ghostlifeghostlife.

by Sir Andrew MacCreary

For those who take the time to get to know a person, there is always something rewarding that is worth the wait. No matter your first impressions there is always more than meets the eye. Well I guess most of the time. It doesn’t always happen, and sometimes you can be completely wrong, but first impressions can be deceiving. And if you take the time, most often, that patience is rewarded. When I first heard Howard on the radio it was just a bit under 7 years ago working at the Newbury Comics warehouse in Boston. A total shithole of a job standing in one place all day putting price stickers on CD’s and the ONLY thing that got me through the morning, and got my day started off right, was listening to Howard and the rest of the gang on the show mercilessly make fun of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky ‘scandal’. I’d never laughed harder in my life, and as I was laughing I would notice a few things. One, every single radio in this massive warehouse tuned in and everyone was listening, and everyone had smiles on their faces and were laughing as hard as I was. Two, all the people I worked with there were probably some of the nicest, sweetest and most sincere people I had known up until then. I thought to myself – ‘these arent the angry, sexist, racist, disgusting people I had expected to be fans of this show’. Ever since then all the people I knew or met who were fans of the show were probably the kindest people you could ever ask to meet. It was like a very large and strange family. I realized that what Howard was doing on his show was not making fun or degrading strippers, he wasn’t insulting the mentally handicapped, he wasn’t condoning racism, he wasnt belittling dwarfs (no pun intended). He relates to outcasts of society as he felt, and in many many ways still feels, to be one himself. Its ironic that to this day people who say hes a sexist, racist, hateful human being are the very ones who dont take the time themselves to get over their OWN prejudice, to see if their own hatred is justified. If they did, they’d see it isn’t. His sense of humor isnt everyones cup of tea, but beneath that is a person who hasnt forgotten who and what got him where he is today. He is a loyal person to his friends, family and fans alike. How do I know? Listen to the honesty that comes out of his mouth everyday and you will see. The real anger, the real passion, the real humor, and the real love for people. He gives millions of outcasts (12 million listeners every day, 20 million a day at hs peak in the early to mid 90′s) a place to vent every morning and to get through jobs they feel get them nowhere in life. He relates to his guests, he understands where they come, he comes from that same insecure place. He relates to his guests, his ‘Whack Pack’, his fans. Sure he busts their balls and teases them on their show, but friends do that to each other. I realized that Howard is very humane caring person, and listening to such things as when he talked a man down from killing himself on the GW Bridge in NYC years ago, or his 9/11 show breaking the news live in total disbelief just blocks away from the World Trade Center, or just his second to last show where he was choked up saying goodbye to members of the famous ‘Whack Pack’. His show is a place for people who feel left out in some way, to come together, laugh, tease one another, and ultimately feel like they are part of something. I love and respect Howard Stern immensely not just for his humor, but for giving alot of people a strange sense of belonging to something, and something that brings joy to everyone who is in their own way, become a part of the show. He has said himself its like one big family of dysfunctional people, and ‘together we are strong’.

Love him or hate him, Stern is a true pioneer
Radio star all but invented reality programming, freewheeling discourse
By James Sullivan
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 2:56 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

Great American pioneers: Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindbergh, Rosa Parks … Howard Stern?

The talk-radio blowhard who deals in relentlessly off-color humor, celebrates bodily secretions with a four-year-old’s glee and surrounds himself with a misfit cast of self-professed drunks, stutterers, retards and angry dwarves?

This may horrify those already inclined to believe the country has fallen, culturally speaking, so far that it can’t get up, but: Yes. Howard Stern, a pioneer. Emphatically, yes.

Even long before he signed that colossal contract — reportedly in the neighborhood of $500 million for five years — to bring his outrageous shtick to the new medium of satellite radio, Stern was already a bona fide American pioneer. And not just as an entertainer, someone who brings laughs, however puerile the material, to an estimated 12 million people (20 million at his peak) each weekday morning. The original big-name shock jock is a tireless crusader for free speech, one of the basic tenets, of course, of Western democracy.

