RADIO : Gotham Grump : Larry Josephson is the host of a public-radio show. He’s liberal, in an old-fashioned way, politically incorrect--and really angry

NEW YORK —  Every week Larry Josephson wants to quit. He gets to thinking about the hours he puts into his bi-coastal Saturday night public-radio show, “Modern Times,” about the money he gets in return for these hours (none, according to him), about his love-hate relationship with his West Coast boss, KCRW-FM General Manager Ruth Hirschman, who, he says, does not appreciate him.

He thinks about the fact that he is 52, is not regularly employed, is in debt to credit-card companies, has no pension waiting for him, no savings and a daughter on her way to college.

He thinks about the sublime folly of giving his much-examined life to public radio, where even the good-paying jobs can make teachers’ salaries look appealing.

Josephson, in fact, is likely to be grousing about these very matters as he glides slowly, like a Jewish Buddha on casters, through the studios of WNYC, on the 25th floor of the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan early on a Saturday evening before his live show goes on the air (at 6 p.m. West Coast time). Staff members scurry about searching for guests who haven’t arrived, transoceanic telephone connections are being tested for clarity, a substitute engineer inquires about Josephson’s monitor levels, and Josephson barks back that they are much too loud.

“How long has Larry been in this mood?” the engineer asks someone in the control room.

“Since he got back from California,” a producer answers, meaning since the end of September.

But then 9 p.m. Eastern time arrives, and the bearded, bulky host, who bears a passing resemblance to organist Garth Hudson of the Band, sits down in front of a microphone, drops his scowl and begins to share his ego and a warm intellectuality with listeners in Los Angeles, New York and 21 other cities across the American Public Radio Network.

On this night the topic is “The Mind of Japan,” but on another night it would have been women’s sexuality, Norman Mailer, California cuisine, the Kurds, Barbara Ehrenreich, cross-dressing, the end of socialism, media coverage of the Gulf War, Irving Howe, multiculturalism and political correctness, Janet Malcolm versus Joe McGinness, homelessness, Father’s Day, domestic violence or cats.

When his two hours of live on-airness are over and Japan has been given the Josephson treatment of educated but emotional analysis punctuated with jokey banter, the host quietly bids goodby to his studio guests, gathers his books and papers into a bulging briefcase, rides the elevator down, signs out at the Municipal Building security desk, drifts toward a waiting cab and heads back uptown for a midnight supper of steak and French onion soup in a restaurant. Sometimes he just gets a pizza and takes it home to his Upper West Side apartment, where he consumes it in front of the television and in the reassuring company of his two cats, Kitty and White Kitty. Tonight, like most Saturday nights, doing the program has lifted his veil of grumpiness and made him feel good again. “About half the time it’s exhilarating,” he says later. And he decides not to quit--at least not until next week.

About 75,000 people each week listen to Josephson, based on audience estimates, or about the same number as subscribe to a magazine like the Nation.

He has built this following presumably because his cantankerousness is the real thing in a broadcast era of soft schmooze and artificial provocation.

Technically, “Modern Times” is a talk show, but it’s a talk show that begins and ends with “The William Tell Overture.” The program is more like one mordantly curious man’s attempt to grapple with the Zeitgeist on a weekly basis--winner take all. It’s a show about life in the big city, about the differences between Los Angeles and New York and about the casualties of what used to be called--in a more innocent time--the war between the sexes. There are smart guests and smart callers, but most of all there is Josephson himself, an old-fashioned liberal and confessional philosopher who bends the program unapologetically to his own obsessions and discontent. There are a lot of shows about men and women, food and serious books. There are fewer about Hollywood and none about the environment or exercise.

It is not a “high-energy” show, he admits, and in keeping with this his voice is tender and deliberate while often pitched in the key of outrage or lamentation.

Adamantly autobiographical, he tries to keep things personal and leads with his id. While canvassing a panel of scholars about Japan’s refusal to trade evenly with the United States, he interjected, in a line you probably wouldn’t hear from Ted Koppel, “Is it like a woman withholding love?” He also said at one point, reflecting on his own girth, “I love Japanese cars, even though I don’t fit into them.”

He rarely hides his deeper feelings about a subject, even when they are likely to be unpopular with his politically correct public- radio audience.

“It takes a lot of courage to do what he does, to open yourself up like that,” says KCRW’s Hirschman, whose stormy relationship with Josephson has included firing and rehiring him within a two-week period in 1989. “Most people get off the air and go back to being who they are because they’ve created somebody to be while they’re in front of a microphone. But Larry is what you hear.”

In many ways his political incorrectness is what most distinguishes Josephson from the cautiously enlightened drone of National Public Radio, a sound he derides as “the sound of an undescended testicle: little boys being gentle and sensitive, what I like to call ‘the Rye Country Day School of the Air.’ It’s like Mr. Rogers for grown-ups.”

A harsh judgment perhaps, but Josephson has never set a course to win friends and influence people. Though he lightens his show with playful puns and self-deprecating humor, he still refers to himself as “a rebel, a loner and an asocial member of my generation.”

