Howard Stern Went From Shock Jock To Centrist Cat-Dad. If His Audience Couldn’t Follow, That’s Not His Fault
News broke this week that SiriusXM may not renew its contract with Howard Stern, a move that would bring to a close Stern’s 20-year run on satellite radio.
Not everyone is convinced the rumors of his show’s imminent conclusion aren’t part of a strategic leak—an attempt by Sirius to gain the upper hand in negotiations with the radio host. Meanwhile, over the weekend, an anonymous source told the Daily Mail that the self-crowned King of All Media may already be planning to take his talents to Netflix or HBO Max if the Sirius show indeed goes south.
Either way—it appears we may be nearing the end of a chapter of broadcasting history that began in 2004, when Stern signed a $500 million contract to join Sirius and leave “terrestrial radio”—a term I don’t remember even existing before Stern himself started using it as a pejorative after he left for satellite.
At the time, Sirius and XM Radio were locked in a VHS vs. Betamax, Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD-style battle for format supremacy (which was resolved when the two providers merged in 2008.) Stern’s arrival became Sirius’ trump card. After just one year of Stern, the Sirius subscriber base had reportedly jumped from 600,000 to six million.
And one of those listeners was me.
I’d been a loyal Sternie since he first became available to those of us on the West Coast in the late nineties; by the time he joined Sirius, my Stern habit was so well-developed that I couldn’t imagine a morning commute without him. I was such a fiend that I got reprimanded for Stern-listening at three separate jobs— on a farm, where I’d surreptitiously listen to him on a portable radio, when I was supposed to be monitoring fruit; by the public pool, where I was supposed to be guarding lives; and in the equipment room of my college’s rec center, where I was supposed to be lending out sports gear. In the first two cases the reprimand was for inattention; only with the latter was it directly related to Stern’s problematic status as the nation’s most prominent “shock jock.”
He never struck me as all that shocking, of course—despite everything that made it infamous, his show was more like comfort food, a way to be part of a conversation even when you were alone. When Stern moved to satellite, I immediately shelled out for a Sirius subscription that probably I couldn’t afford, including a little transponder (pre-iPods, pre-internet-enabled-devices) that would even work outside or in the shower (though not very well). Stern finally had his own channel, free of FCC rules, and he could do whatever he wanted. And with his shows replayed throughout the day, I could listen to him almost any time I wanted—except when the goblin-voiced Scott Ferrall (unlistenable) or sub-moronic Bubba the Love Sponge (too stupid) were on instead.
Not being from the tri-state area, I never contracted whichever brain disease makes people want to listen to degenerate gamblers scream at each other over which athletes are elite and which are frauds every day, but I was nonetheless powerless to resist the Wack Pack, Richard and Sal’s prank calls, song parodies, and Stern torturing his staff with nicknames, running bits, and assorted other forms of hectoring. That also felt like a specifically tri-state collection of weirdos, but somehow it translated. Storylines—about Eric the Actor (née Eric the Midget) flying with balloons, or Scott the Engineer getting $250,000 to have anal sex with Lexington Steele—would play out for weeks or months, entertainingly, even when you knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the proposed stunt would never happen. Occasionally someone rode a Sybian, which was like a mechanical bull that was also a vibrator.
