The Howard Stern Thread

2 years since Eric the Actor's death. Best Wack Packer of all time by a long-shot, Beetle close second obviously but Eric was articulate, insane, and insolent... like Ralph said today, he didn't even like Howard, it was just a means to an end... miss him

like Eric responding to people tweeting at him that he was born the same year as his parents, that he was the one that killed JFK, and getting so incensed...

i am not vegan or gluten free. you. stupid. jackass!

Sal's booth stories were pretty good on 9/14 would have liked to have witness him blacking out at the staff dinner too.

halfway through the norm interview and really enjoying it even though howard has trouble letting him finish a thought.

regarding diminishing returns, your situation is probably different but i've found that the show is such a self-enclosed world that sometimes taking a long break from the show allows you to enjoy it again.

I hear you. I just don't want to take that break!

Jan Hein's anger emerging is the most amazing thing on the show lately. i can't wait until he just explodes one day. thank you jason for hit em with the hein

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rQchVLqkLo

a great moment from 1994? howard calls in to a new affiliate station in phoenix, where they pass the phone around the room the morning after firing all the on-air talent. anger slowly builds.

as noted in the youtube comments, carla foxx, the ringleader of the press conference, killed someone in a hit and run a year later.

holy fuck this is great, thanks for sharing

lol @ "the stars of satellite radio"
Somehow I doubt they mean that ironically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwYhMHUejp4

another moment from 1995. a press conference with friend of the show, al d'amato. stuttering john asks a few mild questions, and then d'amato mentions imus, which sends howard into a rage.

Nice clip of Phoenix. Lol @ H at the beginning when he puts them on hold to collect his thoughts.

Jeff was gold this week!

Agreed. I just can't listen to anything involving HPE for longer than 5 min, so Wednesday's show was a bit of a wash for me. And even though it would probably be one of the all time best bits on the show, wouldn't it be impossible for Jeff to give his amputated arm to Jason so he can eat it? Seems like a lot of legal/medical/ethical (ehh..) hurdles to clear. Loved how you could tell Benjy was so beaten & jealous that he didn't come up with the idea.

Find that guy

His name's Jerry

You know what to do

beetmoji

Really thought this kid from Kuwait caller was a bit last week, but he called in again today, mentioned he had a Twitter, and the thing goes back to April 2014. weird. it would be great if Howard adopted him and then just gave him to Gary or something.

Howard's interview style has really degraded even in the past 3 years. He's just way too manic and he's not really interested in follow-up questions. The Green Day interview today was so rough, it was an hour and a half but it still felt rushed because Howard couldn't let a thought develop. It's a drag.

What's the Kuwait kid's twitter handle?

fwiw I've only been a fan since 2011, but I noticed such a stark difference between his June 2012 and December 2014 interviews with Billy Corgan. I don't know what to make of this Getting Things Done/Marci Turk business, but reading some dirt from reddit user ASiriusProblem is illuminating. (Turk is apparently dating Steve Brandano lmao)

xp https://twitter.com/q8i_snake

on interview style degrading, i listened to the norm macdonald 9-19-2016 interview and it's about all i've heard of the show since the re-up of the contract. he asks about the same questions he's asked norm for a decade (don ohlmeyer, snl impressions, "you were so good at that news!") but the interview is forty five minutes longer than norm's last appearance in 2011. he lets him talk for longer, seems more engaged, more polite than his 2011 interview. there might be other reasons for the 2011 interview being different, like their mutual friend drinking a jug of bleach and stabbed himself about a year prior, comments norm made before about enabling artie, etc.

Interesting article on Stern having Trump on for years, and how his particular interviewing style got Trump to tip his hand and voice a lot more shit than regular chat shows or journos could:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/howard-stern-donald-trump-2016-214322

xp I agree, the Norm interview was really good because Norm was able to take control and steer the thing (that 10 minute joke at the end was amazing). some guests like Bill Murray, Gregg Allman, and Neil Young have called him on his interruptions and get little digs in with "so, as I was saying..." but he also asks the same fucking questions he asked the guest 2/3 years ago. i was blown away in that December 2014 interview when he forgot that Billy Corgan and Courtney Love dated before she was married to Cobain. Corgan seemed genuinely hurt (lol).

and yeah, I love that Howard is on the news constantly because of all of his Trump interviews through the years. he said the other day he's pretty sure Trump is pissed at him because of it... remember that as recently as January, Trump called Howard personally just to chat and clear up some mistake in the press... Trump's last appearance (a call-in) was on August 25, 2015...

"unceasingly onanistic and anhedonic, using others only to spark his disgust or his libido"

Probably the best description of him I've ever read

going to credit/blame the recent interview style on just having so many dudes in back feeding him information and stuff. hes more distracted and also doesnt give a shit anymore.

i skip the interviews quite often unless it's another person who is professionally funny. he tends to give them more leeway in any case.

Will is responsible for the pre-interviews and research but apparently he always passes it off to an intern. H's memory has been particularly bad lately, too.

feel like robin is more cuckoo than usual too lately/

"Again..."

microphone confusion with the back office on the show with JD in the background cackling was A+

Could any kind soul summarise what is going on with Hein? I've been clicked out of the show for about a year now but I'm intrigued.

