They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  If nothing else in my life could be orderly, at least my music would be.

  Because my dad was an ice cream salesman, we took all of our family vacations in winter. (Summers I went to Brooklyn for six weeks to visit my mom’s brothers and sisters. I may have been the only kid on Long Island who actually moved into the city when school ended.) It was ironic, since the most we could afford to do was drive to the Poconos for skiing—and no one in my family actually knew how to ski.

  My dad didn’t own a ski coat, ski gloves, or ski boots. He was never a suburban guy; he was just a guy from the city who happened to raise a family in the suburbs. If he could have, he would have skied in his brown double-knit pants and a pair of black leather shoes. He probably would have looked more comfortable.

  The most memorable ski vacation we took was in the winter of 1970. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Uniondale to the house we rented in the Poconos. To a nine-year-old kid it seemed like ten hours. We were piled in my dad’s red Chevy Impala, a company car, and we listened to WABC on the radio.

  Normally my dad liked listening to WOR talk radio in the car. That was my first education in radio. I still can recite the lineup for WOR: Bob Grant was the original angry, abrasive conservative guy. He was Glenn Beck before there was Glenn Beck. He would argue with the callers, yell at them, and tell them they were stupid. Then he’d invite them to come down for a fight. “I’ll beat you on the head,” he’d yell. My father would laugh. It was like professional wrestling. It was riveting. Long John Nebel would come on late at night. He’d tell insane stories about spaceships landing on the roof of the WOR building.

  But on family road trips we’d listen to WABC, which was the station everyone in New York tuned into and everyone in the country followed. Programmers from Cleveland or Dallas would come to New York for a week, stay in a hotel, listen to WABC, copy the jingles and the station breaks and the pacing, and then take it all back home. Anywhere you went in the tri-state area and beyond, you could listen to WABC, which was a 50,000-watt AM station. We call stations with signals that powerful flamethrowers. Back then, with fewer channels, you could get WABC as far away as Boston. We definitely didn’t have to change the channel on the way to the Poconos.

  Every year, during the last two weeks of the year, WABC would do a Top 100 countdown, only it would play the songs all out of order. The DJ would play No. 50, then No. 72. That was the hook to make you listen. You could send in a self-addressed stamped envelope when the two weeks were up if you wanted the whole list in order. But in the Chevy Impala on the way to that vacation in 1970, the year the Carpenters’ “Close to You” became a massive hit, Steven showed me a different way to keep track.

  He bought a composition notebook and, before we left the house, listed the numbers 1–100 in the margins of the first few pages. For the next two and a half hours we listened to WABC intently, filling in all the songs as we went along. We never finished it (sorry, this isn’t a Capra movie), but it did teach me new ways to obsess over music. Soon after that vacation I was studying it and collecting it in a passionate way. First I’d put a record on my parents’ record player. Then, after a verse, I’d lift the needle and write down the lyrics in my composition notebook. I repeated the process over and over, for hundreds of songs.

  I also began to study liner notes. I liked knowing who guested on which track. It was important to me to see that on one of Linda Ronstadt’s songs Andrew Gold did the claps in the background. Amassing a record collection became my all-consuming hobby. From an early age I thought of myself as a collector. I even used my mowing money to buy rock-and-roll trivia books and plastic sleeves for all my albums. Look, if you wanted them to sound good, they had to be handled correctly.

  When I was in seventh grade and Steven moved out of the house, he gave me the collection of records he kept in orange crates. I put every piece of music I owned into the crates—alphabetically by artist, then chronologically. I can still picture the cover for the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach, because that was always the first album in the pile.

  Steven’s gift left me with hundreds of new records to thumb through and listen to and learn about. I sat on the floor at our record player for hours listening to the most obscure stuff and reading liner notes as if they were holy scripture. That era, the early to mid-’70s, was the height of the storytelling songs, like “The Night Chicago Died” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero.” These were bad songs with bad stories, but every verse advanced the narrative. You had to listen to the whole song to figure out what happened. The collection in the orange crates was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. (Until Steven topped it for Christmas 1975 when he bought me all the records on my wish list: Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and the record that changed my life, Springsteen’s Born to Run.)

