Meet MTV’s Latest Pop Star: The Host

It’s almost show time, and the daily madness that greets MTV’s “Total Request Live” is gearing up on the street outside the music channel’s Times Square headquarters. Sullen cops and wooden barricades are in place to hem in the crowd, which consists mostly of young girls from strange, distant lands like Wisconsin, Georgia and Long Island. One floor up, the panes of the window-lined studio are already vibrating from cheers and thumping music.

If Times Square is indeed the crossroads of the world, the triangular, riveted stage of “TRL” is the corner hangout claimed by youth, pop music, the Internet and television.

The show itself is a hard-wired, music video update of “American Bandstand,” but if that was the extent of it, those kids down on the sidewalk would stay home in front of their keyboards. No, the show also has so-close-you-can-touch-it star power--’N Sync, Madonna, Metallica, Dr. Dre, even Tom Cruise have paraded through. Perhaps more important, “TRL” has an unlikely, full-time star of its own.

That would be the man there in the middle, the curiously serene fellow with the steady gaze who can chat up a grumpy Marilyn Manson or some screeching 13-year-old Britney Spears fan with equal aplomb. Part Dick Clark, part Clark Kent, he is Carson Daly, and if you didn’t know that, not only are you not among “TRL’s” 5 million viewers a week, but you probably can’t even name any of the Backstreet Boys.

Over the past two years, “TRL” has become the heartbeat of MTV and, arguably, of all Top 40 music in the United States. Kid Rock, Christina Aguilera and a slew of other new stars have acknowledged that “TRL” appearances ignited breakthrough album sales, and record companies now view the forum as perhaps the most bankable hype machine in the business.

Entertainment Weekly now publishes the “TRL” countdown just as it does the nation’s album charts or Hollywood box office tallies, and Spin magazine recently dubbed today’s youth “Generation TRL.” MTV in general has been gathering strength too, with robust ratings among the coveted youth demographics. The channel’s Music Video Awards last year were the highest-rated entertainment show in the history of cable, and, love it or hate, MTV is the the single most potent taste maker in music today.

“[‘TRL’] creates the standard for what the youth of today wants,” says Fred Durst, who is not only the front man for chart-topping band Limp Bizkit, but also an executive at Interscope Records. “And Carson, well, he’s just blowing up. The show is unstoppable and Carson is worldwide.”

Indeed, the show’s spotlight is so strong, its glare has turned the 27-year-old Daly, a former Los Angeles radio DJ, into a heartthrob in his own right.

The show, broadcast live every weekday at 3 p.m. on the East Coast (and taped to air in Los Angeles in the same time slot), is an after-school tradition across the country, and ratings are still arcing upward.

“I knew things were changing when we started getting huge crowds on days when we didn’t have any guests,” Daly says. “I’d feel bad, I’d call up somebody like Kid Rock and say, ‘Can you just drop by?’ It was like having a party and not having food and getting on the phone to Domino’s so the kids wouldn’t be disappointed. But the crowds didn’t care about the guests; they just wanted to be here and be part of the whole thing. It’s crazy.”

Now, on any given afternoon, half of the posters and homemade banners brought by the “TRL” crowds profess love and allegiance to Daly, a pop star who neither sings nor dances. To the young female fans, his charm is that of a best friend’s big brother who’s home from college: sweet and safe, bright, handsome, but with an unshaven frat-boy jawline and a killer CD collection--in short, the perfect guy to take you to your first keg party. Even better, this is a guy who hits the clubs with rock stars on Friday night but still goes to church on Sunday. Deep sigh in Middle America.

But there’s more to Carson Daly than the Tiger Beat datum. For one thing, he is the biggest star ever created by MTV (“Well, except maybe for Beavis and Butt-head,” one MTV executive notes judiciously), but he wants to be more than the network’s flagship face.

Daly has just signed a new contract that makes him a “TRL” executive producer, launches his own film production company and opens up opportunities with MTV’s corporate brethren, CBS and Paramount Pictures. In the span of an hour on a recent afternoon, he rattled off a half-dozen directions he may go: Direct a short film? Act? Host a late-night talk show? Maybe run a record label some day?

“There isn’t a massive master plan,” Daly says. It’s about an hour before “TRL” begins and a makeup artist is dabbing at Daly’s face, forcing him to discuss his future with closed eyes and pursed lips.

“I’ve come so much further than I ever really thought I would ever go. At this point, it just feels like they keep piling on the gravy. ‘Hey, Miramax wants to meet with you, they heard about your production company, they’re interested.’ Really? Great. I’m not worried about [expletive] up, saying the right thing, the wrong thing. What do I care? I’m in the room.

