In an internal Howard Stern staff meeting video leak from February 2013, footage shows Stern ranting to his staff employees about how they need to book David Bowie for an interview. This is around the time Bowie came back with his The Next Day album after a long hiatus from music. Bowie tragically died just three years later in January 2016 from cancer, and Stern never got the interview. We previously published stories on Stern demanding his staff book Neil Young, wanting Eddie Vedder on the show with the help of Chris Cornell, and on how he brought Billy Corgan back from being ‘off the radar.’ Alternative Nation transcribed Stern’s comments about Bowie.
“Let’s come up with a strategy. David Bowie, new record comes out, wow, my mind started racing: ‘a new record from David Bowie?!’ Who says more positive things about David Bowie than me? David Bowie, if he does an interview he’ll probably go on [David] Letterman or some bullshit show like that where they don’t say a fucking thing about David Bowie. I’m on here regularly talking about what a genius David Bowie is. Does David Bowie know it? No! How does David Bowie find out about it? Well maybe he’ll subscribe to Sirius, but I doubt it.
There has to be an organized campaign – David Bowie is coming out with a new record, he did it by surprise, boom, our fucking team is on it. Bowie gets the pamphlet that Sirius helped us create, gets the Howard TV donut right away. Bowie gets it, his publicist gets it, his record company, his manager, fucking Tony Visconti gets it because Tony Visconti, his producer, he’s a friend of the court.
We’ve had Tony Visconti on the show many times so we send those materials to Tony Visconti. We don’t call up a record company or David Bowie’s management and say: ‘Would you like to do the show’ then when we get our first ‘no,’ give up and say ‘fuck it.’ This is what we need to do, we need to have A-list guests once a week, that’s how you get em'”