Sure, he’s going to Sirius (“Eh-eh-eh,” as they’ve been calling it on the old show, where he is forbidden to mention his new employer) for the money. More than that, however, he is defecting to make a very big point, after clashing one too many times with the titans of corporate radio and the Federal Communications Commission, which has made Stern the most heavily fined broadcaster in the agency’s history. Howard gets paid to say whatever’s on the tip of his tongue — every word of it — and he does not take kindly to anyone who would wash it out with soap.

Paying for his humor
He’s been fined for joking about masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima; for having a guest who played piano with his genitals; for a graphic conversation with the guy responsible for the Paris Hilton sex tape.

“I disapprove of what you say,” as the famous quote has it, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Often attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire, the line’s origins are uncertain. It may as well have been Howard, who can’t stand the French, anyway.

That tenacity has earned Stern a loyal, ardent following poised to follow him into a whole new format. He’s the Pied ****ing Piper of potty mouth, for **** sake.

“Love him or hate him, you can’t deny his success,” Ed Bradley declared in a surprisingly sympathetic profile on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. In the mid-‘90s, after building an empire for Infinity Broadcasting with blanket syndication, Stern declared himself the King of All Media. He launched a cable TV version of his radio program, published two runaway bestsellers and starred as himself in a feature film. He even ran for governor of New York, aptly enough, on the Libertarian Party ticket.

“Let someone see the full range of emotions,” Stern told Bradley, describing his basic broadcasting philosophy. At its core, that philosophy is an ongoing critique of the rigorous self-censorship that guides typical media presenters, be they talk show hosts, anchors, topical panelists — the full range of yakkers who address the American public over the airwaves and through the broadband connections.

For his absolute devotion to his own id, Stern is often compared with the late comedian Lenny Bruce. He’s also a kind of media-age, R-rated Holden Caulfield, still nurturing the unfettered impulses of adolescence while mocking the pervasive “phoniness” of American public life.

Stern’s move to satellite lends instant legitimacy to the developing medium. In that world, he’s already a D.W. Griffith, a Henry Ford. (Besides revolutionizing an industry, Stern shares with those predecessors an uncomfortable propensity for race-baiting.)

The inventor of reality programming
The list of cultural diversions that have arrived in the wake of Howard’s ascendance is long, and remarkably broad. Without Stern, we might have much less emphasis on fatuous celebrities. There would be no gross-out reality TV as we know it, much less suburban acceptance of strip-club culture, no Drudge Report or “Crank Yankers” or Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

A world without some of that dogged commitment to vulgarity might sound to some like an unattainable heaven. But a world without Howard would also, in all likelihood, be a world without our contemporary brand of freewheeling discourse, a world without both Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and “The Daily Show”’s Jon Stewart. Outrage, from whichever side of the social or political spectrum, is Stern’s stock in trade — “there’s a general distrust, a lot of fear,” he told “60 Minutes” — and he has helped make it a national pastime.

There are times when Stern’s verbal fearlessness borders on surprising profundity. Often these are times of crisis, such as on September 11 or after the L.A. riots. Because he feels no compulsion to distance himself from his gut reaction, he can come across at moments like those, amazingly enough, as a lone voice of reason.

But the bottom line isn’t his occasional minuet with sincerity, or even that gargantuan salary. The bottom line is, Howard’s funny. Not funny all the time; sometimes not funny for hours on end. But he’s using a variation on the Black Power fist as the logo for his new venture. This from a man who readily admits that his trademark indignation comes from growing up one of the few remaining white kids in an increasingly black Long Island town.

In the words of one notorious segment from the Stern show archives, “It’s Just Wrong.”

And that’s what makes it funny.

James Sullivan lives in Massachusetts and is a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454035/from/RSS/

A sallacious send-off for Stern

BY STEPHEN WILLIAMS AND ROBERT KAHN
STAFF WRITERS

It wasn’t exactly “good night and good luck.”

After 20 years as New York’s premier radio personality, Howard Stern signed off WXRK-FM permanently yesterday morning, where the atmosphere inside the studio and on the sidewalk outside was more like a circus than a memorial.