“I’m just having fun. It’s a playground.”

*

It’s a broiling Monday afternoon in Times Square, and the “TRL” guest for the day is a British boy group called BBMak, yet another squad of fresh-scrubbed youngsters singing harmonies over burnished, lightweight pop. This is not Daly’s favorite type of music.

“N.W.A was the first music that made me passionate,” Daly says of his days at Santa Monica High School.

Like so many young white kids growing up in suburban comfort, Daly found that pioneering group’s angry slash of gangsta rap to be a fascinating head trip, and the passion it sparked would lead him to a radio career. He still loves shocking rap (“Eminem’s new album is brilliant, just brilliant”) and, even more, the hard-edged bombast of Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit and other rap-rock amalgams.

Still, the huge success in recent years of youth pop has, in large part, inspired the fan fervor of the “TRL” core constituency, and the show has become a signature venue for the music. That new “TRL” home video, for instance, features four songs by boy bands (and a fifth by youth pop diva Aguilera) among its seven music performances.

Daly often takes gentle pokes at the youth pop stars and their videos during the broadcast, just as he dotes on his favorite new hard-edged acts. He’s well aware, though, that those screaming girls downstairs don’t want to hear him mock their heartthrobs too much.

“It’s surgery out there. You say one wrong thing, and, oh man . . . it’s a constant tiptoe. But I think I also have a sense that I need to educate them a little bit. Not like I’m a teacher talking down to them, though.”

Daly is more like a summer camp counselor with a wry sense of humor. He playfully zings guests, the videos or the show’s young callers with a straight face or gentle smirk. “You got the Backstreet Boys out there in a shed?” he asked one young Kentucky caller in a mocking Southern accent.

The host says the most challenging moment for him in the 460-plus episodes of “TRL” was the day Prince came to visit. Not only is the Purple One notoriously difficult to deal with--”He doesn’t believe in the concept of time, won’t wear a watch, and that can be a problem,” Daly says--but there was also a delicate problem facing Daly: Much of his “TRL” audience had no idea who Prince is.

“So I had to say stuff like, ‘I’m here with someone who has sold over 100 million records, he’s a legend in the business,’ to set it up and sell Prince to my audience,” Daly says. “But I also have to be respectful to Prince, who is standing right there. On top of that, he’s whack. He’s acting crazy, and I’m looking at the camera and want the kids to know I’m in on the joke with them. Very hard.”

*

Daly off camera is pretty much the same as Daly on camera--breezy but focused, confident but self-effacing, with a certain surfer-dude, brand of Zen that has no doubt been enhanced by his career serendipity. “I make decisions one at a time now,” he says with a shrug.

Perhaps, but he is hardly capricious with his career. Last year, he sought out “life lessons” from Dick Clark, who practically invented all this music countdown business with “American Bandstand.”

“Carson does a helluva job and he has the secret of success in television, which is that you have to be likable,” Clark says. “He exudes confidence, and the audience picks that up. . . . The audience has to believe that no matter what happens, good old Dick Clark will pull them through it. Or good old Bob Barker or good old Regis [Philbin] or good old Carson Daly.”

Clark parlayed his “Bandstand” popularity into a far-ranging career in front of and behind the camera. That’s the stuff Daly wanted to hear about.

“Longevity, setting up a business, work ethic, learning a craft, these are the things I want to focus on,” Daly says. Would Daly prefer if that career took him to boardrooms and control booths more often than the stage?

It seems so when Deb Savo, senior producer of “TRL,” hands Daly an advance copy of a behind-the-scenes video cashing in on the show’s success. The cover image of Daly prompts a sigh from the star, and he stares at it with the expression of someone who has just been handed a dead fish.

“I hate seeing myself,” he explains as the makeup artist continues her work. “It’s like, ‘Ugh.’ I can’t watch myself. I never watch MTV. I’m sick of my own name. I hear ‘Carson, Carson’ all day long. I don’t want the rest of the country to get sick of me, too. So I’m trying to be very careful of things I do on my own time.”

In the corner of the room, a television monitor with a feed from the still-empty “TRL” set is abruptly loud as a control room technician does a sound check. “Check one, check two, check, Carson, Carson, Carson, one, two, Carson, Carson. . . .”

Daly rolls his eyes. “See?”

