Now, you must understand that i didn’t set out looking for today’s video. Nor did it turn up in my YouTube morning menu based on any recent searches. Still it’s such a curiosity that I had to listen to it and share it with you. This is a recording of Howard Stern in 1980, age 26, on the local Detroit station that he then worked for (WWWW Detroit–or ‘W4’ as it was cozily referred to) the morning after John Lennon was shot to death. This isn’t ‘shock-jock’ NBC Stern–that was to come in the next couple of years, though presumably the seriousness of the occasion might be responsible for his empathic and emotional demeanor here. This is Stern pre-fame, pre-success, with only a limited audience with whom he was apparently popular enough with to attract attention in larger markets. Within a year he would be broadcasting from DC, then onto New York and the rest is radio history. But in some ways the Howard we hear on this recording sounds a good deal more like the seventy-year-old Howard now heard on Satellite radio. Truly a strange and moving little time capsule…