Upset in a passive aggressive way towards Jason for popularizing "Hit em with the Hein"

Hein seems to be a particularly joyless and unfunny dude, totally unfit for radio

I've said it before but Jan Hein's anger emerging bc of this is amazing. The fucking guy stands in place at the front of the counter when he buys fast food after he's paid "to make sure they get my order right." Doesn't masturbate, doesn't use condiments. Allegedly hates the show and was totally emasculated by the change of format of TWUS two years ago.

anyone else bummed out about Howard getting dragged in the election coverage especially since Friday?

the politico piece about howard luring trump into painting himself as a buffoon is an interesting reading of the interviews because i never thought of howard as particularly savvy??? like, yeah, maybe he did lure trump into debasing himself-- i found myself, like, proud of howard in that interpretation but like i never saw it that way.

Me neither, but I'm glad CNN and Politico have given H some respect here. He's gotta be really bummed though, especially in light of his out of character groveling for HRC to come on the show in the WaPo in August. No presidential candidate will ever go on his show now.

i googled to check what mark harris thinks about trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p5OquHPpNk

he posted this on youtube.

You knew!!

you wanted us all to be abuzz!

the past 48 hours has compressed a somewhat queasy sensation I've had for the past year whenever shit that DJT said to HS has been excavated, where this radio show I have listened to for 25 years discretely, as a pressure valve for certain aspects I am not keen to emphasize in public, is now a key part of this national crisis. I'm quite happy that DJT is self-immolating, but his participation on the HS show doesn't put HS in the best light. Like you said above, the politico article tries to represent HS as manipulating DJT as if he were no different that HPE, whereas HS clearly views DJT as a peer and is egging him on in those interviews not just because "it's good for the show," but because HS admires DJT's shameless assholism.

It's bad timing for H in the middle of his "evolution." To most of the public, he disappeared after he went to Sirius, and they still have a cruder/more obnoxious picture of him in mind. All these tapes confirm that just by association.

FB: did you say that you have been listening since 2011? curious as to what attracts newcomers to the show at a late, post-artie date. I wonder how newcomers pick up old show lore, like the gary "hello hello" tape or Jackie's various antics, or if some shit is inaccessible or best left behind.

i'd been peripherally aware of H and the show my whole life obviously, and I remember when he announced he was moving to Sirius the news was inescapable. i went thru this weird phase my last year of high school getting stoned and watching cable news... H was on Piers Morgan's new show, and before that I had the caricature of him in mind, and the interview flipped my wig... from then on I just listened to interviews on youtube, I didn't really get into show lore for a while. but i could listen to H read the phonebook for four hours. didn't have a Sirius subscription until last year. as far as getting caught up, that's the fun for me... just a lot of time looking up compilations and sagas on youtube and listening to Sternthology... when i like something i get pretty obsessive, but with a band or an author or a filmmaker, there's only so much material you can go through and recycle... with the Stern Show, there's thousands and thousands of hours of tape, it's a bottomless well... it's like serialized theater of the mind, and I love listening in real time and seeing how things develop... like a recent, sorta lame example of this is when they played Nick Cannon's slam poetry/spoken word recordings, and now they have the Spoken Word Robin bit...

the first non-interview thing I got caught up in was the Hurricane Sandy week. i love these sagas because they crystallize the show's themes: Sandy is work ethic, Gary's Dinner Party showed the basic character of the main players (H leaves early, Artie shows up late, Robin doesn't even come), the inscrutable nature of Gary as seen in the first pitch saga and the apology tape...you know, here's a guy that's in many ways very good at his job (calming rowdy guests, a good diplomat), and you see him make these huge miscalculations and lapses in judgment all the time... Artie's downfall as documented on the show is practically Shakespearean, there's so much in play there (addiction, dependency, enabling, parental issues)... Benjy I find the most fascinating, I genuinely can't figure him out & find him hilarious (when H asked him if he could depend on him to be at work during Sandy, he asked "what if my internet goes out?")...

i could go on and on, i haven't even mentioned KC... enough for now... i will say the 9/11 show has always stuck with me, because I lived in new york at the time, and when I first heard that show ten years later, it blew me away because it captured the confusion & anger of the city that day that no news organization could...

i still haven't heard the 9/11 show. didn't start listening until 2002 and often find hearing clips from earlier eras a bit off putting. prefer the more relaxed pace of the show now, though i wish howard would fly into rages more often. the "I PRANK!" rant is one of my favorite moment. about two years ago he went on some truly dark and amazing soliloquy about the meaningless of life and i just can't imagine any other radio show pulling that off in way that was both cathartic and funny.

I PRANK! NO ON ELSE!!

yeah, i love how often the show lapses into existentialism... i think i know what bit you're talking about, did it start because of the chemical smell on his dump button? "i wanna take that dump button, and smash it with a fucking hammer." then he went into this whole thing about "i've been doing this for 40 years almost, i don't have it right, i've gotta get it right...i'm doomed. i've got thousands of people working for me, and i can't get it right."

First time i've seen video of this. One of my favorite interviews ever on the show. This caught me early on as a listener.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHI14mbTAdg

"Somehow at the end of every question, beet ends up in some kind of angry sexual scenario"

Lefsetz is such a blowhard