Speechifying before a crowd of about 10,000 gathered under a steady drizzle, the King of All Media thanked his fan base of strippers, various garbage men, his loyal and long-serving K-rock crew, plus High Pitch Eric, Hook Nose Mike, and Jeff the Drunk. Then he shouted from the top of a double-decker bus, “Long live the Howard Stern Show!”

Posed like a conquering Roman tribune, Stern waved to the screaming throngs after the broadcast ended,andthe bus wound its way through midtown to an invites-only, post-show party at the Hard Rock Cafe, headlined by singer Sheryl Crow and hosted by Martha Stewart.

Stern will next be heard publicly Jan. 9 on Sirius satellite radio, beginning a five-year, $500 million gig. Stern, who essentially has been saying goodbye to terrestrial radio since he signed with Sirius 15 month ago, opened his show with a version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” “Good morning, and welcome to the last show on terrestrial radio,” he said.

The sound of “Taps” played in the background.

For the first couple of hours the show was Usual Howard — at one point producer Gary Dell’Abate, who was chatting with fans on the street, told Howard that one woman in the crowd was wearing a trench coat and nothing else, and had been there since the previous night.

Various guests, including ex-stripper Amy Linn and the “King of All Blacks”,showed up in the studio, as did Stern’s family and his mother and father, Rae and Ben. The parents later appeared outside to huge cheers.

“We’ve had this glorious history together, all of us,” Stern said on the air at one point, before leaving the small studio on the 14th floor for the last time. “I’m thinking all the way back, moving around the country, Detroit, Washington D.C… .we’ve influenced an entire generation of broadcasters.”

Arriving after 9:30 a.m. on an elevated stage under a white tent set up on 56th Street, Stern spent about 20 minutes thanking the fans and others. He also targeted radio giant Clear Channel Communciations and the FCC, with whom he’s battled over indecency violations through the years, and the “religious right.”

Undeterred by the prospect of dismal weather and a possible transit strike, many well-wishers came from far away to mark the occasion.

“I had to be here for this,” said Scott Land, who was the head puppeteer on last year’s “Team America:World Police” movie. Land came from Los Angeles carrying a Howard marionette he had crafted for the event. “When this is over,” he said, “it’s over.”

Some not-so-well wishers were there too, including a contigent of about 100 people from XM, Sirius’ satellite rival.They chanted “Howard Stern’s a bozo.”

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

this is such a great editorial on Howard, nice to see someone can write something about him without having to throw some jab at him, and acknowledging what a ground breaking humane guy Howard really is. also describes how important his 9/11 broadcast was, so much so that Mayor Giuliani called his show to thank him for helping keeping his millions of listeners in NY alone calm and informed.

Last days of Howard Stern
Terrestrial radio’s last star heads to satellite, leaving black hole in his place
By Helen A.S. Popkin
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 1:00 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

The banner showed up last Saturday, spread across a brick building, shouting to every driver and passenger entering Manhattan via the Queensboro Bridge. The stark white background displayed a woodcut fist and black-stencil lettering — the official font of revolution. “Let freedom ring,” the banner read.

“And let it be rung by a stripper.”

The faux-guerilla marketing is just one of many billboards popping up across the United States, announcing radio superstar Howard Stern’s move from the terrestrial airwaves to Sirius Satellite Radio.

Given his 12 million listeners and the media onslaught, Stern’s departure is no secret. But the Queensboro banner is particularly bittersweet. Hanging less than two miles from both his soon-to-be vacated WXRK K-Rock booth and his new digs at Sirius, it drives home that Stern is leaving FM — and ringing its death knell as he goes.

Coverage of Stern’s move has flooded both the newsstands and television. He was even the subject of a favorable Ed Bradley profile on “60 minutes.” The FCC’s tightening grip on the airwaves is well documented, including its liberal doling out of indecency fines which led to a serious crackdown on Stern show language and topics. And we know about his decision to choose Sirius over its competitor, XM, and the $500 million contract that helped get him there.

Media is always eager for a good Stern story, but this time the tone is different. Instead of the eye-rolling attention to the often purlieu bent of his show’s humor, he’s finally receiving widespread acknowledgement for his groundbreaking accomplishments and status as not only one of the best radio personalities ever, but the last of a dying breed.

Corporations such as Clear Channel have consolidated terrestrial radio into a single entity operating with an identical play list. An increasing number of stations don’t even have DJs anymore. Stern’s FM abandonment for the FCC-free satellite waves is more than a defining point in his career; it’s a defining point in broadcast history.

Howard’s humanity
With all the Stern coverage, past and present, about his fines and firings, how disgusting people find him, you don’t hear a lot about why his show works.

I found out about 9/11 from Howard Stern. I was getting ready for work, listening to the Stern gang discuss Pamela Anderson’s breasts, when the tone changed. From their Manhattan studio, they cold see that the World Trade Center was on fire. I thought it was a bit, some kind of joke. But the punch line never came. I turned on the TV and saw it too, the Twin Towers burning seven miles south of my apartment.

You hardly ever read this kind of stuff about Stern, but it’s a big part of the reason Stern imitators fail when they ape the naughty talk and toilet humor. That morning, hearing news that makes you want to be with people, I felt that I was. I, along with millions of other listeners in New York City and the rest of the country, got our information via the humanity Stern projects that lesser DJs cannot.

Stern and crew stayed on the air, discussing the unfolding tragedy, relaying information as they got it. Unlike other broadcasters who fled the city, Stern and crew were on the air that day and the next, taking calls, talking to listeners, a consistent presence in an uncertain time.

Not that I listen to the show because Stern is sensitive. I listen because it makes me laugh so hard tears stream down my face and orange juice blows out my nose. That’s his humanity too. One egghead theory posits that Stern’s naughty talk, over-the-top misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc., provides a release for the politically-incorrect thoughts we all have. My theory: Second grade humor is still the funniest.

Admittedly, I don’t care for some of the more overtly sexual portions of the show. When there’s a bit involving women having their bodies appraised, I go brush my teeth. When I’m back, the group is on to something else, discussing the inequities of producer Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate’s marriage, comedian Artie Lange’s drinking and eating habits, or whether receiving sexual favors from a man as opposed to one’s mother in a life-or-death situation makes you gay.

I play it like the Al Anon slogan — take what I need and leave the rest. Still, it can feel isolating, being female, feminist and a Stern fan. An acquaintance told me in all sincerity that Hell had a place reserved for Howard Stern. This is the same woman who rode in a car with me guffawing to the verge of hyperventilation listening to Stern interview Snoop Dog.

What a godsend when Ira Glass, host of NPR’s “This American Life,” wrote a Howard Stern homage that appeared in the “New York Times” Sunday magazine. No liberal-minded naysayer could argue with the vaunted Glass. I wanted to run down the street, shoving the essay in the face of everyone who ever questioned my love for great radio.

On December 16, with much pomp and circumstance, Stern departs from FM radio, leaving behind any fan not willing or able to pony up for a satellite radio and the $12.95-pre-month subscription. His listeners will drop from 12 million to around 2.2 million, though it’s expected that Sirius subscriptions will jump once Stern is in the house.

Though he won’t appear on Sirius until January 9, Stern is already producing shows on his two Sirius stations, Howard 100 and Howard 101. As Stern told Bradley on “60 Minutes,” these new shows will feature a Howard “sensibility,” not to mention his regular cast of revolving misfits and miscreants. One such evening show, “Tissue Time,” features a female phone sex professional, utilizing her skills to help male listeners “fall asleep.” The other night featured a guest host, frequent Stern show guest, geriatric porn star Blue Iris.

The topic of a sweet old lady performing phone sex for listeners also brings a bandied question to the fore. Many speculate that without an entity such as the FCC to either reign him in or give him a foe to battle, Stern will lose his bite. Stern has pooh-poohed this theory, but there’s also the question whether satellite radio will survive as a whole, seeing as regular radio is free. And his terrestrial days draw to an end, Stern is heard regularly complaining about his fans’ failure to subscribe.

“Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update anchor Tina Fey was a bit more optimistic. Announcing Stern’s move to Sirius in October, Fey read from the teleprompter, “Will listeners pay $13 a month to hear a stripper being hit on the butt with a fish?” Then, looking off camera towards an implied answer, “What’s that? Oh, they will? Okay.”

Helen A.S. Popkin lives in New York and is a regular Stern listener. However, she has never played “It’s Just Wrong” or spun “The Wheel of Sex.” She’s a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10402977/page/2/

another great editorial on Howard from Ira Glass

Howard and Me
Under new F.C.C. rulings, we are all shock jocks now.

By Ira Glass
First published in the New York Times, May 9, 2004.

Last night I dreamed about Howard Stern again. He was disappointed in me, and ordered me out of his car. In my dreams, I never live up to Howard’s standards.

I host a show on public radio and when my listeners tell me they don’t care for Stern, I always think it reveals a regrettable narrowness of vision. Mostly, they’re put off by the naked girls. But Howard’s invented a way of being on the air that uses the medium better than nearly anyone. He’s more honest, more emotionally present, more interesting, more wide-ranging in his opinions than any host on public radio. Also, he’s a fantastic interviewer. He’s truly funny. And his on-air staff is cheerfully inclusive of every kind of person: black, white, dwarf, stutterer, drunk and semi-closeted gay. What public radio show has that kind of diversity?

Recently, in a show about testosterone, we stole the format Howard invented. On the air, our staff debated who among us probably has the most testosterone. Then we were tested. Then we opened the results on the air and tussled some more. That, in a nutshell, is the genius of Stern: you put all your regular characters into some situation; they argue; the situation takes a turn; they argue some more.

Sadly, lots of smart people shrug off the recent government crackdown on Howard Stern – and on other “indecency” – as if it were nastiness going on in some bad neighborhood of the broadcast dial, one that doesn’t concern them, one that they’d never stoop to visit.

But the recent changes in F.C.C. rulings make me Stern’s brother like I’ve never been before. Here are just a few of the things we’ve broadcast on our show that now could conceivably result in fines of up to a half million dollars for the 484 public stations who run the program: assorted curse words, people saying “damn” and “God damn” (a recent F.C.C. decision declared that “profane” and “blasphemous” speech would now come under scrutiny); various prison stories; and a very funny story by the writer David Sedaris that takes place in a bathroom and that violates all three FCC criteria for “indecency.” It’s explicitly graphic in talking about “excretory organs or activities”; Sedaris repeats and dwells on the descriptions at length, and he absolutely means to pander and shock. That’s what makes it funny.

In the past, the F.C.C. would have considered context, the literary value or news value of apparently offensive material. And the agency still gives lip service to context in its current decisions. But when the commissioners declared in March that an expletive modifying the word “brilliant” (uttered by Bono at the Golden Globe Awards) was worthy of punishment, they made a more radical change in the rules than most people realize. Now context doesn’t always matter. If a word on our show could increase a child’s vocabulary, if some members of the public find something “grossly offensive,” the F.C.C. can issue fines.

Because the whole process is driven by audience complaints, enforcement is arbitrary by design. Political expediency also seems to play a role. Stern has pointed out how, on a recent “Oprah” featured virtually the same words he uses but drew no fine. He urged his listeners to file complaints, to test whether the F.C.C. will only fine those it sees as vulnerable. Agency aides told The Hollywood Reporter that Oprah Winfrey was probably untouchable.

What’s craziest about this new indecency witch hunt, is that it’s based on the premise that just one exposure to filthy words will damage a child. (I’ve yet to hear of a scientific study proveing even that repeated exposure affects children.) Recently on my show, I asked one of the people who organizes write-in campaigns to the F.C.C., Brent Bozell, what harm it did anyone to see Janet Jackson’s breast for a fleeting second, or to hear Howard use the phrase “anal sex,” and he said it destroyed the “innocence of childhood.” In our talk, Mr. Bozell used the phrase several times himself, presumably doing exactly as much harm to young people as Stern did on April 9, 2003.

That day, a brief conversation about the act on Stern’s show drew $495,000 in fines. Mr. Bozell and I received no fines. No wonder Howard kicks me out of the car.