton's alleged ex-girlfriend Gennifer Flowers was taken aback when a Stern reporter asked whether Clinton used a condom. When Today's Katie Couric opened the phone lines during a June appearance by Ross Perot, a Stern shill got through with a bogus question about the radio host's sexual organ.

But it is on radio that Stern has made the most noise -- and got into the most trouble. The FCC last month announced its intention to fine Los Angeles' KSLX-FM $105,000 for broadcasting his "indecent" material. (At the same time, three other stations were fined a total of $6,000 for airing an earlier Stern program.) A long list of Stern offenses were cited, ranging from lewd comments about Pee-wee Herman's self-abuse to gross sexual insults aimed at Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps, his chief L.A. rivals. ("First I want to just strip and rape Mark and Brian. I want my two bitches laying there in the cold, naked.")

Stern has refused all press interviews since the FCC action, but he has ranted endlessly about it on the air. The FCC, he charges, is "targeting me because I'm the most visible guy" and is "trying to put a dead stop to my career." When he learned that FCC chairman Alfred Sikes was being treated for prostate cancer, Stern's response was, "I pray for his death."

A native of New York's Long Island, Stern, 38, graduated from Boston University and began his radio career in 1976. But he didn't hit his shock- jock stride until joining Washington's WWDC in 1981. He then moved to WNBC in New York, but his lewd material, including sketches like Bestiality Dial-a- Date, got him fired. He was picked up by a struggling FM station, wxrk, in 1985, and in short order boosted its ranking from 21st to No. 1.

Stern spends nearly five hours on the air each day, gabbing with Quivers, his giggling Greek chorus (who is black and female), and an array of in-studio regulars. Celebrities occasionally join him, in person or on the phone, among them regulars like Jessica Hahn. But the show is virtually all Stern and is always pushing the edge. Stern's conversation is every pubescent male's sex fantasy given voice; a one-man obscene gesture to the politically correct and socially discreet; the national id run wild. It is all an act, but a very savvy one: Stern's over-the-top humor draws a road map of American society's taboos of public and private behavior and brings them audaciously, often hilariously, into the open.

His knee-jerk, New York-edged hostility can be grating. (Superman is dead. "Good. I hate him.") What makes it palatable, however, is Stern's hyperbolic wit and a disarming undercurrent of self-deprecation. Stern, who is married and has two children, with a third on the way, often makes disparaging comments about his own looks and his undersized sexual organ. He may be radio's biggest egomaniac, but the insecure Long Island kid who had trouble getting girls is never far from the surface.

Stern's national success is an entirely new phenomenon in radio. Though talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry King have become hits across the country, Stern is the first to dominate morning drive time from coast to coast with what is essentially a transplanted local program. His show is full of New York news and personalities, yet listeners around the country seem transfixed, as if by some maniacal visiting street preacher. Says Andy Bloom, program director of KLSX-FM in Los Angeles: "He is like dropping a nuclear bomb on the market."

Stern's detonations have won him enemies across the political spectrum. Conservative watchdogs like the Rev. Donald Wildmon placed him atop their hit list years ago. The National Organization for Women recently threatened to boycott the E! channel and its advertisers for giving Stern a new TV forum. "Stern's show perpetuates misogyny, the notion that women want to be abused," says Tammy Bruce, president of NOW's Los Angeles chapter. Al Westcott, 45, a long-haired guitarist who lodged the complaint that led to the FCC fines, describes himself as a "product of the '60s" who feels that Stern should be reined in because of his potential impact on children. Says he: "We're in a society of latchkey children, who don't have parents at home to tell them that the behavior Howard Stern is advocating is inappropriate."

Mel Karmazin, president of Infinity Broadcasting, which owns Stern's flagship New York station as well as two others that carry his program (in Philadelphia and Washington), claims that surveys show there are virtually no children in Stern's audience. He points out, moreover, that Stern never uses the "seven dirty words" forbidden by the FCC and that his language and subject matter can be found on plenty of TV talk shows. "You may not like the / humor," says Karmazin, "but that is why every radio has an on-off button." Advertisers, surprisingly, have not been scared off. Stern is a smart enough broadcaster to know that his irreverence has practical limits: he does many commercials live and never makes fun of them.

Stern has other defenders. Chaunce Hayden, a frequent caller who edits a New Jersey entertainment guide called Steppin' Out, says he first got hooked on Stern in 1986, when an ugly divorce had left him almost suicidal: "It was such a release from the tension. It probably saved my life." A New York broadcaster expresses grudging admiration: "Howard Stern does on the air what other radio personalities do with the mike off." Says Dick Cavett, who has called Stern's show several times: "I admire the way he skirts disaster. I hope to be listening on that day when Howard Stern goes too far."

Too far for Howard Stern? That, radio fans, is a really shocking thought.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles