HOWARD STERN SHOW NEWS
Here's a story about Howard finally getting his freedom.
Stern Goes Out in (His) Style
by Joal Ryan
Dec 16, 2005
"Long live the revolution, long live The Howard Stern Show!"
Friday was a day for fighting words about "dildo golf," and sentimental thank-yous to Rocky the Crack Whore, et al., as Howard Stern hosted his final over-the-air radio broadcast, ending a nearly 20-year syndicated run as the nation's leading morning-drive-time voice.
Starting Jan. 9, Stern is taking his act, his crew and his considerable roster of strippers to Sirius satellite radio. There, loyalists will be required to pay $12.95 a month (or $142.45 a year) to worship their self-appointed King of All Media on one of the service's more than 120 channels of commercial-free music, talk and sports. Back on the free airwaves, ex-Van Halen rocker David Lee Roth will take over the Stern slot in the East Coast markets, while Man Show man Adam Corolla will handle the West Coast. Both begin their gigs Jan. 3.
"I am leaving terrestrial radio for a different kind of airwave," Howard Stern said Friday, as he addressed the crowd that gathered outside New York's K-Rock radio station, "so we can once again be free to do our broadcast the way we want to do it." Stern, 51, repeatedly referred to himself and his show as "the last of a dying breed." He sounded serious and mock-serious, self-important and mock-self-important. ("We played dildo golf! We had the Wheel of Sex with Penthouse Pets...The last of a dying breed!")
But there was nothing faux about Stern's expressed distaste for his longtime foe, the Federal Communications Commission. "The government says clean up your act," he cried, "and we say, 'No way!' " Howard's battles with the FCC over what can and can't be said on the public airwaves intensified after Pamela Anderson's breast-baring stunt at the 2004 Super Bowl brought renewed scrutiny--Stern favored the term "witch hunt"--on the issue of indecency. Within weeks of the Jackson incident, Stern's show was dropped by broadcast giant Clear Channel.
In October 2004, Stern announced he was headed for satellite radio, where the federal government and skittish sponsors would have no sway over the content on his show. "We're going to go back to do the shows the way we started, before getting hammered by the FCC," Stern producer Gary Dell'Abate told Yahoo!, which offered live coverage of Friday's farewell events. The last Howard Stern show on free radio was not unlike those from the previous two decades. There were Vivid Girls, who offered to "date" listeners. There was the Ku Klux Klansman-movie reviewer (Daniel Carver), who used the "N" word in an ungangsta-rap-like fashion. There was the Elephant Boy (Fred the Elephant Boy), who welcomed the move to Sirius by invoking Martin Luther King Jr. ("Free at last, free at last, thank God all mighty, free at last!"). In short, something for everyone.
In the end, in an address that was edited by the censor's button several times, Stern thanked his audience for having "the same sick, infantile sense of humor" that he has. He gave shout-outs to departed friends of the show, such as Sam Kinison and Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. He acknowledged Soupy Sales as his "boyhood hero." (It was unclear why some of the Stern audio was blanked out. Stern himself seemed to be playing by the broadcast rules, even offering a self-censored "F Jackie!" to ex-head writer Jackie Martling. MarksFriggin.com, the completest Howard Stern Show fansite, speculated that the vocal crowd might have been supplying the profanity.)
Howard Stern began his radio career in 1977 at WRNW-FM in the tiny village of Briarcliff Manor, New York. In 1982, he made it to the big island of Manhattan courtesy WNBC-FM. His tumultuous run at the station was the heart of the 1997 movie Private Parts. After being fired by WNBC in 1985, Stern moved to K-Rock (WXRK-FM). The show was syndicated the following year.
Following Friday's broadcast, Stern and company decamped to New York City's Hard Rock Cafe for a Sheryl Crow concert, and a meet-and-greet with fellow Sirius hire Martha Stewart. "It's sad to leave, but onward and upward," Stern said, before he left the studio for the last time. "And let's not let the government win."
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