Greaseman Oozes Back Into Washington

WARW Puts Show Up Against Howard Stern

The erstwhile choirboy turned radio fantasist with a passion for "bodacious ta-tas" is heading home to Washington. The Grease is back.

Beginning Monday at 6 a.m., Doug "Greaseman" Tracht, who ruled Washington airwaves in the 1980s, will broadcast daily from the studios of WARW, the classic rock station at 94.7 FM.

After a not-so-successful four-year sojourn to Los Angeles, the Greaseman will go head-to-head against Howard Stern, whose syndicated show is heard on WJFK (106.7 FM).

"Now Washington will have a potpourri of shriekery to choose from," Tracht said yesterday. "Howard and I do very different shows. I was beating him when I was in D.C. Now that'll be the challenge -- to take it back."

The move is the first in an expected series of major changes in the local radio landscape stemming from a frenzy of station acquisitions by media conglomerates during the past year. CBS Radio owns five stations in Washington, including WJFK, which carries Greaseman's syndicated show on tape weeknights at 7, and WARW, which will now be rebuild around Tracht.

The Greaseman show is a three-hour journey through an adolescent dream-scape pocked with disease, dripping in bodily fluids, and cocked to explode with violence. Working with remarkable speed off situations phoned in by listeners, Tracht slips in and out of alter egos, showers his audience with ethnic and sexist zingers, and generally amazes his mostly male, mostly white, mostly young fans with his verbal dexterity.

He also has a history of infuriating non-fans with his excesses, including a 1986 bit slurring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that led to pickets outside Tracht's WWDC (101.1 FM) studios.

For the fantasies, and for the outrage, Tracht, 46, hs been paid as much as $1 million a year. But his syndicated show out of L.A. has had tough times of late, and he is heard only in Washington, Baltimore, Roanoke and Jacksonville, Fla.

So the offer of a return to a town that once worshiped his act seemed a gift from heaven.

"Frankly, I missed Washington," Tracht said yesterday. He never sold his house in Potomac, and he's so eager to get back to boating on the river and the Chesapeake that he agreed instantly to a deal that was cooked up only a week ago.

"When you whip out into that bay, you can get onto a place like Tilghman Island, where time stood still," "Grease" said, launching one of his ad-lib monologues.

By transferring Greaseman across the country, and shifting him down the D.C. dial, CBS is trying to create a platform for his eventual national success, revive its faltering classic rock station here, and amass a much larger cut of the local morning radio audience.

"It's strange when you've been in a competitive industry for so long, and suddenly you're working together with the stations you've been going up against all these years," WARW Program Directory Craig Ashwood said. To make room for Greaseman, WARW is moving its Harris in the Morning show to the 3-7 p.m. slot.

WJFK Program Director Jeremy Coleman said he will announce plans to replace the evening Greaseman show before Monday. "I've been very supportive, giving up my nighttime show," Coleman said. "But as program director of WJFK, I have to say: Stern will kick his" posterior.

Greaseman's comic book-style theater of the mind fit well on WJFK, where the lineup of Stern, G. Gordon Liddy, and Don and Mike dominates the 18-34 male segment of the Washington Market. The WJFK audience is about 75 percent male, while WARW's much smaller audience is more mixed, about 60 percent male.

Tracht, who grew up in the Bronx, is a classic radio figure, a shy type who bursts to life behind a microphone. Like his longtime competitor, Stern, he was the guy who couldn't get the girl, the teenager painfully ashamed of his acne, his looks, his every molecule. And like Stern, he found liberation at a college radio station.

Both became morning men -- slobbering over the freedom to say "breast" and even "penis" on the air (though Greaseman has an elaborate system of euphemisms: "ta-tas" for the former and "hydraulics" for the latter) -- whose bad-boy routines changed the standards of commercial radio and tranfixed a generation of young men. It was Tracht who replaced Stern when he was fired from DC-101, the Washington rock station.

Tracht developed his Greaseman character -- a woodsman who blundered into the city, ate from Dumpsters and found work spinning records on the radio while squatting on the toilet -- at Ithaca College and at a Rochester, N.Y., station before landing at Washington's WRC-FM in 1973. He didn't last long, and he took his act around the country before returning here in 1982.

Tracht says his new show will be a local one, with plenty of bits about Washington -- an advantage he has over Stern, whose show is focused on his New York base.

Although WARW has been in the ratings cellar for years, Tracht says he's not worried. "The reason the station hasn't kicked in is maybe people want something more edgy in the morning," he says.

Executives at both WJFK and WARW concede that Tracht and Stern appeal to the same demographic, but they say the ratings over the years indicate they nonetheless have distinct audiences.

Which of the two naughty boys wins won't matter much to CBS's bottom line. As Tracht says, "The boss man, why, he owns all the horses in the race."