*

Not too long ago, Daly was a man with no furniture. After getting the “TRL” job, he went on a binge of parties, friends and concerts. He and his roommate had a modest apartment with a video game system, stereo and not much else. The TV star slept on a blowup mattress on the floor, which was often crowded with friends crashing for the night. Then one day the building super came by with some news: The elderly woman in 3F had died and left her furniture to Daly and his roommate. She didn’t know them, really, but she felt bad because they obviously couldn’t afford a couch or chairs. “So then we went from having a place that looked like a crack den to a place filled with old lady furniture,” he says.

That kind of loose lifestyle was a joy for Daly. But by the start of this year, it became impossible. Fans were following him home and camping out at his door. Work was getting harried too. Every day, 60 or 70 messages clogged his voicemail, home machine and cell phone, and Daly felt as if he were suffocating. Finally, he moved out and lived out of hotels for a month.

“It was like Chapter 11, I had to hide out to catch my sanity,” he says. He hired a publicist and put other filters in place to make himself harder to reach. And, two months ago, Daly and his girlfriend, actress Tara Reid, moved into a new apartment. After a major shopping spree, there’s a home entertainment center, fancy furniture and all the things “real grown-ups” have in their homes, Daly says. There’s also a doorman downstairs to stop curious fans. Those fans are also the reason Daly no longer rides the subway to work or enjoys impromptu dinners around town. “The fans are great but they kind of rob some stuff away from you too. But it’s a good problem, right?”

It’s all about the fans at “TRL,” and Daly’s great strength is how he can stand in the spotlight but reflect its warm glow on the kids.

MTV in general knows that its fans love to see themselves and their peers, so shows like “Real World” and “TRL” deliver just that.

The “TRL” cameras pan across the crowd outside every few minutes, and the studio audience gets almost as much screen time as Daly. Viewer e-mail scrolls across the bottom of the screen during videos, and videos are interrupted by fans screaming into the microphones downstairs about why they voted for Juvenile or 98 Degrees. The show sometimes ends with shaky home videos sent in by kids re-creating the dance steps from their favorite videos, which might remind you of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or Pavlov, depending on your cynicism level.

That interactivity and Daly’s persona are the key to the “TRL” success, says Dave Sirulnick, the MTV executive who oversees news and production. “The recipe is Carson, the countdown with the audience voting, the fact that it’s live and the Times Square setting.” The show’s guests deliver star energy, but they’re not the focus. “It’s not like a late-night talk show where we rely on whoever is sitting on the couch to bring in the viewers. The show itself is the star, and Carson is the star.”

The set itself is fairly sparse--just a metallic platform with a dangling video monitor, but the view over Daly’s shoulder and out the windows is classic, cluttered Times Square. During the broadcasts, a giant Mr. Peanut, beaming in his top hat and holding Planters’ salty treats, seems to be peering over Daly’s right shoulder from the building across the street.

The faces of Tiger Woods and David Letterman are also in the neon-and-billboard forest outside Daly’s workplace window. It’s easy to imagine the pair of them, the pro golfer and the pro talker, capturing Daly’s eye now and then as symbols of what could have been and of what yet may be. Daly’s aspiration a decade ago was to become a pro golfer, and he came close (he actually played Woods a half-dozen times) before turning to broadcasting.

Daly’s love of golf earned him a scholarship to Loyola Marymount, where he studied theology and, according to much of the press about him, he also seriously contemplated becoming a priest. That report, along with his comment to Rolling Stone last year that his then-girlfriend, TV star Jennifer Love Hewitt, was a reward from God, created some awkward moments for Daly.

“Howard Stern was calling me a Jesus freak, and there was this whole thing, the guy who wanted to be a priest going to MTV, finding the life of sins. . . . There was a real angle there that everybody jumped on,” Daly says. “I had a great Catholic upbringing . . . but I was never really going to be a priest. I wasn’t. Spirituality and my faith are important to me, but it’s something I don’t feel I need to discuss. I get along with everybody, Satan worshipers and hard-core Bible Belt people.”

Daly’s true pursuit--becoming a pro golfer--took him to Palm Springs in 1992, where he honed his game.

His life took a detour, however, when a childhood friend, Jimmy Kimmel (now a TV star in his own right on Comedy Central), hooked him up with an internship at a local radio station, KCMJ-FM (92.7), which led to series of jobs, among them a prized afternoon commute shift on KOME-FM (98.5) in San Jose. His very first task at KOME: flying to New York to cover the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. In 1996, the then-22-year-old hit the jackpot, “my dream job” as he still calls it, when KROQ-FM (106.7) brought him back to the Los Angeles area to work for the station he listened to growing up.

“We had a rare opening here, and he had been working at our sister station,” says Kevin Weatherly, KROQ program director. “He was my first and only choice. He’s a natural, and he has that star quality. You can’t teach it.”

