Hooked on Howard’s vocal verite

YESTERDAY WAS a sad day for me. After two decades of waking up to the voice of Howard Stern, I listened gloomily as the self-proclaimed “King of All Media” bid farewell to terrestrial radio. Like a political refugee seeking free speech in a new land, the famous shock jock is transplanting himself to satellite radio, where subscribers will have to pay a monthly fee to hear his latest, now completely uncensored musings about strippers, retarded people and disgraced celebrities. Is nothing free anymore?

I may not seem like the typical shock-radio fan -- my mornings are spent flipping the dial between Stern and NPR -- but I count myself among Howard’s most loyal listeners.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard him. It was 1985 and I was 15 years old, riding in the car with my mother to an oboe lesson in New Jersey. A dial flipper even then, I recall scrolling past Madonna and Dexy’s Midnight Runners and pausing at a voice so intense it was as if the speaker was in the car with us.

It’s a good thing he wasn’t. Howard isn’t the ideal driving companion for 15-year-old oboists and their sensitive mothers. But this brief (and thanks to my mom, it was very brief) exposure introduced me to an entirely new kind of radio voice. For the first time in my life, I was hearing someone speak on the air like a human being. Even if he wasn’t the kind of human being some people wanted to spend a lot of time around, Howard Stern did something that earnest public radio hosts, blowhard morning crews and smoky-voiced classic rock announcers hadn’t at that time managed to pull off. He simply sat in front of the microphone and talked. I was hooked.

My appreciation for his program -- and I know this is going to sound like a version of “I read Playboy for the articles” -- goes beyond his scatology and his demeaning comments and even his occasional bursts of political and social insight. As hyperbolic as the “King of All Media” label is meant to be, I would argue that Stern has had a greater influence on a particular corner of radio media than he even realizes.

Ira Glass’ public radio program, “This American Life,” which features stories told by writers and performers who’ve mastered the art of speaking as insouciantly as if they were chatting away on a city bus, has become a cult phenomenon. “The King of All Public Radio” (my designation, not his), Glass has developed a narrative and tonal style that is now mimicked by just about every public radio personality under the age of 45.

Ten years after “This American Life” first aired, young people are dying to get on public radio the way they used to want to be in the movies. But for all of the show’s eccentricities, humor and, let’s face it, opportunities to feel righteous about listening to public radio, I think it’s something much more visceral that draws us in.

WHAT WE love about this new generation of public radio voices is their super-casualness, the punk rock nonchalance of the whole lo-fi genre. The radio version of cinema verite, it calls to mind a John Cassavetes movie without the picture. It’s vocal verite.

Those of us who think about these things (we’re a small group, but we have a lot of blogs) generally assume these mannerisms were invented, or at least popularized, by Glass and his cadre of public radio hipsters. But I would argue that it’s actually Stern who pioneered the genre of vocal verite. Before he came along, radio voices seemed to divide along the party lines of AM and FM. Whereas AM conveyed a sense of vague alarm (think Paul Harvey, Wolfman Jack and those urgent, almost vexed voices on around-the-clock news stations) the personalities on the FM dial were so mellow that they often seemed stoned.

That’s why, back in 1985, Stern was such a revelation to my 15-year-old ears. Yes, his toilet humor sometimes undermined his talents as a social critic and, yes, he put strippers on the air (because we couldn’t see them, this always struck me as brilliantly perverse and even slyly feminist -- though I may be giving him too much credit).

Ultimately, however, his most lasting contribution lies in the physical overtones of his voice. By rejecting the over-enunciated conventions of typical radio, his free associative, meandering discourse made no attempt to hide the degree to which he was winging things. Though he’d surely be shocked to hear it, Stern unwittingly laid the groundwork for a generation of public radio voices who’ve made a study of appearing to fly by the seat of their pants.

Because many of us are willing to pledge money to public radio to hear these raspy folks, I suspect Stern won’t have any problem drumming up business on satellite. His listeners may not get coffee mugs for their donations, but they will get strippers. Seems like a fair trade.