Roth to the rescue

It takes a certain quality to succeed Howard Stern in the rock-radio morning time slot. A certain shamelessness. A certain knack for self-promotion. And David Lee Roth has been practicing for . . . well, a long time.

''I'm 51," he says, ''but my X-rays are 70."

Buh-dum. And the lines keep coming. For the morning show that launches on WBCN-FM (104.1) today, he says, his models will be ''Billy Graham, Muhammad Ali, Castro -- just in terms of delivery." His politics, he promises, will rankle left and right: ''I'm like a tomahawk missile right in the Cheerios." His music-industry rants won't hold back: ''Ashlee Simpson has a career, and nobody's doing anything about it."

He vamps. He weaves. He imitates the heroin-laced jazz voices of '60s underground radio. He brags about sex. It makes a phone conversation fairly exhausting, but Roth doesn't stop. ''I haven't been to sleep since the late '80s," he says, and it could almost be true, given the extreme days as Van Halen's flashy frontman, the ''Just a Gigolo" solo career, the nights as a New York EMT.

That's right: For the past two years, Roth rode ambulances and hauled oxygen tanks in some of New York's toughest neighborhoods. He stopped weeks ago, at about the time the billboard for his radio show went up in Times Square. In some 300 calls, he says, he was recognized roughly three times, always by fellow public servants, never by patients. The neighborhoods he serviced weren't into classic rock.

It adds a bit of intrigue -- a touch of weird humility -- to a man who has been charged with rescuing morning radio from the post-Stern doldrums. Today, Roth takes his new show to seven stations owned by CBS Radio: in Boston, New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and West Palm Beach, Fla. He will broadcast, for the most part, from Stern's former studio at New York's WXRK. He'll be all voice -- no spandex, no sequins, no raging hard-rock hair (in truth, there's less of it now, anyway). No sidekicks. Just Diamond Dave.

That's an intimidating and high-profile start for a radio neophyte, let alone a rock celebrity, to follow. Stern's ''King of All Media" shtick, which he plied on WBCN from 1993 until last month, won him unprecedented loyalty and sky-high ratings. Summer Arbitron numbers put Stern first in his time slot among both 18-to-34-year-olds and 25-to-54-year-olds.

Mark Hannon, WBCN's general manager, isn't expecting the same from Roth's new show, which will air weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m. ''I think we have realistic expectations of life after Howard," Hannon says. ''But I also think we're very optimistic."

And after Stern's protracted, 14-month farewell, WBCN was ready for something new, Hannon says. The station considered both local and national acts, he says. When Roth did a weeklong tryout last March at sister-station WZLX-FM (100.7), the radioheads were impressed.

''It was raw Dave. It was no guidance, no direction, no producers, no guests, no music. There was just nothing that you'd normally get from a radio show," Hannon says. ''Everyone who listened to that said, 'Imagine this guy in a setting where he's going to be surrounded by great radio people.' "

The new national show will still center on Roth, who plans to take calls, talk politics and culture, and play more music than Stern ever did. ''What will make it interesting is, you can't really typecast it," Hannon says.

A bigger question is whether Roth himself will like the radio experience, says Michael Harrison, publisher of the talk-radio trade journal Talkers. Compared to rock, he says, this world is distant and slow; work takes place so far from the audience, so close to the bean-counters, that it can sometimes feel like drudgery.

''You're in a dark, quiet room, there's nobody there, and you may not get your first ratings for a year," Harrison says. ''If you don't enjoy the process, you're not going to get the instant gratification. Radio is not fulfilling to an ego that needs instant excitement and a loud crowd."

Roth declares a built-in remedy: His multiyear contract calls for his show to broadcast from the road every fourth week. He plans, he says, to hit warm-weather spots such as Florida and Las Vegas. Hannon says Roth has also pledged to broadcast periodically from Boston, where he has personal ties -- from time spent growing up in Swampscott and Brookline to his gig, on July 4, 2004, playing ''California Girls" and ''Jump" with the Boston Pops.

Besides, his EMT stint makes it clear that Roth is interested in more than adoration. He sought the job, he says, because his family has a history in medicine: His father was a surgeon, a cousin heads a cancer research institute. Roth is a licensed helicopter pilot, and he worked as a surgical orderly in his post-college, pre-Van Halen days.

Dropping in on real life has given him stories to share, he says: ''We had a baby born in our jurisdiction. She named her kid Nextel." It has given him reason to rant: ''Now I will be one of the loudest voices asking for all the right kinds of pay and benefits that everybody in blue isn't getting." And it has given him an aging rocker's reason to keep the energy high. Even when it's very, very early.

''Don't think of it as morning radio. Think of it as after-hours," Roth says. 'Six in the morning is not entirely unfamiliar."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.