It’s hard to argue with this assessment when you consider that he has staked out a narrowing stretch of beach between the dogmas of the left (as represented by feminism, affirmative action and multiculturalism) and the middle ground of the NPR Establishment reflected in the overall sound of “All Things Considered” and other news shows. He labels himself a socialist. “Something happened to NPR around the time of Ronald Reagan’s election,” he observes. “The innovative spirit and drive that were there at the beginning are gone now.”

He should know. When “Modern Times” arrived on KCRW in the summer of 1988, Josephson was a new voice and personality to most of the station’s listeners. But he was already a much-decorated veteran of public radio in New York.

A native of Los Angeles and a mathematics graduate of Berkeley, he came east after college to work as a computer programmer, but found his real calling while serving as a volunteer engineer at New York’s countercultural WBAI in 1966.

During one of the station’s regular political upheavals in which most of the staff resigned, he was offered an on-air position on a two-week trial basis. He stayed at WBAI for 18 years and became well-known for a morning show called “In the Beginning” and later for a second show, “Bourgeoise Liberation,” that were shining examples of the station’s famous unorthodoxy: He often showed up late, chewed bagels on the air, regularly aired out his psyche, poked fun at WBAI’s hipper-than-thou image and once played the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” over and over again for two hours.

“He was the anti-morning man,” says Steve Post, a former WBAI colleague who is now a classical announcer at WNYC. “I think what he was doing, to approach the radio as yourself as opposed to a well-modulated voice speaking well-thought-out banalities, was tremendously innovative then.”

He got invited to parties given by critic Dwight MacDonald and met Bob Dylan. “I think the ‘60s BAI shows were my peak as a radio person,” he says today, a little wanly.

In 1984, exhausted and no longer welcome at the station he helped establish (“By then it was controlled by minorities and the far left,” he says), he left WBAI and took up computer programming again. But he missed being on the radio.

In 1988, KCRW was looking to develop a national call-in show dealing with culture and current events, and Hirschman thought of Josephson after running into him at an NPR conference in St. Louis. The two had met previously through public-radio circles. She invited him to come to Los Angeles for the summer to launch “Modern Times,” then let him continue when he returned to New York in the fall. (There was a period of six months when the show was being beamed from New York but carried only in Los Angeles.) Then, WNYC, the city-owned New York public station, signed on and provided Josephson with studio time and an engineer. A year later, “Modern Times” was being distributed around the country by NPR’s rival network, APR.

If this sounds like a success story, Josephson cannot bring himself to accept it as such--at least not while he says he is sinking deeper into debt to keep the show on the air. Like other public-radio talent, he is torn between the freedom to do what he loves to do and the rebuke of not being paid a living wage for it.

KCRW pays him $12,000 a year (or $230 a show) and the National Endowment for the Arts kicks in $27,000, but he does not count these monies as a salary. Instead, he turns them over to pay an associate producer, a part-time assistant and other production expenses. As is common practice in public radio, the program is offered free to stations that want to carry it, so it generates no income. The bottom line, he says, actually falls into the red. “I’m putting about $20,000 cash into it a year, when you add up the phone bills and tape and other ways I subsidize the program.”

While devoting 15 hours or so a week to “Modern Times,” Josephson survives from the money he brings in as the producer and distributor of a series of cassette tapes made by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the ‘50s comedy team that Josephson successfully revived in the early ‘80s when he brought them to public radio. He says his nonprofit company, the Radio Foundation, took in $32,000 last year from the Bob & Ray business.

“A proper (annual) budget for a show like this would be $300,000,” he figures, even by NPR standards. “I could get by on $100,000.” But, of course, he’s getting by on half that, or less.

Hirschman, who was instrumental in getting the show carried by APR, defends the small fee she pays Josephson for his program. “He’s comparing it to shows that have got big CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) grants,” she says, “but if he compares himself to other independent producers in the system, his budget is not considered an inconsequential amount of money.”

Josephson is caught in a pinch since his show, which is technically a network show, is not financed by the network. Yet his costs and overhead are much higher than for the average local music or public affairs program.

While many public radio personalities on local stations work for nothing in return for their art and audience, Josephson contends that this is a kind of exploitation nonetheless. He says, “I admire Ruth for what she’s done with KCRW, and I have to say she has helped me make the program better, but she has this 19th-Century romantic view that artists should starve. And I can’t go along with that.”

It’s not hard to discern from listening to the show that Josephson is genuinely angry about a lot of things, which include, besides his financial worries, his life in general and the way the country has changed over the last two decades.

“I’m a very angry person,” he says one day in his roomy rent-stabilized apartment-office-studio on West 89th Street overlooking Central Park, where he has lived for 15 years. “You can ask any of my girlfriends or employees. I scream at them all day. I’ve burned out a lot of assistants. This year I’ve had three or four. I have a very high standard for myself. I’m more like Willy Loman than someone from the cast of ‘Hair.’ My parents came from a hard-working, striving background. I think people should work very hard and do great things.”

