by Al Brumley
After weeks of distant rumblings and an uneasy peace, Howard Stern finally took some shots at the Eagle on Tuesday.
KEGL-FM (97.1) announced earlier this month that it will be dropping Mr. Stern's show Sept. 5. The station says it wants to be all-rock, and that the show is too hard to sell to advertisers.
Through it all, Mr. Stern remained remarkebly calm - eerily so, you might say. He promised to say nothing bad about the station or its owner, Nationwide Communications, Inc. He questioned their reasoning, and he sniped at them for stringing him along, but he left it at that.
On Tuesday, for no apparent reason, the beast stirred.
First, Mr. Stern sent his favorite interviewer, "Stuttering" John Melendez, to Dallas to get on-the-street reaction to the loss of the show.
Unfortunately, Mr. Melendez took his microphone to the Greyhound bus depot downtown, where people are generally more concerned about making it home to Marfa than about syndicated radio shows.
His next stop was KEGL, where some poor research assistant played right into Mr. Stern's hands by not letting Mr. Melendez into the studio. All of that led to the arrival of an Irving police officer, who escorted Mr. Melendez and crew out of the building.
That, in turn, led to a 25-minute on-air telephone discussion between Mr. Stern and KEGL spokeswoman Audrey Wager, who did her stoic best but must have been wondering where the heck KEGL general manager Dennis Frawley was.
Time and again, Ms. Wager said the station loves Mr. Stern and only dropped him because it wants to be all-rock. She said KEGL will do anything it can to help him get on another station.
Mr. Stern said he doesn't believe describing a show as "hard to sell" helps very much. He also said he has tripled KEGL's morning revenues, and all of his stations make millions of dollars. In New York, he said, advertisers on his show pay $15,000 a minute.
He suggested that KEGL issue this statement to reporters:
"Howard Stern makes millions of dollars in every market in the country. We're the only station in the country that can't seem to put a sales department together that can sell him, so we are so incompetent that we are embarrassed to have to let him go."But, Ms. Wager stood her ground and even winged Mr. Stern once by noting in passing, and with just a hint of sarcasm, that his ratings have dropped the last three quarters.
When it finally ended, Mr. Stern thanked her and he said he had enjoyed the conversation.
The revelry will continue Wednesday morning when Mr. Melendez is joined by "Crackhead Bob" - another member of the show's distinguished panel - on the Grassy Knoll for what is purported to be a big announcement.
No exact time was given, but a show staffer said to be there by 6 a.m.
© 1997 The Dallas Morning News
This article appeared in the Wednesday, July 23, 1997, Dallas Morning News "Overnight" section.
Return to the Dallas ratings and other news stories.
Return to the Ratings page.
Return home.
This page © 1997 by The Complete Howard Stern Links!