  I didn’t realize how singular my passion was until late in seventh grade, after nearly a year of picking through Steven’s collection. I was in an art class and it was close to the end of the 1974 school year. Our teacher was a hippie who had the windows open and music playing on a radio. I looked totally cool that day in a pair a flame red bell-bottoms, and I was about to prove I was so much cooler. As we were painting and listening to the music, the song “Band on the Run” came on. The cute girl at the easel next to me said, “Who sings this song?” Without hesitating I said, “Paul McCartney and Wings.” Then “Benny and the Jets” came on and she asked the same question. “Elton John,” I said. I wasn’t showing off. I wasn’t even all that nervous when I answered. The responses came as naturally as breathing. Finally, the song “Be Thankful for What You Got” came piping through. “Who’s this?” she asked. “Oh, that’s William DeVaughn,” I said.

  “Wow,” she said. “You listen to a lot of radio.” I don’t know if she was impressed when she said that or if she meant something more like, Wow, you loser, you must stay home and listen to the radio a lot. But I took it as a compliment. I liked that I had a lot of knowledge about something and that someone recognized it. It made me proud. And it still does.

  Sometime in 2004, we had Adam Duritz, the lead singer for Counting Crows, on the show and he was claiming to know everything about ’80s music. We had just been sent a collection of twenty CDs loaded with ’80s classics. So we started playing hits from those days and quizzing Duritz as well as a guy who called in and claimed to be an ’80s music trivia whiz, too. The first song was “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. Duritz knew the performer and the song; the caller did not. Next was “867-5309” by Tommy Tutone. Same results. The third song was “Harden My Heart” by Quarterflash. Again, Adam got it and the caller didn’t. Finally, for a challenge, we played “Believe It or Not,” the theme song from the TV show The Greatest American Hero. Adam knew the song title but not the performer—Joey Scarbury. But I did.

  We had been looking for another fan-centered segment like “Win Fred’s Money,” in which listeners competed against Fred to answer rapid-fire trivia questions to try to separate him from his cash. During a break that day, I said to Howard, “I could do a music trivia game. We should make a bit about it on the show.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Set it up.”

  We called it “Stump the Booey” and the premise was simple: Beat me in a five-question contest about ’80s music trivia and you win ten thousand dollars. I rarely lost. One of the highlights was when a guy took me into four overtimes—nine questions—before it was finally settled. I won on the song “Lawn Chairs Are Everywhere” by Our Daughter’s Wedding. My reaction when I won: “You’d know the song if you bothered to turn on the radio during the 1980s.” Pretty soon I was getting hate mail for being such a jerk.

  I love being “that guy” when it comes to music knowledge. I was once at one of my son Jackson’s baseball games when a father from the opposing team approached me. He introduced himself and said he was a fan of the show, but that’s not why he wanted to talk. He was working on a graduation video for a relative and wanted to k
now who sang the song “I Can See Clearly Now.”

  I told him, “It depends. Are you looking for the original version made famous by Johnny Nash in the seventies or are you looking for the Jimmy Cliff remake for the movie Cool Runnings?”

  He walked away happy. For a moment I felt like I was back in seventh grade.

  GREATEST AM RADIO

  SINGLES OF THE ’70S

  “Alone Again (Naturally),” Gilbert O’Sullivan

  “Bennie and the Jets,” Elton John

  “I Can See Clearly Now,” Johnny Nash

  “I Want You Back,” Jackson 5

  “Play That Funky Music,” Wild Cherry

  “Shining Star,” Earth, Wind & Fire

  “All Right Now,” Free

  “Stuck in the Middle with You,” Stealers Wheel

  “Spirit in the Sky,” Norman Greenbaum

  “Bad Luck,” Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes

  “Let’s Get It On,” Marvin Gaye

  “Love Train,” O’Jays

  “Strawberry Letter #23,” Brothers Johnson

  “Band on the Run,” Paul McCartney & Wings

  “Smoke on the Water,” Deep Purple

  “A Horse with No Name,” America

  1990

  Boy Gary.