Among the subjects that most get the host’s blood pumping faster is the relationship between the sexes. Interviewing Norman Mailer recently, he confided to the author, “I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life. . . . The relationships that mattered have been, in part, wars. And I’ve had excessive love affairs in which I feel manipulated by women, but I too love them and need them.”

The twice-married Josephson has been separated 12 years from his second wife. He refers to the first as “the first in a long series of women I didn’t get along with.”

Not infrequently, he blames feminism for his trouble, which surely qualifies as apostasy on public radio. “In my cognitive, rational self,” he explains about this, “I believe if a woman wants to be a lawyer or a business person, fine. Who am I to say that they should stay home and have children and be subservient to me? But in my reptilian brain, on a purely emotional level, I’m mad as hell because I was raised by a mother who didn’t work and raised us according to certain social norms, and it seems to me that they’re all gone, just destroyed.

“Politically I’m a feminist, but emotionally I hate it. Figure that one out.”

He’s also down on affirmative action, claiming: “I have lost a lot of grants and some jobs because they were earmarked for a black or a Hispanic. I don’t like it. I’m not David Duke. I’m not going to put on a sheet.”

Never one to say the proper thing, Josephson once admitted on the air that if he saw two black youths coming down the street toward him he would be more concerned about his safety than if he saw two white youths. In New York, he has been held up at knifepoint twice, once on the street and once in his apartment when he was awakened by an intruder in his bedroom. These experiences have dented what he calls the “Eleanor Roosevelt liberalism” he grew up with and still clings to.

Yet he is not ready to abandon New York despite its crime, crookedness and physical deterioration. “The only places that are safe don’t have good restaurants,” he says only half in jest.

Among his heroes, Josephson says, are Pete Seeger, the folk singer; John Leonard, the critic and essayist, and Glenn Gould, the late concert pianist. What he admires about each of them is that they “have (or had) an inner light that they follow and are not driven by the latest marketing trends.”

Gould he idolized and once described as “the preeminent lover in the age of loneliness.” When Gould died in 1982, Josephson devoted a program to him at WBAI and said about the pianist’s notebooks: “I found in these recollections echoes of my own unhappy childhood as a shunned, fat child.” He also said that Gould performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations “has provided me with more solace than any woman or any shrink or any meal.”

One of his favorite moments on “Modern Times” came during the show he did on the right to die, when a man surviving on a respirator called in (with the help of his wife) and confided in halting breaths that he felt it was time for him to go. Josephson was speechless. If that was one sort of unforgettable moment, another came at the end of his program investigating why people, including himself, love cats, when he played the tape of a psychotherapy session held between him, a cat therapist and White Kitty, who had been behaving badly.

Of course, Josephson is not everyone’s cup of tea, and those who disagree with him occasionally call in, taking him to task for his unreconstructed liberalism or sometimes for the emphasis he gives to Jewish subjects and his own Jewishness. He makes a joke out of the latter, often announcing in one of his characteristic mock commercials that listeners can write to him and get free of charge “gefilte-fish bottles with my picture on them.”

He says he prefers callers who disagree with him or attack him. “The most boring thing in the world is to hear some liberal from New Jersey say, ‘Oh, Larry, you’re so wonderful.’ My real bias is interesting radio. That’s what I want.”

He can be stubborn and impatient, and like all interviewers, he has his limitations. His healthy aversion to popular culture nevertheless renders him uninspired when faced with hip musicians or Hollywood types. When the innovative female group the Roches appeared on the show, for example, he had trouble tuning in to their wavelength and inexplicably seemed to give them a hard time.

But if measured on an “interesting radio” meter wired to the 50 or 52 programs he does a year, his ability to keep the needle jumping is impressive. Yet apparently this is not enough, either for Josephson or for the major funders of public radio.

“If I don’t stop my romantic obsession with radio and make a living at it or get a job, I’m going to be in serious trouble,” he says. “Because I have no savings, no anything.”

He has applied repeatedly for financing to CPB, which disperses $4 million a year to various radio programs. He has always been turned down, with the reason given, he says, that “I’m unproducible, that nobody can produce me.”

“I don’t really feel it’s my problem,” says KCRW’s Hirschman. “It’s his decision whether he wants to go out and get more money from other sources or whether he wants to continue to do the program. That’s really up to him. As the only station contributing anything to the program, why are we the only station that has to hear Larry kvetch?”

Josephson has thought about renting a theater and turning his musings into a stage monologue in the manner of Spalding Gray, whom he much admires. “But when am I going to get the time to do that?”

He’d rather just stay on the radio: “I’m not the young Apache I was when I was 25, out to get even with the world and avenge all the hurts of my childhood. Now, I’m looking for some kind of aesthetic radio perfection, which involves feeling and intellectual truth and sound and music that meld together to make a perfect sauce. That’s what I want.”

But can happiness for the expertly exasperated voice of Saturday night really be that simple?

The late Ray Goulding once described Josephson in the credits for a show by saying, “Larry has known the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and he’s not sure which he likes better.”

Josephson tells this story on himself, and as he repeats the line, the look on his face makes it quite clear that he’s willing to have it received as more than a joke.