"Drunk Bitch Friday" Lex and Terry

The Parents Television Council in the News

Glen Garvin, Clearing the air: Has raunchy radio crossed the line?, The Miami Herald, October 10, 2004.

It's just another Friday morning at Zeta 94. While a noisy commercial goes out over the air, a slim blond in the corner of the studio is groggily pulling her pants back up, covering once again her bethonged behind before collapsing face-down in front of her microphone. ''Did I show you my butt?'' she mumbles. ``Isn't it great? Isn't it sexy?''

''Usually we're a little more orderly,'' apologizes Lex Staley, co-host of The Lex and Terry Show, Zeta 94's 6-to-10-a.m. show, slipping his headphones on as the commercial nears its end. ``But this is Drunk Bitch Friday.''

Pardon?

''Drunk Bitch Friday,'' one of the show's regular guests, comedian Carlos Mencia, explains helpfully. ``We get a bitch drunk, we call her a bitch, and it's Drunk Bitch Friday. But it's not a poopy show.''

Poop, among other things, was something radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications promised to get rid of when it announced a ''responsible broadcasting initiative'' last February, dumping Howard Stern and other shock jocks from its stations in several cities, including Miami, where The Lex and Terry Show replaced Stern.

But six months later, not everybody is convinced that Clear Channel airwaves are that much cleaner. ''Clear Channel cracked down on Stern, it's true, but some of the replacements need to be cracked down on, too,'' says Laura Mahaney of the Parents Television Council, a broadcast watchdog group that monitors radio as well.

Consider:

• On Clear Channel's San Diego station, KIOZ, Stern was replaced by The Mikey Show, whose host Mikey Esparza has done everything from simulating smoking dope on the air to playing an unprintable parody called The Statutory Rape Song to providing kidnapping how-to tips. Esparza has been in trouble so often that his last Clear Channel station advertised the show on billboards that said, ``Listen to Mikey before we fire him . . . again.''

• A shock jock known as Bubba the Love Sponge was sacked from Clear Channel's Tampa station, WXTB, after such stunts as castrating and killing a hog on the air. His place was taken by The Monsters, whose hosts routinely spew an astonishing array of racial epithets. They were sued this summer by a police sergeant who accused them of saying she had AIDS and calling her ``a mullet-haired lesbian who likes to take it up the pooper.''

• The Clear Channel station in Atlanta, WKLS, fired deejays Larry Wachs and Eric Von Haessler (they billed themselves as the Regular Guys) after they accidentally aired an interview with a porn star vividly describing her favorite sexual acts. Enter The Bob & Tom Show, where the hosts dispense off-color advice to wives who complain that their husbands don't know where various sexual organs are located.

''In some of these cases, it's hard to say that the new shows are much better than the ones they replaced,'' observes Adam Jacobson, the radio editor of the industry journal Radio and Records. ``And in some cases -- like The Monsters in Tampa -- a lot of people think the replacement show is even worse.''

The Lex and Terry Show is pretty mild compared to some of the others, but they'll never be mistaken for Arthur Godfrey. On a recent Drunk Bitch Friday, they took a call from a man wondering what to do about his crack-whore wife; advised another distraught caller that a cheating girlfriend could probably be talked into group sex; and referred to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly by the name of a body part associated with the digestive track.

They even took a real call from Al Sharpton, who said John Kerry's presidential hopes are looking up. Sharpton impressed the morning's 24-year-old blond drunk, Melissa Waterman. ''He sounded really sexy on the phone,'' she mused, ``even though he's a black political guy.''

That comment actually made it onto the air. Most of what she said earlier in the show -- a barrage of f-words in various conjugations -- had to be bleeped as she slammed down Red Bull and vodka.

''I know it sounded bad in the studio,'' says Staley. ``But to somebody out driving around in their car, it was a totally different thing. Nobody heard any [fornication words]. And yeah, we're an advice show, so we do get calls about crack whores. But that's real, not something we're making up. And people are used to it.''

Staley and his partner Terry Jaymes were just visiting Miami as a promotional stunt to welcome WZTA, Zeta 94, to their syndication network. Zeta 94 picked up the Jacksonville-based show last spring as part of a programming shuffle triggered by Clear Channel's decision to dump Howard Stern's show: The Lex and Terry Show took over the slot left when Zeta 94's morning jocks Paul and Ron moved over to WBGG, Big 106, to replace Stern.

The game of musical broadcast booths was prompted by a general crackdown on broadcast indecency by the FCC, which fined Clear Channel $1.75 million for the content of its programming. The focal point was clearly Stern -- nearly half a million dollars in the fines were for his show -- and Clear Channel dropped his show.

The dust still hasn't settled. Last week Stern announced that he'll leave conventional radio altogether when his contract is up in 2006, moving his show to the satellite radio network Sirius, which isn't regulated by the FCC.

That's likely good news for The Lex and Terry Show. Syndicated by Cox Broadcasting, it's heard on 32 stations around the country, several of them added after Stern's battle with the FCC began earlier this year. His departure to satellite radio opens the opportunity for Staley and James to add more stations, and they're determined not to blow it.

''Where Howard blatantly doesn't care about FCC rules, we do,'' says Jaymes. ``We meet with program directors and FCC people all the time . . . Howard will talk graphically about his sex life all the time. We might say we had sex, but that's it.''

''Stern pretty much puts a target on himself and dares people to shoot at it,'' adds Staley. ``But we're not doing this to shock anybody. Most of our content -- guys complaining about their sex lives, stuff like that -- comes out of real situations.''

Even Drunk Bitch Friday -- DBF in Lex and Terry shorthand -- is a public service, they argue, a chance for listeners to see how stupid they are when they're drinking. The women are chaperoned and chauffeured to and from the show in limos, and a security guard is right outside the broadcast booth.

''The worst thing about it is the title,'' says Jaymes. ``We thought about changing it, but it would be like renaming Coke Classic at this point . . . We've had guys in, too, but doesn't work very well. When guys get drunk, they just want to fight. But women love it. We have a couple thousand applications from women who want to be a DB.''

Clear Channel's regional vice president David Ross admits that Lex and Terry is ''an acquired taste,'' but it's one he thinks a lot of men 18 to 34, Zeta 94's target audience, enjoy. And he insists that any comparisons to Stern's show are absurd.

''I don't see how you can equate them -- in any way, shape or form -- with indecency issues,'' Ross says. ``They can't be mentioned in the same breath with graphic descriptions of anal sex, which is the sort of stuff Stern was doing. This is just somebody getting drunk. It's guy humor, on a guy show.

``If this is indecent, we'd better close every bar in America and tell Budweiser they're out of business. If you're complaining about Drunk Bitch, you better never go to South Beach, never go to Fort Lauderdale Beach. You'd better just head out of here and go to somewhere in Middle America.''

The Lex and Terry show no longer does the "Drunk Bitch Friday" segment and I am not sure exactly when they stopped but I would love to find out. The last DBF pictures on the site are from 2004 but I know that I was hearing DBF a few months ago...I'm looking into when they really quit and what reruns have been played since then.

- G H