  That was my nickname for the first six years on the show. It wasn’t even original. The guy I replaced had been “Boy Lee.” Before that, Howard had called his college roommate “Boy.” I was just another in a long line of boys. In 1989, the Rolling Stones held a press conference at Grand Central Terminal to announce their Steel Wheels tour. This was the early days of cable. Every network—from MTV to CNN—covered it live. With cameras rolling, I asked the first question. “Mick,” I said, “Boy Gary from The Howard Stern Show.”

  I was getting too old to be called boy: I was pushing thirty. I was more than a decade older than our interns. I looked forward to shedding the tag. But I had no idea what would replace it. Until July 26, 1990.

  The day began like any other—with me saying something that became fodder for the show. In the late ’80s and early ’90s collecting animation art became popular. These were iconic cartoon cels—Bugs Bunny eating a carrot or Yosemite Sam sitting on a keg of dynamite—drawn by the original cartoonist, signed and then framed. They weren’t mass-produced. Each picture was numbered, making them limited-edition, high-end pieces of art. Galleries began selling them for a few hundred bucks. A Mickey Mouse at the time sold for more than four hundred thousand dollars. I thought they would be a good investment. “They will never go down in value,” I would say to Howard.

  And he would make fun of me. I babbled about getting a Friz Freleng or a Chuck Jones, two of the big Warner Bros. artists back in the day. The truth was, I talked about the cels more than I collected them. After months of research and browsing, I owned exactly one, a picture of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.

  But I had made a decision: I was going to buy a new one. And that morning, July 26, 1990, I mentioned my intention to Jackie before the show. It was a big deal for me—I was leaving the Warner Bros. family to purchase something from the Hanna-Barbera collection. I told Jackie the characters I wanted to buy and he shrugged, like he wasn’t that interested. I was wrong. He was very interested.

  A couple of minutes later, after we were on the air, Howard called me in. “Gary’s into this weird thing, he collects cartoon art.”

  “Animated cels. Get it right,” I said.

  “My next purchase will be a Da Vinci or a Marmaduke,” Howard said, imitating me in a dopey voice.

  “I am strictly a Warner Bros. collector,” I said. “But I am thinking about dabbling in the Hanna-Barbera stuff. I am thinking about getting a Quick Draw McGraw or a Baba Booey.”

  “Good, good,” Howard said. “How do you make the final determination? How much does a Baba Looey go for?”

  “Quick Draw and Baba Booey are about three hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  “What do you call him?” Howard asked.

  “Baba Booey,” I answered, emphasizing the word Booey by raising my voice an octave.

  “It’s Baba Looey! You’re going to hang a picture of a guy and you don’t know his name. Baba Booey? Baba Booey!”

  A resigned, disgusted silence descended, then Howard continued.

  “Baba Booey … I didn’t know what he was saying. A Baba Booey.”

  I was bored with the conversation. I figured they were done with me and they’d move on in a few minutes. This is what happened every day. I stood up and left the studio.

  “He just walked out,” Howard said. “He thinks we’ve exhausted this, but we haven’t exhausted this.” A pause. Then he yelled, “It’s just the tip of the iceberg! Baba Booey!”

  Then we went to a commercial and I said, “Okay, guys, joke’s over.”

  I sat down at my desk and thought, All right, it’s 8:30. They’ll be on to something else in an hour.

  But an hour passed, and they were still laughing at me. I’d hear Baba Booey, Baba Booey, followed by cackles. They sounded like monkeys who had been smoking dope all morning. The next morning it lingered and I realized it had a little bit of a shelf life. Maybe it would last a week or two. It just wasn’t a nickname that was going to stick—it was like an Abba song that reached No. 1. It had two weeks, three tops. It’s not that I hated the name. It was funny to say, but I just thought it was so silly. I didn’t believe it would stand the test of time.

  One day I came into work with a tape of Quick Draw McGraw saying the phrase “Baba Boy.” If you listened closely it sounded like he was saying “Baba Booey.” I even tried to bring it up, but Howard shot me down. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Why do you want to ruin it.”

