Remembering the Greaseman

Back in the 1990s my go-to radio station was 92.3 K-Rock ("Howard Stern All Morning, Classic Rock'n'Roll All Day). I even blogged about what was a kind of radio golden age back then -- Howard Stern, Allison Steele, and other great DJs of the day who were all on the station at the time.

The only exception to this was the bizarre presence of the Greaseman who broadcast at night from 6-10 PM on the station. It's hard to describe the Greaseman's DJ act -- it was all wild shtick, all over-the-top babble. He couldn't speak clearly or complete a comprehensible sentence, and he'd spout gibberish like "Waddle-doodalay, its da' Grease!" or "Hahahha Bone-Dry!" Weird. He'd burst into song (I remember one about the OJ Simpson trial done to the tune of "Georgia on My Mind" -- that was ... odd) and he'd take calls where he'd give shticky answers -- the whole act was a mess.

The thing about the Greaseman was that he wasn't actually broadcasting in NYC -- apparently he was in Los Angeles doing an afternoon show that was simulcast into other markets in the evenings (his humor was decidedly not New York-ish humor, it was some kind of redneck/middle America stuff that's beyond me). The idea, I suppose, was to have him on nights in NYC and make him a kind of evening bookend to Howard Stern in the morning -- but it didn't work. Howard ruled the NYC morning ratings while "da Grease!" was a ratings flop at night. And Howard haaattted him, ranting about how embarrassed he was to be on the same station as Grease ("I am steak and he's ... a paper cup!"). 

Still, as awful as his show was, he was a part of something great -- and then it all came to an end.

Eventually Greaseman lost his syndicated show and was off the air in NYC. This was clearly the highpoint of his career and it's now long in the past. "Da Grease!" wound up in Washington DC doing a local show -- and got fired there when he made a joke about how if more black people were killed by being dragged from the backs of trucks, we'd get more national holidays. Yeah, that was a baaaaddd and he's bounced around the radio dial from tiny station to tiny station ever since.

So that's the (short) story of when the Greaseman graced the airwaves of NYC, a bizarre moment in time that only Mr NYC could possibly remember. 

"Howard Stern All Morning, Classic Rock'n'Roll All Day": K-Rock Memories

My previous re-post about Alison Steele, and a comment by the great blogger Zen Denizen, triggered a flood of nostalgia in me for the old 92.3 K-Rock. It was the only radio station I listened to in high school during the early 1990s, and it used to be the classic rock station in NYC. While everyone else in my school listened to Z-100 or Hot 97, I was one of only a few who listened to K-Rock all the time. I even remember the line-up:

Howard Stern, 6-10AM
Pete Fornatel, 10 AM-2 PM
Dave Herman's Afternoon Rock'n'Roll Show, 2-6 PM
The Greaseman, 6-10 PM
Maria Molito or Dea Snee, 10 PM-2 AM
Alison Steele, the Night Bird, 2-6 AM

I don't know why I still hold such affection for, of all things, a radio station line-up. Maybe it's just part of getting older and something like this reminds me of a simpler time in my life. Or maybe it was just that it had Howard Stern and my favorite kind of rock music on the same station. But I think what I liked about it most was that Pete, Dave, Allison, and Maria were classy DJs who you could tell really loved the music they were playing and seemed to respect their audience. And in this time of radio consolidation and voice-tracking, etc. they were people who made radio an art form and a community ... the way it used to be.