As the station’s youngest DJ, Daly displayed a natural smoothness on air and, unlike all but a few of his peers, he selected the music for his slot and even produced the show himself. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” he says. The wunderkind, though, caught the eye of MTV, which has a long history of plucking KROQ talent. Key MTV executives Andy Schuon, Lewis Largent and Darcy Fuller, along with DJs-turned-VJs such as Kennedy, had already arrived at MTV via that KROQ pipeline, and Daly’s defection was one too many for the radio station’s leaders.

“We had big plans for him. It was hard not to take it personally, and it happened so fast,” Weatherly says. “But time heals those wounds.”

Daly recalled that after deciding to leave, he sneaked into the station’s offices to gather his tapes and other work. “The next day, I was glad I did because it didn’t go well. It was a bad departure,” Daly says. “I burned bridges and I think I ruined it for all the radio DJs trying to leave to go to MTV.”

The memory leaves Daly solemn for a moment, but a heartbeat later a staffer walks into the backstage room to update the host on his daily delivery of letters and parcels. Tucked in with the packages is a two-days-late birthday gift from, of all places, KROQ. “Really? Wow. I guess that’s a good sign.” For a moment, Daly seems like the Tiger Woods of television, finding the fates smiling on him even when he lands himself in the rough.

*

BBMak is apparently not as well-schooled in media skills as its super-slick American counterparts.

‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, for instance, were coached by their handlers early in their careers on how to present themselves during on-air interviews, so you’ll never see them chewing gum or slouching when a camera is rolling. The members of BBMak, however, talk over one another during Daly’s interview with them, creating a jumble of northern England accents.

The host has arranged in advance to focus on his favorite thing about the trio: “They write their own songs and they play their own instruments,” he tells a staffer before the show, “so I want to applaud them on air for doing it the way it should be done.” But the singers seem a little wide-eyed in reaction to the whole “TRL” setting, and one of them even does an Austin Powers imitation.

When the group does a quick version of its lone U.S. hit, “Back Here,” it changes the last line to “Carson’s the one with the ‘TRL’ show” and mugs for a blanching Daly, who, of course, does not like hearing his own name.

“Sucking up to the host, always a plus around here,” Daly says halfheartedly. BBMak leaves the stage by imploring the fans at home to vote for its video so it can reach the top of the “TRL” tally, which, of course, would translate into huge album sales. Daly looks relieved to get to a commercial break.

During this day’s countdown, Eminem’s ingeniously ludicrous and lewd “The Real Slim Shady” comes in at No. 4. Perhaps nothing shows Daly’s stature as a pop culture figure of the moment more than this song, which mentions him by name. Not to delve too deeply into the perverse verse, but it explores whether Daly or Limp Bizkit front man Durst was the first to enjoy the, uh, affections of Aguilera.

The song and video (which features Durst, with a stand-in for Daly and a blowup doll representing Aguilera) rightly infuriated Aguilera, who dismissed the whole thing as puerile fiction.

“TRL” now makes music news instead of just reporting or charting it. That’s especially clear on this day’s broadcast. Right after “The Real Slim Shady” finishes playing, an unannounced Durst is introduced as a surprise guest. The rap-rocker explains that he had just finished a lunch at Virgil’s barbecue up the street when he saw the “TRL” crowds and decided to drop in to see his pal Daly.

The volatile Durst could hardly be more different from the BBMak singers. Tattooed, glowering and toting a video camera to record the moment, he paces the “TRL” stage with a confident swagger. He also delivers good TV: In the span of five minutes, he alludes to the Aguilera controversy, goes on an extended tirade about the lead singer of Creed and invites the “TRL” studio audience to name a song on Bizkit’s upcoming album. He even uses a bad word and flips a bird, and you can just imagine adolescents in Peoria covering their mouths to hold in delighted giggles.

At a commercial break, a beaming Daly claps Durst on the back. As Durst retreats to a darkened corridor to watch the rest of the show, Daly, speaking to no one in particular, muses aloud that “TRL” is now the “epicenter of pop culture.” Later he will mention to the production team that it should try to get Creed singer Scott Stapp on the show sometime soon to keep this fun rolling.

In a hallway, Durst turns back to the stage and marvels at Daly’s easygoing manner on air. The host, meanwhile, begins bobbing his head as the monitors flicker with a video by Papa Roach. Daly is oblivious to the girls in the audience staring at his every move with giddy delight. The high priest of MTV, the club pro of youth television, is too lost in the music.

“I’m telling you,” Durst says, nodding at his friend, “that guy is a rock star.”