  Every day, Baba Booey grew, leaving Boy Gary behind. Captain Janks, a fan from Philly who used to call talk shows like Donahue and scream, “Howard Stern rules!” started using Baba Booey instead. He realized that if he said it on the air, hosts weren’t as quick to cut him off. They had no idea what he was saying. Larry King was his favorite target. Poor Larry. The worst thing he ever did was get an 800 number, because it meant Janks could call him nonstop without getting charged. Once, Janks got through the screeners and yelled, “Baba Booey, Baba Booey!” But Larry didn’t hang up on him. He just stared into the screen, his eyes wide and confused behind those glasses, and said, “I don’t understand.”

  Then, in February 1991, Howard released a CD called Crucified by the FCC, which was a compilation of all the moments that had gotten him in trouble over the years. It came with a booklet, and on the back cover was a list of the top phrases in the history of The Howard Stern Show. “That’s not flab, honey, that’s bulk” was No. 10; “It’s too late, Soupy, I’ve already cut a string on the piano” was No. 5. And No. 1 was Baba Booey.

  I thought, Really? It wasn’t even the dumbest thing I had ever said on the show. Or the most embarrassing. I had once given such graphic details about my sex life that even my mom called to tell me I had taken it too far. And she beat people with shrubs!

  But Baba Booey wasn’t just about me acting stupid. It was something more visceral. The alliteration made it fun to say. It was a call to action. I used to spend a lot of weekends on the road making personal appearances. I’d hit strip clubs in Buffalo, mattress store openings in Cleveland, happy hours in Detroit—these were my specialties. A lot of times I’d bring one of my guys from Long Island with me. My first couple of times through each town I drew a lot of people. It’s not as though I had a show. I’d just sign my autograph on my glossy head shots. By the third, fourth, or fifth time that I hit the same spot, the crowds grew smaller. The novelty wore off. It was just me, the guy from Howard Stern, signing my name on my face. That changed when I became Baba Booey.

  Soon after the name entered the ether, the lines became longer wherever I went. It was as if Baba Booey gave people a reason to see me. “Hey,” they could tell friends, “let’s go see Baba Booey.” Then they’d laugh—like they were stoned monkeys. I
still signed autographs. But if I wrote, “To Jimmy, All my best, Gary,” Jimmy would shove the picture back in my face and say, “No, just sign it Baba Booey.” Pretty soon, that’s all I signed.

  It wasn’t about me at all anymore. It had morphed into being a code for the show, like a battle cry.

  Fans picked up on that idea, and followed in the steps of Captain Janks.

  In 1997, a Sports Illustrated column mentioned Boston University and that it was Howard’s alma mater. The piece ended, “Baba Booey!” It had nothing to do with me. There were the people who understood what it meant—the loyal listeners to the show; the members of the club—and the rest of the world who didn’t.

  The night of the O. J. Simpson slow-speed chase, in June 1994, we all learned that ABC News anchor Peter Jennings was a member of the latter group.

  It was a Friday night and Mary and I were in Boston for a wedding that weekend. The Knicks were playing in Game Six of the NBA Finals. I really wanted to see this game. We were at Legal Sea Foods in Copley Square and I snuck away to the bar to get the score. I saw the white Bronco and said to the bartender, “Can you put on the game?” Earlier in the day there had been reports that O.J. had killed himself. I didn’t know what was going on. Then some drunk leaned over and slurred, “O.J.’s in the car with a gun. Half of Los Angeles is chasing him.”

  I wasn’t that interested. I wanted to find the game. So I dragged Mary, who was five months pregnant, all around Boston looking for a decent bar that showed sports. There wasn’t a single one. All of them were tuned to O.J. I couldn’t believe the people in Boston hated New York so much they would rather watch a freak show than the finals of an NBA game. I didn’t sense the magnitude of the moment. Big deal. It’s not like I didn’t have a part in the night’s drama. Kind of.

  This was before the Internet was big, remember. I didn’t care about the chase so Mary and I just went back to our hotel and went to bed. In the morning we drove twenty-five miles to the wedding in Salem. As soon as I walked through the door, I was barraged. “You were on TV last night!” “I can’t believe you were in the middle of the O.J. chase!”